Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  “What time is it?” she asks.

  “A quarter to ten, we don’t have to go over there for a while yet.”

  “Do you want to split another slice?” she asks.

  “Ok,” I say.

  She gets up and goes over to get one. The first slice was hard enough going down, but I want her to be happy. She comes back and plonks the half a slice on my plate.

  “It’s very good pizza for the sticks,” she says.

  “What was the Irish girl’s name, it’s a small world, I might know her?” I ask.

  “Victoria something, she wasn’t really Irish-Irish, she was Indian, you know, from India, it was a difficult name to pronounce, I met her once, I think, she was nice, she was born in Ireland, but her parents were from India.”

  “Well, I can’t say that I knew any girls like that, our school was pretty white. I don’t think we had any immigrants, not even from Scotland or anywhere,” I say.

  “You would have liked her, she was nice.”

  “I know this is a grisly topic, but who was the other person that died?”

  “Oh, Hans was a vice president in charge of mass mailing. He was a bit of a drinker, no one’s quite sure what happened. He fell off his balcony. They saw him arguing with two Mexican men or something. The police shot at them, still looking for them. The whole business is just awful. You’re hardly touching your pizza,” she says.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not that hungry.”

  “You said you would split a slice.”

  “I only said that because I knew you really wanted one,” I say, giving her a big grin.

  She laughs and wrinkles up her nose in mock rage.

  “Well, I am tricked and angry,” she says.

  “Apologies,” I say. “Look, why don’t you have it?”

  She thinks about it for a second or two.

  “You’re not eating it?”

  “Nope.”

  She grabs the pizza and bites into it.

  “No sense food going to waste,” she says.

  I really enjoy watching her eat. She finishes the slice with obvious delight and wipes her hands.

  “What do they eat in Ireland? Corned beef and cabbage?” she asks.

  “Actually, no, I’d never heard of that till I came here. But the diet is just awful, anyway. Fried everything. Fried sausage, bacon, eggs, potato bread for breakfast, chips for lunch, fish and chips for dinner. Lot of butter, lot of cream. Blood pudding, ice cream. Beer. Belfast is like Logan’s Run, no one’s alive over thirty, they all have heart attacks.”

  She laughs a little.

  “Maybe the Catholic guilt kills them,” she says.

  “Well, not us, my parents were hippies, they were Jewish, but we didn’t get any religion at all.”

  “Is O’Neill a Jewish name?”

  “Grandfather a convert,” I say.

  “Really,” she says, looking intrigued. “Didn’t you get teased in school?”

  “Not really, no one paid me any attention at school, I did well in my subjects, flew under the radar, everyone thought I was just a bit of a weirdo goof-off.”

  “Well, we like weirdo goof-offs in America,” she says charmingly.

  “I hope so,” I say.

  “We do,” she says, reaches across the table and pats my cheek.

  She’s being ironic, but the gesture is so intimate, it takes me aback for a second or two. Her fingers are sticky.

  “I got cheese on you,” she says, grabs a napkin, wipes it off.

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh my God, Alexander, a long, horrible, freezing night, huh? Every goddamn door was worse than the one before,” she says, giggling. A lovely sound, the opposite of her brother-in-law’s guffaw. Hers is like a string quartet improvising on a theme by Mozart.

  “I know,” I say.

  “I don’t normally do the doors, I usually sit in the van with Charles to keep him company. Please tell me people aren’t that eccentric.”

  “I had a guy with a gun open the door the other night,” I say.

  “No?” she says, appalled.

  “Yes,” I insist.

  “What did you do?”

  “I played it cool, he thought he was James Bond. Bit bloody frightening.”

  “My God, did you tell Charles?”

  “No, it was my very first night, I didn’t want to sound highly strung, you know?”

  “If it had happened to me, I think I would have resigned on the spot,” she says, laughing. I sit in my chair and she plays with the cheese, stringing it from the plate to her mouth, completely unself-consciously.

  “Ten o’clock, we better get back to the others and their tales of woe,” Amber says.

  I go outside as she dashes to the bathroom. I watch her through the window. On the way out, she flashes her smile at the pizza man and he grins at her and comes around the counter to open the door. In the moment when he’s obscured by a pillar she deftly puts her hand in the tip jar, takes out half the notes, and puts them in her pocket.

  “Thank you,” she says breezily, as she leaves.

  * * *

  We had walked nearly the whole way back to the rendezvous point when Amber noticed black spirals of smoke coming from the stoner kids’ house.

  “That’s not pot, is it?” Amber asked.

  “No, it’s not, their fucking house is on fire,” I said, and began to run.

  We got to the house in seconds, but now the fire had taken hold. Sheets of flame coming from underneath the front door, a side window buckling from the heat—all the neighbors bloody oblivious.

  “Amber, go to the closest house, call nine-nine-nine,” I said.

  “What’s nine-nine-nine?” Amber asked.

  “Jesus, whatever it is in this country, the fire brigade, call the bloody fire brigade.”

  “Nine-one-one,” Amber said in a daze.

  “Yes, just fucking go.”

  I had to physically shove her in the direction of the house next door.

  It looked bad. The wind and the open windows had really stoked the fire and as I got to the front step I was hit by a wall of heat. I staggered back, put my jacket over my arm and head. I pulled my shirtsleeve down over my fingers and pulled the screen door. The front door was unlocked, the handle searingly hot. I pushed it open.

  A horrible sight.

  The kitchen was on fire at the back of the house and the walls and carpet were burning. Jets of orange flame shooting up the stairs.

  The living room was in to the right. Stairs to the left. Impossible to breathe. I ran down the hall, got about two feet, dropped to a crawl, fumbled for the handle, and shoved my way into the living room. My lungs aching, sparks falling on my back and hair.

  Both kids lying on the living room floor, unconscious. The room wasn’t on fire yet, but thick black smoke poured in from a door to the kitchen. I stayed down on my knees, breathing. Behind me a huge tube of fire came hurtling down the hall, and I slammed the door. Something crashed down in the back room.

  A couple of breaths of that smoke could knock me for six. But I had no choice. I got to my feet, picked up the TV set from off an upturned wooden crate, threw it through the front window. I kicked away the rest of the glass, got to the floor again, breathed. Stood. I picked up the first kid in a fireman’s lift, hoisted him on my shoulder, ran with him to the broken window, tossed him out.

  The second kid groaned.

  “It’s going to be ok, you little shit,” I said, and picked him up too.

  My legs buckled, but I managed to get him across the room. I tossed him out and leaped after him into the garden. The street full of neighbors now. They dragged the boys out of the garden, helped me to my feet and down the path. A couple of them clapped and patted me on the back.

  I dry-heaved and spat, someone gave me a water bottle.

  I saw Amber. She ran over and threw her arms around me.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” she kept saying, over and over.

  Two fire
tenders arrived and in a couple of minutes they had the blaze under control and out. An easy one for the fire department, considering the number of wildfires they were increasingly having to deal with in this second summer of drought.

  A cop showed up and paramedics took the kids to the hospital. They both had suffered smoke inhalation but would be fine. A paramedic asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital but I said no. He gave me a hit of O2. I coughed and heaved and he gave me Gatorade instead. Amber helped me up.

  “How did you do that, how did you know how to do that?” Amber asked, incredulous.

  I knew, but I didn’t tell her. My cop training had taken over. I’d been a cop for six years, not six months. It wasn’t me, it was automatic pilot.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “it just seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “Are you ok? Are you hurt? Maybe you should go to the hospital? What do you think?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  While I recovered, we sat there on the curb with all the other onlookers. Amber held my hand and give me sips from a water bottle. A couple of minutes later a police officer came over to interview me. Tall, skinny, alert, he looked a little like trouble. I got to my feet. He asked me if I was ok. I said I was. He asked what exactly had happened. I began to tell him as simply as possible. He wrote everything down and in the middle of a sentence he suddenly stopped me.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, I know you from somewhere, I can’t quite place it.”

  “Well, I don’t think I know you,” I said, guessing that the cop recognized me from the bloody artist’s-impression wanted posters down at his station house.

  “Yeah, it’ll come to me in a minute. What’s your name?”

  “Um, it’s Seamus Holmes,” I said.

  Amber looked at me, startled, but said nothing.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Uh, two-oh-eight Broadway, apartment twenty-six,” I said.

  “Ok, Seamus, what kind of accent is that?”

  “Irish.”

  “Irish, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not Australian, right?”

  “No.”

  “Hold on a minute,” he said, and walked off.

  He went to his car and said something into his police radio. I was getting quite scared now. He walked back slowly. His face expressionless, giving nothing away.

  “Just something I had to take care of there,” he said.

  “Ok,” I said.

  “And what do you do for a living?” the cop asked.

  “Uh, I’m a schoolteacher, I coach, uh, soccer,” I said, the first thing that came into my head. Also a stupid thing. If he asked what school I was at, I was sure to blunder.

  “What school you at?” he asked.

  “Kennedy,” I said.

  “Is that near Washington High?” he asked.

  “Reasonably near,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know it, ok, and you just saw the fire and went barging in?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded, was about to ask something else, and then his face lit up.

  “Sheeat, I remember now, you play in the Cherry Creek Soccer League, right? I knew I recognized your face from something.”

  “I play soccer,” I agreed.

  The cop grinned. “I knew I knew you from somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I better cancel that radio call,” he said to himself.

  “What?”

  He looked at me. His face much more relaxed.

  “Oh, nothing, it was to do with something else. I knew I knew you. Shit. And, hey, man, before the fire department gives you a lecture, which they will, I just want to say you did good getting those kids out of there.”

  “Thanks.”

  A TV crew from Channel 7 showed up searching for people to interview. They were getting in the way of the fire crew, and the cop looked distracted.

  “Officer, is it ok if we leave, it’s getting late?” I asked.

  “Hold on,” he said, not looking at me, “I gotta just take care of this and then I can let you go.”

  The Channel 7 crew marched right onto the lawn, started to do a live feed. The cop straightened his tie. This was his chance to get on TV. He marched over and chatted to them for a couple of minutes.

  And then, to my absolute amazement, who should get out of a red Toyota Camry on the other side of the street but Detective David Redhorse. All five feet of him. Jesus Christ. Now I understood. Redhorse was looking for us. He had stuck up a wanted poster at the cop shop or put the word out asking the police to hold for questioning any young men with Australian-sounding accents. So after Klimmer’s murder, Redhorse had gone to the train station to stake it out. He had seen the pair of us run onto the train and decided to follow. We seemed a little suspicious. But then we’d talked to him and his suspicions had been allayed a little. He thought we were ok. I was even injured, but it wasn’t a gunshot wound and the facts they knew at that stage were that the suspects were Hispanic and (because the cop had fired and seen me fall) that one of them had been hit by a bullet.

  Still, something had been nagging at Redhorse, he’d checked out our story and hadn’t liked it and then come looking for us at the Holburn Hotel. Of course we weren’t there. It had clearly worried him. Two Australian boys who perhaps looked a little like the two Spanish boys that had killed Klimmer. John had cut his hair, but there was nothing he could do about his height. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but it was something that he wanted to follow up.

  And Redhorse himself scared me. A digger. A good peeler. His Denver Nuggets cap was on slantwise, his jeans and T-shirt were dirty, like he’d come from dinner or yard work, but appearances were deceiving, I could see that.

  Redhorse lit himself a cigarette, took in the scene, and started making his way across to the cop.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Amber.

  I walked her fast along the street. We hurried down a long alley.

  When we turned the street corner, Amber grabbed me. She led me under a big overhang at the entrance to an elementary school. She threw me up against the wall.

  “You lied to him,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “You’re an illegal immigrant. All that stuff on your résumé is fake, isn’t it? Everything except for the address on your paycheck.”

  “Not everything was a—”

  She kissed me. She thrust her body against me and kissed me hard. Leaning up on her tiptoes, biting my lips. She took my hands and placed them on her breasts and we moved together backward into the shadow of the overhang. Her hands searched under my shirt and she touched my back and chest with her fingernails. She grabbed my ass with her right hand and pulled me closer. With her left she began unbuttoning my jeans.

  “Right here,” she said. “Right now.”

  “Madness,” I said as I grabbed for the zipper on her black jeans. She stopped me and pulled down her jeans and then her panties. She held me and shoved me inside her. She was dripping wet. I leaned back against the wall and she leaned on me and climbed on me and I fucked her the way only a junkie can. Need and desire and displacement and hunger and concentration and pain.

  “You’re killing me,” she said.

  “I—”

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  And when I came, she came, and I groaned and she yelled and bit her finger and laughed.

  “I’m breathless,” she said.

  The whole thing couldn’t have taken five minutes. She kissed me and zipped herself up. I buttoned my jeans and looked at her and caught my breath. Amber had a little crazy in her: this, the stolen money in the pizzeria. A Venus in a sweatshirt. Everything you could ever think and more. And yet a sadness about her too, a sense of loss, a hunger that needed filled.

  “We better get back,” she said.

  She took my hand and we walked in silence along the streets, past the bunga
lows and mock Tudors and ranch-style houses, past mailboxes and strip malls and dog walkers and lovers and illicit men watering their lawn under cover of night.

  She let go of my hand when we made it to the van. All the others inside, waiting impatiently. Robert wound down his window.

  “Come on, you two, it’s been a trying evening for everyone, l-let’s get home,” he yelled.

  I sat near the window. I stank of smoke. Everyone was polite, ignored it, didn’t mention it. Amber said nothing.

  They dropped me on Colfax.

  I watched them turn the van.

  Amber in the front passenger seat.

  You should run, Alex, I told myself. Run, now. Now that you’ve seen Redhorse. You should go.

  Time had passed since Klimmer’s death and the cop resources were stretched thin. We could have gotten out of town easily. A million different ways. And yet I knew it was too late. The hooks were in.

  Amber.

  Stupid to remain.

  I knew I wouldn’t tell John about Redhorse and I wouldn’t tell him about her.

  The van drove off. Through the window I could see her brushing that golden hair.

  I stood there. Coughed.

  The whores. The homeless. The wide street. The black sky. The tail-lights diminishing. Standing there staring after the van, even when it had long since gone.

  9: THE SUTRA OF DESIRE

  Haze covers Lookout Mountain. A calm sky. Aegean blue. Jets bending diagonals. The stillness becoming deeper and more taut. A silent vacancy. An absence from airport to aqueduct. It’s early yet. A stray dog. A tailless cat. A girl in a black stole.

  The foothills close as a spider on the ceiling.

  Hawk’s-eye view.

  A street made more straight by the perfect right angles formed at intersections. Light sucked sideways from the vast eastern sun.

  Worry has you by the hair.

  Enemies from compass point to azimuth.

  But not on this morning of ivory cloud, azure heaven, and the friendly boiling local star.

  And only a moment ago this was the mythic plain, a migration path for bison and the Comanche nation.

  Imagine an archer the instant before release. Before the Spanish, before the horses. Poised and under discipline of sudden death. That same feeling. The template for success or disaster. Blood, either way.