Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  “I didn’t know if I’d find you here. Five years later, you’re still in the same motel room.”

  “I find something I like, I stick with it.”

  She smiled, came closer.

  “Plus they give me a deal. Seven-fifty a month, all the coconuts I can pick.”

  Frank looked back over Hannah’s shoulder into the dark lot. There had to be at least a half-dozen agents scrambling around somewhere out there. The night shift. By now Shane had probably gotten word on the radio and was circling back. Frank thrust into the spotlight.

  “Something wrong?” She glanced back over her shoulder.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s nice to see you. Been a while.”

  Hannah came close. She reached out and touched a finger to his bare shoulder, then brought the finger to her mouth and tasted it with the tip of her tongue.

  “Cabernet?”

  “No,” he said. “Pinot.”

  “It’s a little salty.”

  “That’s probably just me.”

  “You have any more, or did she throw the whole thing on you?”

  “You were sitting out there a while,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Waiting for her to leave. What is she, a girlfriend?”

  Frank considered it for a second.

  “Somebody from work,” he said.

  “Oh, so that’s some kind of FBI secret handshake thing, throwing wine on each other.”

  “Well, that,” he said, “is a long story.”

  “The good ones usually are.”

  “So you want some pinot?” he said. “Or just stand out here in the parking lot and quip the night away?”

  “Maybe a sip. I can’t stay long. Randall’s in the car. It’s almost his bedtime.”

  “Bring him over. I got Coke, chocolate chip cookies. Unless that’s too much sugar.”

  “No, he’s finishing up a burger and fries. Anyway, I think he’d rather stay in the car. He’s had a rough day. And FBI guys make him nervous.”

  Frank could still feel the place on his shoulder where her finger had trailed across the flesh. A tingle. First one of those he’d had in a while.

  “You’re still with the Bureau, aren’t you?”

  “Still plugging along,” he said. “But I don’t like the idea I make a ten-year-old kid nervous.”

  “He’s eleven,” she said. “And it’s not just you. A lot of things make him nervous.”

  Frank nodded, wanting to take a longer look at her, but feeling bashful, keeping his gaze on the tiki bar.

  “And the book career, how’s it going?”

  “Fine.”

  “I read a couple of them, you know. The first two.”

  “Then you stopped. Not your cup of tea.”

  “Well, yeah, I’m more of a Sports Illustrated kind of guy. But they were good. I liked that woman, what’s her name? Sharon?”

  “Erin. Erin Barkley.”

  “Yeah, Erin. She was tough. Real smart aleck. Quite a sex life, too.”

  “It’s make-believe.”

  “Seemed pretty convincing to me.”

  “The cop part is factual, all that procedural stuff. But Erin’s sexual habits, that’s to keep my readers happy.”

  “Well, it worked for me. I remember that.”

  The flesh on Frank’s shoulder was still prickling. Like she had acid on her fingertip, his skin peeling away, but in a pleasant way. He looked at her under the yellow porch light. Her blond hair was loose, tangling in the sea breeze. A dusting of hair on her cheek, a fine golden sideburn. She was looking out toward the ocean, but she must have sensed his stare because she turned her head and gave him a shy smile. With a woman as striking as Hannah it probably happened all the time, men’s appraising looks.

  “I’ll get that wine,” he said.

  Sheffield turned and went inside the motel room, walked briskly to the kitchenette. He looked back at her through the screen door. She was standing there, peering through the dark at the tiki hut. Hannah Keller. Looking even better than the photograph. Better than his memory of her. He stood in the kitchenette trying to remember what he’d come inside for, why he’d left her alone out in the dark.

  Then he saw the wine bottle on the counter. He poured some into a squat highball glass and took it back out to her.

  Now she was sitting comfortably in the director’s chair Helen Shane had vacated. There was a copy of First Light in Hannah’s lap.

  “So,” Frank said. “To what do I owe this pleasant surprise?”

  She took the wine, tasted it. Set it down on the cement porch.

  “Somebody’s screwing around with me, Frank.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said, someone’s screwing around with me. They sent me this.”

  She took the book from her lap and held it out.

  He looked at it for a few seconds. None of this in the script. At this moment he and Hannah were probably lit up green in night-vision goggles. ‘She’s handing him the book. She’s handing Sheffield the goddamn book.’ ‘So what’s he doing?’ ‘He’s not doing anything, just looking at it.’ ‘All right. Just as long as he doesn’t take it. Jesus, we can’t have him getting involved. That’ll screw up everything.’

  “Frank?” Hannah said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Sheffield said, no, there was nothing wrong. Then he sat down beside her and reached out and took the book. He set it on his lap and watched as it spilled open to a random page.

  TEN

  She wasn’t sure why Frank Sheffield was so tense. Maybe still worked up about the redhead who’d tossed the wine on him. Nervous she’d come back, find him sitting there with another woman. Hannah couldn’t read him. He seemed different from the breezy beach bum she remembered. Kept his eyes down, dodging hers, fumbling with the book, looking at the pages, but not really studying them. She wasn’t sure how she could tell, but he didn’t seem to be paying full attention. Leafing too quickly, looking at nothing long enough to absorb it.

  “Look at the front, the numbers in the front,” Hannah said. “And the name.”

  Sheffield took a breath and blew it out.

  He flipped to the front, tilted the book so it caught the full light.

  “J. J. Fielding,” he said.

  He looked up at her. Holding her gaze for a couple of seconds, then his eyes straying off toward the tiki bar. Some folks over there dancing to a Phil Collins tune.

  “Yeah, J. J. Fielding. His signature in a book that just happened to be lying in the middle of a table in the doctor’s office where I take Randall every week. Imagine that.”

  “And you’re saying what?”

  “I think it’s pretty obvious, Frank. Someone’s sending me a message.”

  “Could be another J. J. Fielding entirely.”

  “Oh, yeah, the name is so popular.”

  “And what do you expect from me?” Still keeping his eyes from her. Sitting stiffly in his chair like he was on trial.

  “Well, I thought you’d be intrigued. A little startled maybe. Some normal human response like that.”

  “I’m intrigued. Sure, I am.”

  He met her eyes. Smiling, but hiding something behind it. She couldn’t tell what. Maybe he thought she was nuts. Scribbled Fielding’s name in the book herself to get her parents’ murder investigation cranked up again.

  Hannah said, “The case is still open, isn’t it? Fielding’s money-laundering indictment, the embezzlement? You’d still like to catch this guy.”

  “Sure, we would,” Frank said. “And so would a lot of other people.”

  “You mean the Cali cartel,” she said.

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “It was in the paper.”

  “It was?”

  “You should get off the sports page, Frank, maybe you’d learn something. Four hundred million and change, I seem to recall. I remember thinking, with that kind of money Fiel
ding could hide anywhere. A penthouse at the Ritz, order room service till the end of time.”

  “Four hundred and sixty-three million is the exact figure. Largest embezzlement in U.S. history.”

  “But for some reason this doesn’t interest you. J. J. Fielding. The name of an FBI fugitive written in a book, that doesn’t arouse your curiosity.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What exactly did you say, Frank?”

  “This is crazy. A copy of your book, Fielding’s name in it. It’s Looney Tunes.”

  She stiffened.

  “Give it to me.” She held out her hand. ‘The book. Give it to me.”

  He hesitated a second, then handed her the copy of First Light.

  She stood up, crossing her arms over her chest, pressing the book tight.

  “Look, I’m sorry I bothered you. Just go back to whatever you were doing, forget any of this happened.”

  “Wait a minute, would you?”

  “I’ve got to get Randall home. It’s his bedtime.”

  She turned and headed back down the sidewalk toward the parking lot. Then Frank was beside her, stride for stride. He put a hand on her shoulder and she halted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You caught me by surprise, coming out of the dark like that. The book and everything.”

  “Look, it’s nice to see you again, Frank. But I can take it from here.”

  “Hey, wait a goddamn second, will you? I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean to imply you were Looney Tunes, I mean the book, the situation. This whole thing.”

  She could see Randall watching from one row over. Sitting in the same position she’d left him. Frank stepped in front of her, his chest blocking her view of Randall. The curly hair lit up golden by the parking lot lights.

  “Don’t you ever wear a goddamn shirt, Sheffield?”

  He grinned.

  “Only when it’s required.”

  She took a step back, used her left hand to hold the hair off her face.

  A white Lincoln caught them in its lights for a moment, then rolled on.

  “You come out here, dump this in my lap, what exactly do you expect?”

  “I guess I expected you to help,” she said. “But never mind. It’s after hours, you’re busy with all this.” She waved her arm toward the tiki hut and the beach.

  “You want my help, like what, in an official capacity?”

  “Official, unofficial. I thought you’d be interested.”

  “I am,” he said. “I’m interested.”

  Frank was looking at her, his gaze steady and resolute. But Dan Romano had taught her to mistrust eyes. An expert liar could fool himself into believing what he was saying was true, and bring that sincerity to his eyes. What you looked at was the throat. The amount of swallowing. A telltale sign of a liar’s dry mouth.

  Frank’s Adam’s apple was bobbing. Every two or three seconds it moved.

  “Look,” she said. “Those numbers in the front of the book, they’re some kind of half-assed code. Randall figured it out and it describes the murders, details only an insider would’ve known. And there’s an address there too. An address on Bayshore Drive, and a time for the meeting. By nine tomorrow morning.”

  Sheffield nodded.

  She said, “Randall is off to school at eight in the morning. I figure I can get to the Bayshore address by around eight-thirty. Maybe you’d like to drop by, we could see what this is all about. If you get lucky, you might even be able to make an arrest. You still make arrests, don’t you, Frank? You haven’t got so laid-back you don’t do that anymore, have you?”

  Frank swallowed again.

  “I’ll have to read my manual,” he said. “Brush up on how it’s done.”

  “Eight-thirty then. The address is twenty-six forty-nine Bayshore. You need to write that down?”

  “Twenty-six forty-nine. My memory’s still working fine.” Another swallow.

  “Sure there’s not something bothering you, Frank? Something you want to talk about.”

  He waved away a night bug dancing at his ear.

  “Twenty-six forty-nine,” he said, mustering a smile. “I’ll be there at eight-thirty. But if I’m a few minutes late, you’ll wait for me, right?”

  “I’ll give you five minutes,” she said. “Then I’m going in.”

  “Okay, okay, eight-thirty sharp,” he said. “Scout’s honor.” And made a two-finger salute.

  And another swallow.

  * * *

  Hal sat on his motorcycle in the large dark parking lot.

  The air was different out here. It smelled like fish and seaweed. There was wind rattling through the palm trees. He watched as Hannah Keller got in her small car and started it and pulled out of the parking lot.

  The man she had been talking to stood and watched her drive away.

  Hal waited. He watched other cars pull out of the parking lot. They might be following Hannah Keller or they might not be.

  Hal would ask somebody in the motel who this man was. He’d find out his name, what he did for a living, maybe even his relationship to Hannah. The man looked like a cop. That’s how he stood, how he walked, like a lazy cop, a cop who drank too much, who sat around and watched TV. Worthless, slothful. A doughnut lover.

  After he learned who the man was, then Hal had another person he wanted to talk to, somebody else he’d seen. Somebody he was curious about. He could let Hannah Keller go for the time being. She was taking her son home to bed. A good mother. Tucking him in, singing him lullabies. What good mothers did. He could pick her up again tomorrow morning. That would be soon enough.

  From where he stood in the dark, Hal could smell the beach. He could smell coconut butter suntan lotion.

  He’d been to the beach once long ago. Summer vacation, the eastern shore. Someone took him, he couldn’t remember which one of his foster parents it was. Hal spent a while digging in the sand, then when he’d worked up his nerve, he walked down to the shore and stepped into the ocean. But the waves knocked him down and tried to drag him under. Like the ocean knew who he was, what an evil mind he had and the ocean wanted to kill him. Hal almost drowned.

  A woman pulled him out of the water and carried him back to the beach.

  The woman laid him on the sand and tried to press her mouth to his, but Hal pushed her away. He spit up water, then he got up and marched back down to the ocean and he walked into it and the ocean tried to push him down again. But Hal was ready this time. He kept his balance. He pushed back against the water. He slapped and punched and fought the ocean for a long time until the adult who had brought him to the beach yelled for him to come out of the water and go home.

  By then Hal was exhausted. But he’d beaten the ocean. He wasn’t scared of it. He wasn’t scared of anything. He was seven years old.

  ELEVEN

  It was nearly midnight before the third cup of Tension Tamer tea finally began to take effect and Hannah felt drowsy enough to walk into the bedroom and lie down. She closed her eyes and almost instantly she was dreaming, drawn back into the shadowy images of her past.

  She was eleven years old. Randall’s age. She was a thin girl with thick blond hair that embarrassed her because everyone was always touching it as though it was community property, like the belly of a pregnant woman. Strangers standing behind her and her mother in the grocery store checkout line might reach out and stroke Hannah’s golden curls. So lovely, they would say, like spun gold, the tresses of a fairy-tale princess. And Hannah cringed, wanted to hide, wanting to shave it off.

  Seeing it now in her mind, part dream, part memory. The long-ago moment still simmered in her cells, unspooling before her now with all the detail of the actual event. Though she knew it was not real, knew she was dreaming it again, half-awake inside the dream, trying to interpret the images as she was seeing them.

  Hannah was eleven years old, wearing pink pajamas, rising early on a Sunday morning in January, she went to her parents’ room to see if they were awake. S
he pushed open the door and peered through the crack and saw her parents making love in the king-size four-poster bed, the same bed she slept in now, the same bed where she lay dreaming.

  Hannah stood in the doorway and listened to the bed creak and watched them make love. She knew what they were doing. Martha Keller had already explained about sexuality. A straightforward talk with a pad of paper and drawings of a flaccid penis and an erect one. Both of them giggling at times, because it was funny, the whole thing, mother and daughter talking about that absurd object, that penis, how it changed, what it did. The big secret exposed. Hannah was fine with it. Ready for what was to come, her body’s budding. Ready, eager, not shy at all. There were girls at school who were already there at eleven. Breasts, their periods. So when she saw her parents making love, the one and only time this happened, she was not shocked or upset.

  But she stood there and watched because she had never seen her mother this way. Martha Keller on top of her father. Sitting up, her large breasts swinging loose from side to side as she rode up and down her father’s shaft. Up and down again and again with her eyes closed. Controlling this love-making. And her father lay nearly still, his eyes also shut, head rocked back in the pillow. And Hannah could not stop watching.

  For her mother was in charge, so obviously asserting herself in a way that she never did in public. Martha Keller was a quiet homemaker, willing to let Ed run the show, slow to reveal herself to strangers, quiet, holding back. Everything Ed Keller was not. Her wide-shouldered, athletic, tall husband, a federal prosecutor, an outdoorsman, brimming with confidence, maybe even a little arrogance. This man with enough strength to hold up a thrashing five-foot barracuda with one hand, a great sleek silver monster, holding it up beside the boat for the two of them to admire while he extracted the hook from its jaw with his free hand.

  But there in the bed, her father was clearly powerless beneath Martha Keller’s hips, grinding against him, pressing him down. Her father moaned and Hannah stood in the doorway absorbing this moment, this revelation of female power. This insight into her mother and into her father as well, their secret agreement, the thing that pleasured them both.