Hard Luck

by Pascal Scott

  The thoughts stopped. She felt her hips pitch forward to meet Denise’s insistent fingers; her mind went into a black hole and disappeared; her body trembled and surrendered.

  “There, baby,” Denise said softly after a few minutes had passed. “That’s how you’ll remember me, when you’re down with all those hot babes in Belize.”

  After Elizabeth had gone, Denise pulled the covers up to her chin. She had a phone call to make, but it was still too early. She would do that later. For now, all she wanted to do was sleep.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Ya got any luggage to check?”

  The Greyhound ticket seller with the weathered face and beige uniform hadn’t asked for ID, but why would he? A photo ID wasn’t required by law in 1996 for bus travel. Still, it made Elizabeth feel better that she had one. Kelly Anne Campbell. Now if she could just remember her name. Kelly.

  “No.”

  She had the clothes on her back plus Denise’s ripped jean jacket, which Denise had given her before she’d left the hotel. She had a blond wig on her head, and now—after buying a one-way ticket to San Ysidro—she had nine hundred twenty-five dollars left in her pocket. In San Francisco, that wouldn’t go far, but in Tijuana, it would buy her lunch from a street vendor, a flight to Belize, and enough money left over for a month in a cabana on the beach.

  The job would happen in fifteen days. Mickie didn’t know how much it would be, but based on past deliveries, she guessed their take would be between seven million and eight million dollars of paper bills that were just going to go up in flames. Really, Elizabeth thought, why shouldn’t they have that money? Split three ways, they would each score at least a couple of million that was going to be destroyed.

  Although she had doubted her at first, Elizabeth was thinking that Denise had turned out to be very useful. Denise knew people. She knew somebody who stole cars and somebody else who sold California plates with current tags. She knew small-time drug dealers and, Elizabeth suspected, she was probably one herself. It was all good, just as long as Denise followed the plan.

  “Gate K,” the Greyhound man said.

  It wasn’t even 6:00 a.m., and already there was a long boarding line ahead of Elizabeth at Gate K. No one traveled by bus if they could afford anything better, and the passengers this morning reflected that reality. Elizabeth took her place behind a young bearded guy who reeked of marijuana. He wore baggy jeans and carried a camouflage backpack with a zipper that Elizabeth was tempted to pull, just to get a look at what was inside. No. This was not the time to get into trouble and bring attention to herself.

  At 6:10 a.m., a loud gray bus pulled up into the stall for Gate K. A middle-aged driver with a road-weary face checked tickets as the line of passengers funneled up the steps and through the opened door of the coach. Elizabeth took a window seat in the first row on the left side behind the driver’s compartment. Struggling out of her jean jacket—Denise’s jacket, which was about a size too small—Elizabeth placed it on the seat beside her in the hope that it would send the message, don’t sit here. It didn’t work. As the bus filled, an old nun boarded, hesitating on the step up while looking down the aisle. She spotted the seat next to Elizabeth and claimed it. Bending her veiled head, she asked politely, “Is anyone sitting there?”

  Elizabeth removed the jacket, and the nun sat.

  “I’m Sister Ruth.”

  “I’m…” Elizabeth almost blew it. “I’m Kelly. Kelly Anne Campbell.”

  “Nice to meet you, Kelly Anne Campbell.”

  Sister Ruth was dressed in the traditional black tunic that Elizabeth had come to associate with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the drag queens in San Francisco. Was anybody a real nun anymore? Apparently, there were still some relics like Sister Ruth, who was unzipping a black backpack. Everybody’s got a backpack. Elizabeth would need to get one, to blend in. Five years in prison and nine months in a halfway house had obliterated her sense of American social norms.

  Sister Ruth pulled out a worn Bible and opened it to the page she had marked with a red ribbon. Jesus. Literally. That was the last thing Elizabeth wanted on a thirteen-hour bus ride, a lecture on the state of her soul. Elizabeth made a pillow out of her jacket and bunched it against the window. Pressing her cheek to the rough fabric, she shut her eyes.

  The driver took his seat. The door closed with a pneumatic hiss, and the engine rumbled to life.

  Nine hours and forty-five minutes later, the bus arrived at the Greyhound station in Los Angeles. It was the ninth stop since leaving San Francisco that morning; Elizabeth had counted. There would be a one-hour layover in LA, and then another coach would take the transferring travelers the rest of the way to San Ysidro. Passengers were advised to wait inside the terminal during the layover; if they left the station, they would do so at their own risk, warned the driver, who looked like he was ready to hit the nearest bar as soon as he shed his uniform. Sister Ruth gave Elizabeth a final “God bless” before hoisting her backpack and wandering off, heading for a nunnery or wherever it was that the brides of Christ went these days.

  The station was located downtown on Seventh Street in Skid Row. At least that was what the area had been called when Elizabeth was a kid. When foster father number one had twisted her arm until it broke, she had spent two weeks in the children’s hospital in this part of the city, lying in a cage-like bed on rubber sheets, her arm in traction. It was somewhere around here, she remembered, somewhere near Skid Row. It was ironic. Foster care was what happened when social workers took you out of one abusive home and put you into another. That was what Elizabeth had learned from spending seventeen years in the system.

  After checking out the terminal’s vending machines, Elizabeth settled for a Snickers and a cup of coffee. Sugar and caffeine. That should get her through the rest of the trip. She looked around for a magazine rack or, better still, a bookstore. No luck, of course. She wished she had something to read. If she had planned this, she would have had a good book with her. How long had it been since she’d read something substantive? Not since grad school. That was 1989. Seven years had passed. No doubt women studies had changed during that time, but she had no idea how. Were academics in the humanities still enamored of postmodern theory? Foucault, Derrida, that whole French crew?

  Sometimes, Elizabeth missed graduate school. She missed flexing her intellectual muscles, sitting in the closed circle of a seminar with smart women who challenged her. All at once, she felt a terrible homesickness, although she didn’t know for where. She had no home. She never had.

  She sat on a black wire chair, eating a candy bar and sipping bad coffee, to wait out the hour.

  The last stop wasn’t an official Greyhound station. It was a small concrete building that looked more like an outhouse than a bus terminal. The clock on the wall behind the closed ticket counter told Elizabeth it was 8:50 p.m. She looked around for a restroom. There wasn’t one.

  She followed two twenty-something girls who were chatting in Spanish. One of them wore a backpack; the other pulled a suitcase on wheels. They went out of the building, down a narrow sidewalk lit by tall streetlamps, past a pawn shop, an ABC store, and an accounting firm that promised a refund on your income taxes. At a sign for Tijuana, the girls turned left and merged with a crowd of nationals going home and a pack of polo-shirted frat boys out for a good time on a Friday night in Mexico.

  The crowd came to a pedestrian ramp and walked for another ten minutes, over a concrete bridge. Midway, they passed a three-man mariachi band, two guitars and an accordion, serenading everyone with a mad polka. At the end of the walkway on the Mexican side, Elizabeth picked out a yellow taxi from the dozen or so waiting in a gravel parking lot.

  “Aeropuerto de Tijuana, por favor,” she said, getting into the backseat. Spanish had been her language in high school and college, but she had forgotten a lot of it.

  “Bueno,” the driver said. He wore a crumpled white shirt unbuttoned to his belly, a white undershirt, and a lanyard a
round his neck with a photo ID.

  He didn’t want to talk. That was good. She didn’t want to talk, either. With a low, pebble-crunching sound, he pulled his cab out onto a paved street crowded with evening traffic. A few minutes later, the street turned into an avenue with palm trees on either side and in the median strip. In the darkness, they looked to Elizabeth like giant sentries. After about ten minutes, the cabbie took an exit for Highway One and sped up, weaving through the congestion of red lights. Another ten minutes, and they were there. He left her in front of a glass-walled building that glowed with fluorescent lighting. Aeropuerto Internacional de Tijuana, it announced in white neon.

  She paid him in dollars instead of pesos. He seemed grateful.

  Elizabeth was in luck. There was a flight out to Belize at 11:50 p.m. Her one-way ticket cost six thousand two hundred fifty-five pesos. Elizabeth pushed three American Benjamins at the scowling woman in the blue and white pin-striped blouse at the Aeromexico counter. The woman shook her head and looked Elizabeth in the eye.

  “Usted necista mas.”

  Elizabeth pulled another hundred from her pocket. The ticket agent nodded with approval. She made change in green peso notes—Elizabeth counted eight of them—and one yellow bill. After slipping the ticket into a boarding pass jacket, the agent tapped it on the counter.

  “Puerto Cinco. Usted entiende?”

  Gate five. She understood.

  No one asked why a single señorita was traveling one way to Belize with no luggage at all. No one asked to see a passport.

  “Si. Lo entiendo. Gracias.”

  Unlike the bus station in San Ysidro, the Tijuana Airport actually had restrooms. Inside the women’s room, Elizabeth tried to translate a sign that seemed to ban toilet paper from the commode. No tire la basura fuera del cesto. A wastepaper basket lined with plastic had been placed in each stall to accompany the request. Maybe that was how they did things in Mexico. She followed the custom, using the trash can, and then flushing the toilet with a foot pedal.

  At the sink, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. Kelly Anne Campbell, age twenty-five. Blue-eyed, blond-haired. Under her wig, her scalp itched. She was still in the same clothes she had been wearing when she killed Billy. That was fewer than twenty-four hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime. It felt as if it had happened to someone else. Well, in a way, it had. It had happened to Elizabeth Taylor Bundy. She was no longer that woman. She was Kelly Anne Campbell now. She would have to believe that.

  She wondered if the story had made the evening news in San Francisco. She wondered how long it would be before she was wanted for questioning and for violating the terms of her release from Diablo. Correction. How long it would be before Elizabeth was wanted. Kelly Anne Campbell was in the clear. Kelly Anne Campbell was innocent.

  At 11:50 p.m., Aeromexico Flight 193’s dual-engine Boeing 737 taxied onto the solitary runway of the Tijuana Airport, waiting in place like a purring animal. Onboard, the stewardesses took their seats, babies cried, and the wings trembled in anticipation of takeoff. On some unseen signal, the engines roared to life as the plane began its race down the airstrip. Faster and faster, bumping along until it lifted up and the ground fell away. There was a sound like ping above the noise, as the jet rose higher. Elizabeth had never been in an airplane until now. She wasn’t afraid at all. To her, the plane seemed like a great mechanical bird, soaring into the darkness.

  From her window seat, Elizabeth could see the lights of Tijuana on the ground, the white and red lines of cars moving on the highway, and something shadowy and long that must have been the Tijuana River. The lights grew smaller and more distant, as Elizabeth watched, mesmerized. There were so many of them, more than she could have imagined. Tijuana was bigger and more populous than she had thought. The lights of the city disappeared like a slow parade of stars, fewer and fewer until there was nothing but the deep, complete blackness below.

  Chapter Fourteen

  She made it. Elizabeth was in Belize, home of international bankers who welcomed dirty money and law enforcement that didn’t recognize North American authority. Paradise.

  During the two-hour layover in Mexico City, Elizabeth had purchased a backpack from an airport shop along with a small zippered bag containing toiletries: a folding toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, a tiny bottle of mouthwash, and a miniature stick of deodorant. Then, at 8:30 that morning, she had boarded a narrow-bodied, propeller-driven Grupo Aeromexico airplane. Two hours later, the bumpy connecting flight arrived safely in Belize City. Boarding stairs were pushed up to the door, and the nineteen passengers disembarked. It was Saturday, May 18. Disheveled and sweaty, Elizabeth wanted nothing more than a hot shower and a clean bed.

  As they walked across the tarmac to the terminal, Elizabeth noticed that the control tower had been constructed right on top of the building, giving it an outdated, military look. Compared to the airports in Tijuana and Mexico City, BZE was decidedly unimpressive. Inside, the waiting area was dimly lit by overhead tubes that buzzed and bounced their light off the yellow linoleum floors. Airport security seemed to consist of a long table, an entryway that was largely symbolic, and a bored-looking and apparently unarmed guard. A customs agent in a white shirt with black epaulettes and black trousers stood at a checkpoint.

  “Do you have anything to declare?” he asked each arriving passenger in a heavy accent that Elizabeth assumed reflected the local dialect. If the answer was no, the traveler was passed through the entryway and out into the concourse. Elizabeth felt a small wave of anxiety as she stepped forward in line.

  “No,” she said, steadying her voice.

  His dark eyes checked her passport as he gave her a mock frown.

  “Why is a beautiful woman like you traveling alone?”

  Elizabeth flipped back a strand of the blond hair of her wig. “I’m here to enjoy your charming country,” she said with as much flirtation as she could muster.

  It worked. He grinned and placed a round blue stamp of approval on the unmarked page. “Then enjoy Belize, Miss Kelly.”

  “What’s the prettiest place in Belize?” she asked a young dreadlocked guide sitting below an aquamarine sign displaying a schedule of Sea Express Water Taxis.

  “For you is Caye Caulker. We have a boat for you.” He pronounced it like “key kahkah.”

  The sign informed Elizabeth that boats left for Caye Caulker every hour between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Returning taxis were scheduled hourly between 6:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. After accepting ten dollars American for a one-way ticket to Caye Caulker, the guide flashed a white smile and nodded in the direction of a van parked in front of the glass door. Elizabeth boarded the shuttle, sharing it with two retired couples from Arizona and a scruffy backpacker from California. Everyone talked excitedly about their travel adventures, except Elizabeth, who kept to herself, disclosing as little as possible in response to the Arizonians’ attempts at conversation. Twenty minutes later, having hit every pothole on the dilapidated road, the van deposited the jostled group at a pier where they were waved onto a waiting boat identified as the Sea Express.

  In California, Elizabeth had lived near the Pacific Ocean all her life, but until now, she had never seen seawater like this. The water here amazed her, it was so intensely blue and clear, nearly surreal in color. Her ride on the Sea Express more than made up for the uncomfortable shuttle and even less comfortable airplane.

  “Please, ladies and gentlemen,” the boat pilot said as they stepped onto the Caye Caulker pier. “It is 1:10 now in Belize. You must set your watches to be on Belize time. But remember, in Belize, there is no time, and there is always time. Enjoy your stay!”

  “What did he mean by that?” the Arizonian asked his wife.

  “Damned if I know,” his wife said. “What time does your watch say, honey?”

  “Says it’s ten after noon.”

  “You need to make it right.”

  Elizabeth was exhausted. She walked down the pier of uneven wood plank
s until she came to a white sand beach dotted with palm trees. A short distance beyond the beach was the island’s main street, fronting the coastline and flanked by brightly colored, ramshackle buildings and kiosks promoting their services and wares on hand-painted A-framed signs. Elizabeth stopped at a clothes shop. From the awning, the owner had hung tropical shirts and surfer shorts.

  “How much?”

  She bought two pairs of blue shorts and four short-sleeved blouses sporting bright images of toucans and coconut trees and sea turtles. Noticing a pair of sandals, she bought those, too. And when the owner urged her inside to point out the “unmentionables,” Elizabeth bought underwear, as well. And then, on an impulse, she added a floral do-rag, thinking she could wear it instead of her wig. She paid fifty dollars American in total.

  Overhead, phone lines dipped from post to post, crisscrossing the street every few yards. Half a block later, she walked into La Posada del Pelícano and asked for a room for two weeks. She was shocked at the price. The señora wanted eight hundred sixty-eight dollars, more than Elizabeth had left in her pocket.

  The next lodging had an English name and was better priced. Cuesta’s Guest House promised a cabana for two weeks for two hundred sixty dollars. The owner was a local fisherman named Marco Cuesta, who informed Elizabeth with pride that he was the grandson of one of the original Spanish settlers of the island. Elizabeth surmised that Marco felt superior to the largely Creole population of Caye Caulker. He showed Elizabeth the way to a plywood cabin painted royal purple, elevated about five feet in the air by stilts. It sat on a pristine coral beach with a balcony that faced the ocean. She booked it on the spot, paying in cash.