The Terror of Living (5 page)

    "I worry," she said, "but it's what I do and you can't help that."

    "No," he said. "Though I wish I could."

    Nora stood looking at him a moment longer. Maybe just to look him over. Maybe just to know if everything would be okay. She had felt his clothes when he came in, worn and crusted with dirt, so stiff and starched with mud, Hunt knew they felt as if they'd been washed in a bog, then hung from tree limbs to dry. He'd smelled it all the way home, jeans and shirt smoky with the odor of the forest, lichen and moss and something else, something he knew she hadn't smelled in years, something that he could see troubled her but that Hunt knew was fear.

    His eyes gave the place a quick once-over while she tried to settle him. "I'm going to trust you," she said. "I'm going to trust you and I don't want you to tell me different."

    "Don't worry," he said again. "Eddie's going to come by and we're going to work this out."

    Nora stared at him a second longer. He could see she was unsure of herself, had no idea what to do or how to react. He'd never been the kind to stare out the window before. Always sure of himself, always in control. "I'll put some coffee on," she said.

    After she'd gone, Hunt went back to the window. When he straightened he could feel the cold metal of the Browning touch his back, the muzzle wedged between his underwear and his jeans. It made him shiver, and briefly he had a vision of himself and Nora running, hands clasped tight, into an unknown darkness.

    I DIDN'T SAY I GUARANTEED IT," EDDIE SAID. HE SAT there alone with his phone pressed to his face. The Lincoln rested on the side of the road, midway to Hunt's place, flashers on. The only things coming down the road were container trucks and flatbeds. "I've worked with these guys for twenty years now. I didn't say I'd guarantee it, but I trust them. It was some hero deputy. No. I wish I could tell you that, but I can't. We can work something out. Yes, I remember. No, I don't think that's necessary. It's a good crew. There must be something that can be done." His voice lowered. "Yes, I understand. I'll call back later."

    Eddie threw the phone and it bounced off the windshield. He pressed his palms to his eyes before he even heard the phone fall and clatter on the plastic dash. His breaths came one at a time, filling his cheeks, then bursting out. His hands were still at his eyes, his fingers stretching up into his hair. He knew what would happen now. This had all been explained to him. But twenty years had made him confident. Made him think it wouldn't happen this way. That it couldn't.

    The lawyer's voice had been very clear. Eddie didn't think the man was on the level. Probably cooled out on some real expensive drugs. Some laboratory stuff that didn't let him feel. Made him think of people the way he did. Nothing made sense, and maybe Eddie had been here his whole life, stuck in the middle, because he'd tried to make sense of money and friendship and a million other things that were never meant to be.

    There were other things to think of now, other things he could do. He looked at the clock on the dash and figured the time. Hunt had called nearly two hours before. He'd be expecting him, waiting for him, angry and alone, and it was how it would have to be. Hunt would have to get used to that. Would have to understand he couldn't go back to the life he'd led, to what he'd built.

    AROUND NOON, HUNT SAW EDDIE TAKE THE TURN off the main drive and pull down into the gravel. Hunt had taken to sitting in the big red chair, the back faced into the corner so that he could see the road. Sometime during the morning, while he was cursing Eddie and calling him on his cell phone, he'd started a fire in the fireplace. The shivers had come over him again and it was all he could do to light the fire and kneel next to it with his big, clay-colored hands held out.

    He watched Eddie turn down off the main road, the gravel popping beneath his tires. He drove a big Lincoln, one of the new ones meant to look like a Cadillac. Hunt watched him for a moment, then went into the kitchen, where Nora was standing over the sink looking out the windows. She was dressed for the house in a favorite pair of faded jeans and an old oversize undershirt that hung loose on her slender frame. "Can you give him a wave when he gets out?" Hunt said, touching the grip of the Browning and trying to look like he was merely adjusting the fold of his belt. "I'm going to go out the back for a moment."

    Nora gave him a worried look but didn't say anything.

    "If you can, let him in through the garage and bring him in the side door here."

    They owned five acres south of Seattle on the outskirts of a place called Auburn. When they were young they'd taken out loans to build stables, and they raised and boarded horses on the back acre of their property. On Sunday nights they could see the big lights from the horse races and hear the cheers coming off the crowd as the horses neared the finish. Mostly, though, it was cow pastures and scrap lots filled with old car parts, refrigerators, and stacked tires. The fecal smell of dairy animals-mud and cow droppings always the first thing. Most days he didn't even smell it. Either he'd gotten used to it or the wind was blowing from the north and carrying the scent south toward Tacoma. A light rain had fallen the night before and he could smell the scents coming off the cows, smell them in the grass and on the trees, coating everything.

    He took the back steps quickly, in a hurry to get down onto the lawn, but then turned around, remembering the spring on the screen door and the clapping aluminum sound it would make, from where he stood holding the door, he could hear cars passing on the highway next to the horse track, the bump and gurgle of a small irrigation stream behind the house. Most of their property was wooded, but a good acre of it - around the house, where they had a small pasture set up for the horses-was open, and he could see clearly into the birch and pine that surrounded his house.

    Hunt and Eddie had met twenty years before when Eddie had come into the bar where Hunt was drinking, looking for a junkie named Stone. Hunt ran the numbers on the local horse races, and though he made good picks, his drinking got in the way of his profits and he'd reached the point where he was so broke he felt there were bottomless holes in his pockets. "If you find him," Hunt had said, feeling a little drunk from a string of shot glasses laid out in front of him, "tell him he owes me twenty dollars."

    "He owes me a lot more than that," Eddie said, looking down the bar toward Hunt. "Give you a percentage if you can show me where he lives."

    Hunt knew where Stone lived. But he didn't know Eddie. "How much?"

    "Enough."

    "Isn't that always the answer," Hunt said, sliding off the barstool and giving Eddie a smile.

    "Tell you what," Eddie said. "If you can show me where he lives, you'll make yourself a lot more than twenty."

    It took them ten minutes to drive from the bar to the house where Stone lived. Late summer, the clouds braided up and flat as a rug across the sky above. No wind, and the stillness of the summer heat all around them. Eddie parked the car in an alley around back. "If he tries to come through here," Eddie said, making things sound as simple as possible, "just stop him."

    Hunt gave Eddie a doubting look. "With what?"

    "You want your twenty bucks, right? Figure it out."

    Eddie got out and closed the door with his hip. Hunt still remembered the smell of that back alley. Acrid smell of food, Dumpsters stuffed up with furniture and half-eaten pizza crusts, produce boxes from the nearby store lining the alley, their waxen bottoms colored in vegetal funk.

    A minute passed and then Stone appeared, rounding the Dumpster at a full run with Eddie close behind him. Hunt sat in Eddie's passenger seat, still dazed from the bar-not expecting any of it. Hunt didn't have any clear idea what to do, Stone running straight at him. Hunt opened the door and meant to tackle Stone, but Stone, with his head turned back toward Eddie, wasn't looking and ran straight into the open car door. The clap of Stone's body as it bounced, then hit the ground. Hunt stood there looking down. Eddie drew up, breathing hard. Stone was laid out on the stained cement alleyway, looking up at the two of them. "Fuck, man. Dealers and bookies unite," Stone muttered.

    Eddie kicked Stone twice in the stomach, hard enough that Hunt heard the air burst from the man's lips. With Stone doubled up on the cement, Eddie reached down and took Stone's wallet from him, along with a bag Hunt recognized as heroin. "Here's your twenty," Eddie said, taking a weathered bill from the wallet and giving it to Hunt. "What did we say for a percentage?"

    Hunt looked down at the man crumpled up at their feet. "We didn't," Hunt said.

    Eddie took a wad of bills from his pocket and thumbed two hundred out and then replaced the wad in his pocket. "Thirty percent sounds right to me." He handed the two bills to Hunt.

    Over the past twenty years they'd both gone on to bigger and better things, Hunt's standard 30 percent paying for his first date with Nora, a down payment on his house and property, and even a few young horses they had jokingly called their kids after they found out they couldn't have children. Nothing in his life had ever arisen that would make him think Eddie wasn't playing straight with him. There was no reason Hunt could think of to be worried about his welfare. Eddie had never had a reason to take his frustrations out on him. They were friends after years of doing business together, backyard barbecues, horse races, and bets. Hunt trusted Eddie because there was no other option and because Eddie had always played straight with him. Hunt could see how everything might change. He'd never messed up this bad, never screwed up, never been in the position Stone had found himself in, laid out and helpless, turtled on his backside in some foul alley waiting to see what would happen next.

    Now, Hunt heard the electric whir of his garage door opening - Nora letting Eddie into the garage. As Hunt went around the house, he was careful to duck his head below the frame of the garage window, taking his steps with caution so as not to upset the small line of garden pebbles they'd put in around the foundation for drainage. He felt for the Browning and brought it out, holding it in front of him as he went along the length of the garage. He'd never planned to hold a gun again in his life. But here he was, holding one, waiting for his friend, Eddie Vasquez, to duck beneath the garage door and walk into his house.

    The garage motor was still going when Hunt put the gun up against Eddie's back. Eddie didn't say anything, and Nora, standing in the light of the side door, raised a hand to her mouth as if to quiet a scream.

    "Be calm," Eddie said, his voice as cool and relaxed as always.

    If Hunt had played the part all the way through, he might have knocked Eddie right over with the butt of the gun. But it wasn't in the plan, none of it was, he was making it all up as he went. For all that had happened he had no reason not to trust Eddie. A lot of money was involved, a whole shitload of powder, and it didn't seem to make the most sense to piss anyone off more than he already had.

    "Didn't figure you for the gun type," Eddie said. They were standing there in the garage. The door settled down on its motor, and besides the dull rush of cars on the highway a half mile off, it was quiet.

    "Sorry about this, Eddie," Hunt said, looking up at his wife, Nora looking back at him, completely horrified.

    "Hunt," Eddie said, a note of caution entering his voice. "No one knows about what happened up there. For all they know, it was just the kid. I can blame it all on the kid and that's how it will turn out.

    "The kid should never have been there," Hunt said.

    "Two hundred kilos is a lot for one man to pack out."

    "I could have done it with an extra horse. No sense in getting the kid involved."

    "He's involved now, isn't he? Just be glad it wasn't you they got their hands on."

    "What now?" Hunt asked.

    "You need to relax is 'what now.'" Eddie lowered his hands. "Nothing is registered under your name, cell phone, truck, everything under a different name. Let's all go inside, you can put the gun away. We'll figure this out."

    Nora poured the coffee and stood leaning with her hip against the counter, looking the two men over. She had begun to say something and then stopped. If he ever made it out of this, there would be questions; Hunt knew that, but he couldn't do anything about it now, just clean it off and hope it didn't stink.

    "Look, Hunt," Eddie was saying. "It was dark. No one can say who you were, wearing that hat and riding like you do. It was an aerial drop twenty miles this side of the border. Unless you're out there taking Polaroids and tacking them up to the trees, you should be fine."

    "There's going to be a lot of pissed-off people when you don't deliver," Hunt said.

    "You let me worry about that."

    "Eddie, I'm not trying to be difficult about this, but the kid knows who I am and it's not going to take him long to figure out he's got chips on the table."

    "We all have chips on the table," Eddie said, taking a draw from his coffee.

    THE HEAD DEA AGENT, DRISCOLL, SAT TAPPING HIS card on the metal table, tapping lengthwise, then turning the card and tapping it again. He'd been doing it at a near-steady pace for more than an hour. When Drake came in, it was the second time they'd met that day. Just the two of them in the room, Driscoll with his jacket off and tie loosened, sitting there with a stack of paper laid out before him. A man with the posture and thick cut of an athlete, now slumping into his later years, the agent ran a hand through his mustache and off his chin, then leaned back in the chair and looked up. To Drake the motion seemed practiced, almost polite, like the gesture of a lion with a kind of social conscience, cleaning blood from its fur, readying itself for the next kill. "I've just finished looking through your report," he said after Drake had taken a seat in the chair across the table from the agent. "There isn't anything in here about you braining the kid with the dull end of your rifle."