The Last Deep Breath (2 page)

“That was too tough a question?” she said.  She took off her shoes and curled in the seat, put her bare feet out the open window.  “I can see you’re not going to tax my conversational skills.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Grey said.

“You going to tell me you hate talking about yourself?”

“No.”

She held her hand to his upper thigh, squeezed just enough to get the pulse in his neck snapping.  “Ah ha, meaning you don’t have to because it’s already implicit in your attitude.  Right.”

They kept to it like that for mile after mile.  He’d been hanging around Reno for three weeks and knew the lay of the land.  He thought she was starting to doze when she cleared her throat and asked, “Okay, so what’s chasing you?”

It wasn’t a perceptive question.  She was appealing to his vanity.  Every guy liked to think that his demons were meaner and crazier than anybody else’s.  He could see her asking the same question of the stuntman as the guy nudged his Chevelle along the back lot, brooding and self-involved as hell.

Grey smiled, turned on the charm by dashboard light.  “I’m just drifting.”

“Adrift, huh?”  It wasn’t what he meant, but then again, maybe it was.   “Me too.  When about a million bucks worth of your shit is sold at auction, it gives you a certain Zen clarity about ownership and property.  About home and security.”

“Yeah?  So what did you learn?”

Her features hardened, the parentheses around her mouth looked like they’d been carved in with jagged glass.  “That I’m never going to let it happen again.”

The resolution in her voice was as firm and inflexible as an oath made at the side of a grave.  He’d spit out a few of them himself.

They kept heading into the rocky hills.  Moonlight jockeyed between the crags.  Grey kept his hand on the gearshift and she toyed with his fingers, brushed his knuckles.  He cracked the window and let the warm air blow against his sweaty neck.  One song ran into the next and bad mood started to take hold of him.  The hinges of his jaw tightened, the muscles in his back froze.  She noticed the change.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Turn off the music, okay?”

“Sure.”

Now she had her way in.  He’d opened the door.  Couldn’t even drive for a half hour without the past rising up and hooking his ankle, tugging him back down into its deep motionless waters.  He wondered if he’d ever be free of it, or if he should even try.  In a minute she would ask a throwaway question, the way they always asked, which would be full of intent and meaning, the answer to which he would never be able to fully give.

She brushed his wrist and plucked at the thick scars there.  Some people thought he’d gone wild with a straight razor trying to snuff himself.  But the truth was it had happened when he’d gone through the rear window in the car accident that had killed his parents.  If he’d been wearing his seatbelt the way his mother always told him to, he would’ve died with them.

“What cut you loose?” she asked.  “What did you do?”

“You don’t go in much for chit-chat. Am I reading that right?”

“I’ve done enough party prattle and hot spot club chatter to last a lifetime.”

“And yet you found me in a bar.”

“I told you my story even though it’s boring.  Is yours?”

What cut him loose?  What did he do?

He wasn’t sure how to answer.  The words weren’t there.

She touched his scars again.   He heard his mother tell his father, Slow down, Eddie, the roads are icy.

“I made a promise to do something I don’t really want to do,” Grey said.

Kendra didn’t ask what it was that he didn’t want to do, which surprised him.  Instead she made a flat statement.  “You’ve been in prison.”

“Narrowly avoided.”

“For doing what?  Or nearly doing what?”

“Nearly punching an asshole commanding officer in the mouth.”  He pressed the lighter in.  It still worked after all these years.  You get a classic car, renovate and recondition everything about it, and most of the time you still can’t get the damn lighter to heat up.  He shook a cigarette from the pack, champed it between his teeth, listened to the pop of the lighter, and lit up.  “What movies have you been in?”

She mentioned a few titles.  Grey had seen most of them but only remembered her in them after she got really specific about the characters she’d played and what they’d done in the films.   “In
Flowers of Evil
I was the gardener’s wife who finds the bodies under the rose bushes, who’s having the affair with the pool boy, and he turns out to be the killer.  I get it with the shears in the neck at about the hour and fifteen mark.  They CGIed my head rolling out of the top of the closet.”

A little surprising that she’d been so high profile, that he’d watched her so many times before.

She fondled his scars some more and asked, “So who’d you kill?”

The question made him raise his eyebrows.  He hadn’t been expecting it.  “What the hell made you ask that?”

“You’ve got the look about you.”

“I do?”

Was that why they were always chasing him?  These women who needed their husbands aced?  Because he looked like someone who’d already put two in the back of somebody’s head?  And if he’d done it before then it wouldn’t be a stretch to do it again?

“It’s not just your eyes, but in the way you stand, how you present yourself.”

“I present myself like someone who’s snuffed somebody?”

“Yes.”

He thought of Pax and everyone else he’d ever met who was a killer and tried to imagine how they held themselves, presented themselves, how they stood.  They stood like regular people.  He supposed, when you put it like that, he was as likely to have aced someone as anybody else.

“So?”

“Nobody,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.  “Then who do you
want
to kill?”

4

Didn’t tell her that night, or the next, or the one after that, though she kept asking.  It was a game to her.  She’d smile and come in with her nails, scratching and tickling him, start wrestling with him across the bed, and then ask him again.

Okay, so she was serious.  Wanted to know so she could put it to use somehow.  Put him to use.  Maybe send him after her agent or some film critic who’d slapped her silly in the trades.  He couldn’t figure out what kind of hold she expected to get on him.  Sexual, emotional, financial, or were they just going to be good pals?  It didn’t much matter.  Somehow he wound up with all her luggage in the trunk and back seat of his car, heading toward L.A.

They floated into East Hollywood about noon.  He’d never seen the Pacific and wanted to drive that long winding road with hairpin turns that might land you on the cliffs below.  He’d seen it in a hundred movies, mostly black & whites, usually in the rain, rising up and up until a tire blows out and the bad guy takes a header onto the reefs below.

But when he mentioned it to her she said, “What road?”

That taught him something right there.  He was coming at it all wrong.  She knew the reality, he knew the dream.  Grey wondered if there would be any middle ground to find.

He pulled up in front of an apartment complex with a large courtyard.  A couple of cats were fighting in one of the pomegranate trees. There was a swimming pool with a couple of bikini-clad girls and some bulky guys catching rays, slathered with baby oil and letting their mustaches and spandex briefs do their talking for them.

Kendra told him to sit tight.  He parked and hung his legs out the window and smoked a cigarette.  Could you really rent an apartment on the spur like this?  No credit or background checks?  Maybe she knew the manager.  At a rest stop a couple hundred miles back, while she used the ladies room, he’d rifled her bags and found a couple ounces of coke.  He figured she could always trade it to help keep her off the map.  Life ran differently out here in L.A., but a lot of the ground rules were the same as in New York.

He watched her walk with the manager up a staircase to a corner apartment with a nice balcony.  Ten minutes later she came down the steps, trotted along the walkway, leaned in the window and kissed him.

“Come see our new place,” she said.

That made his stomach tighten, seeing how easily she got things accomplished.  You had to be careful.  He carried the bags to the apartment while the mustaches gave him the stink eye.  It looked a hell of a lot better than the place he’d had in the Village.  There was a lot more sunlight coming through too.  He dropped the bags and she threw herself across the bed.  He thought she wanted him so he crawled across the mattress on his knees only to find her out cold.

That Hollywood sign, he figured he’d go find it.  Took him a couple of hours of prowling the town without asking directions before he found the right mountain, looked up and saw the word there hanging in the sky.  He got out and stood at the side of the road, enormous shadows already starting to angle and stretch toward him.  Hollywood.

5

In the dream Pax was beating the hell out of old man Wagner.  Grey was screaming for him to stop and throwing ineffectual punches at Pax’s heavily muscled back.  Blood had already begun to pool and lap toward Grey’s sneakers.

Yellowed dentures lay cracked perfectly in half under the kitchen table, a thin broken red trail leading to them across the kitchen floor.  The old lady was in the other room sobbing and digging through the hall closet trying to find the shotgun.

The eleven-gauge wasn’t there anymore, Pax had already packed it into the pickup.  Along with some stolen jewelry, about two hundred in cash, some old folks’ medication, a painting of boats that Pax liked, Grey’s small collection of comic books, Ellie’s couple of dolls and her pink backpack of clothes, some dog food and biscuits, and a picture that Pax said was of his mother but looked like it had been ripped out of a magazine.

Grey woke then, but the dream kept unfolding before him.  He knew he couldn’t stop it.  It would have to run its full length whether he was asleep or not.  It wouldn’t end until he got to West 4
^th
.  He decided to take a swim and pushed open the gate with the sign NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK and dove in.

Ellie was huddled in the corner clutching at her dog, a Shepard-Lab mix that whined as she held him but didn’t bark.

This time, Grey aimed for Pax’s kidneys and worked them hard, but even that part of Pax felt covered in armor plating.  Pax ignored him and continued to draw his arm back slowly, with great deliberation, gathering all his strength from second to second as he breathed deeply and with all his focus hauled off and punched their foster father, Mr. Wagner, in the face again.

The man was surely dead by now, Grey thought.  He’d stopped coughing and spitting and even moaning.  The bones in his face were crushed.  Lips torn in too many places to count.  One eye was gone.  The other couldn’t be seen beneath the swelling and bruising.  Nose had long ago turned to pulp.  And still Pax kept hammering.  Even if Wagner lived, he was going to wish that he hadn’t.

Ellie made a noise of great happiness.  Grey looked back over his shoulder at her and tried to tell her not to urge Pax on, that it had already gone too far.

Then Mrs. Wagner came running into the kitchen carrying a golf club.  She got two solid whacks at Pax’s skull with it before he turned and backhanded her into the sink, where she crumpled.

“It’s enough,” Grey said.

“It’ll never be enough,” Pax responded, but at least he got to his feet and moved off the old man.  He kicked the old woman twice and took his time washing his hands.  He looked at Grey and said, “Stop crying, it’s over.”

Grey was about to argue that he wasn’t crying, but a stream of tears was dripping off his chin.

“You’re twelve years old now, it’s time to man up.”

That was one of Pax’s favorite expressions.  Man up.  He was fourteen and had grown more than twelve inches and put on thirty pounds of muscle in the last year, but when they’d first met three summers ago they were about the same size.

Ellie crawled out of the corner and said, “He’s still breathing.”

Pax said, “Yeah.”

“Well, finish it.  And her too.”

The three of them lasted on the run almost a month before two cruisers cornered them at a roadside motel almost six hundred miles away.  The shotgun was still in the back of the pickup or Pax might’ve tried to use it.  He’d been hanging the boat picture over the motel TV when the police kicked in the door.  Ellie’s dog didn’t make a move but the cops still tasered it and gave the poor mutt a heart attack.

Mr. Wagner had lived and they were going to try Pax as an adult on a straight-up attempted murder charge.   The DA strong-armed Grey and Ellie, hoping to get them to say they’d been kidnapped by Pax.  With the dog collar tight in her fist, Ellie told him to get fucked.  Grey gave the death glare, manned up and said Pax was his brother and best friend.

The media hung Pax out to dry until Mrs. Wagner burned down her own house when the meth lab in the garage went up.  Firemen found child porn, lists of hacked credit card numbers, and evidence of an interstate lottery scam.  The DA asked Pax, Grey, and Ellie why they never explained their reasons for running.

Pax just grinned.  Grey said he’d been waiting for somebody to ask, which was the truth.  Ellie just told the DA to get fucked again.

They shuffled Pax to reform school and let him wait out the four years until he was eighteen.  Then he joined the Army.  Grey went back into the system and landed with another foster family, sweet folks who went a little heavy on the Jesus loves you shit, but overall very solid citizens.  He hung in until he was old enough to join the Army too.

Three years later he was on KP duty in Ramadi, east of Baghdad, on his way out on a dishonorable discharge. Pax walked into the kitchen where Grey had his arms down to the elbows in the grease trap and said, “You learn how to throw a solid punch yet?”

It was better than “Man up,” anyway.

Grey wouldn’t meet up with Ellie for another two years after that, over ten since he’d last seen her, when he turned the corner on West 4
^th
and found her crouched in the doorway of his building, leering at him with red teeth, a four-inch blade half-buried in her side.