The Terror of Living: A Novel

by Waite, Urban

  WHAT’S CHANGED?” SHERI SAID.

  “Nothing. I just—” Drake stopped midway through. “I don’t know what to say here.” He was in the federal building downtown. Driscoll had put in the call about the thumbprint and they were waiting to see what would come back.

  “What do you mean?” Sheri asked.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” Drake said. He put his arm up on the wall and rested his head. He was holding the cell phone close into his face, cradling it so that no one could hear.

  “Does this have something to do with what Hunt said to you?”

  “No.”

  “This man you’re chasing, he’s not your father,” Sheri said.

  “I know that.”

  “It’s not going to bring him back into your life,” Sheri said.

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?”

  “I keep going back to it,” Drake said. “What if I hadn’t picked them up in the mountains? Everything would be different.”

  “That’s not any way to talk.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “You were doing your job, that’s all. You can’t blame yourself for that,” Sheri said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with your father.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Drake said.

  “Only if you make it.”

  “I’m just trying to do a good thing for him. Doesn’t mean I’m going to invite him to Christmas.”

  “Stranger on the side of the road?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Thought you said they all had it coming.”

  “Doesn’t mean I want him to end up dead.”

  “Is that what’s going to happen?”

  “Every way I look at it.”

  They said good-bye, and by the time Drake walked in, the phones were ringing in Driscoll’s office. Something about a gun battle down south, several dead, and then a mile away a routed ambulance and Eddie’s blood-covered Lincoln.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Driscoll said. He was staring up at Drake from his desk. “SPD just found a frozen Vietnamese girl in the basement freezer, belly opened groin-to-rib.”

  “They find anything else?”

  “Three dead guys. One shot through the head, one throat slit, and my favorite, tacked to the side of the house with a kitchen knife.”

  “No Nora?”

  “No. But there’s a good chance she’s still out there somewhere. None of the dead guys match the print taken off the car up by that motel.”

  “Whose blood all over the Lincoln?”

  “Don’t know yet, but I’ll bet it matches our thumbprint.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Grady Fisher, early release from Monroe a few years back.”

  “Early release for what?”

  “What do you think—murder followed by eight years of good behavior.”

  “He the one renting the house?”

  “Landlord says he’s some sort of chef.”

  “More like a butcher,” Drake said.

  “Well, come on.”

  “ ‘Come on’ what?”

  “Can’t say you hadn’t been expecting it.”

  “I’m done identifying bodies.”

  “You’re not coming along?”

  “I’m heading back to the hotel.”

  “What’s wrong?” Driscoll smiled. “You sick or something?”

  “This the same address Hunt gave us?”

  “No, different.”

  “You still got your guys on that house?”

  “Nothing’s come or gone for the past two hours. What are you thinking?”

  “You got that sheet on Hunt?”

  “Here it is.” Driscoll handed it over the desk to Drake.

  Drake sat studying the face looking back at him, angular, lean, the picture grainy, colors fuzzy. “What do you think the truth is?” Drake asked. “You know, about what I told you of the conversation I had with Hunt. Do you think there’s anything there to what he said about my father?”

  “I can’t answer that for you,” Driscoll said.

  Drake folded the sheet and put it in his pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Driscoll asked.

  “What do you think.”

  “The warden will want to know what’s going on. I can call ahead—you might be a little late for visiting hours.”

  “It’s about time, I guess.”

  “Yes,” Driscoll said. “I’ve been waiting to see if you had it in you.”

  Drake stared down at the printout in his hand, Hunt’s face looking up at him. “You ever get sick of seeing people die?” Drake asked.

  “Not yet.” Driscoll got up and walked across the room to one of the file cabinets. He took out his vest and began to strap it on. “Like I said before, when heroin is involved, nothing surprises me.”

  GRADY DROVE THROUGH THE NORTH SEATTLE NEIGHBORHOOD until he found the lawyer’s house. He’d been there once, but that had been a long time ago, simply a meeting. The view had impressed him, and the way the lawyer spoke to him. He’d been offered more for one job than he was able to make in a year. Since then, everything had been done over the phone, but the money had always been the same. Grady knew somehow that it was too good to be true. It was a good thing to have going, and even from the first day, he’d known he wouldn’t be able to give it up.

  Grady drove past and parked the car. The gate had been left partially open and Grady squeezed through, feeling the pain well up inside him. His shirt was almost dried and stiff as canvas, but the rain was falling still and his clothes were growing heavy again. Tall rhododendron bushes grew thick along the drive and obscured the full size of the house. Built partially over a hill, it rested on stilts, with a view of the sound. It was a house built like most of the other houses from the fifties, ranch-style front, with vaulted ceilings in the rear and a large, open living area. From what Grady remembered, he could see all the way across the sound to the other side, the snowcapped Olympics rising up past evergreen hills. All of that was gone now, with the dark coming and the rain falling. He felt the water begin to soak into his shirt again, the blood becoming like mud as he passed his fingers across the soiled fabric.

  The sound of his feet on the gravel drive was just audible over the patter of the rain. With him he carried the knife bag, and though it hurt, he hunched as he walked, trying to remain unseen.

  When he drew near the house, he could see a car shadowed by the front awning, the lawyer’s driver at the wheel. Grady paused. Between gusts of wind, he heard music escape the house and carry to his ears. The driver hadn’t moved, and after a minute, Grady took a few cautious steps toward the vehicle. When he reached the car, he could see the driver was dead, his head slumped forward on his chest.

  Scanning the bushes, Grady crouched beside the car, rain dripping from the awnings and falling onto the drive. A drop of water slowly formed and fell along his face.

  Grady followed the sound of the music to where the rock retaining wall held the hill. Light escaped from the living room windows onto a deck. Fifty feet below in the almost black of the underbrush and deep, unforgiving stones, he saw the young girl—an apparition of the falling rain—wrapped like a ghost in a thin white robe, which lay open at the chest to show her naked breasts. She lay with her head downhill, one arm pulled back at an unnatural angle, deep gashes along her body where she’d hit the rocks. Grady stood looking at her, then went in through the broken window.

  THE GUARD BUZZED DRAKE THROUGH, AND HE ENTERED the waiting room. Steel picnic tables everywhere. No other visitors but him, after-hours and the visiting room shut down. In the far corner a guard stood but didn’t say anything as Drake took a seat and waited. After five minutes the opposite door buzzed, and his father walked in. Drake took the printout of Phil Hunt and unfolded it onto the table.

  Drake’s father wore the standard one-piece jumpsuit and slippers, his beard grown out and his head shaved to the skin. He looked rougher th
an Drake remembered him. He looked like a convict. Something about him even scared Drake a little, the rough shave, the dead stare he gave his son as he sat down. He wasn’t the man Drake remembered; he was something else that Drake sat trying to understand. Ten years had passed since they’d seen each other face to face. “Knew it would take something special for you to come see me,” his father said.

  THE LAWYER’S MOUTH HAD BEEN SO BROKEN HE COULD barely speak. Grady knelt, the lawyer trying to find his words. To Grady it looked like someone had gone over him with a meat tenderizer. Busted shins, a foot so broken it looked like gelatin, caved-in ribs, blood-soaked pants, and fingers mutilated and swollen big as carrots. A pool of blood rounded on the carpet beneath him. Grady knelt closer, listening as the air whistled through the lawyer’s cracked lips. All Grady wanted was the address for the Vietnamese.

  Grady didn’t dare touch him, the carpet beneath his body blood-soaked as if the lawyer was melting into the floor. He waited, finding some hidden reserve of patience. The lawyer mouthed the address Grady needed. One more job for the lawyer, one more trip to settle things. All Grady knew now was that his life, or at least the life he had enjoyed up to this point, would change, and that the lawyer had somehow kept him sane. Grady could feel it all changing, cracks beginning to spread across his skin like porcelain breaking in an oven’s heat, fissures opening and the fire coming through.

  “Kill me,” the lawyer said. “Don’t leave me like this.”

  It was the first kill Grady could think of that hurt. He felt no pleasure, didn’t feel anything anymore, just the dull weight of the trigger on his finger and the repercussion of the bullet as it went through.

  The house was close, near enough to the lawyer’s that Grady thought if he was lucky he might even have beat the Vietnamese back to their own house. And though he hoped Nora was still alive, if she wasn’t he hoped that she had given them a fight and slowed them down enough to make a difference.

  When Grady pulled up a block away from the address, he could see the unmarked police cruiser sitting there just as plain as if the sirens were going. Two men sat in the car, dusky rain falling around them. He parked around the corner, smashed the dome light from the ceiling of the ancient car, and got out. Night all around him. He had on new clothes he’d taken from the lawyer and with him his bag of knives.

  For a time he watched the men in there. He didn’t know them. Didn’t have to. When the Lexus drove down the street, he could see the two men slump down in the unmarked car. He tracked the Lexus till it went past and then up the drive and around the back of the house.

  The man on the driver’s side of the parked car had just closed his phone when Grady approached bare handed, tapped on the window, and made a rolling motion with his hand. The two men looked up at him. Grady smiled. He made the motion again with his hand. Grady could see a twelve-gauge pump laid lengthwise between the seats.

  The window came down. Grady smiled again, said good evening.

  There was the sound of a spring-loaded trigger, and the first man slumped forward on Grady’s hand, blood running from the fatal slice across his neck.

  “Phone,” Grady said, the silenced .22 taken from behind his back and aimed at the second man. Grady saw the man twitch, think about the gun he kept in a side holster, just at his fingertips. “Don’t be stupid,” Grady said. “This thing will carve out a hole neater than that twelve-gauge.”

  And then it did.

  DRAKE SLID THE PICTURE ACROSS THE TABLE TO HIS father. “Know him?”

  His father looked down at the picture. “Should I?”

  “Says he knows you.”

  “Personally?”

  “On a professional level.”

  Drake’s father smiled. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “You either know him or you don’t.”

  “Look,” his father said, “it’s not like I’m going back into it when I get out of here, but I don’t want to give anyone reason to come looking for me either.”

  “Dad, he’s in trouble.”

  His father looked at him from across the table. “Why do you care? He’s just like me, just some hustler trying to make some extra money.”

  “He’s in trouble, and he’s got a wife who’s gone missing. He’s a good person. Wouldn’t you have wanted someone to help you if they could?”

  “Are you calling me a good person?” his father said, a thin smile spreading across his lips. His father picked up the printout and scanned it. “Sometimes good people do bad things,” he said.

  “Yes, sometimes they do.”

  “What do you think?” his father said. “Are you going to get his wife back?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “And what about him? What are you going to do about him?”

  “You know that’s not up to me.”

  “If you found him in some back alley, just you, what would you do?”

  “It’s not up to me.”

  “But you say he’s a good person.”

  “He is a good person. But I can’t just let him go.”

  DRISCOLL PUSHED THE DOOR OPEN AND STOOD LOOKING at the interior of the house. Wood splinters all across the floor, broken glass, the air thick with couch dander and a million other things that had exploded into the air. The house in a horrible state, sticky pools of blood, gunshots through plaster, picture frames, and lampshades. There were small yellow markers left by the city cops. It seemed there were thousands, one for every bullet, the bodies gone and the house empty except for the buzz of flashbulbs and the lowered conversation of investigators. A uniformed officer led Driscoll to the freezer.

  They followed a trail of blood into the basement, careful to avoid the small pool that had accumulated at the base of the stairs. They found one bloody handprint and the outline of a set of knuckles on the cement floor.

  “How many pieces was she in?” Driscoll asked.

  “Had to cut her legs off to get her to fit.”

  “She still around?”

  “They’re thawing her out down at County.”

  “How frozen was she?”

  “At least a couple days.”

  “A real stiff, huh?” Driscoll laughed and the officer stared back at him flatly.

  Outside, Driscoll sat in the cruiser and went back over his notes. A text came in from one of the agents he’d put on surveillance: “Black Lexus pulled up. Instructions?”

  He closed the phone and stared up at Grady’s house, a wash of emergency lights falling again and again on the porch and small front garden. He picked up his radio and called over to the car he’d put on the house. No answer. Then, just a minute later, a new text: “False alarm.”

  THE VIETNAMESE BROUGHT HER IN THROUGH THE back. Nora tried to remember everything she saw, hardwood floors, peach walls, dim red lighting. They were moving fast. Through a doorway she saw what might have been a sorting table, a small shrine in the corner, incense, and a bowl of fruit. A door opened in front of her and she was thrown in. Two dirty foam mattresses, torn sheets. The door closed. No light. Just a sliver of red from the crack beneath the door. She sat and waited.

  The air felt dead and musty. She worked her hands and tried to loosen the twine around her wrists. Five minutes passed, her wrists raw but the twine still there. She could smell garlic, the scent of it cooking in a pan. She knew she was close, a few feet away from the kitchen. The room pitch black, the only sign she was not alone a shadow of footsteps passing beyond the door. A dish fell and broke on the floor somewhere. A brief scuffle, the gagging sounds of someone struggling for air. She waited, hearing nothing else.

  THE KILLING OF THE TWO MEN IN THE PATROL CAR and the killing of the lawyer had lit something inside Grady that he could not stop. At the lawyer’s house he had felt like he was breaking apart—the fire coming through and his body cracking and falling in a million pieces to the floor, a black hole opening and ready to suck down anything in his way. He was made whole, stronger than he had been before. The morphine was wor
king away inside him, making his movements more fluid, more practiced, the heat he’d felt merely tempering his fissures, like scar tissue, building him stronger.

  He found the first of the two Vietnamese in the kitchen, smell of garlic cooking and the crackle of hot oil working through the air. Grady with a small boning knife taken from his bag, and the man in front of him with his back turned to Grady, facing the stove. Grady stepped forward and plunged the blade deep into the spinal column at the base of the neck and worked the bones free, bringing the knife around on the man’s throat. The man fell across the floor, smell of burning garlic, the oil smoking, at the point of ignition.

  He waited, crouched near the kitchen doorway, gathering his senses about him. The smoke alarm went then, and he knew it would only be a matter of time now. He bent low and waited, crouched at the doorway with the knife in his hand. The second man entered and Grady reached out with the blade and severed the man’s Achilles and watched him totter, his legs gone gummy as he fought for balance, then fell backward onto the hallway floor. Grady was on him immediately, working the knife into the man’s flesh.

  A MINUTE PASSED AND THEN ANOTHER. THE SMOKE alarm sounded, the smell of something burning. Nora heard footsteps go past. Something hit the floor hard outside her door, shaking the wooden boards. She heard a man’s voice call out, and then nothing else. Nora didn’t dare to move. There was no sound now, just Nora sitting in a pitch-black room with only the sliver of light entering from beneath the door. She waited. Something dark and liquid began to creep beneath her door. She knew already what it was, the light slowly disappearing as the blood spread out along the floorboards.

  V

  SNOW

  HIS FATHER HADN’T GIVEN UP ANYTHING BUT A SMIRK when Drake asked about Phil Hunt. What had Drake expected? What else was there?

  At the end, it was clear Drake hadn’t been searching out Hunt but a memory of his father, some humanity he hoped was still there. His father sat on the hard metal bench looking back at him. “Why’d you come here?” his father said. “Why did you come all the way out here to search for a man you know better than I do?”