The Terror of Living: A Novel

by Waite, Urban

  He knew this was either the safest place he could put it or the stupidest. He wasn’t sure which, but at a certain point he knew that all that had happened in the past couple of days seemed to be a matter of chance. He thought his chances were better this way, if not very good. Having all the heroin with him felt like death sitting there beside him.

  After he was done and the board had been put back and the dust had settled once again across the hiding place, he took his phone from the bag and tried the hospital again.

  WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED, DRAKE exited onto a floor of cream tile, walls the color of eggshells, and rooms consumed by the last light of day. What Sheri had said to him was still there, floating along with him as if pulled by a string. Twice he had brought the phone from his pocket, wanting to call his wife back, but then reconsidered and put it away. At the nurse’s station he presented his star and asked about Driscoll.

  “Not much reason to be in there,” the nurse said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I just don’t know what information he’s going to get out of her.”

  “I’m sure she’d be able to say something.”

  The nurse gave him a look Drake didn’t understand at first. “She’s nearly brain dead with all that heroin in her system.”

  “Brain dead?”

  “In a coma,” the nurse said shortly, looking down the hall. Drake followed her gaze but saw only the eggshell walls and the cream floors, every ten feet a door, the outdoor light coming in onto the floor. “When she came in she was already going, and no one to tell us who she is.”

  “Her name is Thu,” Drake said. “She has two kids.”

  “See,” the nurse said, “that just doesn’t make one bit of sense.”

  “Doesn’t that make the most sense?”

  “Not if you end up like this.”

  Drake looked on down the hall. He needed to see Thu for himself, see if she was the same woman he’d seen in the picture. “Will she recover?” he asked.

  “They’ve been pumping her full of a medicine that counteracts the drug.”

  “Like an antidote?”

  “She’s absorbed most of it already, but the dose of heroin in her system should have killed her right off. When they brought her in she was showing signs of cyanosis in the nail beds, bluish skin like she wasn’t pumping oxygen into the bloodstream. It wasn’t a good sign.”

  “Would you mind walking me down there?”

  “I can do that. But I’m telling you there’s not much to see.”

  When they reached the room, Driscoll was already inside. The doctor had an X-ray held up and he was circling a white bump near the hip bone. “You see what I mean,” the nurse said. What Drake saw was a small girl lying faceup in bed; her skin seemed to be drawing away from her, as if the climate had hurt her, something shrinking up inside her and pulling all of her along. She was pale, her eyes closed, the dark fall of her hair on the pillow seemingly the only living thing about her.

  Something in the room began to give off low beeping noises, and the doctor and the nurse turned to the bed. Drake stood by, held at the doorway to the room. He was pushed aside and out into the hall as a few more of the staff came to assist. He did not see Driscoll but assumed he was in there, pressed to the corner while the staff tried to save the girl in the bed.

  From the doorway it was obvious what was going on, there was no need to watch, but he was drawn to it as one is to an accident passed on the highway, with the same morbid fear of what he might see. Down the hall the phone rang. For a moment it was just part of the background, nurses and doctors scrambling for syringes of epinephrine, the shock and rattle of the crash cart. He felt himself fade back, the outcome now set, the future decided. He was aware again of the phone. He didn’t know how long it had been ringing, but he knew there was no one on the floor to pick up. He walked to the desk, reached over the lip of the counter, picked up the receiver, and said hello.

  A brief pause, then: “I’d like to know about the girl brought in a couple days ago, the overdose?”

  Drake looked back down the hall, now empty, and all he could hear were the muffled voices of the staff and the constant warnings of the machine in the girl’s room. “I can take a message,” Drake said, feeling foolish, but in the same moment reaching for a pen.

  “No,” the voice said, “there’s no need, I was just checking in. If you could just tell me how she is?”

  Something about the voice, a roughness, like stones gargled in the throat. “Hunt?” Drake said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  A pause. “Don’t hang up. I met your wife a few days ago.”

  “What about her?” Hunt said.

  Drake could hardly believe it. “I met her a few days ago. I was looking for horse-riding lessons. It was before we knew anything about you.”

  “What do you know about me now?”

  Drake told him. “I was the one in the mountains,” he said. “You’re in a lot of trouble here, Hunt. More than I think you know.”

  “I think I’ve got a pretty good picture of it.”

  “You’ve been to the motel. Have you been to your house?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Then you’ve seen—”

  “Enough.”

  “Yes, I bet you have.”

  Hunt didn’t say anything. He didn’t hang up, and Drake listened. There was something lonely and fractured to the way Hunt hung on the line, and in the air that escaped his lungs and rasped across the receiver of the phone.

  “I read about you in the paper,” Hunt said.

  “I didn’t ask them to print any of that.”

  “But they did.”

  “Yes,” Drake said, “there was a good amount written about the past that should have stayed in the past.”

  “It’s odd,” Hunt said.

  “What’s odd?”

  “I knew your father, Sheriff Drake, up there in Silver Lake.”

  “You mean you used to run drugs with him?”

  “No, I mean I knew him. Just competition, that’s all.” A pause, the sound of Hunt’s breathing on the other end of the line. “We had a beer once, smoked a cigarette, nothing to get friendship rings over. He was nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “He was good at running drugs, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I meant as a father, not as a smuggler.”

  “Well, that ended.”

  “Didn’t want to take up the family business?”

  “Wouldn’t know anything about it.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “What about now? You know something about it now?”

  “I know a little.”

  “He cared about you,” Hunt said. “He took a lot of chances. A lot of what he did, he did because he cared about you. If that matters at all.”

  Drake didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell if Hunt was trying to manipulate him. If Hunt was lying, if he was telling the truth, there was no way to tell; Drake just had to feel it out for himself.

  He heard Hunt on the other end of the line, slow, steady breathing now. Drake didn’t know where Hunt was. Didn’t think Hunt would tell him. He had hoped that whatever happened in the past would stay there. But he knew that it hadn’t and that it never would. The girl down the hallway was dead. Drugs missing. Paid killer out there. Horses and gunmen, OK Corral on an atomic level.

  “Do you still have it?” Drake asked.

  “What?”

  “We’ve seen the X-rays of the girl, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Is she all right?” The voice once again drifting.

  “She just passed, Hunt. I’m sorry.” A long pause: Drake with his ear to the phone, his fingers bent over the edge of the counter, almost holding on. “Hunt?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Do you still have the heroin?”

  “No.”

  “You could save yourself if you did. We know about your wife, we know she�
�s been taken. We can work something out here.”

  Still no one emerged from Thu’s room, and Drake wanted to call out, to call Driscoll and have him there to tell him what to do.

  “What are you offering, the same thing you offered the kid?”

  “That was an accident, it should never have happened.”

  “What about your father?” Hunt said. “What do you think? Did he get a deal? Did he get what he deserved?”

  “I can’t say anything about that.”

  “You mean you won’t say anything about it.”

  “I’m trying to help you here.”

  “Why don’t you get my wife back? How about that?”

  “We know only as much as you tell us.”

  “But I have to give you something, don’t I?”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “If I gave it to you, would you drop everything against me?”

  “I’d do my best. I can’t tell you that without speaking to you further.”

  “He has my wife.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Then you’ll understand that I can’t.”

  Silence.

  “Hunt?” Drake said.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Why didn’t you run?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “After you shot the man in the bait shop, why didn’t you run?”

  “Why are you asking me this now?”

  “I don’t know,” Drake said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I’m trying to understand it.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. I shot a man and I’ve been paying for it ever since. That’s it. I’d take it back if I could, but I can’t. There is no taking back something like that.”

  “Hunt,” Drake said, “why don’t you let us help you?”

  A long pause on the line, then: “I don’t have the heroin, but I can tell you where Thu was taking it.”

  “You would do that?”

  Hunt read him the address. “I took it from Thu’s purse, figured it’s where she was going, where she was supposed to end up. With or without me, in twenty-four hours, the heroin will be there.”

  “What about you?”

  Hunt laughed, his voice strained, breaking. “I will be dead.” He hung up the phone, and Drake was left holding the receiver. The pen he’d picked up still in his hand, he copied the address down onto a piece of paper and stood looking at it.

  FROM BEHIND THE STAIRS, TUCKED BACK INTO THE darkness, Nora had watched Grady come down the steps, shot through, his ankle rolling until he landed in a mess on the basement floor. She’d thought him dead. The big booming sound of the guns overhead, the house above shaking as the bullets splintered wood, dug through plaster, and lodged themselves an inch deep in the ceiling and the walls. Above, the sound of glass falling, footsteps on the porch and then inside on the wooden floor, the crush of glass underfoot. Grady groaned, half-dazed. Like the walking dead rising from the grave, he stumbled toward the door, his shirt plastered to his skin.

  He moved forward, shuffle of feet on cement, grit and the slop of blood falling from his wound. He pulled the body of the dead man away from the door, grabbed his knife bag, and disappeared out the basement door.

  Nora sat watching the open door. Outside, the rain, verdant overgrown grass, a back fence gray with age and rot. More sounds of gunfire, the brittle scream of metal on metal, and a car engine racing. Then nothing.

  He had forgotten her.

  Footsteps above. The door at the top of the stairs opened, kitchen light falling onto the dead man in front of her, a human shadow above on the stairs followed closely by another.

  DRISCOLL DROVE AND THE TWO MEN SAT SILENT IN the cruiser on their way back to Seattle. Drake hadn’t said anything about the conversation with Hunt. He hadn’t talked to his father in ten years, not since he’d been put away. It felt strange, talking to Hunt. Almost as if he’d opened a door and stepped through to a life a decade before. There had been something to Hunt’s voice, something that said it would all be finished soon, and Drake didn’t know what to do with that.

  The sheriff called over the radio to say they’d run the car and nothing had come back. A dead end, the vehicle registered under an alias, though they’d taken a partial thumbprint off the door handle and faxed it to County and maybe something would come of that. He hadn’t heard anything back yet.

  “We can check it when we get back to the Seattle office,” Driscoll said.

  “Let me know if you want me to do anything with this car,” the sheriff said.

  “Impound it.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Whatever you feel like, street sweeping, fire lane, abandoned vehicle—think of something.”

  “I can do that.”

  “We’ve got nothing else to go on.” Driscoll turned off the radio.

  Hundred-foot cement sections went by under their car at eighty miles an hour, the throb like a heartbeat beneath the wheels.

  “I’ve got something,” Drake said. He dug the address out of his pocket and gave it to Driscoll.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s where the heroin will be.”

  Driscoll looked from the address to Drake with a mixture of shock and disbelief. “Where did you get this?”

  “Hunt gave it to me.”

  “Hunt?”

  “He called in to the hospital, asking about the girl,” Drake said. “The nurse’s station was empty, so I just picked up. I didn’t know it would be him.”

  “He just called in,” Driscoll said, holding the address out in front of him over the wheel, “and you picked up?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You got this from Hunt?”

  “You can believe me or not, but that is where the heroin will be in a little under twenty-four hours.”

  “What exactly did he tell you?”

  Drake told him.

  “You think he was lying to you?” Driscoll asked.

  “Didn’t seem to have much reason.”

  “You think he’s already dead?”

  “Could be.”

  “Could be he’s trying to throw us off.”

  “What other choice do we have?”

  They were an hour north of Seattle. Driscoll fingered the piece of paper. He picked up the radio and called in the address.

  GRADY DROVE. HE DROVE ERRATICALLY, SIDESWIPING parked cars, his vision closing. He made the turn out onto the main road. Car headlights were coming at him out of the rain. He laid on the horn and swerved back into his lane. A mile up was a retirement home he’d passed earlier, with an ambulance perched on the little rise of a driveway like death itself, just waiting.

  He pulled up. Opened the Lincoln’s door, half falling onto the street, his bag held in one hand and his other clutching the ragged hole in his side. He didn’t pause to close the car door, just left it, the scene inside the car nothing short of horrid disaster, blood-soaked leather, broken glass, dashboard sawed through with automatic fire. He stumbled forward, holding his side.

  He tried the handles on the doors first, and when they didn’t open he shot the back two windows out of the ambulance and punched the glass in with his hand. He reached inside and worked the latch until the door swung open, and he raised himself inside.

  In desperation, he went through the back of the ambulance, upturning bins of alcohol swabs, gauze, and rolls of medical tape. He found the morphine, filled a syringe, and emptied it into his leg. Almost immediately, the feeling came into him, his heart slowing, almost floating, dreamy pain somewhere out there like the clap of distant thunderclouds. He raised his shirt and inspected the hole. Clean through, a small puckering of the skin. Nothing vital seemed to be punctured, already the muscle bruising and the hole black and full, brimming with his own dark blood. In the tin reflection of the supply cabinet he surveyed the entry hole in his back. The same disfigured blackness. He would be okay, he thought. Just another few hours and it would all be do
ne. He reached for a bottle of alcohol, poured it on, feeling the pain there again. More morphine. Then gauze and tape, a rolled layer of it all around his stomach and back.

  He dropped his shirt across his midsection, sopping wet with blood and rain. His vision was drifting again. He slapped himself hard across the face and brought up the knife bag, loading it with syringes and bottles of morphine. The bag was already heavy with weapons and heroin. Outside, the rain still falling.

  How had they found him?

  He had a good idea who’d given him up. He had every intention of getting Nora back and finishing his business with Hunt. If he could get an address quickly, he might still have a chance. The Lincoln sat out there on the street but he didn’t go to it. He went instead to one of the old cars lining the retirement home, popped the window open, then let himself inside. His back and stomach were on fire but holding. The only blood now was that on his shirt. From beneath the steering column he brought out the wires and dashed them together until the engine started.

  GRADY WAS GONE. SHE WAS ON HER OWN. NORA PUSHED herself farther under the stairs. She could smell the cold mineral odor of cement, damp basement air. Through the openings in the wooden steps she saw one man, then the next, come down the stairs. One of them held an automatic shotgun, the other some sort of assault rifle, the two men standing there at the bottom of the stairs, the open basement door in front of them and the sound of the rain pattering on the grass beyond.

  Nora pushed herself back, shoe to cement, until she was against the wall. She heard them say something in their language. One of them bent to look at the dead man on the floor. The other went to the freezer and pulled it open. Dull light escaped from the open freezer door and exposed her hiding place.

  They were on her immediately, gun barrels pointed at her face and body. She didn’t have any of the answers they were looking for. She didn’t know anything. Sirens now in the background, growing closer. Grady might come back for her. One of the men pushed her face down on the floor, gun barrel to the back of her head, cold feel of the cement against her cheek. The other tore a length of butcher’s twine from one of the prep tables and tied her hands behind her. They picked her up by her arms and set her on her feet. They were moving now, out through the basement door, rounding the house. Rain falling, bright daylight, a cold feel coming in the air, the sirens drawing closer.