by Candice Fox
He remembered the boiling tension as Audrey and Christine talked on the back porch. Kradle making use of himself in the kitchen, lying on the floor fixing a leak under the sink, hearing mention of Frances Faulkner through the parted back doors.
‘Don’t tell me you came all the way back here finally to go to that fucking show!’ Audrey had screeched.
Kradle remembered smiling in the dark, surrounded by cleaning bottles and the smell of dampness, the heaviness of the wrench in his hand.
He opened his eyes now as the phone buzzed in his lap. A message. He opened it. The number was unfamiliar, not one he had dialled, not one he recognised from the list.
Will talk about Kradle murders in person only.
Kradle tried to answer, feeling sick with exhilaration. His fingers were trembling so bad he had to type the word out in full twice.
Where?
The phone buzzed. An address in Vegas. Kradle gave a sharp sigh of disappointment.
You will have to come to Mesquite, he typed.
I’ll be at that address at midnight. You’re not there, I don’t talk.
Who is this? Kradle typed. He waited for an answer. None came. He called Celine. She didn’t answer either. He called four more times. The dog sank down beside him in the gravel and put its head on his thigh. A little sunshine had leaked into the desolate, empty corner of the world where they sat, and it was picking up flashes of chocolate brown in the animal’s fur. Kradle smoothed the creature’s head as the phone rang and rang.
It was dark by the time Celine arrived in her driveway, which seemed to have doubled in length while she was away. Though she had checked her phone, and none of the media coverage of the incident at Rancho Salvaje Wildlife Park had mentioned her by name, her neighbours seemed to know she had danced closely with death. Across the street, she spied a couple she had never spoken to huddled in their doorway, openly watching her wave off the cab that had driven her home. As she turned to shut the front door behind her, she saw a man standing on the corner with an impatient little dog, looking towards her property. Celine had never interacted with any of her neighbours. There seemed no point. She was never home long enough to make meaningful connections with them, to share stories on front lawns, to borrow tools, to remark at kids learning to ride bikes on the sidewalk. Celine’s life was at Pronghorn. It felt like years since she had walked its halls, and she yearned for the clanging of doors and sounding of alarms as she closed the door and flicked the deadbolt.
Her phone was jammed with missed call notifications and unread messages, all of which she had ignored as she sat in an isolation room at the Mesa View Regional Hospital. She had been escorted there by members of Trinity’s team after being rescued from the woods. She had lain on the bed in the room, listened to the noises out in the hall – people talking, walking, rolling gurneys. Sounds of life. No one seemed to know what to do with her, uninjured yet numbed with trauma, sectioned off from the world in her little room, awaiting instructions and avoiding the press. Celine supposed she was not a high priority. There would be the teenage girl to question. Brassen’s body and the body of the fallen tactical team member to deal with. Another US Marshal would need to be assigned as head of the Pronghorn inmate recovery effort. Celine didn’t care. She put her head on the pillow and let her phone buzz and buzz and buzz. When someone came for her, she asked them if Trinity Parker was dead. The man, who she’d never seen before, said that was classified information. Celine gave up and went home.
On the cab ride home she learned of the death of ‘a second US marshal’ at the Rancho Salvaje Wildlife Park. She thought about Trinity’s body slumping to the ground, how the fall had made her seem like a rag doll when only seconds before she had been a powerful beast terrorising the girl on the ground.
Celine sank now onto her couch. Jake the cat came and tried to breeze past her, offering no more than his usual tail flick against the back of her arm as consolation. She grabbed the cat by the hind legs as it reached the end of the couch and dragged it back to her, where it struggled, yowling with horror.
‘I don’t care.’ Celine hugged the animal to her. ‘I don’t care. I need this right now. I need this.’
She hugged the cat until the yowling turned to growling, her chin buried in the fur at the top of its head. When she let it go, the animal sprinted away, claws skittering for traction on the floor.
Celine opened her phone and looked at the notifications. There were sixteen calls from a number she didn’t recognise, and a bunch of text messages.
Need your help. K.
Please please please answer.
It’s JK. Pick up.
Have got something major and need to be in Vegas by midnight. Can’t get there. Need you to go.
Trying to get out of Mesquite. Road blocks. Will keep trying.
CELINE WHERE R U?
There was only one missed call from Keeps’s number. And a single message.
Talk 2 me.
Celine opened his number, let her thumb hover over the call button. Then she closed the message, went back to Kradle’s messages and dialled him.
‘Oh, thank god,’ he said when she answered. ‘Listen, I—’
‘No, you listen,’ Celine seethed. ‘I killed someone today.’
Celine waited. Kradle didn’t speak. She heard cars passing in the background of his call. Wind rattling through the line. A dog barking. The wilds of the fugitive life. She didn’t realise how close to tears she was until she tried to speak again.
‘I talked a guy to his death,’ Celine said. ‘He was scared. He . . . He didn’t want to do it. He trusted me. And I walked him right into it. I said it was safe and I knew it wasn’t. And then . . . And-and then we ran, and someone was shooting at us, and Trinity . . .’
‘Celine?’
‘Three people died in front of me, Kradle.’
‘Celine,’ Kradle said. ‘You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.’
His voice was gentle. Warm. She’d never heard it that way, and it pulled her out of the long descent into misery. For most of the time she had known him, Celine had listened to John Kradle’s prison voice. The voice that had to be strong, unflinching, confident, because prison was a place where the slightest waver could indicate to a nearby predator – whether staff or inmate – that a person was vulnerable. She’d heard John Kradle’s mocking voice. She’d heard him challenging, taunting, raging, but she had never heard him comforting, and for a moment she had to stop and check the number she had dialled to make sure there was no mistake.
‘Seriously, though,’ Kradle said after a time. ‘When you’re finished feeling sorry for yourself, I need your help.’
‘You are such a dick!’
‘I am a dick,’ he agreed. ‘But listen.’ He explained the call to In Focus Studios, the messages that came from the unknown number, the address in Vegas. Celine held her head and felt the weight of the day crush her spirit, and with it the very last remnants of who she was before the breakout, of the woman with the keys, the rules, the rock-solid sense of who was good and who was bad and what that meant for her.
‘I can’t believe I’m going to say this,’ she said when he was done talking.
‘What?’ Kradle asked.
Celine drew a deep breath, let it out slowly.
‘Tell me where you are,’ she said. ‘I’m going to come and pick you up.’
CHAPTER 35
For four days, Randy Derlick had been stationed at the desert roadblock closest to Las Vegas from the south: a small, slapped-together job that had been set up at short notice and never strengthened. He guessed that the brains running the Pronghorn recovery effort probably had minimum quotas in place for roadblocks and the people staffing them. Most policing, he had discovered in his nine months on the job, was about meeting certain numbers. The set-up of five checkpoints was probably more about keeping to a number written in a handbook about prison breakouts somewhere, and less about the chances of actually catching an inmate. An es
capee from Pronghorn would have to get through four other roadblocks to get to where the twenty-one-year-old probationary officer stood now on the asphalt, and that’s if they were coming from the south, having looped around the city for some obscure reason before deciding to head in. If they made it past Randy and his fellow officers, it would be another couple of miles before they saw the barest hint of pink neon lighting, cheap hookers and palm trees.
So for four days, Randy had done nothing but wave cars, vans, trucks, motorcycles and every other known type of vehicle into the bay by the side of the road and search fruitlessly for escaped prisoners. As the days wore on, his hope of finding a real-life fugitive stowed away in someone’s trunk or pretzelled into a box in the back of a cargo truck were dwindling, and his irritation with tourists from the West Coast was increasing. There was only so many times a guy could hear, ‘How ’bout that breakout, huh? Catch any bad guys yet?’ before he wanted to blow out his own or somebody else’s brains. The one highlight from his searches were the RVs full of sorority girls heading into the city of sin for Christmas fun. On day two, a blonde with big tits had run a hand up the inside of his thigh as he bent over a huge cooler searching for stowaways. While it had been a cheap thrill, all it left him with was a hankering for vodka pre-mixers on ice and a hard-on that wouldn’t quit for the rest of the day.
If he enjoyed anything about standing in the desert sun, sweating into his jocks and staring at the unchanging rocky horizon, it was shooting the breeze, or lack thereof, with his teammates. Somehow, the last-ditch roadblock between Pronghorn and Vegas had ended up being staffed entirely by probationaries, none of whom Randy had ever met before. Vinnie from Enterprise District, Tuko from Paradise South and Randy from Silverado Ranch bonded over their frustrated desire to find anything interesting in a car headed for the great gambling city behind them. And when Tuko nabbed a bag of weed from a car on day two and smoked it in the cruiser, and Vinnie suggested a rotation of afternoon naps in the shade on day two, Randy knew he was with a good crew.
The van appeared on the distant horizon just as Tuko’s phone bleeped in his pocket. The young officer was leaning on the road partition, his arms folded, his aviator sunglasses like devil eyes, coloured sunset-red. The text message and the van were the first things to happen in forty minutes, so Randy felt a little buzz of excitement in his chest. He watched the speck in the distance become a watery ball, then sprout two black tyre legs as the van grew closer.
‘Aw, shit.’
‘What is it?’ Randy glanced over.
‘My buddy,’ Tuko groaned. ‘He’s on a checkpoint in the north. They just caught an inmate.’
‘You serious?’ Vinnie was sitting nearby in the driver’s seat of the cruiser, with the window rolled down and his elbow on the sill. ‘Goddamn it.’
‘Anybody good?’ Randy asked.
‘Nah,’ Tuko sighed. ‘Some medium-security guy. Smash’n’grab robber. Found him curled up under a blanket in the back seat.’
‘Criminal genius.’
‘This is such bullshit.’ Vinnie thumped the steering wheel. ‘I just want one inmate. I don’t even care if he’s minimum. He could be a tax evader. A fucking DUI dirtbag. I just want to bring somebody in.’
‘Not me,’ Randy said.
‘Huh?’
‘I don’t want just anybody,’ Randy said. ‘I want someone with money. Somebody who’s gonna slide me a tasty bite so I’ll let them through the roadblock.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Tuko smiled. ‘Like a, like a . . . bank robber. He just hit a place in some shitty town down in Mexico, and now he’s all cashed up. He wants to get to Vegas for a big score, so he slides us ten grand each to say we never saw him come through here.’
‘Or a rich guy.’ Randy lit a cigarette, his eyes on the approaching van. ‘He’s been locked up in Pronghorn for ten years for trying to kill his wife. Now he’s out and he wants to finish the job. So he transfers a million bucks each to our bank accounts.’ He grinned. ‘We take off into the sunset. Rich-ass motherfuckers.’
‘You two ought to write a screenplay,’ Vinnie yawned.
‘It could happen.’ Tuko shrugged.
‘Yeah.’ Randy nodded at the van. ‘This van right here might be full of the big four ace cards. Hamsi driving. Carrington riding shotgun. Marco taking a nap in the back . . .’
‘Schmitz hanging on underneath the van like Pacino in Cape Fear.’ Tuko laughed, holding up his hands like they were claws.
‘They got Hamsi already,’ Vinnie said. ‘And Carrington’s dead. Marco never left Pronghorn. He’s a million years old. They found him in the prison infirmary, taking a nap. Don’t you guys watch the news?’ He shook his head. ‘And it was De Niro in Cape Fear, for Chrissake.’
‘I love that movie,’ Randy said. He took a few steps towards the van as it slowed for the last hundred yards, and held up a hand to halt it. Two young women in the front seats: tattoos, glasses, college types, probably. Feminists. Randy went to the driver’s side and Tuko headed for the passenger side.
‘Ladies,’ Randy said as the driver rolled down her window. Randy heard Beyoncé on the radio and smelled pomegranates. Disappointment flooded him. ‘What you got in the back?’
‘Tampons.’
‘Tampons?’ Tuko said from where he crouched at the passenger side wheel, shining a flashlight beneath the van for signs of Max Cady–type characters.
‘We’re from an organisation in South LA called Debbie’s Dignity. You’ve probably heard of us. We supply care packages for homeless women in Los Angeles.’ The girl tossed a little pink backpack through the window at Randy. He unzipped it and glanced in. Womanly things. Bottles, packages, baggies.
‘So now you’re spreading the hobo-love in Vegas, are you?’ Randy said.
‘We’ve had a surplus of stock. Christmas givers. People have been very charitable.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said. He reached through the window to hand the bag back. ‘’Tis the season, all right.’
The passenger leaned over to take the bag from Randy. Her paisley top slid up her forearm, exposing a tattoo of a rope swirling in and out of itself as it wound around her arm.
Randy felt all the hairs on his arms rise.
‘Interesting tattoo you have there,’ he said as she settled back in her seat. He said it just to see her reaction. The girl glanced at her sleeve, tugged it down.
‘Oh, yeah. Stupid.’
‘What’s it mean?’ Randy leaned his forearms on the windowsill.
‘Togetherness,’ the girl said. ‘Like, uh, loyalty. Being bound together with someone.’
‘Oh, really?’ Randy said.
‘They’re all good.’ Tuko came to Randy’s side. ‘Ladies, you can shoot through.’
Randy stepped back. Then something pushed him forwards again, an urge that seemed to come from nowhere. It made him shove a hand into the windowsill again just as the van lurched forwards.
‘Do you ever get any shit for it?’ Randy asked.
‘What?’ the passenger said.
‘Your partner said we could go.’ The driver glared at Randy.
‘Just hold on. I want to know if you ever get any shit for it,’ Randy said. He turned to Tuko. ‘She’s got a rope tattoo.’
‘So?’ Tuko frowned.
‘So sometimes people interpret tattoos in different ways.’ Randy shrugged. ‘My dad was a tattoo artist. He had a shop back home. In Texas. I’ve seen tattoos like that. The rope with the swirls going in and out.’
‘I have too,’ Tuko said. ‘The hipsters are getting all kinds of weird tattoos. Arrows and ropes and swallows. It’s, like, symbolism and shit.’
‘What’s going on?’ Vinnie had appeared out of nowhere, his hands in his pockets. Tuko and Randy backed off from the van. As they assembled a few yards away, it seemed to Randy that night had slammed down on them like a cupped hand. The horizon was gone. Dust swirled in the air, gold and thick as smoke in the van’s headlights.
‘Something doesn’t
feel right here,’ he said.
‘It’s a fucking tattoo.’ Tuko rolled his eyes. ‘Jeez. She also has a dolphin tattoo on her neck. You see that one?’
‘No.’
‘He was like this yesterday about the guy with the beard.’
‘It looked like a fake beard!’ Randy said.
‘It was very thick,’ Vinnie conceded.
‘Listen’—Randy huffed an excited breath—‘we’re supposed to be on the lookout for skinheads, right? Skinheads love rope tattoos. I’ve seen dozens of them in my dad’s shop. Nooses and swirly ropes. Ropes spelling out letters. It’s a thing from a book that they like. The, uh . . . The Day of the Ropes.’
‘You’re thinking of The Day of the Jackal,’ Vinnie said.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘They’re not skinheads,’ Tuko said. ‘They’re feminists.’
‘When I said something about the tattoo,’ Randy said, ‘she pulled her shirt down, not up. It’s not a hipster tattoo.’ He waited. The guys weren’t reacting. ‘I just—’
‘You’re bored, Randy,’ Tuko said. ‘If you want to strip a vehicle, let’s wait for something fun. You want to get knee-deep in tampons and Vagisil? Because I don’t.’
‘Look.’ Vinnie put his hands up in surrender. ‘Let’s just go back, we’ll quickly open the van and we can—’
Thumping. That’s what the gunfire sounded like. Randy’s mind told him an old generator had started up behind him, and the rapid thumping was its engine turning over, coughing to life. But he felt the thumping through his centre, three hard knocks against his back, and the big black bowl of the Nevada sky whipped downwards from above him as he arched and hit the ground. He rolled, saw another staccato blast of white light as the shooter rounded the back of the van and sprayed the three officers again. Randy felt Tuko against his legs, fallen sideways, already dead. He heard Vinnie give a wet cough from somewhere to his right. Randy reached for the gun on his hip, but the driver of the van was standing over him now, and she kicked his wrist away.
