The Devil's Right Hand (14 page)

She was dressed like the rest of them, in her
formal blues. She was again wearing her dark glasses. She walked up
to a small knot of officers who were chatting about something, as
nonchalantly as if the funeral had never happened. All
conversation, however, ceased as Marie walked up. They stood in
their circle, not looking at her or at each other. Finally she
turned and walked away, her shoulders slumped. Keller swore under
his breath and started the car. The brunette reporter detached
herself and her team from the crowd and trotted after her. Marie
made a go-away gesture with her hand without looking around and
walked faster. The reporter persisted, following behind her at a
trot and holding the microphone in front of her like a baton being
passed to a runner. Finally Marie whirled, and said something short
and brutal that caused the reporter to reel backwards, the
technicians crashing into her from behind. The reporter turned to
shove the sound guy away, cursing. The cameraman was laughing. He
continued to film the collision and its aftermath until the
reporter made a savage slashing motion across her throat. Marie
continued her march down the street alone. Keller pulled out and
followed.

Her car was parked at the end of the street
near the corner. Keller pulled over and rolled down his window.
“Marie,” he called to her.

She turned around. Her face hardened. “Shit,”
she said. “It’s you.”

“
I need to talk to you,” Keller
said.

She opened the car door. “You’re not helping
me, you know,” she said savagely.

“
I can,” he insisted. “I’m the only one
besides you who knows what really happened. I’m the one who can
prove Wesson’s death isn’t your fault.”

 “
Oh, great,” she said, tossing
her cap onto the front seat. “That’ll make me REAL
popular.”

“
Like you are now?” Keller
said.

She sat down in the car, but left her feet on
the pavement and her legs outside. “I can make it back from this,”
she insisted. “It’ll blow over. But not if I keep getting seen with
you.”

“
It’s not going to blow over, Marie,”
Keller said. “I’ve seen this shit before. You’re getting shafted.”
He took a deep breath, hating what he had to say. “You’re gone,
Marie. It’s over. But you don’t have to go quietly.”

Marie looked up the street. Cars were
beginning to pull away from the curb. She swung her legs into her
car and closed the door. “C’mon,” she said. “I can’t be seen with
you. Follow me.”

“
Where are we going?” Keller
said.

“
My place,” she replied. He backed up
slightly to allow her to get out, then followed.

Marie Jones lived in a small one-story house
with a two-car garage in a development full of nearly identical
one-story houses with attached two-car garages. The houses were
clustered around cul-de-sacs off a central street, in an attempt to
make neighbors out of the strangers who moved in, stayed a few
years until the next transfer, then moved out. Each house had a
concrete-slab driveway where the cars were actually parked. The
garages had no room for actual vehicles; they were full of
lawnmowers, bikes, tool benches, and boxes of things that the
families in the houses never actually got unpacked because they
were of little use, but never discarded because they were too
valuable. Keller parked behind Marie’s car in the driveway after
she got out and moved a plastic Big Wheel from the center of the
drive. He followed her inside.

Inside, the house was small and neatly kept.
The front door opened up into a small living room with a couch, a
recliner, a TV/VCR combination sitting on an old footlocker, and a
pair of low plastic bookshelves. A few plush toys were scattered
here and there.

“
Wait here,” Marie said. “I need to
change out of these blues before I drop over from heatstroke.” She
went off down the hallway, leaving Keller alone.

Keller sat down on the couch. After a few
moments, he got up and walked slowly around the living room while
he waited. He stopped to look at the pictures that completely
filled one wall. In one of the photographs, an obviously much
younger Marie was standing, holding a rifle confidently on her hip.
She was standing next to a smiling gray-haired man. Another photo
showed her cradling a soccer ball in one hand, standing next to the
same man. In this picture, the man was in a police uniform. They
were both smiling. In another photo, obviously a professional
portrait, she was dressed in an Army Class-A uniform, looking
serious against a cloudy silver background. A series of smaller
pictures in a collage frame showed her in a variety of situations
with a young child: a hospital bed holding an infant, holding a
baby in her arms in front of a Christmas tree, bending over to push
a laughing toddler in a swing. There was no sign of the father.

Keller heard Marie reenter the room. He
continued looking at the pictures. “This your dad?” he said over
his shoulder, pointing at the picture of her with the gray-haired
man.

“
Yeah,” she said around a hair clip
held in her teeth as she pinned her hair up.

“
He was a cop, too.”

“
Yeah,” she said. “Thirty years. He’s
retired now.”

Keller turned around. Marie had changed into
a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of running shorts. Her face was drawn
and pale and there were dark circles under her eyes.

“
Where you from?” he asked.

“
Portland, Oregon,” she
said.

“
Miss it?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

Keller gestured back at the picture. “Bet
your dad loved the idea of his little girl joining the force.”

“
I’m not a little..” she began, then
caught herself and grinned. “Sorry. Conditioned reflex. But yeah,
he nearly had a stroke. He got over it.”

He looked again at the picture of Marie in
her class-A’s. He noticed another, smaller frame hanging next to
it. Instead of a photograph, the frame held a small badge. It was a
wreath surrounding an iron cross with a target in the center of
it.

“
Expert rifleman,” he said.
“Impressive.”

“
Thanks,” she said. “Dad always wanted
a boy to take hunting with him, but he only got daughters. So he
taught me to shoot.” She grimaced. “For all the good it did me. I
ended up in the MP’s. Germany.” she walked back over to the easy
chair and sat down. Keller tried not to stare at her legs. “You
were in Saudi, I hear.”

“
Yeah. And points north.”

She smiled a little sadly. “Closest I ever
got to a war was directing traffic at Oktoberfest.”

“
You were lucky,” he said. She looked
strangely at him and he realized that he had spoken with a bit more
heat than he had intended. He looked back at the wall. “Cute
kid.”

“
Thanks,” she said. “He’s with his
grandparents for the weekend.”

“
Not with your ex?”

Her lips tightened. “You didn’t come here to
talk about my kid.”

“
Right.” Keller sat down on the
couch.

“
You said I didn’t have to go quietly,”
she said. “What did you mean?” she said.

“
Has anyone come to you and actually
said, 'keep your mouth shut, let it blow over, and we’ll take care
of you'?’”

She shook her head and looked at the floor.
“No.”

“
They need someone to blame for Wesson
getting killed. Good cops don’t let punks like DeWayne Puryear gun
them down.”

Her voice was bitter. “Good cops don’t let
punks take their guns away, either.”

“
You didn’t want to get close to him.
You tried to argue Wesson out of it. He pulled rank. He did it to
show me he was the boss and if I said black, he could say white and
that was that. If he hadn’t let that blind him, you wouldn’t have
gotten near enough to Puryear for him to have been able to get your
gun.”

She shrugged. “So?”

“
So right now, Wesson’s being treated
like a goddamn hero and a good cop can’t even get the time of day
from the people who are supposed to be her backup. I don’t like it.
I bet you don’t either.”

“
How do you know so much about
it?”

“
Like I said. I’ve been there. I’ve had
the people I trusted to be watching my back turn on me.”

She stood up suddenly. “I need a drink,” she
said. “You want one?”

“
Yeah, okay,” Keller said. “Whatever
you’ve got.”

She went into the kitchen and came back with
a pair of rock glasses half-filled with ice and a half-empty bottle
of Jack Daniel’s. She set the glasses on the coffee table in front
of Keller and poured each one half-full. Keller noticed that her
hand shook slightly as she poured. She sat back down in the
recliner and drained off half of her glass before Keller had gotten
his to his lips. He took a sip. Marie raised the glass again and he
heard the edge of it rattle against her teeth as her hand shook
again. He set his glass down.

“
It’s not going to help,” he
said.

She looked at him. He could see the whites
all around her eyes. “What?” she said.

“
The booze. It helps blot out what
happened, but the only way to get to that place is to get too
plastered to think. And it doesn’t last. You sober up eventually.
And you’ll still have the dreams.”

“
You don’t know me. You don’t know shit
about my dreams."  Her voice shook.

“
I think I do,” he replied. “You’re
back there on that roadside. Staring down the barrel of that gun.
And you’re not just afraid you’re going to die. You
know
it. You’ve just seen someone you
know, someone you’ve lived and worked with, cut down. And you’re
next. You know you are. There’s no way you’re going to survive. Am
I right so far?” She was looking at him with an expression of pure
panic on her face. Her breath was coming in short gasps. He
couldn’t stop himself from going on. “You push it down, pretend it
doesn’t bother you because that’s what it takes to do your job, but
it keeps coming back at you. Whenever you stop for a minute,
whenever you let down your guard, whenever you lie down at night,
you’re back there again. On that roadside.”

Marie’s face went slack. Keller snatched the
glass from her limp hand, catching her as she slipped off the chair
towards the floor. He guided her down to the carpet. Her body shook
feverishly.

“
G-g-god,” she whispered against his
neck. “I was s-s-so
scared
!”
He wrapped his arms around her. She clutched him back with the
hysterical strength of the drowning. She sobbed into his chest like
a child, her whole body convulsed with grief. He pulled himself up
to a sitting position against the recliner and rocked her gently,
stroking her hair with one hand. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I
know. I know how it feels. It’s okay.” He held her like that for a
long time as she cried herself out.

Gradually, as she ran out of tears, she
quieted. Keller became uncomfortably aware of her body pressed
against him. Her breasts pressed into his chest. He became even
more aware of how her hands had stopped clutching at him and had
become gentler, almost caressing. She turned her tear-streaked face
up to him. Her lips were slightly parted and her eyes were glazed.
Her hand dropped lower, finding unerring proof of the effect she
was having on him. She moaned. The edge of hysteria in her voice
made it almost into a whimper.

Keller swore to himself. He had experienced
this himself in the aftermath of combat, a surge of pure sexual
heat that was the body’s response to nearly being snuffed out. It
was as if the genes within the body, realizing their fragility,
desperately tried to take one last chance to reproduce. He knew
that what she was feeling had nothing to do with him. He could have
been any warm male body. It was wrong to take advantage of her in
the aftermath of her emotional catharsis, he knew that. But her
lips under his were warm and yielding, tasting slightly of the
whiskey. Her hand stroking him was gentle but insistent. He reached
down and pulled her hand away. She made a petulant sound and tried
to grab him again. He pinned her hand and gently kissed her on the
forehead. She looked at him for a moment as if he had lost his
mind. Then she leaned her head against his chest and her body
relaxed. She fell asleep as quickly as if she had been blackjacked.
Keller sighed. He shifted her body slightly to try to get his arms
under her. He stood up, with difficulty, cradling her in his arms.
He carried her into the bedroom and laid her on the bed. He found a
blanket in the closet and threw it over her. She grumbled a bit in
her sleep, but pulled the blanket tighter around her. He stood by
the bed for few moments, watching her breathe. He thought about
Angela’s words to him.

You think it’s your job to
rescue the world
, she had said.
So now you’ve found yourself another damsel in
distress
. He sighed and shook his head. He walked back
out into the living room and stretched out on the couch.

It was dark when he awoke. He sat up, checked
his watch. 11:30. He heard the sound of the shower running. He
rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. His back felt cramped from
sleeping on the couch. He hadn’t realized how tired he was.

After a few minutes, she came out into the
living room. She was dressed in a short white silk robe that belted
at the waist. Her hair was still wet from the shower. She sat on
the recliner. They looked at each other for a while, neither one
speaking.