The Terror of Living

by Urban Waite

  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 than 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 mat
tresses, 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 working 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?"

  "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 drivers seat with the heater going and watched the Monroe walls. All he could see of the night was the snow fulling. 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.