The Terror of Living (26 page)

    "That was taken about thirty years ago. He shot a store owner with his own gun. It's the only reason he got second degree as opposed to first."

    "Didn't seem like he had much of a plan when he showed up here either," Roy said.

    Driscoll turned and looked at Roy. "Would you mind looking at the picture."

    Nancy handed the picture to her husband. "This is the guy?" Roy said.

    "This is the first time you've met him?"

    "Of course. Why would I know someone like this?"

    Driscoll brought out a second packet of paper. On the front was a picture of Roy. "You and Phil Hunt were both in Monroe together. We could start there."

    "Monroe is a big place," Roy said.

    "Come on," Drake interrupted.

    "I don't know him," Roy said.

    "Relax," Driscoll said. "For the moment, let's say you don't know him. We find out otherwise, you could be in a lot of trouble. Do you understand, Roy?"

    "Yes."

    "What happened with the drugs?" Driscoll asked.

    "We don't know," Nancy said. "Thu passed them that night, and Phil took them when he left."

    "Did you see him with the drugs?"

    "No, but I didn't see him take my car keys either."

    "Can you tell us what the drugs looked like to you?"

    "Little pellets, about this big." Roy made a circle by putting his trigger finger and thumb together.

    "How many were there?"

    "Fifty, maybe. Thu probably had one still in her. None of the ones we saw looked to be open."

    "They didn't tell you when you called to check on her at the hospital?"

    "They asked us a bunch of questions," Nancy said. "Made us feel uncomfortable, made it seem like we were the ones who had done this thing to her. I work there. Doesn't make sense."

    "We saved that girl," Roy said.

    Driscoll wrote something down in his notebook. "Probably so she can do it again in a couple years."

    "I don't believe that at all," Nancy said. /

    Drake walked over and picked up one of Roy and Nancy's framed pictures. He rubbed a smudge from the frame with the end of his thumb. "How much is that worth, Driscoll? Fifty pellets?"

    "Not much. Not enough to warrant all this. A little shy of a hundred thousand, maybe?"

    "How much do you think they're paying that assassin to go around doing what he's been doing?"

    "More than that."

    "Doesn't make sense, does it?"

    "Nothing makes sense when pellets of heroin are involved."

    "What will happen to Thu?" Nancy asked.

    "I don't know what the situation is. She'll most likely be deported. But we'll need to talk to her first."

    HUNT SAT ON THE SIDE OF A BACK ROAD. THE MORNING sun warmed his face, and in the field before him the three horses grazed, dipping their necks like oil pistons and tearing at the grass. He could hear their teeth working. He was going after

    Nora, but first he had to do something about the horses. He couldn't go around with a trailer attached to the hitch of the truck, and he didn't even know if he'd be coming back. He thought he might be dead, and that was no way to leave the horses, like he'd left the others, just sitting there out behind his house to be used for target practice.

    Someone owned this patch of field, but he couldn't tell who. The field was on the eastern slope of the Cascades, where the rain would not come and there would be just a few days of protection from the coming snows. The field shone yellow under the sun, the grass already turning with the oncoming winter, all around the perimeter a band of tall fir. At the far end of the field he could see how the forest began, a rise in the earth that seemed to continue into the high peaks. The fence that had once surrounded the patch of land had wilted into the dirt, the wood covered in patches of green cattail moss.

    He sat with his legs pushed out in front of him in the grass and his arms held back for support. He had no idea what to do. Leaving Nora wasn't an option.

    Ninety thousand wasn't a lot of money to run on; it wasn't anything. He was fifty-four years old. Old enough to know he wasn't going to run. Nora had told him to. But he couldn't, not now, not like this.

    He limped out into the field. The horses were staked to the ground and held on ten-foot ropes. They watched him come, ambivalent, their teeth grinding. In the right circles, they were worth about forty thousand each. He went to the big spotted Appaloosa and combed her mane with his fingers. He began to speak to the horse as if he were making confession.

    He talked first of the man in the bait shop, the man he'd shot with a spray of buckshot. The man was old, losing his vision. Hunt told the Appaloosa about the old man, how he lived above the store, how he'd heard Hunt down there. It hadn't taken long for him to come down those steps, Hunt standing there, the man carrying the gun with him down the stairs, holding it on Hunt, Hunt sidestepping and grabbing for the weapon. The discharge of the gun. Hunt hadn't meant to do it, the gun going off, buckshot at point-blank range.

    All this he told to the horse, the big Appaloosa pulling at the grass, tearing it up, and moving it off the ground in a sideways motion. The wet sopping sound of the man's lungs, the old bagpipes, the blood at his lips. One of the old man's eyes was shot out and the blood flowed from it like tear tracks on the man's face. Hunt couldn't move, his ears ringing, the power of the shotgun still vibrating in his muscles. The man leveled out there on the floor of his shop. Hunt should have run, should have gotten the hell out of there.

    Hunt shuddered, his hand up over the neck of the Appaloosa. Like the two he'd lost in the mountains, he'd raised her from a foal, bringing her up in his own paddock, feeding her, giving her love and time to become the horse she was now. He stroked her mane, his fingers digging deep beneath the hair. "I'm sorry," he said, his face pressed into her neck and the words suffocated in her skin. He didn't know what would happen now. He didn't know what would happen to any of them.

    THE GIRL FROM THE COFFEE SHACK CALLED IN THE afternoon. Drake could hear the dull sound of the espresso machine, the brush of her cheek and hair against the receiver. He pictured her there in the little shack, the police tape pulled across the motel and the whole thing moving in the wind, stink currant and willow, yellow tape. After their introductions, he asked about the night.

    "One strange thing," she said. "A man parked in the lot here and sat in his car. He sat for a long time."

    "How long did he sit there?"

    "Nearly thirty minutes, it was past the time I usually close."

    "Did he buy coffee?"

    "That's why I stayed open. I thought maybe it was one of the owner's boyfriends come by to check up on me. It was near dark by the time he walked over."

    "Did you ask him what he had been doing that whole time?"

    "No. I was uncomfortable."

    "Why?"

    The girl didn't say anything.

    "Didn't you want to know?"

    "It looked like he was jerking off," she said after a while. "It freaked me out."

    "In the car?"

    "Yes, for thirty minutes."

    "Did he say anything to you after he came to the window?"

    "He wanted to talk about when it would get dark."

    "What did you tell him?"

    "I told him it already was. But he wanted to know if it got pitch black."

    "What was your impression of him?"

    "He made me feel strange, he didn't seem right. Very pale skin, irritated around the eyes. He had what looked like a bruise near his hairline."

    The man didn't sound anything like Hunt. "He was a little rough?"

    "He was nice enough. He gave me some advice."

    "What did he say?"

    "He said I should be careful about the city. He said it was nothing like this coffee shack."

    "I don't know why you didn't call the sheriff right then." Drake attempted a joke.

    The girl laughed but he could tell it was only to be polite. "To tell you the truth, he frightened me a little," the girl said. "I'm a little scared now. Just jumpy."

    "I don't know if this is the guy we're looking for. I doubt it. You shouldn't need to worry, there's no reason he should come back there."

    "I don't know," the girl said. "His car is still in the lot. I don't know why he wouldn't come back for it."

    He'd forgotten about the assassin's car. Hadn't even thought of it. He knew it now. Four vehicles had come to the motel, but only two had left. He'd figured Hunt for taking the Lincoln after ditching the hatchback. The killer back in his own car. "Can you read me the plate?"

    He listened to her voice. He could tell she was leaning over the counter, her diaphragm compressing and the airiness coming into her voice. Drake had probably walked right past it.

    He gave the girl the local sheriff's number. "Don't worry," Drake said. "Just procedure." Drake asked her to call the sheriff for a look at the car. "Tell him exactly what you just told me." He thanked her and then hung up.

    GRADY LED NORA IN THROUGH THE BACK AND TOLD her to sit. She looked around for something to sit on but didn't find anything. They were in the basement, and when she didn't sit immediately, he gave her a hard stare till she sat on the floor. There was cold cement all the way back to the water heater, windows covered over with white paint. A dull, claylike glow leaked in through the windows, raindrops and dirt spattering the panes. In the corner, a large standing freezer hummed. There were several workbenches, and a stainless steel prep table by the back door.

    He left his bag on one of the benches, walked over to the freezer, and opened it. He pushed a human leg aside and dug out the heroin, frozen through and covered with a thin pink hue. The freezer smelled sour. Though he'd washed everything down and bleached it as best he could, the freezer smelled of stomach acid and human excrement mixed together with all the things the girl had been carrying around inside her. He closed the door and looked back at Nora. She hadn't moved.

    Upstairs they heard the front door creak open, the weight of footsteps on the wooden boards above.

    Grady looked up. "Don't worry," he said.

    He crossed the floor with the heroin and deposited it in his knife bag. From the bag he took out the.22 and stuffed it in his pants, then the twelve-inch chef's knife, which he placed on the table, the edge of the metal singing in the empty basement.

    "You're in good hands," he finished, not looking at Nora but at the windows running the length of the basement wall.

    The basement was dug eight feet into the ground, and the only things discernible through the windows were the shapes of grass tufts where they pressed against the panes. Rain pattered on the drive, droplets clinging to the outside of the painted glass. Grady could feel an old, familiar urge flood his insides, like the devil pouring kerosene, thick and heavy, down his throat. A shadow passed across the window nearest the street and then, a second later, a window near the basement door.

    HUNT LEFT THE THREE HORSES IN THE FIELD. HE staked them and gave them thirty feet of cord, enough to get beneath the shade of the tall fir trees. The field was not too far off, but remote enough that no one would find the horses for a day or two.

    The trailer he hid up an old forestry road. He left it a quarter mile off the field, and when he returned to the back road, he could see that the tree trunks covered the silver trailer just as if it were a boulder in the forest. Down the road he filled a large bucket of water from a moss-covered stream. Once the bucket was filled he cupped his hands and brought the water to his face. He removed his wallet and keys from his pockets and laid them beside him. The address he'd taken from Thus purse he kept weighted under his keys.

    He was hungry, he felt it now, and he let the water run down his cheeks and roll from his chin, the cold of it settling into him. When he had done this several times, he ran the water through his hair and combed it back with his fingers. From the car he got the small survival bag and laid it near the stream. He checked the bandage. Nancy had done a good job, sewing the wound closed on both sides of his calf, and he could see how the scar would be in the pattern of a star, the skin already starting to conceal the wound. He used the water to rinse; then with the hydrogen peroxide and the iodine he cleaned the cut and let it air-dry for a moment before he put on a fresh bandage and wrapped the whole thing once again.

    When he finished washing, he collected his wallet and keys from the grass and put them into his pockets. He still wore the same clothes he had left the marina in, jeans cut off on one side and his white tennis shoes, one the vermilion color of his dried blood and the other stained dark as mud. Hunt picked up the Seattle address he'd taken from Thu and held it between his fingers, a subtle breeze working across his wet skin. Grady had guaranteed Hunt would die. It was the only thing Hunt was sure of. There was nothing left for him to lose. He looked at the address again, knowing he needed help and hoping he would find it there.