by Urban Waite
"What would you say?" the sheriff interrupted. "No one would believe you."
"They might not, but still, it would probably get people talking. I doubt you'd see another term. You make so little as it is."
The sheriff gave him a cold stare. He glanced around the bar as if looking for witnesses, Hunt expecting to get coldcocked right there. The sheriff reached for the beer in front of him and drained it back in one motion. He stood, chair screeching on the hard tile floor. "What you do with your time is not my business," the sheriff said. "But you put me in a position where I have one of my deputies with me, I'm going to have to act. And I'll make sure you're in no shape afterward to slander me. You understand?"
Hunt nodded. The sheriff straightened his shirt, then walked out of the bar and left Hunt there. Hunt and Eddie had dealt with crooked cops before. But this was different; the man was not looking for a handout or a bribe, he was just trying to do the same thing Hunt had been doing. How long he'd been up to it, Hunt didn't know. All he knew was that he'd caught the sheriff up there in the mountains one time, had seen him from a far ridge, receiving a small load to take down through the mountains. The sheriff had seen him, too, or at least had known about him for some time, pulling him over on the side of the road just outside Silver Lake. No one around, the sheriff could have done anything he wanted, but he hadn't.
In a way, Hunt thought, he owed the man his life. Though it was grudgingly given, he knew the sheriff was not the type to murder him in cold blood. A warning, simple as that, and Hunt with the intention to honor it. He stayed away, picking different routes through the mountains. Careful not to upset the balance drawn between the two of them.
He drove on, drinking from his Cherry Coke. Passing the time by thinking about what he owed this man. Hunt was in rough shape, hole clean through his calf, business gone, wife kidnapped, but he was alive. Everything could have been different had all of it ended ten years before. But he was driving still, heading south, trying to pick up what little there was left of a life that seemed to break as fast as it was being built.
In Everett, thirty miles north of Seattle, he pulled into the parking lot of a hunting goods shop he knew on the east side. He knew there were people looking for him, and he thought someday they'd find him, but not today. He was walking around with pants half- gone around his knee and a bandage wrapped white as a flag around his calf. And he wasn't ready yet to just give up.
He turned the key in the ignition, and the rumble of the engine quieted. He put the survival bag beneath the seat with the Browning. When he walked in, a bell announced his presence, and an employee he knew only by sight waved from the counter. He went over to the pants section and found his size. In the dressing room he eased his pants past the bandage and then fit the new pair on.
From the old pair he retrieved the small slip of paper he'd taken from Thu, and his wallet and keys, and he laid them on the changing-room bench. Standing there in his new pants, he picked up the slip of paper with the address written on it, a North Seattle address that he didn't have any clue about. He didn't know how
Thu had come across it, whether it was a friend or a relative. He thought he knew what it was. The address was a good place to drop off ninety thousand dollars of heroin, or at least it could have been for Thu.
Hunt gathered the address and the rest of his things and stuffed them down into the pockets of his new pair of jeans. He didn't have much time. He didn't have any time at all. If someone wanted the heroin more than Grady, it was probably the people waiting at this address.
He looked at himself in the mirror, a tightness in the lower left leg where the bandage was. When he turned to look at the back, he could see where he had wiped his own bloodied hand across the bottom of his sweatshirt. He was running out of time, not even enough time to worry about himself.
He opened the curtain, and on the way to the register, he picked out a cheap rain slicker long enough to hang past his bloodstained sweatshirt. In his hand he carried the old pair of jeans. There was a funk to them, something of the salt water mixed with iodine. At the register he asked if there was a trash can he could throw them in. The man took them from him and dropped them into a waste- basket behind the counter.
"What happened to your leg?" the man asked, taking the cash Hunt offered him.
"Hunting accident."
"Someone thought you were the deer?" The man laughed. He'd probably said it a million times.
"It was the deer who shot me," Hunt said. The man smiled and gave Hunt his change.
Outside, Hunt started the truck engine. He turned west and found the interstate, then headed south again.
DRAKE EXPLAINED IT ALL TO HIS WIFE OVER THE phone. He was sitting on a bench outside the hospital doors. Rain fell in the parking lot, and the hospital awning was the only thing keeping him dry. Farther down, where the red painted ambulance lines ended, there were several nurses smoking at the edge of the shaded protection, close enough that he could smell their cigarettes and catch brief fragments of their gossip. Across the parking lot he saw Driscoll's cruiser and beyond that the rounded green of a grass embankment, where bushes had been planted. Lonely incandescent lights sprang like trees from the cement and shone over the cars in a moonlike glow. After he had explained it all, Sheri said, "What do you want me to say, the couple was lying?"
"I'm not asking you to say that. I just wanted to know your opinion."
"There's no right or wrong?"
"There's no right or wrong."
"I'd say they were just doing what anyone would do. Roy and Nancy's problem was not the drugs. It was the injury. Don't look at it like there's someone to blame."
"But there is someone to blame."
"You think that's it."
"Yes. That's how it works."
"You know that's not how anything works. To that couple, the man with the gun wasn't the threatening part. It was the girl overdosed in their bed. You think either Hunt or the couple would have sat by and watched her go like that?"
"Yes, I do."
"Don't be stupid, Bobby. You've been spending too much time with Driscoll. It's always the injury. You think this guy Hunt was up in those mountains because he's something evil, something just bent on doing wrong. He's like that girl you got in that hospital, just someone with an injury, someone needing to be healed."
Drake sat on the bench, turning to watch the nurses in their smoke circle. When he turned back, he said, "What have you been doing, reading the self-help section in the bookstore?"
"Come on, Bobby, when you're hungry, you eat. When you're thirsty, you -"
"When you're broke you smuggle ninety thousand dollars worth of heroin into the country," Drake interrupted.
"You know that's not how it is."
"That's what we prosecute them for."
"Yes, but that's not the problem, is it?"
"No," he said, taking a while with his words. "I don't think it is."
"Did you ever think the girl up in that hospital room needed this more than she cared about her own life?"
Drake didn't say anything.
"You know, if you're going to save that man's life, it's not really about the gun chasing him, or even you."
"No, I suppose it's not."
"There's probably something that's been chasing him for longer than you've been alive, and it'll be chasing him longer still, no matter what happens up there."
"You think you're right on that?"
"I know it."
"How do you know it?"
Sheri was quiet for a moment. "I see it on you." "What do you see?"
"I see it - anyone who gives you a good look can see it. Why'd you go up there into those mountains in the first place?" "Hunting. I told you that." "That's not true. You know that." "All I know is what I did."
"That's the heroic answer, but I bet the truth has to do with that car, and somewhere deep down your father. But I don't think you'd admit that, would you?" "Come on."
"What do you want me t
o say? I'm telling you the truth. How come you haven't come home yet?" "I'm working."
"When did you become part of the DEA?" "Driscoll needs me." "Where's Driscoll now?" "Upstairs."
"Why aren't you up there with him?" "That's not fair, Sheri."
"You're still up in those mountains. That's where you are."
GRADY LANDED FACE-FIRST ON THE BASEMENT FLOOR. So much blood he didn't know what belonged to him and what belonged to the men he'd killed. He groaned, forced himself up. His hands slick with it. Red handprint on the gray floor. He still carried the.22, pushing himself up on his closed knuckles. He screamed, feeling the torn muscles in his side. White-hot pain all through him. Up through his spine and into his head.
He knew the men were coming after him. The whole situation was fucked and he knew there was no time for Nora. He crossed the room, holding his side, blood between his fingers. The dead man was blocking the doorway. He reached down with his hand and dragged the man out of the way, took his bag off the workbench, and opened the door. Gray, overcast light, rain, and the mossy taste of wet earth.
He rounded the house, holding his bag, clutching his closed fist over the wound, the silenced.22 growing slippery and warm in his grip. Pain anytime he lifted a leg, anytime his muscles moved. It was all through him now.
In the drive, on his way to the Lincoln, Grady flattened himself to the side of the house and listened. On the porch he heard the last of the men enter through the front door, following his path. A neighbor appeared at her window and then quickly disappeared. He pushed forward, got to the Lincoln, and pulled the door open. It hurt to sit. His shirt and pants were covered in a mix of human blood, suctioned to his body and weighted with it. He felt around in his pockets for the keys and brought them out.
This hadn't been in the plan.
The back window blew out. He dropped his head and turned the ignition over. The engine started and he hit the gas, head ducked beneath the dash for cover, not looking, estimating a turn and scraping off a car as he went. Gunshots. A puckering of buckshot along the body of the car.
Gas pedal. Gas pedal.
Nora, he thought.
ALREADY, THROUGH THE TREES, HUNT COULD SEE the dark ash smeared like grease across the lawn. All he could see of his house were the bricks of the chimney. He drove past and parked a quarter mile down the road. Rain showers had come through, and the whole place had a look of gloom and growing desperation. He sat in the car and he knew the truth, that it was over, that there had been a point when he thought he might make it out, that Nora and he might have a future, but he knew it was over now. He had seen the yellow police tape stretched around on all sides, like the shape of an imagined house, now just standing in his memories.
He took the survival bag from the truck and walked across the road to the small horse trail that led through the woods and out onto his property. For a while he stood in the trees and took the whole thing in. It looked like a bomb had dropped: where the house had been was nothing but a blackened crater. When he was sure there was no one around, he walked up through the trees and followed the fence toward the house. The patches of blood where Grady had shot the horses were dark holes amid the grass. He stood for a while with his arms up on the fence and stared into the pasture. Even if he did escape, what would be the use? But even as he thought this, he knew that there were still three horses waiting for him in the mountain field. Although they were not his, he could possibly breed them and make a decent profit. He knew, too, that the owners of those horses would never see them again, not unless he was killed, but he tried to put that thought aside.
The closest he went to the remains of the house was the edge of the scorched grass. On the ground he could see the dirt where the fire had burned everything away. And even the earth had the appearance of being baked until nothing could be distinguished except the flatness of the spot he had once walked and the small bits of blackened gravel that had once caught and stuck between the treads of his shoes.
He felt the emotion rise in him again and he took his time and forced it back down into his stomach, where he felt it tighten. He opened the survival bag, took from it the heroin, and went to the stables. On the floor he found the loose board under which he had sometimes kept shipments. With his fingers at the edge of the wood, he pulled it back and sat looking down into the black hole below.
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 nurses 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 ph
one. 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, lm 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.
