by Waite, Urban
“I thought I might find a change in this. Some small piece I could understand.”
“Did you find it?” his father said.
“I don’t know,” Drake replied. “I don’t know if any of this is what it’s meant to be. It’s just what it is, drugs, kidnap, murder—none of it has ever made any sense to me.”
“We do what we have to,” Drake’s father said. “When they came for me, I ran. I went the other way. I knew what I was doing. I was doing what I was supposed to. I was doing what made sense.”
“I know,” Drake said. “I read the file. It was the first thing I did when I got my star.” Drake studied his father for a long beat, shaved head, cold eyes. This man wasn’t his father anymore, not like he used to be.
“Here’s something you can use,” Drake’s father said, leaning back from the table. “I pulled Hunt over once outside Silver Lake. I had the flashers going, the sirens, the whole deal. Thought I’d be chasing him an hour, thought I’d really run him off.” Drake’s father looked to the guard near the door, then looked back. “Hunt didn’t even try for it, he didn’t even move. He didn’t run. You know?”
Drake was silent. He was waiting for his father to finish.
“You’ve got the file right there,” his father said. “You read that part about how they found Hunt the first time, just sitting there with that old man in the bait shop, just waiting for the police to come get him.”
“That was a long time ago,” Drake said.
“He knows what he’s doing, one way or another.”
“Why doesn’t he just come in, then?”
“He’s got a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s all there is.”
“I can’t believe that,” Drake said.
“That’s just one of those things you have to learn along the way. They don’t teach it.”
“Teach what?”
“That the law used to be about keeping order, it was that simple.”
“You don’t think people need to answer for what they’ve done?”
“I think they answer in their own way. I think Hunt knows that. I think he knows if he comes in now, not one thing will be answered for. You’ll have your man, but it’s not going to do anyone any good.”
Drake didn’t say one thing. His father was watching him to see how he’d taken it.
“And when you get out, what are you going to do?” Drake asked.
“I don’t know that yet. I can tell you I won’t do anything like what Hunt has going on now. I’ve already done this once. I’m not planning on doing it again.”
“Surest way to stay out would be to follow that advice right there.”
“I know,” his father said.
The first wet flakes were beginning to fall as Drake reached his car. He sat in the driver’s seat with the heater going and watched the Monroe walls. All he could see of the night was the snow falling. Black night out there and the white flecks coming down out of the sky. He checked his phone for missed calls. Nothing. The snow was beginning to stick.
Drake pulled out of the parking lot, the far-off glow of Seattle in the distance. Driscoll hadn’t called and there was nothing to go on but the address Hunt had taken from Thu’s purse.
WHEN HUNT FOUND THE HOUSE, HE DROVE BY AND ran his truck down a couple of blocks, then walked back through the growing snow to the address he’d taken from Thu. He looked normal enough except for the limp and the shoe on his foot colored a dark red in places. He’d stuffed the Browning into the glove box of his truck. The absence of it in his belt made him feel naked. But he thought that if anyone wanted Grady dead more than him, it would be the Vietnamese. It was his only hope, the last thing he had left before he just gave it up and let Grady find him.
The sun had set and it had taken him about thirty minutes after leaving the interstate to find the house in the dark. Still, there was light from the overhead streetlamps, and it was as if he was seeing everything through falling ash, snow in the air and the dull, almost blue lights covering it all. Porch lights shone above doors. Cars passed down the street and continued on. Hunt walked to the end of the block and stood at the corner looking at the house. It was just a normal house in a neighborhood, surrounded by houses of the same muted composition.
The house was painted the color of brick, built in the fifties style, a one-story frame with flat wooden shingles over a cement foundation, the roof almost flat but with that slight rise toward the top and the tin chimney above, from which steam could rise. From the basement he saw the yellow glow of a naked bulb and the bend and curve of piping. When he looked back to the windows on the main floor, he could see the curtains shift and he knew someone had been watching.
Everything said to get out of there. He felt sick, his stomach tight and a feeling of unease all through. When he went to walk, he found his legs did not want to move. The tension inside him made his limbs jitter. At the base of the stairs, he paused to steady himself.
Hunt had expected the door to open. Nothing moved. He went up the stairs and stood on the porch, taking deep breaths and trying to push the air down inside. It was as if he were trying to inflate his arms and legs and make them appear solid. When he knocked, he heard movement behind the door, and then the door opened.
DRAKE PULLED THE COLLAR OF HIS COAT CLOSE AROUND his neck and set out from his car toward the house. There was snow an inch deep now, untouched on the ground. He was looking for the DEA officers Driscoll had put on the house. He adjusted the weight of his service weapon on his belt, then looked on down toward the house. There were cars down both sides of the street, muted, snow-covered mounds, one after another, windshields nothing but a patchwork of fallen snow and glass.
The house wasn’t much to look at, but he’d guessed it wouldn’t be some big mansion made of drug money. It was painted the color of brick, with shingled siding and cement stairs leading up to a porch half as wide as the house. He paused to look at this.
What had he expected? He had an address written on a sheet of paper, given to him by a convicted murderer, a drug runner, and he, the law, was trying to bring him in. He knew now it was nothing but wishful thinking, something Hunt had told him to get Drake off the phone.
The sight of a single bare bulb in the basement window and the glow of something farther in were the only signs that anyone lived there. He stood in the shadow of a telephone pole and watched the house. Nothing moved. A plane passed overhead, engines shifting as it descended toward the nearby airport. A world softened by snow and the sound of a jet passing overhead, then nothing, snow again and the simple comfort of porch lights going on down the street.
He felt the cold come into his shoes. He was shivering, caught out in this cold without the proper clothing. Drake looked up at the house and then moved off again. His father hadn’t told him one thing he could use. He didn’t know what he had expected. An answer? Part of him felt the same way he’d always felt, but a little part of him said it was all right. It was how it was, and it was all right.
Hunt was probably dead. Nora, too. The killer gone. The heroin gone. All of it gone. Nothing left but the gray darkness to guess at.
He wrapped his arms around himself and walked a little farther along the row of cars, making fresh tracks in the snow, keeping the house in view across the street. He noticed a shadow, thick as molasses, on one of the snow-covered car windows as he passed, like oil under sawdust. He came closer, looked at the shadow on the window, blue black with the overhead halogens.
There was something seeping from the inside of the car window out through a hole and onto the fresh-fallen snow, and he put his finger to it and brought it close to his face. The lights overhead made the liquid on his finger a strange, otherworldly color. “Shit,” he said, dropping to the ground with his hands out in the snow, feeling the cold.
Drake tried the handle, and the dead officer slumped half out of the car, his fingers resting on the ground next to Drake. A bullet hole in his head, neat as if the hole had been drilled
through from one side to the other, spiderwebbed glass and the shattered hole where the bullet had come through and disappeared out into the snow-covered world.
He couldn’t see the face, didn’t want to. The man just lay there on the ground with the snow falling and melting on his skin. Drake checked the pulse. Nothing. The skin was still warm to the touch, snowflakes melting into water droplets on the dead man’s skin.
Inside he found the other man, neck gaping, blood down his front and dried onto his shirt collar. Deep odor of blood and the human body hanging in the car. Drake pushed the man back in his seat and reached through until he could get the shotgun out from between their seats. He checked the cartridges, five slugger shells, big and solid enough to stop a bear. He sat panting against the side of the car, his breath heavy and a nervous sweat beginning to dampen his clothes.
He looked back up at the house, the same naked bulb hanging in the basement, and somewhere toward the back another light, an orange glow, just visible through the front curtains.
GRADY HAD HUNT AND NORA SEATED IN THE KITCHEN. There was a dead Vietnamese man in the middle of the floor with his neck slit so far open they could see the back of the man’s tongue, broken pieces of a white ceramic bowl spread everywhere around the kitchen floor, and a burnt skillet of garlic on the stove. Grady sat in a chair and looked across at them, holding a small boning knife in his hand. Nora was tied by the hands with a length of butcher’s twine Grady could see had come from his own basement. Hunt smoldered in his seat.
With his free hand, Grady brought out a syringe from his bag and put it between his teeth, taking the cover off the needle. He brought up a bottle of the morphine, and with the bottle held between his legs, he drew the liquid up into the barrel. After clearing the air bubbles, he injected himself and felt his head swoon. When he looked up, Hunt was staring at him. Grady still held the knife.
The Vietnamese were dead, and the lawyer was dead. Grady was trying to decide what to do. All that was left worth any money was the heroin. Hunt’s half wasn’t on him. Grady guessed it was hidden away somewhere, some deal Hunt had hoped to work out with the Vietnamese.
From the first girl, he had about sixty pellets of heroin in his bag, and not a clue what to do with them. He didn’t know how much they were worth, but he could guess the amount was enough to warrant all the trouble he’d been through. He looked across at Hunt, then looked away.
The morphine was beginning to work on him again. He felt as he had before, unstoppable. He wanted to yell, he wanted to walk through walls, to plunge his fist through glass and walk on water. He looked over at the dead man on the floor, then at Hunt. “You ever wonder what it’s like?” Grady asked, his vision swinging back to the dead man on the floor. “What’s it like over there?” Grady asked the dead man. He waited for a response. The man stared up at the ceiling, a bloom of red down the skin of his neck, his eyes searching the heavens for an answer.
“What did you expect?” Hunt said.
Grady turned and looked at Hunt. He was having a hard time focusing, the outline of Hunt’s face appearing blurred. “Get up,” he said.
“What?”
“I said, get up. Both of you get up.”
Nora began to snivel a little, and when she didn’t quiet, he crossed the room and hit her with his open palm.
“Grady,” Hunt said, his voice going feral.
Grady was standing over Nora, ready to hit her again. “ ‘Grady’ what?” His attention focused on Hunt now. “Thanks to you, everything is fucked. Can’t you see that?” He wanted to slice Hunt’s face off. He wanted to do cruel things with no real purpose, things he knew he would enjoy. “Get up,” he said again.
Hunt stood.
Grady hit him hard across the face four times in quick succession. Hunt was still standing, his head merely rocking back after each blow, the blood coming now and dripping in streams from his nose and off his chin and pattering on the floor.
“You’re going to show me where that heroin is, or I’m going to carve the two of you up and sell you for your organs. Do you understand?”
Hunt wiped the blood away from his nose with his forearm and stood looking at Grady. He was shamed and Grady knew it. Beaten down in front of his wife. Hunt mumbled something under his breath.
“What did you say?” Grady asked.
“I said I’d take you.”
DRAKE BROUGHT OUT HIS PHONE AND CALLED DRISCOLL. The snow was still falling and his shoes were wet with it. “Driscoll,” he said, speaking close to the phone, his eyes still on the house down the street. “Your guys are dead, and I’m sitting out here with their bodies, watching this house, and I think Grady is in there.”
“Slow down,” Driscoll said. “Where are you? Wait—you went over there?”
“Listen to me,” Drake said. “These guys you had watching the house are dead. They’re dead, Driscoll.” He was squatting with his back against the side of the car, almost hysterical, the bad situation he’d landed in beginning to dawn on him. His voice was only a whisper, spitting into the phone, the shotgun propped between his legs.
“Don’t do anything,” Driscoll said. “Just stay put. I’m on my way over there now. Just stay right where you are and don’t do a thing.”
Across the street the door of the house opened, and a man walked out onto the porch carrying a bag of some sort. Drake held the phone to his chest, whatever else Driscoll had to say lost in that moment. The man on the porch swung his head down the street toward the unmarked patrol car, and Drake dropped down. He held his breath, watching the snow fall, watching it drift down, feeling each flake as it landed on his face, everything clear.
He chanced a look back over the hood of the car in time to see Hunt and Nora, her hands bound, coming down the stairs with the man close behind them. Driscoll was saying something on the open phone, and Drake eased it closed until there was no sound but the scuffle of footsteps across the street. With his elbows he positioned the shotgun over the hood of the car and found a clear sight. He took a breath and felt it go down inside him, felt it fill his lungs and his lungs give it back. Everything in slow motion, snowflakes falling, far off the sounds of wet, snow-covered streets, a plane miles overhead angling in for a landing.
GRADY DIDN’T KNOW WHERE SILVER LAKE WAS, OR WHY any cop from there would be yelling at him from across the street, telling him to throw down the bag. He looked at the knife bag in his hand. He was feeling the bullet wound now. Somewhere along the way he had stretched it too far, had pulled it open, and he could feel the blood, warm on his stomach, slipping down along the skin and into his pants. He stumbled for a second and then recovered. His thoughts came to him in a jumble, rolling one over the other, like loose rocks tumbling down a hillside with no sense of control. For a second he thought perhaps this cop was something of unrelated interest—a tab he’d forgotten to pay in some country diner, a missed parking ticket—but then the man called Hunt’s name, and Grady knew it had something more to do with the latest string of unfinished events.
The cop had yelled for them to stop, and they had. All three of them, Grady, Nora, and Hunt, stopped there in the dusky half-light of the streetlamps. There didn’t appear to be anyone else around, just the single cop across the street and no one else.
The knife bag dropped from Grady’s hand, revealing the retracted stock of the AR-15.
“Don’t,” the cop yelled.
Grady came on with the gun, muzzle flash going, the smell of gunpowder and the hot bullet casings falling to the snow-covered street, steam catching in the wind.
ALL HE COULD HEAR WERE THE BULLETS GOING PAST at a million miles an hour, the car shaking. Drake kept his head down, cradling the shotgun. A bullet hit one of the tires, and he felt that side of the car drop, followed by the sound of glass breaking and falling everywhere along the hood and all over Drake’s shoulders and head. It was like some hideous carnival ride, Drake too scared to rise up or even move out of the way as Grady came on with the AR-15 switched over to f
ull automatic.
Another tire shot and the car angled dangerously away from him and he felt the shift with his back. He could feel the bullets getting closer. Any minute, he expected the muzzle of the AR-15 to pop over the top and Grady soon to follow, hot death from above. He hadn’t known what he was doing. He’d just gone ahead and done it. Hoped that it would all work out and that someone like Grady would just stop, raise his hands, and throw the weapons down.
Fuck, Drake thought. It was him or Grady, and he knew he’d be no use to Hunt or Nora if he was dead. He cradled the shotgun, pumped it once, then put it over the hood without looking and squeezed the trigger. Time slowed, a brief hope that Nora and Hunt had the sense to take cover. Then, as if all of it had been playing on a television screen, the film reel sped back into focus, everything on fast-forward. Big booming of the shotgun barrel. The recoil sent his hand back over the edge of the hood and the gun to him and he shucked a shell. Grady returned fire, bullets screaming over Drake’s head. Drake put the barrel back up over the hood and fired again. Sound of aluminum car siding buckling, glass shattering. He didn’t have a clue what he was firing at. Couldn’t see a thing, just hoped that Nora and Hunt had known to get out of the way.
HUNT FIGURED HE HAD ABOUT A TWENTY-SECOND start before Grady noticed they were gone. An inch of snow had fallen since he’d limped up the stairs and Grady had opened the door to find him waiting there on the porch.
Now on the street, with Grady’s attention on Drake, Hunt took Nora under the arm and ran, almost dragging her after him, the bullet wound in his leg pulsing and the blood coming now. His legs were pumping up the street, feet moving, the sound of automatic gunfire behind him, bullets tearing through car siding, through house boards, clunking their way into wooden telephone poles. He ran, his feet slipping through the snow, off one curb and up the next, the big diesel parked at the end of the block and his only hope that they would make it.
