Silencer (2 page)

He crawls to the edge of the river and eases himself into the chill current, but the water's only 18 inches deep and he finds himself half in, half out of the river, and oh Jesus the flashlight is right on his face like a malevolent eye, and he's blinded and electric pings of panic vibrate through him.

‘I spy with my little eye,' one of the guys says in a singsong voice. ‘Somebody beginning with R.'

Galindez takes a few jittery steps back, the bank dips abruptly about 2 feet, and just as he's about to draw himself under the surface a gun goes off again with the sound of a thunderclap.

And Reuben – who thinks he sees the cylinder of a slot-machine revolve in front of his eyes and all the jackpot cherries appear simultaneously in the magic window – cries out, falls and slips away, turning over and over in relentless currents, leaving a spiralling trail of blood in the white wake of the river.

2

Amanda had been fishing since daybreak with no luck, trying to keep in mind what Rhees had told her about patience. You learn how to wait, he'd said. Remember, you're under no pressure.

Rhees lay on the bank with his eyes shut, raising a lazy hand now and again to brush aside a fly. A man in repose. A man on first-name terms with patience. Amanda studied her line in the water, concentrating on the little red plastic float that shivered on the surface. She was coming to the conclusion that either there were no fish in this river or else they were cunning little jokers who knew a trick or two about survival.

She looked up at the cloudless blue sky. Heat was beginning to build, the sun climbing above the trees. On the opposite bank of the river sandstone already shimmered. She nudged Rhees, who opened his eyes.

‘Maybe they've all migrated,' she said.

Rhees said, ‘It's not the catching that counts, Amanda.'

‘Tell me it's the waiting.'

‘The waiting's part of it, sure. But there are other factors: how to contain a sense of expectation, an ability to be alone with your own thoughts.'

‘It's a whole fishing philosophy,' she remarked. ‘I bet it's called pisceology or something like that.'

Rhees smiled at her. ‘This is more to do with self than landing a fish.'

‘Do you charge by the hour?' she asked.

‘Just watch the float.'

‘I haven't taken my eyes off the float. My whole life is centred around the goddam float. I'll dream floats tonight.'

‘Think about this as part of a simple healing process, if that helps.'

A healing process. A life lived away from all the old stresses. No pressure, Rhees had said. She returned her eyes to her line and watched how it rippled in the movement of water. She envied Rhees's ability to drift into contented torpor. He could switch off his engine any time he liked.

She lit a cigarette. A bad habit, one she wished she could abandon, but you didn't win all your victories at once. It was a sequence of steps, and being up here in the deep isolation of the forest was just one of them. Being here on this granulated riverbank, staring at the float, trying to think of nothing, seeking, as Rhees might have said, an inner zone of quiet, a place where you might find all the hairline cracks in your psyche fixed.

She felt him touch the nape of her neck. Her hair, pinned back and held by a black clasp, was brown, flecked with touches of red. Wisps of it always strayed from her head. She had problems with hair management, and she knew Rhees found this disarray touching. He was in love with her flaws. There was a sweet easy flow to life with him. Six years along the road and she could barely remember past lovers except for the weird coincidence that at least three of them had been named Robert, and they all wanted to be called Bob. Plain old Bob.

Even their faces were spectral in recollection. If she considered them at all, she could recall only a sickly medley of deodorants and skin oils. Funny, her past love life reduced to a distillation of odours from bottles and spray-cans, and no memory of any one lover who transported her to a place where comets crashed through the skies and the earth reverberated underfoot. No interplanetary daredevil Bob.

She lay back, finished her cigarette and stared at the sky. Rhees kissed her cheek, laid a hand gently on her breast. She felt the sun hot against her face. The warmth had a certain tranquillity. She thought how easy it would be to slip into a light sleep, lulled by the fluting of the river. Four weeks up here and she was already becoming accustomed to the luxury of dozing off at odd moments.

Rhees stroked her breast again.

‘Somebody might come along, John,' she said.

‘Way out here? I seriously doubt it.' He slid his hand under her cotton shirt and she turned her face towards him. The kiss, Rhees's mouth, his breath, the intimate locking together of familiar parts. She imagined a day might come when familiarity novocained passion and everything became jaded and repetitive, but it hadn't happened that way with her and Rhees.

‘Listen,' she said. She turned and looked through the trees behind her. The gear-grinding sound of a vehicle was audible in the woods.

‘I hear,' Rhees said. ‘It's probably a gang of good old boys in a jeep. A keg of Bud and a cassette of Garth Brooks's greatest hits and it's party time. Whoop-de-doo.'

‘If that's the case, we'll go back to the cabin,' she said.

‘And finish what we were just getting into?'

She smiled at him. ‘I thought you were a master of contained expectation.'

‘Up to a point,' he said.

‘You're such a fraud at times, John.'

She stood up, brushed specks of sandstone from her cut-offs, then turned once again towards the trees. She could see the vehicle between the trees now, a Bronco that kicked up fine coppery dust as it churned and laboured along a very narrow track. It emerged from the woods in a flurry of broken branches and scattered pine needles and came to a halt on the bank about 20 feet from Amanda and Rhees.

There was no gang of good old boys. The big man who stepped down from the cab had plump benign features and his plaid linen jacket was crumpled. He wore sunglasses and moved with a limp – a familiar figure – but his unexpected appearance was baffling.

‘Willie?' Amanda said.

‘I know, I know. The last guy on earth you expected to see,' and he smiled, slipping off the shades.

Rhees was curt. ‘Rephrase that, Lieutenant. The last guy we
wanted
to see.'

Willie Drumm glanced at Rhees, nodded, then shook Amanda's hand two-fisted. He had big soft hands and they dwarfed hers. ‘You're looking good,' he said.

‘It's this simple life, Willie.'

‘Agrees with you. Anything running? Rainbow? Catfish?'

‘Not that I've noticed,' she said. ‘They must be keeping a low profile.'

Willie Drumm gazed at the river. There was a moment of uncomfortable tension. Amanda knew what Rhees was thinking. Drumm belonged firmly in the past, and he wasn't welcome because the past had no place here. He wasn't a part of her life any more. Those days were dead and buried. Rhees regarded Drumm as a dangerous gatecrasher, a homicide cop from the grim abattoir of the city. Somebody who dragged this environment on his shoulders like a bag stuffed with soiled laundry.

Drumm said, ‘Boy, this ain't the easiest place to get to.'

‘That's the whole idea,' Rhees said.

‘Yeah well. Sure. I finally found the cabin, saw your car parked there, figured you couldn't be far away.' Drumm fidgeted with his glasses. He was uneasy.

‘You're a detective, after all,' Rhees remarked. ‘A piece of cake for you.'

This sour note in John's voice. Amanda felt a shadow fall across her mind, provoked by Drumm's arrival.

‘You haven't come all this way to pay a social call, have you, Willie?' she asked.

Drumm looked at Rhees before answering. ‘I'd be lying if I told you that.'

Rhees said, ‘She quit, Willie. Q–U–I–T. She's no longer involved. She's out of it.'

‘Yeah, I know, John. I just figured she'd be interested in what I have to say, that's all.'

‘Maybe you figured wrong,' Rhees said, and slung an arm around Amanda's shoulder, a protective gesture. He wants to keep the world away from me, she thought. Especially that part of it where Willie Drumm belonged, that greased slope into despair. He doesn't want me sliding back down into that abyss.

She said, ‘Willie's come a long way. It would be bad manners, John.'

‘Far be it from me to be uncivil,' Rhees said. He stared at Drumm, who was wiping his wide forehead with a handkerchief.

Drumm said, ‘Lookit, I don't mean to cause a problem, John. This is awkward.'

Amanda said, ‘It's OK, it's OK.'

‘Oh sure, it's just fine. Amanda says so.' Rhees stepped away from her. With his hands in the pockets of his jeans, he slouched, staring at the ground.

‘What's on your mind, Willie?' she asked.

Drumm said quietly, ‘Something connected with our old friend Sanchez.'

‘Sanchez?' She had an odd experience of darkness, as if the shadow she'd felt a few moments ago had lengthened in her head. A sensory malfunction. There was a kind of faltering inside her.
Sanchez
. The chill claustrophobic space of a courtroom entered her memory and she heard refrigerated air rush from a wall-duct and the sharp knock, knock of a judge's gavel and the quiet tapping of the court reporter, babble she didn't need, but it filled her head regardless.

She fumbled out a cigarette and lit it, aware of Rhees frowning and jingling coins loudly in his pockets.

Drumm said, ‘I didn't want you seeing this on the eleven o'clock news before I had a chance to tell you in person.'

‘Tell me what?'

‘Something's turned up. Literally.'

‘Explain, Willie.'

‘I'm talking a fish,' he said. ‘A very big fish.'

3

It was 23 miles to the morgue in Flagstaff. Willie Drumm drove slowly out of the pines. ‘John was pretty steamed up back there,' he said.

‘He worries about me. But he gets over things quickly,' she said. Where was the conviction in her voice? Rhees had stomped back to the cabin, having registered a couple of protests.
Butt out of this. This hasn't got a goddam thing to do with you any more
. She imagined him walking up and down the small rooms, burning off his funk. The wonder of Rhees was his inability to maintain a bad mood. He might go through the motions, but he didn't have the heart to keep a bad humour alive for long.

Drumm said, ‘I still feel like the guy who turns up at the banquet too late to tell everybody the soup was laced with arsenic.'

‘You were talking about a certain fish,' she said.

Drumm slowed at a yield sign. ‘Right. Washes up in a shallow tributary of the Little Colorado River. No ID, nothing. Gunshot wound in the heart. So the body comes under the jurisdiction of the Navaho cops, but Sergeant Charlie House isn't happy with non-native American bodies turning up on his reservation, so he ships the body to Flag, and a set of prints down to Phoenix. We run the prints, we get a match. Which is why I'm trucking up here to look at the body and talk with the coroner. Meantime, I'm thinking, it doesn't add up. Make any sense to you, Amanda?'

She searched the breast pocket of her shirt for cigarettes and matches. ‘Reuben Galindez was supposed to be far, far away. He was supposed to be secure. That was the arrangement.'

‘Right. So what's he doing in a river in northern Arizona? And who shot him?'

She lit a cigarette, shrugged the question aside. The morning had taken on a fuzzy dreamlike quality. One minute you're fishing and the day's sweet and rich with promise, the next you're cruising off to the morgue to look at the face of a dead guy, and the axis of reality tilts and you wonder if this is hallucination. Who shot Galindez?

‘I couldn't begin to guess,' she said. She wasn't sure if she even wanted to try. This wasn't her business any longer – so why had she agreed to accompany Drumm to the morgue? Curiosity? A sense of disbelief that Galindez had turned up in a place where he didn't belong? That maybe the ID made from a set of fingerprints was a mistake and the corpse on the slab would turn out to be that of a stranger?

Drumm drove a mile or two in silence, a toothpick parked at the corner of his mouth. ‘The only way I can figure this is that Sanchez is behind the slaying. Galindez turns State's evidence and Sanchez gets a room in the Death Row Hilton. He's going crazy in there, so he gets a message out and somebody does a number on Galindez. Revenge being sweet and all.'

‘Yeah. Just try proving it,' she said.

They were in downtown Flagstaff now. The main drag was motels advertising waterbeds and cable TV, stacked alongside an abundance of fast-food franchises. Plastic flags hung motionless in the sunlit air outside car dealerships. Drumm rolled down his window and the smoke from Amanda's cigarette drifted away.

He parked the Bronco and turned to gaze at her. ‘You don't really need to come inside.'

‘I've seen dead men before, Willie.'

‘It's up to you, Amanda.' Drumm got out of the vehicle. Always courteous, he stepped round and opened Amanda's door.

The room was chilly and windowless, lit by a grid of pale fluorescent lights. Charlie House was there, an enormous copper-faced Navaho whose tan uniform was immaculate. The deputy coroner, wearing a badge that identified him as T. Lavery, was also present. He was a lean man dressed in a starched lime-green smock.

It was Lavery who slid open the drawer and said, ‘Step right up, folks. See Moby Dick.' He had an irksome chuckle. He'd clearly developed a barricade of insensitivity against death.

Amanda hesitated a moment before she looked at the bloated corpse on the metal slab. There was a hole in the area of the heart. Ragged, cleansed over and over by the river, it suggested a large embittered mouth. The left eye was blood-red, the right gone entirely. The socket was filled with sediment from the river. The lips and cheeks and throat had been gnawed and slashed by predators – rats, vultures, whatever. The man's hair had the slimy texture of strands clogged in a shower-drain. On the middle finger of one plump, water-puckered hand was a ruby ring embellished with miniature gold leaves.