The Terror of Living (9 page)

    The stalls were all empty, but Drake found a man hosing down the floors.

    "What day they race around here?"

    The man looked up and took his hand off the spray nozzle.

    "What day they race around here?" Drake asked again.

    "Sundays usually, though every once in a while they'll do a few races during the week."

    "They any good to bet on?"

    "Not if you want to keep your money."

    "Good advice."

    "Been working here almost ten years and it's the best I've got."

    "How many horses come through here?"

    "Two hundred or more on a busy day."

    "You keep them all in here?"

    "We end up bringing them in in shifts. Usually, if they lose, it's a quick turnout anyway."

    The man went back to washing the floors. "You know anyone I can talk to that might know a little something about riding?" Drake asked.

    The man released the spray nozzle again. "What type of riding are you interested in?"

    "Jumps and that sort of thing. Obstacles."

    "Best I can think of," the man said, "is this place around here. A few of the owners board horses there. It's a small operation, but they're good, decent people. They have a little run on the property and they can tell you a little more than I'd be able to."

    He followed the directions the man gave him, drove the few miles up the highway, and turned off at the next exit. It wasn't the prettiest piece of land he'd seen, but it wasn't the worst either. Freight tracks ran parallel to the highway, and where the road crossed, the rains had taken old newspapers and plastered them to the ground. There were cigarette butts, old soft-drink cups, all of it flung to the side when the gates lowered and the trains came through.

    He drove a few miles in, passing a scrapyard and a long expanse of pasture where he could see cows grazing. Where the houses sat, he could see stands of ash and alder and a few bent pines. In the distance a hill rose, and beyond it, he thought, must be the freeway and the sound. The land was all low wetland and grass field. There was a smell of wet sod and foul earth in the air. He could taste it, and he went on down the road wondering what it would take to feel at home in a place like this.

    He checked the address before turning in. The house lay below the road in a little depression that seemed to go back a fair ways, where he guessed the horse run must be, and the stables. In the drive outside the garage he saw a black Lincoln parked, and around the edge of the house, a silver horse trailer.

    When he stepped from the car, he could see a hand at the blinds. He adjusted his hat and straightened the fall of his shirt so that it wouldn't rise up on the gun. A skinny woman met him at the door. He guessed by the look of her that she was in her forties, in good shape, and he thought perhaps she could have been older but didn't show it. It had taken two rings of the doorbell before she opened. "I wondered if I might come in," Drake said. "I'd like to talk a little about riding."

    "We're not that sort of operation."

    "I know," Drake said, "but I asked at the track and they sent me here and I wondered if I could just ask you a few questions."

    The woman seemed to hesitate but then stepped aside and let him pass through. There was a man sitting at the table, wide bodied and unshaven, the black stubble showing on his dark skin. Drake took off his hat, straightening his thinning hair. The woman offered him a seat. He declined. Drake leaned across the table and offered the man his hand. "Bobby Drake, sir."

    "Nice to meet you, Bobby," the man said, but he didn't offer his name.

    "This really will only take a moment," Drake said. "I'm interested in learning a little about the horse business."

    "You look like you know a thing about it," the woman said. She was looking at his hat.

    "Oh, this," Drake said. "This is just part of the costume."

    "My husband wears one occasionally, though we don't see them on this side of the mountains often."

    Drake looked to the man at the table. He didn't seem much like the type to wear a cowboy hat, or any kind of hat, his black hair slicked back and a face that could have been Mexican but could have been anything really.

    "I'm Nora," the woman said.

    "Bobby."

    "What were you wondering about, Bobby?"

    "They told me over at the track that you've been keeping horses for almost twenty years now."

    "That's right."

    "You've probably come in contact with a lot of different people."

    "All types."

    "I'd really like to know how someone learns to ride." The image of the man riding bareback into the thick woods came to him, the pulse of the animal. "I mean really ride, like they do in the movies."

    Nora laughed and looked away, and when she looked back, her eyes were wet at the edges. "How old are you?" she said.

    "Thirty."

    "Have you ever been on a horse before?"

    "My family kept a few horses when I was young, but not anymore. Once recently."

    "Let me show you something." She took him out back and walked him over to the run. "This is what's called a triple bar and this is a hog's back. We don't do it here, but I'll give you a number and you can call and get lessons. You live around here, don't you?"

    "Up north, but I'll be down here on business for a few days. Do you think they could squeeze me in?"

    "You don't seem like you have a problem squeezing in." Nora laughed. "Wait here, I'll get you the number."

    Drake watched her go. The Mexican was standing at the back door, looking out on them, and when she came up the steps he went in after her. Drake walked over and offered his knuckles to the stabled horses; he counted six horses for the ten stalls. Two of the six were out in a field farther on.

    When Nora came back, he said, "Looks like you've got room for me when I get serious."

    Nora gave a weak smile. "Slow month."

    "Sorry to hear it," Drake said, his face screwed up with embarrassment. He should have known better.

    "Don't worry about it, Bobby. I know you were just asking."

    Drake looked out on the two horses in the paddock, and when he looked back he said, "You seem like a really nice person. I'm sure things will turn around for you. They usually do. At any rate I appreciate the help."

    "Happy to give it," Nora said. "It's funny, you know. I thought you were going to be someone else entirely."

    "I hope I didn't disappoint."

    "Not at all. Did you have something like this when you were growing up?"

    "No, nothing like this, just a few feet of open ground and a converted garage for a stable. Nothing fancy."

    "We were always planning on having kids, but it never happened. Always thought it would be a wonderful thing for them."

    "Wish I would have known about this place as a kid. I would have been down here every weekend."

    "Nice of you to say. You have any?"

    "Not that I know of."

    "That's pretty much what my husband says. He's always giving me little heart attacks."

    "Husbands do that."

    "Yes, they do."

    Drake didn't say anything, and then after a second had passed, he said, "Thank you, Nora. I'm going to call this number and see what I can work out."

    "They'll do something for you, I'm sure."

    Drake walked around the side of the house to his car. He passed the trailer and, out of habit, looked in at the garage. A late-model Honda sat in the bay, but not the truck he'd been expecting.

    THE CALL CONCERNING THE HEROIN CAME AN HOUR later than the lawyer expected. The driver stopped the car and ran around to open the back. The lawyer held the phone to his ear as he got out of the car. He was big in the belly and wore a shirt and tie, opened a bit at the collar, and fine slacks that fell straight from below the bulge of his stomach. The lawyer had been expecting this call from his Vietnamese clients, but not this late, and as he looked out on his property, at the rhododendron plants and the white gravel drive, he told the man on the other end of the phone not to worry. "There has been a little holdup, but it will be here tomorrow."

    The driver pulled away and left the lawyer in front of the expansive house, which looked on the far side of the property toward the ocean and was held over the hillside by metal stilts. In truth he didn't know why Grady hadn't delivered the girl. He had never run into a problem like this one before, Grady always being very thorough, always punctual, always clean. Perhaps the lawyer had been unclear with his instructions. Perhaps Grady had thought he'd just deliver when he had both girls. The lawyer didn't know for sure. He could hear the angry tone of the man on the other end of the line.

    "I've already sent someone to pick up the first girl from the airport," the lawyer said, trying to think it over, trying to come up with some sort of answer. "The other spooked and walked off the plane in Vancouver. My contact in customs was able to find her, and both packages will be delivered tomorrow. Noon, beside the downtown ferry docks." The lawyer closed the phone without waiting for a response.

    He walked to the edge of the rock retaining wall and lit a cigarette. The tops of pine and fir trees climbed out of the landscape. An odor of turned earth came from lower down, fresh manure and wood chips, the faint smell of lemon coming off the pines. He held the burning ember of his cigarette out in front of him, its smoke taken on the wind. He felt the tobacco in his lungs, hot as his own blood. In the far distance he could see the other side of the sound, the blurry shape of land across the water, green and smoldering with mist, like fresh-hewn branches laid across a fire. He still held the phone in his hand, and when he'd drawn deeply from the cigarette, letting the smoke rush back out into the world through his nostrils, he dialed Grady and waited for a response.

    EDDIE'S BAYLINER WAS TIED AT THE END OF THE DOCK, just fifty feet from the ramp. Hunt had stopped hiding drugs in the thing years before. Taking the example from the old-time smugglers who used to bring it across in the rims of their tires, in the past he'd stuffed each inflatable bumper with wide cylinders of rolled and Cryovaced cocaine and heroin and hung them from the side for all to see. It was the oblong bumpers he stood working with, unscrewing the false bottoms and checking the space into which he would slip the drugs later. The bumpers, really just opaque containers for air, sealed with a lid and a rubber washer, were airtight. It was the perfect place for drugs, easily cut loose from the boat, easy to access, and often overlooked, the same way that smugglers in the Florida Keys sealed their drugs to the undersides of their boats in fiberglass compartments called blisters. Hunt needed something he could ditch with ease and speed.

    The Bayliner held two Mercury engines, six hundred horses between the two of them, and enough fuel to get him suitably lost. He'd preferred the privacy of the mountains, but it would do; it was how he'd come into it all those years ago.

    A man and his daughter sat on the far dock, picking fried chicken into a crab trap. The daughter, not much older than five or six, stood nearly at the height of her father's waist. At the base of the ramp was another family, the father bringing the trailer down and two teenage boys bringing the boat up until the hull squealed across the carpet pad. Hunt sat and watched them for a time. He cleaned down the cockpit and checked the boat permit. A man passed the family on the ramp, joking with the father, then, after spotting Hunt, walked out along the dock.

    From the man's pocket, Hunt heard the pulse of a phone ringing. The man seemed to consider this, pausing to debate whether to pick it up, then, deciding against it, walked forward down the dock as if he and Hunt had some sort of appointment to keep. The man carried with him a small bag that, as he walked, swung from his hand and connected in a rhythm with his thigh. It reminded Hunt of a large cue case, square, with a zipper along its length and a handle in the middle.

    "Let me ask you a question," the man said. He was even with Hunt, looking down from the dock. "How far can one of these take you? It's a real nice boat. I'd like to have one of my own someday."

    Hunt looked up at him from the bow of the boat, where he stood coiling a length of rope. The man was very pale, with a blond, almost white mustache, and though his eyes were blue, the skin around them seemed thin and dark, as if the blood were coming through very close to the surface. There was something familiar about the man, a passing memory, broken like a bubble as the thing formed in Hunt's mind.

    "Hey," the man said, "weren't you in Monroe a few years back?"

    Hunt gave him a deadpan face. "I was there."

    "You remember me?"

    "Can't say I do." He didn't want to talk about this, didn't care. He had a few friends from his time in Monroe, a few friends up north he used for stashing drugs, for a place to stay on long trips. He didn't want to make any new friends. Didn't need any.