The Long Fall (24 page)

Outside, every trace of the dust storm has vanished. The wind is gone, and the light has a sharp, brittle edge. The sky has reopened, immense and bright and depthless, and is much too blue, the shade that Arizona always peddles to tourists.

Evelyn is behind the house, crouched at the edge of the gravel driveway apron. She has a small fire going and a stack of photographs piled at her feet. She feeds them one at a time to the flames. She doesn’t look up when Jimmy walks over.

“Is he dead?” she asks.

“He’s on his way,” Jimmy says and tells her about the cuffs.

Evelyn slips another black-and-white photo into the flames.

The Mesa View Inn. Evelyn crouched in front of Jimmy in her panties and unzipping his jeans. Evelyn with a Mona Lisa smile. Jimmy with his hand in her hair.

“He cut out my face,” Jimmy says, “on the ones he sent to Richard.”

Evelyn nods and picks up the next black-and-white from the pile.

Jimmy waits, hoping Evelyn will add something or at least look at him instead of the photos, but she’s in lockdown mode, there and somewhere else at the same time, no different from the planes still stranded and stacked in all that blue above them to the north circling and waiting for clearance from the tower at Sky Harbor International.

Jimmy walks a little farther into the backyard. To his right is a dilapidated wooden storage shed and behind that the remains of the orchard, the oranges and lemons hanging from branches like forgotten Christmas ornaments.

Luck, he tells himself. All they had to do is ride the luck. It’s breaking their way, and when it does, you don’t question it. You ride it all the way out.

In a little while, he’ll scare up a shovel from the shed and bury Limbe behind the orchard. Then Jimmy will take Limbe’s car and put it out back with the rest of the junk and torch it. He’ll talk to Evelyn afterward, work on getting their stories straight. Jimmy’s got some plans for the ransom money, and there’s no reason to let his brother, Richard, in on them.

No, Jimmy’s going to play it as if everything went Limbe’s way. Let Richard believe he followed instructions and got Evelyn back unharmed. No snake. No secret grave. No torched cars. Straight business.

Everything’s going to work out just fine, Jimmy’s sure of it now, Evelyn and him walking away, clear and clean, outside of anything the cops or Richard can do about it or them.

When Jimmy turns around, Evelyn is standing in front of the fire, the pile of photographs gone. She rummages in the front pocket of her jeans, pulls out something small and soft blue that’s wadded like a piece of paper, and looks briefly over at him before dropping it in the flames. Then she turns and starts toward the house.

“What are you doing?” Jimmy asks when he catches up with her.

“I want to watch.”

“Oh man, give it a little more time, Evelyn. A snakebite, what it does, believe me, that’s not something you want to see.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Jimmy,” she says. “More wrong than you’ll ever know.”

She brushes by him, and then she’s through the door and in the house, and Jimmy, shaking his head, walks over to the shed to look for a shovel.

A
aron Limbe knows this: what it means to burn. There is blood, and there is burning, and there is the heart that pumps them both, and that’s where he lives, where he’s always lived, in the burning and with the burning, and he’s witnessed its power and true form, and at times been its instrument and agent, and he’s come to understand there’s a burning that in itself does not burn, that when loosed upon the world consumes all that is not itself, a burning that burns away the accidental and incidental and the fortuitous, that clarifies and therefore purifies all which is false and not of itself, because that which is false is without purpose, and to be without purpose is to be without form, and that without form is weak and broken and lost and does not last, but he who lives within such burning will come to learn all the secrets of the blood and the form the heart bestows upon them, and he is then with purpose and therefore emptied of everything not of himself and lives in the knowledge that what is left is forever who you are and that who you are is forever burning.

He is waiting for the door to open again.

When it finally does, Aaron Limbe pulls himself from the floor to a sitting position. The skin on his face is hot and tight and puffy, and his eyes have almost swollen shut.

Aaron Limbe looks down at his left hand and slowly moves its fingers.

He coughs, and the cuffs bite into his right wrist. His head drops back against the pantry door. There’s a tightness in his temples and an avalanche of a headache breaking loose in his skull. Every other breath is shadowed by a wheeze. Something leaks from the corner of his mouth down his chin.

There’s something he’s supposed to be remembering. It’s important.

His arm. He thinks it has something to do with his arm. But he’s not sure which one or why.

There is a woman at the table. He is sure of that.

And he is in a kitchen.

He is sure of that, too.

Kitchens do not have drains in the center of the floor.

The cement block room outside Managua did not have windows, but it did have a drain.

You do not have to hose down a kitchen afterward.

First, though, you must ask the questions.

And to ask a true question, you must know what is true.

Otherwise, you are lost. Irrevocably lost.

That’s why you have drains and uniforms. And why you must keep each clean.

Because nothing else is.

He winked, Ramon Delgado did.

The judge threw out the evidence and declared a mistrial, and Ramon Delgado, who thought the law was his toy, had picked up his files and then looked over at him from the defense table and winked.

Ramon Delgado did not understand that a thing is what it’s named.

Wetback, for example.

Your back could be wet, but that did not mean you were clean.

There are no drains in a courtroom though.

That’s why he needed matches.

A baker’s dozen, including Delgado.

No winking, that time, when he locked the door in the safe house.

Borders. This side. That side.

Everything burns except the law.

That’s part of what he’s supposed to be remembering, something about the law, and his arm, his left arm, the one not cuffed to the pantry door, the arm he keeps lifting and throwing at his right ankle, like he’s slowly waving the woman at the table over.

That’s what cops do. Wave you over.

Then they ask you questions.

Except he’s not a cop. Not anymore.

And he can’t ask questions anymore either, because his tongue is swollen and bloated and slow and will not help him say the words.

But she gets up from the table anyway and crosses the room, and when she squats in front of him, he remembers.

Thanks to Jimmy Coates, he is not a cop anymore, but he has not forgotten how to think like one.

His left arm remembered. Now all of him does.

An unwritten law: no cop goes in without a throw-down.

His is strapped above his right ankle.

A Taurus auto-pistol, nine-shot magazine.

And this time his fingers find it.

She’s starting to move out of her crouch, her head turning toward the door.

But he’s already lifting his arm, following her, and just before he pulls the trigger, Aaron Limbe knows this: He has come to fullness and completion, and he will be forever in this moment.

The wood’s so spongy around the clasp that Jimmy doesn’t bother picking the lock on the shed; he simply pulls it off and levers the door, then steps inside and starts hunting down a shovel.

That might take a while though. The shed’s crammed everywhere with junk, most of it his grandfather’s, from back when the ranch and Gramps were still functioning, before he squandered his business holdings and finally over 1,800 acres of prime south Maricopa Valley on a string of wildcat investment schemes, waiting until he was seventy to undo what it had taken him forty years to build, the ranch dismantled parcel by parcel by the bank until it had shrunk to the house and twenty acres, and Gramps had retreated to a chaise lounge with red and white plastic webbing that he stationed behind the house so that he faced the skyline of the city and century that had outgrown and outfoxed him and worked his way through a handful of cigars and a fifth of bourbon a day, every day, for the last three years of his life, “dotting the i” he called it, and laughing, Jimmy remembering that laugh, long and deep, a laugh that always seemed somehow bigger and more complicated than the man himself.

Jimmy’s surrounded by old cardboard boxes collapsing into each other and spilling magazines, dishes, and clothes, a couple of lawnmowers, a saddle and tack, a broken chandelier, a pile of kerosene lanterns, cans of paint and primer, an artificial Christmas tree, three fishing poles, toolboxes, a weathervane, and a handheld post-hole digger, but no shovel, so he picks his way further into the shed.

Portions of the roof and walls are missing, and the air’s checkerboarded with floating pieces of light. Everything around him is dry-rotted, dust-covered, or rusted. He keeps expecting Evelyn to appear in the door behind him and admit that watching what sidewinder venom does to someone’s nervous system was maybe not such a hot idea after all, but she doesn’t show up, and all Jimmy wants is to get that grave dug and fast.

Jimmy spots the shovel in the far west corner of the shed. It’s standing face up, a dusty ace of spades.

To get at it, he has to step around a galvanized washtub holding a dented mailbox and a pile of frayed rope, then drag a rusty set of bedsprings out of the way.

Jimmy leans over to grab the shovel, but stops when he sees he’s about to step on a two-by-four with a large nail jutting from its center. He detours to the left instead.

And walks right into the web.

It takes him a couple seconds to realize that’s what it is, a spider web, big as a bedsheet, because at first all that registers is the contact, the wrap and tangle where he’d been expecting air, and then he’s flailing his arms and yelling, and no matter where he steps he’s dragging part of the web with him, strands matting his hair and shirt, clinging to his eyelashes and lips and ears, and just as Jimmy’s lifting his hands to his face, that’s when he hears it, the abrupt punctuation of a pistol shot.

J
immy’s cycled through three days of visiting hours at Phoenix Memorial before he’s finally alone in the room with Evelyn. The last couple of days have been wall-to-wall Scottsdale matrons, the country club and fitness center set, a parade of well-maintained thirty- and forty-somethings all trying to outdo each other in making empathy a fashion statement; and then there’d been Richard, the doting husband, Mr. Bedside Vigil, even the nurses talking about it, Jimmy overhearing them, what a fine man, how lucky Evelyn, etc., Jimmy left floating around the edges of the show until this afternoon.

Evelyn’s propped up and asleep, an IV running into her left arm. There’s a slight wheeze each time she takes a breath, and her color’s gone south. She’s lost some weight, it showing up first in her face, the cheekbones more insistent, sharpening the angles of her profile.

She turned her head.

That’s what saved her life.

Simply that.

She turned her head, and the bullet hit the spot where shoulder and neck meet instead of ripping into her throat, a couple of inches that made all the difference.

She was lucky, the doctors said.

All Jimmy remembers, though, is the blood and Evelyn slumped against him as he hauled ass to the emergency room, Evelyn mumbling, saying something over and over that he couldn’t catch, and bleeding, everything shrunken to a moment that held no room for luck or anything else except Jimmy’s foot on the gas.

Then Richard had shown up, and Jimmy had wanted to wait around to see if Evelyn was going to be all right, but a gunshot victim brings out the cops and the cops have questions, and Richard was determined they’d get his answers, so Jimmy had driven back to his grandfather’s house on West Dobbins and stood over Limbe’s snake-bitten corpse, and then he’d scouted down the Smith & Wesson 3904, and he’d done what he couldn’t do before, put a bullet in Limbe—two of them actually, one in the upper right thigh and the other a dead-center heart shot—and then he’d taken the cuffs off Limbe’s wrist and left him propped against the pantry door and grabbed the canvas bag and left, Jimmy not bothering to wipe down for fingerprints because he could already see how things were going to play out, Richard putting in a call to one of his chamber of commerce or Rotarian or Jaycee buddies, and that buddy putting in a call to the commissioner or chief, and in the end you had an investigation that found what it was supposed to find, the version of events that Richard had worked out in the parking lot outside the emergency room with Jimmy, a simple case of self-defense, no incriminating batch of black-and-white photos, no murder for hire, no ransom demands, just Richard and Evelyn heading out to the farm to do some repair work and interrupting a burglary in progress, the guy panicking and shooting, hitting Evelyn, Richard running back to the car for the Smith & Wesson in the glove compartment, and the burglar ending up dead, with Jimmy spliced from the action altogether, as cleanly and neatly as his face had been from the photos Aaron Limbe had delivered to Richard.

The details on the books. Everything in place.

No need to dust for prints or look too closely at the corpse and push things with an autopsy. No need to run a check on the registration for the pistol that Richard supposedly owned and fired.

Or, for that matter, to work very hard at identifying the corpse, especially when that led back to a sociopathic ex-cop, a dead Mexican American lawyer, and a safe-house fire. That was some terrain the Phoenix police brass was not too keen on revisiting.

When the story hit the papers, it was buried in the back pages of the
Republic
and rated less than 150 words.