by Candice Fox
Celine cringed, slipping off her shoes and putting her sock-covered feet on the coffee table.
‘Today my guests are here to reveal intimate details of their private sexual lives to people they love the most.’ Faulkner grinned at the camera over the microphone and raised a coy brow. ‘They say their families won’t accept them for who they are in the bedroom, and they’re here to tell them that ain’t right!’
‘That ain’t right!’ the crowd echoed.
‘We’re gonna find out what happens when deeply held prejudices clash with family loyalties.’ Faulkner smiled. ‘Let’s start with our first guest!’
The crowd erupted into cheers. Celine watched a young Asian woman dressed in grey work coveralls walk out onto a stage and take a seat in one of two empty, plush pink armchairs.
‘Please meet Tammy,’ Faulkner said as the camera cut back to her standing among the crowd. ‘Tammy says she and her father have been working together at his welding business since she was a kid. But Tammy wants her father to know it’s not men who make her sparks fly. Tammy, tell us all about it!’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Celine slumped back on the couch.
By the time Kradle appeared at the end of the couch, Celine had watched the welder’s daughter confess to her father about her girlfriend and the other women she had dated. She listened to the audience coo over their hug, and scream with delight as the next guest, a male flight attendant, revealed to his police officer brother that he was gay, only to have the brother pick up a chair and hurl it across the stage at him. Kradle’s hair was wet, and he was wearing the clothes Celine had picked up from Walmart on her way to Mesquite. He was drying his ears with the corner of Celine’s favourite towel.
‘I haven’t smelled this good in years,’ he said, bending to sniff his armpit.
‘Did you use my toothbrush?’ Celine grimaced.
‘Was there something else I was supposed to use?’
Celine closed her eyes. ‘Note to self: Burn all belongings.’
He sat and they watched a teenage boy tell his mother he was having a secret love affair with his first cousin.
‘This show is terrible,’ he said.
‘Yeah. But it’s probably not the worst thing out there.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Where’s Christine?’ Celine asked, handing Kradle the remote. He watched the screen carefully for a while, then paused the clip. He walked to the screen and pointed to a blurry image of a plump woman sitting three rows from the back of the studio. An empty grey chair sat beside her.
‘Right there.’
‘Okay.’
They watched the show in full. At the end, while credits slid slowly across the bottom half of the screen, members of the audience stood and asked questions or made comments about the guests, who were all assembled on the stage in pink chairs.
‘Does Christine make a comment?’ Celine asked.
‘No,’ Kradle said.
They watched a woman in a red dress stand and take the mic from Frances.
‘I just wanna say y’all need to have your heads checked.’ The woman cast a finger over the people on the stage. ‘What you’re doin’ is against God’s word, and—’
The audience exploded with jeers.
‘And it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and—’
The camera panned over the people in pink chairs on the stage. Some of the guests were nodding. Others were calling back insults. The welder reached over and hugged his daughter into his side.
‘Well, I feel stupider,’ Celine said as the In Focus Studios logo flashed onscreen. She looked over. Kradle was asleep with his head hanging against the back of the couch, his mouth open. As she watched, he drew a snoring breath. Celine guessed it would take some time to recover from the fugitive life. She opened her phone to disconnect it from the television and paused with her finger above the episode she had just played.
The length of the video was displayed on the thumbnail. It read 33 minutes and three seconds. As she glanced down the list of videos, she read the numbers indicating the length of the other episodes.
44 minutes, 19 seconds.
46 minutes, 3 seconds.
41 minutes, 20 seconds.
Celine scrolled. There were no other episodes of The Frances Faulkner Show from season eight that were under forty minutes. She went back to her initial search, opened a collection of videos marked season five, and scrolled through the running time of the videos. As her excitement built, she reached over and slapped Kradle in the chest with the back of her hand.
‘Something’s been cut out,’ she said.
‘Hmm?’
‘Of the episode. A segment’s been cut out.’
‘Trade you,’ Kradle murmured, turning his head away. ‘Five sachets of coffee.’
Celine got up and pushed Kradle sideways on the couch until he lay down, then lifted his legs onto the seat.
‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ she said. ‘We leave in an hour.’
‘Hmm.’
She went into the bedroom and flicked the light switch in the ensuite throwing light onto her bed, where two figures curled side by side. Jake made a small, round ball near the pillow on the left side of the bed. The black dog made a bigger ball of fur on the right side.
CHAPTER 37
Burke David Schmitz took his blue snow cone from the food truck vendor and made his way through the crowd to the edge of the rink. On the ice, there seemed to be three types of people skating: confident zoomers, who twirled and skidded and danced around the inner circle; semi-confident skaters, who shuffled awkwardly in a wider circle around the blue-lit rink, now and then slipping and thumping dramatically onto the hard, white surface; and an outer ring of newcomers to the sport, who gripped and giggled their way around the edge of the rink, gloved hands trembling as they slid along a surface painted with colourful snowflakes. Burke pulled the edges of his hoodie up around his face, adjusted the fake glasses on the bridge of his nose and scanned the crowd. Mostly white faces. The following morning, Christmas morning, there would probably be a good mixture of races in attendance, but what mattered would be the colours of the targets as they lined up on the big stage at the far end of the rink. For now, the stage was empty. A sound technician was fiddling with a microphone mounted behind a podium. Burke looked at the huge Christmas tree dominating the left side of the stage, twinkling with fibre-optic stars transitioning between pink, purple and blue.
Burke surveyed the ice in front of him and thought about a mixed crowd of people, rubbing shoulders, exchanging smiles, some of them running into each other, gripping each other’s arms, tumbling to the ice. He thought about the ice itself, a large, circular slab sitting like a jewel in the middle of the desert, exactly where it didn’t belong.
In the distance, the Planet Hollywood Resort hugged the park in which the rink lay, at the centre of a makeshift winter wonderland. The hotel was a black mass in a sea of buildings lit with hundreds of gold windows, strips of flashing globes, golden cones beaming up from inground lights. Along the front of the building, wooden panels held signs detailing the building’s renovation timeline.
Burke stood licking his snow cone, running his eyes along the wall that sectioned off the front of the hotel. It was ten feet tall, windowless, seamless, a perfect barrier that at that moment stopped civilians interfering with the construction site that lay beyond it, but on Christmas Day would force panicked, screaming civilians from escaping that way.
Burke could just see the faint traces of #VegasStrong tags that had been painted on the panels back in 2017. Like the memory of Stephen Paddock’s massacre, the tags had been exposed to time and had lost their strength. Rain, the searing Nevada sun, splatters of dirt and paint and the coming in contact with the shoulders of passers-by had taken the edge off the lettering, but Burke knew that the ink would be layers deep under the surface, seeped there, immoveable.
What he would do on Christmas Day wasn’t just going to deeply stain the memories of men, women and c
hildren in Nevada. It would not be rubbed down and faded by time. What he would do would blast right through the world, splinter it, shatter it, crush some of it to dust. Because Burke was not some lunatic with no discernible motivation cutting through young lives at a concert. He was a soldier with a specific target, a strategic intent, a master plan.
On the ice, a family with two little blonde girls were shuffling haltingly along the middle circle, grinning and holding hands. Burke turned, put an elbow on the edge of the rink and watched. The family was heading in the direction of the stage, the Christmas tree and, beyond it, a line of trucks backed bumper to bumper containing equipment for the Christmas Day extravaganza on the ice. Burke turned again and surveyed the third wall that corralled the ice rink, a second row of wide, high trucks, these painted bright colours and adorned with signs. The food trucks were giving off a mixture of enticing smells, the strongest of which was the Mexican truck, which had just put on a fresh batch of ground beef. Burke locked eyes with the woman behind the counter of the snow cone truck, who was squeezing red food colouring out of a ketchup bottle onto a dome of ice in a pointed cone. The woman raised the cone in a small salute, and Burke nodded in acknowledgement. From where he stood he could see the sleeve of her shirt slide back down over the rope tattoo on her forearm.
He turned again to the ice. The family with the little girls had stopped to rest against the barrier. Burke heard Christmas carols on the wind and smiled.
CHAPTER 38
An hour’s solid rest on the couch, and the snippets of sleep he had snuck in the car, had filled Kradle with a disproportionate amount of energy. The shower, the fresh clothes, and the first substantial meal he’d had since the breakout had probably also helped. He sat in the passenger seat of the car, itching to get going, while Celine readied herself inside the house, now and then passing the door to the garage, a dog or cat following close behind. He honked the horn a couple of times and she leaned into the doorway and flipped him the bird before disappearing again.
By the time they were pulling out onto the street, his heart was hammering in his chest and his fingers were dancing on his knees.
‘Would you chill?’ Celine asked. ‘You’re making me nervous.’
‘You should be nervous. You’re driving a wanted man to a secret meeting with a mystery person in the middle of the night.’
‘Stop.’
‘Pretty ballsy stuff.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Celine shrugged one shoulder. ‘I’m a pretty ballsy chick.’
‘I haven’t said thanks yet.’
‘Anytime is good!’
‘Thank you,’ Kradle said. ‘Although, now that I say it, it doesn’t seem like enough.’
‘It’s not.’
‘I appreciate it,’ he said. ‘After everything you’ve been through.’
‘Kradle, I don’t want to talk about that with you. At all. Not ever.’
‘I’m not talking about what happened to your family. I’m talking about what I put you through at Pronghorn.’
‘You think you’re the most problematic inmate I’ve ever had?’ She rolled her eyes.
‘I do.’
‘Well, you’re not.’
‘What about the countdown?’ he was smiling. ‘What about the Valentine’s Day cards I sent you from Satan? What about Fingernail Jesus?’
‘Urgh, Fingernail Jesus,’ Celine groaned, remembering the six-month period when Kradle had refused to shave, have a haircut or trim his fingernails. He had ended up a taloned, Christ-like figure who preached nonsensical commandments at passing officers.
They drove towards Vegas. Through five checkpoints, Celine showed her ID, smiled and joked with the police officers stationed there about being the angry Pronghorn correctional officer who introduced the world to the five most wanted men from the breakout. A young officer took a selfie with her at the third checkpoint. At the fifth, on the crest of a hill looking down towards the valley where the great shimmering city lay, the tone was more solemn.
‘They got no word from them at all?’ she heard one officer ask another.
‘Nothin’,’ the officer responded. He was a young man, looking at his phone. ‘The cruiser is gone. The barricades are gone. It’s as if they just bailed out. I’m calling Tuko but he won’t pick up.’
Celine stopped behind a Costco just inside the city limits and let Kradle out of the trunk. They followed Route 95 through a block of shopping malls north of Summerlin, the blazing white lights of Target, Walmart and the little chain restaurants that clustered at their base making the highway seem lit almost by daylight. Kradle watched the stores pass as if he were a kid at the aquarium. They stopped at an intersection and saw a family wheeling a huge flat-screen TV across the six lanes of the highway in a shopping cart. Kradle glanced at the clock set into the dashboard.
‘Must have been a sale,’ Celine said.
Kradle shrugged. ‘Hey, you want to go to Walmart at midnight? Go to Walmart at midnight. Go to a bar. Go to the beach. If you’re free to do it, do it.’
‘I guess you’d come away from death row with that kind of attitude,’ Celine said.
‘I used to go on little mental journeys if I woke up in the middle of the night in my cell,’ Kradle said. ‘Drive down the highway, stop at a gas station, look through the aisles. Pick up a Coke and a burrito, maybe.’
Celine drove through the intersection. ‘You nervous?’ she asked.
‘A little,’ he said. ‘More . . . More excited. I’ve wanted an answer for so long.’
‘What are you going to do? When this is over?’ Celine watched the road, the streetlamps crawling overhead. She couldn’t deny the jealousy that was making her throat ache, that Kradle had a chance of not only learning the truth about his family’s murders, but of going back to something that resembled the life he had lived before they died. There was no place Celine could go where she could be who she had been – the teenager, the daughter and sister and niece and cousin, the naive kid filled with hope and dreams about her future. She realised before long that she had got so caught up in imagining Kradle back in the swamps on his houseboat that she had not heard him say that was his plan. In fact, he had not said anything at all.
Celine fidgeted in her seat.
‘Because, I mean, when we . . . you know,’ she said. ‘When we catch whoever did this to your family, we’ll bring him to justice. You’ll be found innocent and set free.’
Again, Kradle didn’t answer.
‘That’s the plan,’ Celine said slowly, firmly. ‘To find him and bring him in.’
‘Here it is.’ Kradle pointed.
They pulled alongside the parking lot of the Everpalm Motel, at the corner of an intersection. Celine felt her jaw aching with tension.
‘Don’t go in,’ Kradle said. ‘Pull in here and we’ll watch.’
Celine turned left instead of right and parked in the lot outside the Best Western across the street from the Everpalm, and the two watched from between rows of short palm trees bordering the road. There were only three cars at the Everpalm. Celine could see no one hanging around the edges of the lot, no one watching from the laundromat next door or from the Chili’s restaurant on the other side of the street to the squat blue building.
‘Text him,’ Celine said. ‘Tell him to come out and wave.’
Kradle did. As they watched, the door to room three opened and a man stepped out, dressed in jeans and a pinstriped business shirt. He looked up and down the road, waved, and pushed the door open fully with his boot. Kradle leaned forwards and squinted at the doorway.
‘Recognise him?’ Celine asked.
‘No.’
‘Maybe I should go first,’ she said.
Kradle nodded.
Celine got out, crossed the highway and went to the door. The man was sitting now on the edge of the faded floral coverlet on one of two single beds in the room. He swiped a hand nervously over his long nose and chin and gestured to the bathroom.
‘You can check,’
he said. ‘It’s just me.’
Celine went in and checked. A tiny bathroom that smelled of mould. A plywood closet, empty but for laundry bags and empty hangers. Nothing under the beds but dust. She walked to the doorway and waved.
‘You have a friend with you?’ the man asked.
‘“Friend” is a strong word,’ Celine said.
John Kradle walked into the room and shut the door behind him, pulling down his hood as he did so.
‘Oh, shit!’ The man got up and backed into the dresser, rattling the fingerprint-spotted mirror.
‘Calm down,’ Celine said. ‘He’s fine. You’re safe. It’s him you’ve been texting.’
‘You called the studio?’ The man pointed at Kradle.
‘I did,’ Kradle said. ‘I’m not from the New York Times.’
‘Yeah! Ha! No kiddin’!’ the man said. ‘I agreed to meet a journalist here, not a fucking escaped prisoner. I could – I could get arrested for this!’
‘Right,’ Celine said. ‘So let’s get this over with quickly. The longer we all sit here wailing about what we’re doing, the more likely it is that we’ll get caught doing it. You’re from In Focus Studios?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name?’ Kradle asked.
‘Never mind.’ The man put a long-fingered hand up as though to hide his face. He sank to the edge of the bed again. ‘Let me just tell you what I know so I can get out of here.’
Celine sat on the edge of the opposite bed, next to Kradle.
‘I . . . I started working at In Focus back in 2015,’ the man said. His eyes were searching the patchy carpet, as if his mind was sifting through what he could and couldn’t say. ‘I worked on the front desk during the day. That was my regular job. But I was also interning on The Frances Faulkner Show two days a week. I ended up giving up the internship. It wasn’t paid, and my interest in television—’
‘You’re babbling,’ Celine said.
‘Okay, okay, sorry. Point is, I worked on the show, and I worked on the desk. The episode your wife attended, Mr Kradle – I was there when they filmed that.’
