The Terror of Living: A Novel

by Waite, Urban

  The lawyer’s voice had been very clear. Eddie didn’t think the man was on the level. Probably cooled out on some real expensive drugs. Some laboratory stuff that didn’t let him feel. Made him think of people the way he did. Nothing made sense, and maybe Eddie had been here his whole life, stuck in the middle, because he’d tried to make sense of money and friendship and a million other things that were never meant to be.

  There were other things to think of now, other things he could do. He looked at the clock on the dash and figured the time. Hunt had called nearly two hours before. He’d be expecting him, waiting for him, angry and alone, and it was how it would have to be. Hunt would have to get used to that. Would have to understand he couldn’t go back to the life he’d led, to what he’d built.

  AROUND NOON, HUNT SAW EDDIE TAKE THE TURN off the main drive and pull down into the gravel. Hunt had taken to sitting in the big red chair, the back faced into the corner so that he could see the road. Sometime during the morning, while he was cursing Eddie and calling him on his cell phone, he’d started a fire in the fireplace. The shivers had come over him again and it was all he could do to light the fire and kneel next to it with his big, clay-colored hands held out.

  He watched Eddie turn down off the main road, the gravel popping beneath his tires. He drove a big Lincoln, one of the new ones meant to look like a Cadillac. Hunt watched him for a moment, then went into the kitchen, where Nora was standing over the sink looking out the windows. She was dressed for the house in a favorite pair of faded jeans and an old oversize undershirt that hung loose on her slender frame. “Can you give him a wave when he gets out?” Hunt said, touching the grip of the Browning and trying to look like he was merely adjusting the fold of his belt. “I’m going to go out the back for a moment.”

  Nora gave him a worried look but didn’t say anything.

  “If you can, let him in through the garage and bring him in the side door here.”

  They owned five acres south of Seattle on the outskirts of a place called Auburn. When they were young they’d taken out loans to build stables, and they raised and boarded horses on the back acre of their property. On Sunday nights they could see the big lights from the horse races and hear the cheers coming off the crowd as the horses neared the finish. Mostly, though, it was cow pastures and scrap lots filled with old car parts, refrigerators, and stacked tires. The fecal smell of dairy animals—mud and cow droppings always the first thing. Most days he didn’t even smell it. Either he’d gotten used to it or the wind was blowing from the north and carrying the scent south toward Tacoma. A light rain had fallen the night before and he could smell the scents coming off the cows, smell them in the grass and on the trees, coating everything.

  He took the back steps quickly, in a hurry to get down onto the lawn, but then turned around, remembering the spring on the screen door and the clapping aluminum sound it would make. From where he stood holding the door, he could hear cars passing on the highway next to the horse track, the bump and gurgle of a small irrigation stream behind the house. Most of their property was wooded, but a good acre of it—around the house, where they had a small pasture set up for the horses—was open, and he could see clearly into the birch and pine that surrounded his house.

  Hunt and Eddie had met twenty years before when Eddie had come into the bar where Hunt was drinking, looking for a junkie named Stone. Hunt ran the numbers on the local horse races, and though he made good picks, his drinking got in the way of his profits and he’d reached the point where he was so broke he felt there were bottomless holes in his pockets. “If you find him,” Hunt had said, feeling a little drunk from a string of shot glasses laid out in front of him, “tell him he owes me twenty dollars.”

  “He owes me a lot more than that,” Eddie said, looking down the bar toward Hunt. “Give you a percentage if you can show me where he lives.”

  Hunt knew where Stone lived. But he didn’t know Eddie. “How much?”

  “Enough.”

  “Isn’t that always the answer,” Hunt said, sliding off the barstool and giving Eddie a smile.

  “Tell you what,” Eddie said. “If you can show me where he lives, you’ll make yourself a lot more than twenty.”

  It took them ten minutes to drive from the bar to the house where Stone lived. Late summer, the clouds braided up and flat as a rug across the sky above. No wind, and the stillness of the summer heat all around them. Eddie parked the car in an alley around back. “If he tries to come through here,” Eddie said, making things sound as simple as possible, “just stop him.”

  Hunt gave Eddie a doubting look. “With what?”

  “You want your twenty bucks, right? Figure it out.”

  Eddie got out and closed the door with his hip. Hunt still remembered the smell of that back alley. Acrid smell of food, Dumpsters stuffed up with furniture and half-eaten pizza crusts, produce boxes from the nearby store lining the alley, their waxen bottoms colored in vegetal funk.

  A minute passed and then Stone appeared, rounding the Dumpster at a full run with Eddie close behind him. Hunt sat in Eddie’s passenger seat, still dazed from the bar—not expecting any of it. Hunt didn’t have any clear idea what to do, Stone running straight at him. Hunt opened the door and meant to tackle Stone, but Stone, with his head turned back toward Eddie, wasn’t looking and ran straight into the open car door. The clap of Stone’s body as it bounced, then hit the ground. Hunt stood there looking down. Eddie drew up, breathing hard. Stone was laid out on the stained cement alleyway, looking up at the two of them. “Fuck, man. Dealers and bookies unite,” Stone muttered.

  Eddie kicked Stone twice in the stomach, hard enough that Hunt heard the air burst from the man’s lips. With Stone doubled up on the cement, Eddie reached down and took Stone’s wallet from him, along with a bag Hunt recognized as heroin. “Here’s your twenty,” Eddie said, taking a weathered bill from the wallet and giving it to Hunt. “What did we say for a percentage?”

  Hunt looked down at the man crumpled up at their feet. “We didn’t,” Hunt said.

  Eddie took a wad of bills from his pocket and thumbed two hundred out and then replaced the wad in his pocket. “Thirty percent sounds right to me.” He handed the two bills to Hunt.

  Over the past twenty years they’d both gone on to bigger and better things, Hunt’s standard 30 percent paying for his first date with Nora, a down payment on his house and property, and even a few young horses they had jokingly called their kids after they found out they couldn’t have children. Nothing in his life had ever arisen that would make him think Eddie wasn’t playing straight with him. There was no reason Hunt could think of to be worried about his welfare. Eddie had never had a reason to take his frustrations out on him. They were friends after years of doing business together, backyard barbecues, horse races, and bets. Hunt trusted Eddie because there was no other option and because Eddie had always played straight with him. Hunt could see how everything might change. He’d never messed up this bad, never screwed up, never been in the position Stone had found himself in, laid out and helpless, turtled on his backside in some foul alley waiting to see what would happen next.

  Now, Hunt heard the electric whir of his garage door opening—Nora letting Eddie into the garage. As Hunt went around the house, he was careful to duck his head below the frame of the garage window, taking his steps with caution so as not to upset the small line of garden pebbles they’d put in around the foundation for drainage. He felt for the Browning and brought it out, holding it in front of him as he went along the length of the garage. He’d never planned to hold a gun again in his life. But here he was, holding one, waiting for his friend, Eddie Vasquez, to duck beneath the garage door and walk into his house.

  The garage motor was still going when Hunt put the gun up against Eddie’s back. Eddie didn’t say anything, and Nora, standing in the light of the side door, raised a hand to her mouth as if to quiet a scream.

  “Be calm,” Eddie said, his voice as cool and relaxed a
s always.

  If Hunt had played the part all the way through, he might have knocked Eddie right over with the butt of the gun. But it wasn’t in the plan, none of it was, he was making it all up as he went. For all that had happened he had no reason not to trust Eddie. A lot of money was involved, a whole shitload of powder, and it didn’t seem to make the most sense to piss anyone off more than he already had.

  “Didn’t figure you for the gun type,” Eddie said. They were standing there in the garage. The door settled down on its motor, and besides the dull rush of cars on the highway a half mile off, it was quiet.

  “Sorry about this, Eddie,” Hunt said, looking up at his wife, Nora looking back at him, completely horrified.

  “Hunt,” Eddie said, a note of caution entering his voice. “No one knows about what happened up there. For all they know, it was just the kid. I can blame it all on the kid and that’s how it will turn out.”

  “The kid should never have been there,” Hunt said.

  “Two hundred kilos is a lot for one man to pack out.”

  “I could have done it with an extra horse. No sense in getting the kid involved.”

  “He’s involved now, isn’t he? Just be glad it wasn’t you they got their hands on.”

  “What now?” Hunt asked.

  “You need to relax is ‘what now.’ ” Eddie lowered his hands. “Nothing is registered under your name, cell phone, truck, everything under a different name. Let’s all go inside, you can put the gun away. We’ll figure this out.”

  Nora poured the coffee and stood leaning with her hip against the counter, looking the two men over. She had begun to say something and then stopped. If he ever made it out of this, there would be questions; Hunt knew that, but he couldn’t do anything about it now, just clean it off and hope it didn’t stink.

  “Look, Hunt,” Eddie was saying. “It was dark. No one can say who you were, wearing that hat and riding like you do. It was an aerial drop twenty miles this side of the border. Unless you’re out there taking Polaroids and tacking them up to the trees, you should be fine.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of pissed-off people when you don’t deliver,” Hunt said.

  “You let me worry about that.”

  “Eddie, I’m not trying to be difficult about this, but the kid knows who I am and it’s not going to take him long to figure out he’s got chips on the table.”

  “We all have chips on the table,” Eddie said, taking a draw from his coffee.

  THE HEAD DEA AGENT, DRISCOLL, SAT TAPPING HIS card on the metal table, tapping lengthwise, then turning the card and tapping it again. He’d been doing it at a near-steady pace for more than an hour. When Drake came in, it was the second time they’d met that day. Just the two of them in the room, Driscoll with his jacket off and tie loosened, sitting there with a stack of paper laid out before him. A man with the posture and thick cut of an athlete, now slumping into his later years, the agent ran a hand through his mustache and off his chin, then leaned back in the chair and looked up. To Drake the motion seemed practiced, almost polite, like the gesture of a lion with a kind of social conscience, cleaning blood from its fur, readying itself for the next kill. “I’ve just finished looking through your report,” he said after Drake had taken a seat in the chair across the table from the agent. “There isn’t anything in here about you braining the kid with the dull end of your rifle.”

  Drake didn’t say anything. The card kept tapping on the table, steady as a metronome. Driscoll’s eyes on him, a small, sickly smile lingering at his lips.

  “Kids can make up the damnedest stories,” Drake said.

  “Yes, they can,” the agent said, giving the card a final tap on the table, then slipping it across to Drake. They were in the federal building in downtown Seattle. From the freeway, Drake had seen the covered bridge, seven stories up, where the prisoners crossed from cell to courthouse without touching the street or coming into contact with the civilized world. “Is there anything you’d like to add?”

  “I wrote it all down as it happened.”

  Driscoll looked away, and when he looked back he said, “Deputy Drake, the truth is that the paper is going to be running a story on this tomorrow.”

  “A story on what?”

  “Wasn’t there a Sheriff Drake up in Silver Lake convicted of smuggling?”

  Drake didn’t say anything.

  Driscoll leaned forward in his chair and looked across the table at Drake. “I can’t guarantee they’re going to keep something like that out of the article.”

  “My father?”

  “I don’t know how they heard about all this, but I got them to hold off on running it at least for a day.”

  “Thanks,” Drake said. “What does this mean now?”

  “It means you better start answering questions.”

  “That was ten years ago. What does the past have to do with any of this?”

  “Some would say the past has everything to do with what happens today,” Driscoll said. “What do you think?”

  Drake put his hands up on the table and spread his fingers. Flat, cold, metal. He could feel something inside him working loose. Shame? Fear? He didn’t know. He wanted to get up, wanted to leave, but there was nowhere he could go. He’d got himself into this mess, and every way he looked at it he couldn’t get himself out.

  “You the son who used to play Division One?”

  “The paper tell you that when they called?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Had to move back after my father went away.”

  “What did you play?”

  “Point guard.”

  “You were supposed to be some big star, weren’t you?”

  “Basketball and my father were almost ten years ago.”

  “And now you’re a deputy up there? Would have thought you’d be coaching or something.”

  “Doesn’t pay as much as the state.”

  “Well, it won’t make you rich.”

  “No, but I guess that’s what my father thought, too.” Drake met Driscoll’s eyes for a moment, then looked away.

  “Must be hard to be the son and deputy of the guy who made the sheriff’s department famous up there.”

  “Like I said, it was before my time.”

  Driscoll looked across the table at him. He straightened up in his seat and leaned forward. “You playing on the right side here?”

  “I’m playing on your side, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Driscoll apologized. “I can’t make much sense of it,” he said. “I don’t know a lot of people who would go up into those mountains. What were you doing there?”

  “My job.”

  “Sounds like you were doing your father’s as well.”

  “It was my father’s. It’s not his job anymore, it’s mine.”

  “Sorry,” Driscoll said. He did a little wave with his hand, like he was shooing away an odd thought. “I had to ask.”

  “It’s fine. I know who my father was and I know who I am. We’re not the same.”

  “I’d guess you’ll never be elected sheriff.”

  “No? People can surprise you. There’s a few forgiving hearts out there.”

  The agent took a moment to thumb the report. “I can’t say if the story running tomorrow in the paper is going to be positive. You might want to start thinking about that.” Driscoll looked through the files in front of him, and when he looked back he said, “This is pretty big.”

  “I realize that.”

  “This is really going to piss a few people off. I’m just telling you because I think you should be ready. The people you stopped are not going to take this lightly. About now, their only concern is how to make this all go away. That means silencing those who try to get in their way. The story running tomorrow will have your name in it. Are you ready for that?”

  “I suppose I should have thought about that at the time, but I didn’t and I don’t think I’d have changed the outcome.”
/>   “Taking in the two of them would have been nice.”

  “Yes, it would have.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me about the second man that could help out my team?”

  “There’s not much to tell.” Drake knew he wasn’t being helpful. Wasn’t doing his best. Driscoll was looking for answers and Drake had none to give. All of it was too close to him already. He could almost feel his father’s presence, sitting there in the room ten years before.

  “You are the only one, besides the kid, who knows anything about this man.”

  Drake tried to draw the man’s face from memory. The only image he could find was of his father, fifteen years ago, riding slow up a game trail in the West Cascades. His father turning in his saddle to look back at him, face shadowed, church light filtering down through a patchwork of green forest branches, blue and green as stained glass, yellow slanted columns of sunlight, dusted through with tree pollen, floating, ghostlike. “I’m afraid what I do know is not much,” he finally said.

  “Is there anything to add about the second man that I may have skipped over in the report?”

  “I’d prefer not to speculate.”

  “But if you did.”

  “If I did, I would say he was a very fine horseman.”

  “Yes,” the agent said. “I had guessed at that from the report.” The agent waited for Drake to speak on the subject, and when he didn’t, Driscoll continued. “I’m at a loss. I wonder if you might be more familiar with this sort of thing. It’s not often we come across something of this caliber. Hippies with backpacks are one thing, but aerial drops and horsemen are something quite different.”

  “I’m not the most familiar with this sort of thing either.”

  Driscoll gave him a doubting look. “Where did you learn to ride?”

  “My father had a few horses when I was a kid. He would take me into the mountains for rides when he could.”