The Exiled

by Christopher Charles

  “Christ,” Dunham said. “We’re about to make some shitty lives a whole lot shittier.”

  They flipped a shopping cart, climbed up through what had been the porch door, and entered a gutted kitchen—appliances gone, sink gone, electrical wire torn from the sockets. A narrow hallway connected the front and back of the house. Two rooms on the left, staircase on the right. Light flickered through bare door frames. A slow and droning conversation seemed to come from nowhere in particular.

  “You want the front or back?” Dunham asked.

  “Front.”

  Front gave him a chance to clear the room before Dunham could survey his work.

  “All right,” Dunham whispered. “If the upstairs junkies slip past us, who gives a shit? We’re looking to send a message. Just make sure it’s a clear message.”

  Dunham pulled the Glock from his waistband. “Fear-of-God time,” he said.

  He fired three rounds into the floor. Raney jetted, suppressed a Hands, hands, show me your fucking hands. Inside, three skels huddled around a garden-pail fire. Skel 1 was tied off, a needle jutting from his bicep. Skels 2 and 3 were roasting marshmallows on chopsticks, calm, as though the sound of Dunham’s Glock had died in the kitchen. Raney spotted a fourth lying under the front window, wrapped in blankets. The Boy Scout skels saw him, dropped their sticks, stood with their hands folded behind their heads. Glassine eyes sunk deep in sallow faces; no meat and hardly any bone. Impossible to guess an age, to say if they were twenty-five or fifty. Their friend was weaving through a heavy nod. Raney fired at the floor near his feet. The man raised himself up, fell face-forward, jerked back when the flames licked his forehead.

  “Get him out of here,” Raney hissed.

  He tucked the gun back in his waistband, lifted the bat over his head, swung at the empty vials scattered across the floor.

  “This is your fucking eviction notice.”

  “Jesus, man. We wasn’t hurting nobody, we just…”

  Raney palmed the handle of his gun.

  “You ain’t hearing me. Run, motherfucker. You don’t live here anymore.”

  They hobbled off, dragging their friend between them, protesting in a flatlined drawl Raney couldn’t decipher. He started for the man in the blanket, stopped at the sound of Dunham’s voice echoing from the other room.

  “Did everyone here just shit themselves at once?”

  Raney heard what sounded like a body hurled against a wall, then a woman screaming. He stepped into the hallway, wondering how he would play it if Dunham went too far, wondering what too far meant. A pair of eyes gleamed down from the top of the stairs. Raney waved the man on, raised his hands as a sign of peace. A small militia of junkies came barreling down the staircase, tripping, bouncing off the remains of an oak banister.

  Dunham:

  “So you’re a hero now? You’d bash her head in yourself if I gave you a dimebag to do it.”

  He let loose another round. The woman lost her voice, started dry-heaving.

  “What? I didn’t touch you.”

  Two more shots followed by a scattering through the hall, one of the junkies yelling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” another gripping his head, blood spilling through his fingers. Then Dunham smacking the woman around, taunting her: “It must be easier to suck dick with no teeth.” Enjoying himself. Raney thought: One day soon, I’m going to put this fucker down. He fired into the stairs, hoping to draw Dunham’s attention. The woman went quiet. Raney stepped back into the front room, emptied the pail onto the floor and stomped out the flames.

  Dunham appeared in the doorway, dragging a female skel by the hair, dangling her an inch off the ground. Her coat was three months out of season, her feet bare.

  “Jesus, Deadly,” he said, nodding at the man in the corner. “You missed one.”

  “I was getting to him,” Raney said.

  “He must reek like sewage under all those blankets. Come on, let’s finish this.”

  Raney walked over, jostled the man with his foot. Nothing. He pressed the barrel of his bat against the man’s temple.

  “Get the fuck up. Now.”

  Nothing. A hard kick to the ribs. The man didn’t stir. Raney turned to Dunham.

  “I think he’s dead.”

  “Take out your piece and make sure.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Raney felt the bat being pulled from his hand, looked down, saw a long blade swing for his thigh.

  “Holy shit,” Dunham said. “It’s alive.”

  Raney jumped back, reached for his gun, but the man was on top of him.

  “Gonna cut you, motherfucker.”

  Raney backpedaled, his hands up, the man following, slicing hard and fast, Dunham laughing, his female skel begging to be let go.

  “Handle this, Deadly,” Dunham called. “Come on, handle it.”

  The man drew his arm back and lunged. Raney slipped him, saw the knife stick in the wall, saw the man struggling to jerk it free. Raney kicked his feet out from under him, jumped on his chest, pummeled him unconscious. He stood, breathing hard, burying his face in the crux of one arm.

  “Nice, Deadly! Nice.”

  Dunham stepped forward, jerking the woman with him.

  “This guy a friend of yours, darling?”

  She shook her head.

  “He’s no skel,” Raney said.

  “Sure he is. He sobered up inside is all. Look at him—he’s still got his yard muscle.”

  “His eyes were burning red.”

  “Do me a favor,” Dunham said. “Take a couple of steps back.”

  “What?”

  Dunham tossed his bat, pulled out his gun. The woman went limp. Dunham shook her.

  “Now, darling,” he said. “There’s some good news. You’re gonna live to see your next fix. But I want you to watch this very carefully, and then I want you to tell all your friends from the neighborhood what happened here tonight. You understand?”

  She nodded, spit dangling from her lips.

  Dunham shot the man twice in the face.

  “You think you can remember that, angel?”

  He let her drop, knocked her backward with his heel, belly-laughed as she crawled through the doorway and down the steps.

  They pulled into a dark and empty aisle at the end of a Turnpike rest stop. Dunham beat his fists against the steering wheel, unleashed a victory howl.

  “Goddamn, that feels good,” he said. “I mean, tell me your blood’s not pumping. Tell me you aren’t more alive now than you were when you woke up this morning. Where do you go after something like that? What do you do? Fuck a stripper? Lift some weights? It’s like one minute you’re swimming with sharks and the next you’re in a coma. So how do you hold on to that feeling? You know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell me something—do you sleep?”

  “Everyone sleeps.”

  “Okay, but I mean, do you just lie down and shut off? Head hits the pillow and that’s it?”

  “Most nights.”

  “You’re lucky. Not me. I’m afraid if I fall asleep I won’t wake back up. It’s a thing. There’s a name for it. I’ve had it since I was a kid. Since before I can remember. So I take pills. And then those pills stop working, so I have to find different pills. It’s like a game. Sometimes I mix the pills with booze. But sometimes I don’t want to sleep. There’s a feeling I want to keep. I want to stay up with it all night long. You hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “So let’s keep this feeling.”

  He pulled a small, clear Baggie of white powder from his jacket pocket.

  “Peruvian shit. The stuff out of Mexico will make your brain fizzle.”

  He dug his wallet from his jeans, spread an assortment of licenses and credit cards on the dashboard.

  “Try some,” he said. “You look tired. I need you to keep up. You did good tonight. We’re going to be great friends.”

  They met at District Attor
ney Stone’s apartment on West 96th Street, far from any courthouse or precinct station. Stone ordered lunch from a Thai place, gave Raney the tour while they waited for the food to arrive. A long and lean two-bedroom, an art collection in its early stages—small modernist canvases that reminded Raney of Dunham’s bathroom. Stone’s home office was decorated in laminated news articles chronicling his successes, everything from maximum sentences for street-level dealers to a 120-year bit for a serial killer preying on Columbia undergrads. The Times described him as “a man whose small stature belies his ferocity.” He was known for apoplectic cross-examinations, for crowding the witness stand while spewing out harangues. Op-ed after op-ed called him heroic; one called him a legend at forty. Still, he hadn’t touched anything the size of Meno’s organization. Raney saw himself in the middle of a pitched battle between two giants who would only meet face-to-face once Stone had already won.

  Raney told him everything over a heaping plate of noodles—from the weed outside the club to the killing in the crack house to the coke in the car. Stone rolled his cloth napkin between his fists as though it were a snowball.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked.

  “I had a man murdered at my feet, and I’ve broken just about every law I’m sworn to uphold.”

  “Apart from that.”

  “Hungover.”

  “Sometimes justice has to work backwards.”

  Raney sniggered.

  “Listen to me,” Stone said. “Everything you did was to protect yourself and your cover. There’s a bigger picture here.”

  “Bigger than homicide?”

  “Bigger than a single homicide, yes.”

  “Okay, but why not arrest Dunham now? Threaten him with life twice over. Get him to turn witness. There’s bad blood between him and Meno.”

  “Because we don’t know enough yet.”

  “Meno ordered the job.”

  “You can’t be sure. You said so yourself: Dunham wouldn’t give a name.”

  “He killed a man,” Raney said.

  “A man you beat unconscious. How do you think that will play in court?”

  “He came at me with a knife.”

  “You came at him with a baseball bat and a gun.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the good guy.”

  “The man was still defending himself.”

  “So what’s the endgame here? Why am I doing this?”

  “We want to dismantle Meno’s organization. Top to bottom. We want to cripple it so severely that no one rises up to take his place. This isn’t about putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

  “A dead junkie is a bullet wound?”

  “For now. We’re building a case. He’ll be a part of that case. He’ll get his day in court.”

  “And in the meantime I keep playing accessory?”

  “If things continue at this pace, it won’t be long. I promise you.”

  He rented a room in Fort Hamilton, just across the bridge from Dunham’s club. He told Sophia it was for her protection. He repeated the DA’s words: It won’t be long. Sophia looked at him as though she knew better, as though she saw the end in the beginning.

  10

  Raney pulled the curtain back, watched the contrails of an airplane fade into a sky that was just starting to brighten. It would be an hour before the diner opened. He splashed water on his face, then noticed for the first time that the bathroom, with its claw-foot tub and double sink, was at least as big as the room he’d slept in. The lore about the place being a brothel for pioneer soldier boys seemed more likely: they’d simplified the conversion by making every other room a bath. The building suffered as much from lack of imagination as from neglect.

  He dressed, walked past the empty reception desk and out to his car. There was something his father used to say, something he’d forgotten for a long while and then remembered: Find what makes you glad you’re alive and do it before the world’s in your face. A day is no good unless you get out in front of it. Back in New York, that meant rounds on the heavy bag and a circuit in the weight room. Then mornings became the dead time in which he slept off one fix in order to make way for the next. Now he spent the early hours of the day walking the trails behind his cabin, climbing a thousand feet before reversing direction. When he first arrived in New Mexico, he brought a gun with him every time he stepped outside. Now he brought a camera. City life had been an accident of birth, one he’d corrected with a brutality that he could only put behind him by thinking of his life as part 1 and part 2.

  There was national land on the other side of the reservation. He parked at the first trailhead he came to, zipped up his nylon jacket and strapped his camera around his neck. He set his stopwatch for thirty minutes, hiked up into a juniper-piñon savanna, pausing to photograph whatever might not be there if he followed the trail a second time: a Steller’s jay pecking at juniper berries, a tuft of fur where a small animal had brushed against a prickly pear. When the stopwatch sounded, he sat for a moment, breathing in the altitude—a thin air he found invigorating though it made most people nod off.

  On the drive back he thought again of Luisa Gonzalez. No one would come forward to claim her body. She’d be buried by the county in an unmarked grave. If anyone cared enough, they’d hold a service for her and her brother back in Mexico. Her uncle would call her loyal, disciplined. The priest would recommend her soul to heaven. The people who’d raised her to be murdered in that bunker would glorify her death, make her a martyr to local children. Raney saw himself standing among them, saw his guilt reflected in theirs. He’d brought a child into a world split between people who cause pain and people who endure it, and then he’d left. He offered her nothing—no guidance, no love. What place, he wondered, did she see for herself now?

  He sat in a corner booth with a cup of black coffee, poring over the Gonzalez file. He imagined sharing the contents with Mavis, setting the twins’ mug shots on the kitchen table, asking if she knew whose kin it was that died in a bunker on her property. With nothing else to go on, he’d cast Uncle Gonzalez in the role of bad cop. His blood died down there, Raney would say. His sister’s children. He may not know where they are now, but he damn well knows where they were headed last time he saw them. When vengeance came, he’d tell Mavis, it wouldn’t be swift. He’d prompt her imagination with true-crime descriptions of tire fires, of people buried to their necks and left to burn or bait scorpions in the Mexican desert. Gonzalez had an army at his disposal. And what did Raney have? The protection of the state and federal governments, if she chose to cooperate.

  He continued rehearsing over an egg-white omelet, scripting and rescripting Mavis’s reaction. She wasn’t Dunham, wasn’t Meno, but she wasn’t one to flinch, either. Her performance yesterday afternoon may not have been nuanced, but it didn’t have to be: for the time being all she needed was conviction. She needed to stick with the same lie she’d been telling for forty years no matter how transparent it now seemed. Jack didn’t build a shed with a false floor to escape the apocalypse; he built it because he thought they might have to hide, wait someone out. Jack and Mavis had been on the run.

  “Good morning, Detective Raney,” Clara said.

  Her eye shadow clashed with her skin tone; the straps of her tank top hung at odd angles. She stood behind the coffee bar, looking like a bleary version of the woman he’d met a little more than twelve hours ago. Daniel sat on the floor a few feet away, filling in a coloring book, crayons scattered around him. He lifted his head briefly, then let it drop: invisible as well as silent. But listening, Raney thought.

  “Are you holding up okay?” he asked.

  “I spent last night with Mavis, at the ranch.”

  “How was she?”

  “Inconsolable. Not for Jack or for herself, but for the girl. For what Jack had done to the girl. She kept repeating, ‘It should have been me.’ Over and over again. Sobbing. I didn’t know what to do. I kept wondering if I should call a doctor, but then I thought that was just an excuse to
leave the room.”

  “All you could do was be there.”

  “It didn’t feel like much.”

  “It never does.”

  “What can I get you, Detective?”

  “An Americano. Large, with a little bit of cream, please.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to be buying for a certain deputy?”

  “This is a small town,” Raney said.

  “These things are going to ruin his stomach.”

  Raney watched her tamp down the espresso, line up the shot glasses. She moved quickly, her fingers graceful. Raney knelt beside Daniel, in part to keep himself from staring. The coloring book was desert-themed. Daniel was rendering a saguaro in purple, no trace of color beyond the thick black lines. Again, as if by instinct, the boy’s fingers reached for Raney’s badge. Raney unhooked it, handed it over. Daniel weighed it in his palm, then set it on the page below the cactus and began tracing its outline in silver.

  “You know, a paper shield is just as good as the real thing,” Raney said.

  Daniel tapped his forehead with one finger: I’m not stupid.

  “Who knows?” Raney said. “Maybe you’ll be Detective Remler one day.”

  He clipped his badge back in place, stood. Daniel grabbed his pants leg.

  “Hey, there, kiddo,” Clara said. “The grown-up detective has bad guys to catch.”

  Daniel turned back to the outline of Raney’s shield, began filling it in with gold crayon. Raney pulled out his wallet.

  “Tell Junior it’s on the house,” Clara said.

  Raney lifted the cup.

  “Thanks again,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He felt her watching him go. It should have been me, Mavis said. Why did Clara choose to share that detail? Was she advocating for or against her friend?

  Outside, his phone rang.

  “We found the Mexies’ truck,” Bay said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Or at least a truck.”