The Terror of Living: A Novel

by Waite, Urban

  Immediately the man’s eyes focused on Nora, sitting there on the cement. Behind her, in the middle of the basement, wooden stairs led up to the main floor of the house. He swept the basement with his eyes—a stainless metal table, several workbenches, and from the darkness across the basement floor the dim hum of the freezer’s motor. On one of the benches he saw the knife bag, open at the rim, pellets of heroin and the stock of the AR-15 exposed. He took a step forward, hand held out toward the gun. Nora closed her eyes.

  Blood exploded like rough paint from the pea-size hole in the man’s head. The man fell to the floor with a clatter of gun and bone matter, a dark pool growing around him. Grady lowered the .22 and kicked the man’s legs out of the way before closing the door. He put the .22 into his pants pocket and passed Nora at a near run. He didn’t stop when he reached the stairs, just kept going. The sound of his breathing on the dark basement steps above her, Nora crawled to a space behind the wooden stairs. She got in under the shadows and stayed hidden. The dead man was between her and the door. She was scared, fear loaded so tight in her veins she couldn’t move. Her eyes hadn’t left the dead man on the floor, the seep of blood and brain on the cement.

  At the top of the stairs, Grady cracked the door and looked out into his kitchen. He could hear whispering, but he couldn’t tell from which direction it came. He rose and opened the door wide enough to pass through, that urge already working away inside him, floodgates open, devil riding down on a cascade of blood and fire.

  He found the first man pressed just inside the kitchen doorway. Without even a word, Grady slid the twelve-inch blade across his throat and severed the man’s neck nearly to the spine. Blood in glossy strands, from wall to doorframe, like red waxen candle drippings. Grady caught the body and eased it to the floor. The weight of the man’s blood on Grady’s shirt, pleasure, wet and warm, on Grady’s skin.

  In the front room, he saw the door hung open and a shadow waiting on the porch. The cheap metal screen door rested against the wood frame. Grady charged it, and the door swung open with his weight and pinned the man on the porch to the side of the house. Grady stabbed him so hard the knife went all the way through the mesh screen of the door, through skin and skull, out the other side, and nailed the man’s head to the wood siding of the house. Pressurized blood welled from the man’s head and ran through the mesh screen door.

  Grady was struggling to take the knife handle back when the first bullets hit the porch. Grady dropped. Broken bits of wood and potting soil rained down on him. The windows behind him exploded and fell back into the house. From what he could hear, there were two guns on him from the street. With the rain falling, nothing was clear; in the dull, clouded light he could see nothing but dark gray shapes moving in the rain, and the muzzle flash of automatic weapons. He dove back through the doorway and into the house.

  A step before he made it to the basement door, he was shot back-to-front through the flesh of his side. Blood, soft and warm on his skin. He opened the basement door and fell through.

  HUNT STOPPED ONCE FOR GAS, PAID CASH, AND WAS careful not to show his bullet-torn left leg. He bought a bag of peanuts, a large hot dog roasted over an electric spit, and a two-liter bottle of Cherry Coke. While he drove, he drank the soda with one hand, holding the bottle between his thighs when he wanted to take the cap off and then again when the cap needed refastening.

  He drove with caution, keeping his truck below the speed limit. He knew he was close to the end; one way or another, it would all be finished soon. There were people out there looking for him. He’d read about the deputy, Drake, trying to track him down. Hunt had known his father, the same age as Hunt. They’d shared a beer once, the sheriff and Hunt, just a friendly meeting, the two of them in the same business, working the same range. It was easy for Hunt to see that the man meant to run him off, and Hunt had told him it would be just as easy for him to do the same.

  Still, Hunt had felt bad for the man, his son in school, wife passed away, medical bills and a son two thousand miles away to worry over. Hunt could understand a thing like that. He knew they’d had it hard. Even after he’d heard about the sheriff going away on a smuggling charge, he knew his son would never know the truth of it—that his father had been doing it for him, that in some bemused, half-conscious way his father had seen it as the only way out.

  They had met an hour’s drive outside Silver Lake, at an empty roadside bar where the two of them could be fairly certain they wouldn’t see anyone they knew. Still they had used caution, sitting toward the back at a corner table, Hunt’s cigarettes laid out on the wood, two beers beaded with sweat between them. The sheriff had explained about his past, about his wife and son. He didn’t want to do the things he did, but he was doing them. Hunt said it was the same for him. Said he was just the same as the sheriff. The sheriff looked him over, waiting to see if Hunt would smile, if he was making fun, but then when Hunt didn’t, he said, “I should run you off.”

  “You could do that.”

  “It’s what I’m paid to do.”

  Hunt looked down at the beer on the table. He touched his palm to the glass and felt the cold bead of the water. “If I said something—”

  “What would you say?” the sheriff interrupted. “No one would believe you.”

  “They might not, but still, it would probably get people talking. I doubt you’d see another term. You make so little as it is.”

  The sheriff gave him a cold stare. He glanced around the bar as if looking for witnesses, Hunt expecting to get coldcocked right there. The sheriff reached for the beer in front of him and drained it back in one motion. He stood, chair screeching on the hard tile floor. “What you do with your time is not my business,” the sheriff said. “But you put me in a position where I have one of my deputies with me, I’m going to have to act. And I’ll make sure you’re in no shape afterward to slander me. You understand?”

  Hunt nodded. The sheriff straightened his shirt, then walked out of the bar and left Hunt there. Hunt and Eddie had dealt with crooked cops before. But this was different; the man was not looking for a handout or a bribe, he was just trying to do the same thing Hunt had been doing. How long he’d been up to it, Hunt didn’t know. All he knew was that he’d caught the sheriff up there in the mountains one time, had seen him from a far ridge, receiving a small load to take down through the mountains. The sheriff had seen him, too, or at least had known about him for some time, pulling him over on the side of the road just outside Silver Lake. No one around, the sheriff could have done anything he wanted, but he hadn’t.

  In a way, Hunt thought, he owed the man his life. Though it was grudgingly given, he knew the sheriff was not the type to murder him in cold blood. A warning, simple as that, and Hunt with the intention to honor it. He stayed away, picking different routes through the mountains. Careful not to upset the balance drawn between the two of them.

  He drove on, drinking from his Cherry Coke. Passing the time by thinking about what he owed this man. Hunt was in rough shape, hole clean through his calf, business gone, wife kidnapped, but he was alive. Everything could have been different had all of it ended ten years before. But he was driving still, heading south, trying to pick up what little there was left of a life that seemed to break as fast as it was being built.

  In Everett, thirty miles north of Seattle, he pulled into the parking lot of a hunting goods shop he knew on the east side. He knew there were people looking for him, and he thought someday they’d find him, but not today. He was walking around with pants half-gone around his knee and a bandage wrapped white as a flag around his calf. And he wasn’t ready yet to just give up.

  He turned the key in the ignition, and the rumble of the engine quieted. He put the survival bag beneath the seat with the Browning. When he walked in, a bell announced his presence, and an employee he knew only by sight waved from the counter. He went over to the pants section and found his size. In the dressing room he eased his pants past the bandage and then fit the new pa
ir on.

  From the old pair he retrieved the small slip of paper he’d taken from Thu, and his wallet and keys, and he laid them on the changing-room bench. Standing there in his new pants, he picked up the slip of paper with the address written on it, a North Seattle address that he didn’t have any clue about. He didn’t know how Thu had come across it, whether it was a friend or a relative. He thought he knew what it was. The address was a good place to drop off ninety thousand dollars of heroin, or at least it could have been for Thu.

  Hunt gathered the address and the rest of his things and stuffed them down into the pockets of his new pair of jeans. He didn’t have much time. He didn’t have any time at all. If someone wanted the heroin more than Grady, it was probably the people waiting at this address.

  He looked at himself in the mirror, a tightness in the lower left leg where the bandage was. When he turned to look at the back, he could see where he had wiped his own bloodied hand across the bottom of his sweatshirt. He was running out of time, not even enough time to worry about himself.

  He opened the curtain, and on the way to the register, he picked out a cheap rain slicker long enough to hang past his bloodstained sweatshirt. In his hand he carried the old pair of jeans. There was a funk to them, something of the salt water mixed with iodine. At the register he asked if there was a trash can he could throw them in. The man took them from him and dropped them into a wastebasket behind the counter.

  “What happened to your leg?” the man asked, taking the cash Hunt offered him.

  “Hunting accident.”

  “Someone thought you were the deer?” The man laughed. He’d probably said it a million times.

  “It was the deer who shot me,” Hunt said. The man smiled and gave Hunt his change.

  Outside, Hunt started the truck engine. He turned west and found the interstate, then headed south again.

  DRAKE EXPLAINED IT ALL TO HIS WIFE OVER THE phone. He was sitting on a bench outside the hospital doors. Rain fell in the parking lot, and the hospital awning was the only thing keeping him dry. Farther down, where the red painted ambulance lines ended, there were several nurses smoking at the edge of the shaded protection, close enough that he could smell their cigarettes and catch brief fragments of their gossip. Across the parking lot he saw Driscoll’s cruiser and beyond that the rounded green of a grass embankment, where bushes had been planted. Lonely incandescent lights sprang like trees from the cement and shone over the cars in a moonlike glow. After he had explained it all, Sheri said, “What do you want me to say, the couple was lying?”

  “I’m not asking you to say that. I just wanted to know your opinion.”

  “There’s no right or wrong?”

  “There’s no right or wrong.”

  “I’d say they were just doing what anyone would do. Roy and Nancy’s problem was not the drugs. It was the injury. Don’t look at it like there’s someone to blame.”

  “But there is someone to blame.”

  “You think that’s it.”

  “Yes. That’s how it works.”

  “You know that’s not how anything works. To that couple, the man with the gun wasn’t the threatening part. It was the girl overdosed in their bed. You think either Hunt or the couple would have sat by and watched her go like that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Bobby. You’ve been spending too much time with Driscoll. It’s always the injury. You think this guy Hunt was up in those mountains because he’s something evil, something just bent on doing wrong. He’s like that girl you got in that hospital, just someone with an injury, someone needing to be healed.”

  Drake sat on the bench, turning to watch the nurses in their smoke circle. When he turned back, he said, “What have you been doing, reading the self-help section in the bookstore?”

  “Come on, Bobby, when you’re hungry, you eat. When you’re thirsty, you—”

  “When you’re broke you smuggle ninety thousand dollars worth of heroin into the country,” Drake interrupted.

  “You know that’s not how it is.”

  “That’s what we prosecute them for.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the problem, is it?”

  “No,” he said, taking a while with his words. “I don’t think it is.”

  “Did you ever think the girl up in that hospital room needed this more than she cared about her own life?”

  Drake didn’t say anything.

  “You know, if you’re going to save that man’s life, it’s not really about the gun chasing him, or even you.”

  “No, I suppose it’s not.”

  “There’s probably something that’s been chasing him for longer than you’ve been alive, and it’ll be chasing him longer still, no matter what happens up there.”

  “You think you’re right on that?”

  “I know it.”

  “How do you know it?”

  Sheri was quiet for a moment. “I see it on you.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I see it—anyone who gives you a good look can see it. Why’d you go up there into those mountains in the first place?”

  “Hunting. I told you that.”

  “That’s not true. You know that.”

  “All I know is what I did.”

  “That’s the heroic answer, but I bet the truth has to do with that car, and somewhere deep down your father. But I don’t think you’d admit that, would you?”

  “Come on.”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m telling you the truth. How come you haven’t come home yet?”

  “I’m working.”

  “When did you become part of the DEA?”

  “Driscoll needs me.”

  “Where’s Driscoll now?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Why aren’t you up there with him?”

  “That’s not fair, Sheri.”

  “You’re still up in those mountains. That’s where you are.”

  GRADY LANDED FACE-FIRST ON THE BASEMENT FLOOR. So much blood he didn’t know what belonged to him and what belonged to the men he’d killed. He groaned, forced himself up. His hands slick with it. Red handprint on the gray floor. He still carried the .22, pushing himself up on his closed knuckles. He screamed, feeling the torn muscles in his side. White-hot pain all through him. Up through his spine and into his head.

  He knew the men were coming after him. The whole situation was fucked and he knew there was no time for Nora. He crossed the room, holding his side, blood between his fingers. The dead man was blocking the doorway. He reached down with his hand and dragged the man out of the way, took his bag off the workbench, and opened the door. Gray, overcast light, rain, and the mossy taste of wet earth.

  He rounded the house, holding his bag, clutching his closed fist over the wound, the silenced .22 growing slippery and warm in his grip. Pain anytime he lifted a leg, anytime his muscles moved. It was all through him now.

  In the drive, on his way to the Lincoln, Grady flattened himself to the side of the house and listened. On the porch he heard the last of the men enter through the front door, following his path. A neighbor appeared at her window and then quickly disappeared. He pushed forward, got to the Lincoln, and pulled the door open. It hurt to sit. His shirt and pants were covered in a mix of human blood, suctioned to his body and weighted with it. He felt around in his pockets for the keys and brought them out.

  This hadn’t been in the plan.

  The back window blew out. He dropped his head and turned the ignition over. The engine started and he hit the gas, head ducked beneath the dash for cover, not looking, estimating a turn and scraping off a car as he went. Gunshots. A puckering of buckshot along the body of the car.

  Gas pedal. Gas pedal.

  Nora, he thought.

  ALREADY, THROUGH THE TREES, HUNT COULD SEE the dark ash smeared like grease across the lawn. All he could see of his house were the bricks of the chimney. He drove past and parked a quarter mile down the road. Rain showers h
ad come through, and the whole place had a look of gloom and growing desperation. He sat in the car and he knew the truth, that it was over, that there had been a point when he thought he might make it out, that Nora and he might have a future, but he knew it was over now. He had seen the yellow police tape stretched around on all sides, like the shape of an imagined house, now just standing in his memories.

  He took the survival bag from the truck and walked across the road to the small horse trail that led through the woods and out onto his property. For a while he stood in the trees and took the whole thing in. It looked like a bomb had dropped: where the house had been was nothing but a blackened crater. When he was sure there was no one around, he walked up through the trees and followed the fence toward the house. The patches of blood where Grady had shot the horses were dark holes amid the grass. He stood for a while with his arms up on the fence and stared into the pasture. Even if he did escape, what would be the use? But even as he thought this, he knew that there were still three horses waiting for him in the mountain field. Although they were not his, he could possibly breed them and make a decent profit. He knew, too, that the owners of those horses would never see them again, not unless he was killed, but he tried to put that thought aside.

  The closest he went to the remains of the house was the edge of the scorched grass. On the ground he could see the dirt where the fire had burned everything away. And even the earth had the appearance of being baked until nothing could be distinguished except the flatness of the spot he had once walked and the small bits of blackened gravel that had once caught and stuck between the treads of his shoes.

  He felt the emotion rise in him again and he took his time and forced it back down into his stomach, where he felt it tighten. He opened the survival bag, took from it the heroin, and went to the stables. On the floor he found the loose board under which he had sometimes kept shipments. With his fingers at the edge of the wood, he pulled it back and sat looking down into the black hole below.