by Ian Rankin
My mother was opposed to the whole enterprise, but could never stand up to my father. It was a couple of years before I could beat him. I don’t know whether his eyes were getting worse, or his aim less steady, or it was just that I was getting better. When I finally left home, I left it as a marksman.
I’d always been clever at school, and ended up at a university, but I didn’t last long. After that there were dead-end jobs, jobs which gave me a lot of time to myself. I worked in a library, then in a couple of bookshops, and eventually got a great job working with kayak rentals in the Lake District. Only that fell through when my employers discovered I was a haemophiliac. They said the job was too risky, I’d become a liability.
Was it any wonder I couldn’t hold down a job? The only place I wanted to be was on the range. I joined gun clubs and shot competitively. I even went hunting on a few occasions, looking for a new challenge. Then I met a disarming man called Holly MacIntyre. He swore this was his real name. Friends of his called him ‘Mad Dog’ MacIntyre. He was huge and bull-headed with cropped hair silvering above the ears. His eyes were bulbous and red-rimmed, like he spent too long in chlorinated swimming pools. He was always ready for aggro, and sometimes initiated it for its own sake. He reminded me of a rugby league forward.
Holly had known my father, and he’d seen me shoot a few times. He was by this time long out of the armed forces and working in what he called a ‘security capacity’ for a number of countries, though he couldn’t name them. In fact, he was a mercenary, leader of a gang of about a dozen men who could be bought, who would go anywhere in the world and train any rag-tag rabble for a price. Mad Dog was on the lookout for fresh blood.
I told him he couldn’t have mine, and explained why.
‘Is that all that’s stopping you?’ he said. ‘Christ, you could still be useful to me.’
I asked him how.
‘Sniper, my boy. Sniper. Put you up a tree and leave you there. You’d be nice and cosy, no cuts or bruises, nobody’d know you were there. All you’d do is pick ’em off as they came into sight.’
‘Pick off who?’
‘The fucking enemy, of course.’
‘And who would they be?’
He leaned close to me and hissed whisky. ‘Whoever you like!’
I turned down his offer, but not before he’d introduced me to a few people who were later to prove useful. See, at this time I was a military groupie. I liked to hang around with squaddies and old soldiers, with anyone who shared my background and belief system. I knew which pubs and clubs to go to, which gyms. I knew where some weekend shoot was going to be. These shoots, they weren’t paintball or grouse or a few hoary old foxes. They were held in secret, far away from humanity, where you could make a big noise and nobody’d hear you. I used to take bets. They’d place a coin upright on the bonnet of a car, and there’d be someone in the car with his hand by the bonnet-release. At a given signal, I’d have to hit the coin before the bonnet sprang open.
Everyone loved me. But I knew I was turning into a sideshow. Worse than that, I was becoming a freak. So I did something about it. I made myself a life plan. It didn’t happen overnight; I read books and went travelling. I knew three things: I was bored, I was poorer than I wanted to be, and I had a skill.
I started small, shooting a few rats I bought from a pet shop. That wasn’t very satisfactory: I’d nothing against the rats, and nothing to gain from shooting them. I found I actually liked them better than I liked most of the people around me. I don’t like people really, I’m just very good at pretending. I did some hunting in the USA, and that was better than shooting rats. Then one night in New York, I picked off a junkie from my darkened hotel room. They were standing in an alley six floors below me. I reasoned that they didn’t have long to live anyway, the life expectancy of a junkie on the New York streets being slightly less than that of your average rat. From then on, it got easier.
I went back to see Mad Dog, only he was somewhere in Africa, and this time he didn’t come back. But I knew other people I could talk to, other people who knew what I needed to know. It was six months before I got my first contract. They were expecting me to hit the victim on the head and bury him in Epping Forest. Instead, I took him out from four hundred yards and created an immediate news story. My employers decided this was okay, too. I was paid, and my name was passed along. I knew I wouldn’t be working for the Salvation Army. But then I wasn’t killing any nuns and priests either. It was only after a few hits that I decided anyone was fair game. It isn’t up to the executioner to pronounce guilt or innocence. He just makes sure the instruments are humane.
I noticed that Bel was sitting like a block of stone beside me.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know.’
‘Michael, you’ve spoken for so long, and yet you’ve said almost nothing.’
‘What?’
‘Can we go get something to drink?’
‘Sure.’
I told the driver to take us back now. We passed another carriage on the way. There were some Japanese tourists in the back. While the drivers exchanged bored looks, the Japanese videoed us, waving and grinning as they did. We looked like a couple weary of their life together, and reeling from yet another spat.
‘You know,’ Bel said, ‘you’ve never asked me about myself. That’s strange. When I’ve gone out with men before, they’ve always ended up asking me about myself. How old are you, Michael?’ ‘My passports say thirty-five.’ We were lying in bed together. We hadn’t made love, our bodies weren’t even touching. The silent TV was playing.
‘And you’ve never been married, never had a steady girlfriend?’
‘There’ve been a few.’
‘How many?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A few hundred? A few dozen?’
‘Just a few. Christ, Bel.’ I threw off the cover and stood up. The air conditioning was whirring away, blowing cool air over me.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m not... I never said I was much good at this... this sort of thing.’
‘Do you hear me complaining?’
‘Okay, I’ll ask you something about yourself.’
She smiled sadly. Her eyebrows were beautiful. Her lips were beautiful. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘Ask me some other time when I’m not expecting it.’
Then she sat up and started watching TV, disappearing back into herself.
The next morning we flew to New Mexico. I wasn’t going to buy a car in New York. Nobody buys a car second hand in New York if they can help it. The cars are rustier than elsewhere, with more miles on the clock (even if they show less miles) and steeper price tags. You either buy on the west coast or you buy in New Mexico, Texas, somewhere like that. We bought in Albuquerque.
Bel was right: the blond man and his team might have no trouble picking up our trail again. From flight and hotel information, they could trace us as far as New York. But Michael West, not Michael Weston, had paid for the flights to Albuquerque, and the name on his companion’s ticket was Rachel Davis. I was taking all these precautions when all the blond smiler from Oban had to do was head directly to the Olympic Peninsula and wait for us there. That was okay; I just didn’t want him intercepting me. This way, I might get at least one good shot in first.
We didn’t linger in Albuquerque. My New Mexico ID and a bundle of cash bought us a fast car. It was a Trans-Am, just right for the trip ahead. I’d picked up a few small ads and car ads magazines from the first newsagent’s in town, and we sat in a diner while I scoured them. I ringed half a dozen and went to the pay-phone. The first number I called, the owner was at work and his wife said I’d have to see the car when he was around. I hit the jackpot with the second number. I was talking to a drawling mechanic called Sanch who was mad about ‘shit-kickers’ (his term for fast cars) and was selling this Trans-Am because he wanted to buy a beautiful old Firebird with a paint job 'to die for, man’.
He was so
keen to sell, he picked us up outside the diner in a pickup truck and took us back to his three-storey house along a dirt road in what seemed a nice middle-class neighbourhood.
‘I fix all the neighbourhood cars, man, they bring them all to me.’
It looked like half the neighbourhood cars were parked right outside Sanch’s house, mostly in bits. He kept his best models in the garage, including another, highly-tuned Trans-Am. I’d rather have had this one, but the one he was selling sounded sweet too. I looked at the engine, and we took it for a spin. It was white, and the interior was a bit grotty, plus it was missing quarter of a fender. The engine was clean though, and it had a hi-fi. He brought the price down another $1,000 for cash and I asked if I could use his bathroom.
While Bel enjoyed a cold beer and the collection of nude calendars in Sanch’s kitchen, I unzipped my money belt and took out the notes. Back in the kitchen, Sanch had already filled in the relevant details on his ownership papers.
‘Hey,’ he said, handing me a beer, ‘I meant to ask you, what you gonna use the car for?’
‘Just some driving.’
‘That’s the way to see America.’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said, handing over the money. He examined it, but didn’t count it.
‘Looks about right. Here, I got something for you.’ It took him a little while to find what he was looking for. It was a Rand-McNally Road Atlas, its covers missing, corners curled and oily. But the pages were all there. ‘I got about half a dozen of these things laying around. After all, you don’t want to get lost between here and there.’
I thanked him, finished the beer, and put my part of the ownership document in my pocket.
Then we drove to Lubbock.
It served as a nice introduction to American driving. Long straight roads, the occasional shack planted in the middle of nowhere, and sudden towns which disappeared into the dust you left behind. The car was behaving, and, lacking a TV, Bel was communing with the radio. She liked the preachers best, but the abrasive phone-in hosts weren’t far behind. One redneck was praising the gun.
‘Guns made America, and guns will save America!’
‘You’re loon-crazy, my friend,’ said the DJ, switching to another call.
Albuquerque is only about 250 miles from Lubbock. We could do it inside a day easy, but we weren’t in any particular rush. When we stopped at a place called Clovis and I still got an answering machine in Lubbock, we decided to check into a motel. The place we chose was choice indeed, twenty dollars a night and decorated in 1950S orange. Orange linoleum, orange lampshades, orange bedspread. We looked to be the only guests, and the man in the office could have given Norman Bates some tips. He rang up our fee on an ancient till and said he was sorry about the swimming pool. What he meant was, the swimming pool wasn’t finished yet. It was a large circular concrete construction, waiting to be lined. It was unshaded and sat right next to the road. I couldn’t see many holidaymakers using it. There was a hot wind blowing, but the motel boasted an ice machine and another machine dispensing cold cola.
‘The TV hasn’t got cable!’ Bel complained, already a seasoned traveller in the west. Along the route we’d been offered water beds and king-size beds and adult channels and HBO, all from noticeboards outside roadside motels. Bel wasn’t too enamoured of our bargain room, but I was a lot more sanguine. After all, the owner hadn’t made us fill in a registration card and hadn’t taken down the number of our licence plate. There would be no record that we’d ever stayed here.
‘Let’s go do the sights,’ I said.
We cruised up and down the main and only road. A lot of the shops had shut down, their windows boarded up. There were two undistinguished bars, another motel the other end of town with a red neon sign claiming No Vacancies, though there were also no signs of life, a couple of petrol stations and a diner. We ate in the diner.
There was a back room, noisy from a party going on there. It was a fireman’s birthday, and his colleagues, their wives and girlfriends were singing to him. Our waitress smiled as she came to take our order.
‘I’ll have the ham and eggs,’ Bel said. ‘The eggs over easy.’ She smiled at me. ‘And coffee.’
I had the chicken dinner. There was so much of it, Bel had to help me out. Since there was no phone in our room, I tried Lubbock again from the diner, and again got the answering machine. After the meal, we stopped at the petrol station and bought chocolate, some cheap cola, and a four-pack of beer. I had a look around and saw that the station sold cool-boxes too. I bought the biggest one on the shelf. The woman behind the till wiped the dust off with a cloth.
‘Fill that with ice for you?’
‘Please.’
Then I added another four-pack to our bill.
Next morning we filled the cool-box with ice, beer and cola, and had breakfast at the diner. The same waitress was still on duty. ‘Good party?’ Bel asked.
‘Those guys,’ clucked the waitress. ‘Practically had to hose them down to get them out of here.’
It was ten o’clock and already hot when we headed out of town. One thing Sanch hadn’t told us about the Trans-Am, its air conditioning wasn’t a hundred percent. In the end, I turned it off and we drove with the windows down. At another service station, Bel bought some tapes, so we didn’t have to put up with the radio any more. The drivers on these long two-lane stretches of Texas were kind to a fault. If you went to overtake someone, the car in front would glide into the emergency lane so you could pass without going into the other carriageway. Even lorries did it, and expected you to do the same for them. Not that many people passed us. We cruised at between 70 and 80 and I kept an eye open for radar cops. Every time we passed a car or lorry, Bel would wave to it from her window.
This was the most relaxation I’d had in ages. I’d driven part of the way across the USA before, and had enjoyed it then too. As Bel said, you became your favourite film star in your own road movie. More importantly from our point of view, no one could trace your route.
Lubbock, birthplace of Buddy Holly, was a prairie sprawl with a museum dedicated to ranching. The museum boasted a large collection of types of barbed wire, plus a rifle display that took the breath away. That was all I could tell you about Lubbock. The last time I’d been here, I had failed to find a centre to the place, but that’s not so surprising in American cities. Last time, I stayed in a run-down motel near the Buddy Holly statue. But after last night, I reckoned Bel would object, so we found a new-looking hotel just off the highway and registered there.
American hotels and motels used to ask for your ID, but these days all they did was ask you to fill in a registration card. So it was easy to give fake names, fake car details and fake licence. Bel liked the room: it had Home Box Office on cable, plus in-house pay-movies. It also had a king-size bed and a telephone. I called the number one last time, then decided to head out there anyway.
‘So do I get to know now?’ Bel said as we got back into the Trans-Am.
‘What?’
‘Who you’ve been trying to call.’
‘A guy called Jackson. Spike Jackson. You’ll like him.’
Spike lived not far from Texas Tech and the Ranching Heritage Centre. He’d taken me there on my previous visit. There was a dual carriageway, with single-storey shops along one side, and a couple of lanes off. Up one of these lanes, at the end of the line, was Spike’s place. I hoped he wasn’t out of the country on business. I knew he did most of his business from home.
We came off the dual carriageway and drove alongside the shops. Bel spotted a western-wear emporium, and wanted us to stop. I dropped her off and said I’d be back in five minutes, whatever happened. She disappeared through the shop door.
There were a couple of cars parked outside the two-storey house, but that didn’t mean anything. Like all ‘good old boys’, Spike usually had a few cars hanging around. He owned at least two working cars, and sometimes bought another dud, which he’d tinker with for a while before towing it to the ju
nk yard. I revved the Trans-Am a couple of times to let him know he had a visitor. I didn’t want him nervous.
But there was no sign of life as I walked up the steps to the front door. There was a screened-in porch either side of the door, with chairs and a table and a swing-bench. Spike hadn’t had the maid in recently; there were pizza boxes and beer cans everywhere. I rang the bell again, and heard someone hurtling towards the door. It flew open, and a teenage girl stood there. Before I had a chance to say anything, she waved for me to follow her, and rushed back indoors again.
‘I’m about three thou off the high score!’ she called. I followed her upstairs and into a bedroom. It looked like a radio shack. There were electronics everywhere. Sprawling across a makeshift table (an old door laid flat with packing-cases for legs) was a computer system.
The girl could have been anywhere between fifteen and eighteen. She was thin and leggy, her black denims like a second skin. She’d tied her thick red hair carelessly behind her head, and wore a black T-shirt advertising some rock band. She was back in front of the computer, using the joystick to fire a killing beam at alien crustaceans. Two speakers had been wired to the computer, enhancing the sound effects.
‘Who are you anyway?’ she asked.
‘I’m a friend of Spike’s.’
‘Spike’s not here.’
‘When will he be back?’ As the screen went blank and a fresh scenario came up, she took time to wipe her hands on her denims and look at me.
‘What are you, Australian?’
