by Dan Flanigan
“Stop it.”
“You’re gonna leave me, I know it.” He spoke without inflection, in a monotone, as if the human being in him had been replaced by a computer-generated telephone message.
“Maybe I should just end it now. It’s not worth living this way.”
When Lenny moved the shotgun from his lap, O’Keefe thought he intended to turn it on Tag, but it was himself that Lenny intended to harm. His thumb groped for the trigger. She screamed and leaped at him. The shotgun exploded. It happened so fast that O’Keefe could only stand frozen in stupefied witness. She had managed to grab the gun and turn it away from Lenny just as it fired. There was now a large hole in the wall next to Lenny’s head. Lenny sat there gasping for breath, his face glistening with sweat. On her knees in front of him, sobbing hysterically, shoulders heaving with terror and grief, her right hand tightly gripping the gun barrel, her left arm locked around his leg as if she were trying to hold him to his life.
“That was it,” Lenny said softly. “That was all the courage I had.”
He pushed her gently aside and rose uncertainly to his feet, staggering a little.
“What did you do with the stuff? No use trying to hide it anymore. I’ll ransack the place if I have to.”
“In my backpack,” she said. “I put it all in there.” Lenny walked over to a small table near the breakfast bar to her pack and opened it. When O’Keefe saw what was in the pack, an image, a sound, and a concept flashed across his mind: angels’ wings, a dying fall, paradise lost. The pack was stuffed full with bags of white powder and green cash He slumped down the side of the house. He had solved her mystery. He so wished that he hadn’t.
“You want some?” Lenny asked.
“Just a little,” she said in the smallest of voices. “A couple of lines.”
“You want to try the needle again?”
“No,” she said, her voice lifting in stress.
“You didn’t like it?”
“I liked it too much.”
O’Keefe struggled back up the hill to his place behind the boulders like a wounded animal crawling back to its hole. He was cold. He dragged himself into his sleeping bag. If he had been a coyote, he would have howled at the moon, but instead he lay a long time on his back in the sleeping bag, smoking cigarettes and looking out at the night, wishing it would tell him something he desperately needed to know. Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might . . . But he was beyond even wishing now. Out there somewhere was Andromeda, the Chained Princess, and Perseus, the Champion, but Andromeda had only herself to thank for her chains, and Perseus could not break them, try as he might. He had hoped against hope that she hadn’t just used him that night in the nightclub and cabin, buying time so she could make good her escape. Delusional, wishful thinking. At dawn he should just walk out of this desert forever and leave Tag Parker to the tawdry destiny she had brought on herself. The object of his quest had proved unworthy. He felt like a fool and knew now that he had been a fool all his life.
He tried every trick he knew, but he could not force himself to fall asleep, and, before that long painful night ended, he had somehow come to see things in a different way. She was a damsel corrupted but in distress all the same. Anderson had not hired him to find and protect her only on the condition that she remain true to O’Keefe’s illusions about her. He had always done his duty. Dreams may die, but duty lives on.
CHAPTER 24
SHE DID NOT see him sitting on top of the boulder until she had come through the line of trees into the oasis, riding toward the spring-fed pool. Frightened, she started to turn Pegasus around and gallop off. Fine with him, her decision to make. Halfway into the turn, she must have realized who she had seen, and she whirled the horse back around to face him.
“Hello, Tag.”
“Pete,” he heard her say faintly. She rode up to him.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said dreamily. “It’s good to see you again.”
She sounded like she meant it, but surely he was just striving to delude himself yet again. Grasping at straws seemed to have become a specialty of his lately. She swung off the palomino and let him wander off to graze on the grass beside the pool. She wore jeans, a white cowboy shirt, and a pink bandana tied around her neck. He thought he would be disappointed when he saw her close up and shorn of her beautiful hair, but she was lovely still though a little boyish and slimmer and sharper around the edges, like the vegetation in the desert she seemed so at home in. The short hair gave special prominence to her aqua eyes that seemed to beckon him.
“Well,” she said, looking up at him perched on the rock, “I guess the question is ‘What are you doing here?’ And ‘Why’?”
“Your father sent me.”
“Of course,” she said, with doom in her voice, the aqua pools in her eyes clouding, and she looked like a prisoner suddenly aware that she had failed to escape, probably never would escape.
“I told you to stay away.”
He jumped down to face her. “You just used me to get away, didn’t you?”
She seemed genuinely surprised by his tone of outrage. “Yes, I used you. I used you to save my life. And what’s wrong with that? What else were you there for?”
He had no answer for that.
“And whether I used you or not, I still meant what I said, and I still meant what I did, and you didn’t deserve more than that. If you want perfection, you’re in the wrong world.”
“I’m in the wrong world, all right. It wasn’t a Ponzi scheme at all. It was a real investment with real return on the money. But the investment wasn’t in minks. The suckers didn’t know it, but the investment was in cocaine.”
“I told you to stay away,” she said, trying to turn his accusations around on himself.
“Not at first,” he continued. “It took Lenny a while to figure out that the mink farm wasn’t going to work. How he hit on the idea of becoming a pusher I don’t know. But the returns on the cocaine investment were truly fabulous, better even than the promises he’d made to the investors.
“That cocaine turned his lies into truth. There was enough money to give the investors back big bucks and plenty left over so Lenny and Tag could live high in the treetops.
“But Lenny got himself in too deep in a couple of ways. First, the people you run with in the drug business aren’t exactly Sunday-go-to-meeting types. Once he got hooked up with Mr. Canada, Mr. Canada owned him, body and soul. But even that might have worked. You might have been able to go on for a long time that way, maybe even long enough to make enough money to give the investors all their money back and still have a nice pile left over, even after Mr. Canada got what he wanted out of the deal. Then it’s out of the country and live the rest of your life in leisure, Lenny-and-Tag style. But Lenny fucked that all up when he started sampling the product. More and more of the product started going up Lenny’s nose and then through a needle into his arm. And Lenny started thinking and acting crazy, like all cocaine addicts do. Jekyll and Hyde. I can’t believe now I didn’t recognize the symptoms when I heard them from Jane. Maybe that was what you were there for—to make me not see what was sticking out right in front of my face. And Lenny got crazy enough to get the fool idea that he could even rip off Mr. Canada himself. I mean, after all, hadn’t Lenny’s life been blessed by God? Didn’t God have a Special Plan for Lenny? And then there’s Tag. How does she fit into the Plan?”
He glared at her, trying to shame her, but she did not seem ashamed, only sad.
“I didn’t know what he was doing until he was already in deep trouble. And then, when I found out, what was I gonna do about it then?”
“And you were afraid to lose your toys and your trips, the big-time lifestyle.”
“Maybe. For just a minute or two.”
She turned away from him and lifted her head toward the mountains as if asking them for forgiveness. “I held onto it for just a minute or two. And then it was too late.”
; “And now Mr. Canada wants your head. And you’ve got a paranoid cocaine addict on your hands down there, and you’re starting to like the stuff a little too much yourself.”
She looked toward him but not at him, still talking beyond him to the mountains, entreating them but without any real hope of reprieve. “I should have gone to the police when I first found out,” she said. “Now I’ve got blood on my hands. Jane’s. Roy’s. There are some sins that there’s no forgiveness for. Once you go a certain way, even just a little way, you can’t go back.”
He knew the line for that. Sara’s. No cage you couldn’t walk right out of if you have the courage to face what’s outside. But he did not really believe it. That was for other people, people like Sara, not people like Tag, or him.
“You can walk away right now,” he said half-heartedly.
“Mr. Canada won’t let that happen.”
“Then go to the cops.”
“And then to prison.”
“Maybe you’ll have to pay some dues. But I have a lawyer friend who can probably trade your testimony for a suspended sentence. That’s not a bad deal.”
“You’re dreaming. Mr. Canada lives forever.”
He had nothing to say to this. She was right. Mr. Canada would live forever, or, if not forever, then long enough.
“Day after tomorrow we’re crossing the border,” she said.
“How?”
“We’re meeting them out there,” she said, pointing to the mountains to the south. “Our buyer arranged it. A package deal. Money and passage out of the country in exchange for the drugs. We’ll have a car, and we’ll cross Mexico and end up on a little island in the Caribbean where there’s no extradition and we can stay lost for a long time.”
“Who’s dreaming now? Why don’t you think you’re being set up? That buyer’s gonna feed you and Lenny to the vultures out there.”
“Well, it’s either that or Mr. Canada. At least we’ve got a chance with the buyer.”
“Yeah. Slim to none.”
“Sometimes you make a choice that eliminates all the other choices whether you like it or not.”
“Then I’ll go with you. At least through Mexico. Your father is paying me to protect you. I’m sure he didn’t have this in mind, but then I guess if he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have to pay the bill.”
“Don’t get in this any deeper. This is our problem, not yours. You’d be committing a crime. You might go to jail. I’ve got enough blood on my hands.”
“I’m a survivor,” he said.
“What have I done?” she said softly, desperately, more to herself than to him. “What have I done?”
He recognized suddenly where he had seen those eyes before. The wild creature imprisoned in the cage, doomed but defiant, resisting its fate and accepting it at the same time. Tag, you have mink eyes. They wait for the knife to fall.
She reached out to him, and he let her embrace him. They held each other.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “So wrong. So sorry.”
She molded herself to him like she had that night on the dance floor. He pushed her away.
“You’re married.”
“Married! Somehow I don’t understand your morality. That didn’t seem to bother you that night in the cabin.”
“You said you’d kicked him out of bed a long time ago.”
“And I did. Just because I take care of him doesn’t mean I love him. I’m all he’s got. I can’t just throw him away.” Then she laughed, not a real laugh, more an exclamation of amazement, as if she had just gotten a joke. “You’re unbelievable,” she said. “Maybe I just don’t understand you Irish-Catholic boys. Is it some kind of purity you want?”
That was probably it. That was probably it all along.
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve been celibate for months except for that night in the cabin. Jesus, stop this. There’s no time left for this, whatever this is you’re doing.”
He let her come to him then, and for many seconds they just held each other, rocking slowly back and forth, and for a few moments they only kissed, not even touching tongues at first. He kissed the top of her head, her forehead, the closed lids of her eyes. He untied the pink bandana and kissed her on the neck. She gave the front of her shirt a tug, and the metal buttons snapped apart. An invitation, and a request. He cupped her breasts in his hands and watched her eyes relax and close, a gesture of release. They teased each other with their tongues and fingers and hands until she took his right arm in the crook of her left, hugged it to her side, and led him toward the grazing palomino.
She had an extra blanket tied to the back of the saddle, which she spread on the grass in front of the pool, and the horse moved away from them as if deliberately giving them room. After she took off her shirt and then her boots and jeans, he just stared at her for a few moments. She seemed to understand that, for him, just looking at her was almost enough. Then he went to his knees and fondled her inside and out with his hands and fingers and tongue until she clenched his hair in her fingers and humped and shuddered and moaned.
After a while, she made him undress too and sit down on the blanket. She knelt down in front of him and returned his favors. He placed his hands on her hair and watched her—her long, slender fingers flat against the outside of his thighs, the muscles in her back, the sides of her breasts, her rump resting like a pillow on the soles of her feet, and he could not recall ever seeing anything in the world more pleasing than that. Then he remained as he was, and she straddled him, carefully sliding down on him, gently impaling herself. She bent her head down, kissed him on the neck, and whispered “fuck me, Pete, fuck me now, fuck me forever” just before coming, and her words and her churning made him come along with her.
When they finished, she raised herself up and let him out of her, then turned around toward the mountains and sat between his legs, wrapped his arms around her, kissed his hands and let them drop to her lap. He contemplated the mountains over her shoulder.
“I want them to bury me right here,” she said. “I want to spend my eternity right here.”
They spent more time on the blanket and then packed up to go. She watched him strap on the cartridge belt and the shoulder holster and sling the rifle tightly across his back so it would not bump against him when they rode back to the house.
“You look like you’re ready for war,” she said. “And that makes me feel good. I still don’t think you should come with us, but I’m glad you’re coming.
“You want to do the driving?” she asked, holding out the reins.
“Yeah, I’d like to try it.”
She swung into the saddle behind him and wrapped her arms around his stomach as they rode. Halfway across the bowl, she said, “I could make a cowboy out of you in no time,” and they said nothing else the rest of the way.
CHAPTER 25
“HOW DO I know he won’t shoot me?” O’Keefe asked, only partly in jest, as they walked toward the back door of the ranch house.
“He won’t,” she said. “I won’t let him.”
Lenny sat on the couch with the shotgun cradled in his arms, much like he had been sitting the night before. He looked even more bedraggled now than then, but he was no longer depressed; he was exalted. The source of his exaltation lay on the coffee table in front of him. He had a straw and had been snorting the cocaine directly from the bag. O’Keefe knew how Lenny felt. He felt triumphant, that he would prevail despite everything, that this shabby human form he appeared to be mantled in was only a disguise, a mere cloak that concealed a godhead.
Lenny had bestowed upon Tag a smile of triumph, but when he saw O’Keefe behind her, he looked stricken with fear, and he leapt to his feet and trained the shotgun on the intruder. Tag kept her body between Lenny and O’Keefe, advanced on Lenny and quickly, gently took the shotgun from him as if he were a small boy brandishing a toy.
“Lenny, this is Peter O’Keefe, the private detective I told you about. Dad sent him. He’s here t
o help us.”
Lenny’s face changed, like a sea grown suddenly calm and ominous, a deep black pool of hatred. O’Keefe wondered if Lenny knew what had happened at the Silver Lake Resort.
“Help?” Lenny said. “He’s here to help, all right. He’s here to help himself.”
“Stop it, Lenny,” Tag said. “We can use all the help we can get.” “You found us?” Lenny asked in amazement.
O’Keefe nodded. “It wasn’t that hard either.”
“That means somebody else can find us,” Lenny said. He moved to the front window and stared down the dirt road. “There was that guy that drove up here the other day.”
“That was my man,” O’Keefe said.
“We’re not gonna make it, Tag,” Lenny whined. “I know we’re not gonna make it.”
“One more day, Lenny. We just have to make it one more day.”
There’s a lot more than that involved, O’Keefe thought.
Lenny looked at Tag, at O’Keefe, at the backpack, and, finally, at the bag of cocaine on the coffee table as if that was his only friend in the room. O’Keefe could tell that Lenny did not want to accept the situation but didn’t know how to change it, at least for now.
“One more day,” Lenny said, as if steeling himself. He slumped down on the couch and eyed the bag of cocaine. He obviously wanted in that bag very badly but was reluctant to take it in front of O’Keefe. O’Keefe considered making some kind of speech to reassure him but gave up the idea as futile. No words could halt or even really slow down the roller-coaster that Lenny now found himself hurtling along on, swooping gut-wrenchingly up and down from paranoia to grandiosity. Although he had himself many times taken that same ride, O’Keefe could muster no empathy or sympathy, only loathing for the worm-like creature on the couch, writhing in his self-pity. He turned and walked out of the house. He may have violated the man’s wife, but he would not violate his privacy too. Tag followed him out as Lenny reached for the straw and the bag.
“Did you tell him about us?”
“I wouldn’t do that to him.”
