Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  Hal wasn’t stupid.

  Once when he was young, his IQ had been measured, and on the morning when he was sent to the guidance counselor, the woman looked across her desk at him and then looked down at the sheet and then looked at him again and shook her head sadly like she couldn’t bring herself to say the number out loud. She just kept shaking her head.

  Finally Hal stood up and told the woman that it didn’t matter whether the number was high or low. All that mattered was that Hal could kill the woman with his bare hands if he chose. He could strangle her right there, right then, and she was helpless to prevent it. That’s all that mattered in the world, not numbers on a sheet of paper, whether they were high or low. He told her that. And she sat frozen behind her desk, staring up at him.

  That night a social worker came to talk to his foster parents. A big black man who brought along two uniformed cops. The next morning Hal was put on a Greyhound bus and shipped to another small town in Indiana. Only because of some words he spoke to a woman across a desk.

  This was before he had killed anyone. This was before he had used his hands the way he’d learned. He had only imagined killing at the time. He pictured it and with time the pictures grew clearer. They became so clear that finally he knew how to do the thing even though he had not done it yet. He could see it perfectly in his mind. And then he was doing it in real life. Seeing it in his mind and doing it exactly as he’d pictured.

  He stood in the shadow of the pines and watched the house for another moment. Then he dropped the weed-eater and walked over to his motorcycle, and climbed on it. He kick-started it and rode through the dense stand of pines down to the road. He could see Hannah Keller’s car up ahead. She was stopped at a traffic light.

  The old man in the hospital bed was clever. He was playing a game. Being careful so Hannah could find him but no one else could. He was sending her secret messages, telling her what to do next. Hal could try to intercept one of the messages and go where it told him to go, get there before Hannah Keller, or he could simply continue to follow her. He had decided to follow her. That was his decision. Track her till she led him to the man who had stolen four hundred and sixty-three million dollars of his employers’ money. His employers were impatient with Hal. They were giving him this one last chance to find Fielding, then they would fire him and hire someone else to do it. Hal had been searching for Fielding off and on for five years but with no success. This was as close as he’d come. The man sending messages to Hannah Keller, playing some kind of game.

  Hal Bonner didn’t play games. He never had. Not board games or sports, none of it. It was a waste of time. All that mattered was eating food and drinking water and staying strong so you could kill when it was necessary. Everything else was a waste of time.

  People played games to have fun. He wasn’t dumb, he understood that. Over the years he’d tried to figure out what fun was. He’d asked a lot of different people. Tell me what fun is. And they’d say things like, fishing is fun. Lying in bed, reading a good book on a rainy afternoon is fun. Sex is a lot of fun. But that didn’t mean anything to Hal. He didn’t believe there was such a thing as fun. He’d tried to watch games on television, but he usually fell asleep. Maybe he would ask Misty about fun. Hal believed it was a lie, one of the things people told themselves so they could keep on living. Like God. Like those things they told you in school. If you work hard, you will succeed. But it was a lie. Some people worked very hard. They shoveled coal or they welded, but they didn’t succeed like the people who sat around in offices not working hard. It was a lie. Like God. Like fun. Like love. He’d ask Misty about it. She would know. At least she’d have something to say about it. She was a talker.

  Misty was sticking in his head. The way her face looked. The way her voice sounded. Sassy and blunt, the way she hated her father for leaving her and she hated Hannah Keller for living the life she was supposed to live. The way she tried to talk Hal out of killing her, giving him reasons, one, two, three.

  Hal was on his dirt bike riding down the street two blocks back of Hannah Keller’s car and he was thinking of Misty Fielding. Seeing her in his head. A girl, her face, her body. It was the first time that had happened to him. First time he’d felt the thing in his chest, something burrowing down inside him, digging a hole, a small narrow den where it would curl up and be safe.

  Hal was zipping through traffic. A red helmet, a red bike, black sun visor. And something small and warm nesting in his chest.

  FIFTEEN

  Hannah fired two quick shots, then, with four more squeezes of the trigger, she emptied the cylinder. To her right and left other handguns answered back, their concussions shaking the air.

  She set the empty pistol on the shelf and stepped back. A suffocating pressure was tightening around her as if she had sunk to the ocean floor, the relentless press of gravity stealing her air.

  It was eleven-thirty, and the firing range was busy. A half-dozen cops and a clean-cut gang at the far end that looked like FBI trainees, and a few other moms and pops keeping their skills honed for neighborhood crime watch.

  This was her first time at the range since leaving the force. Until today it’d been five years without so much as fitting her hand around the grip of a pistol. Only a few moments earlier, as she’d unholstered Ed Keller’s .357, she felt the panic begin to build. Looking out into that bright, fluorescent room, the pistol sagged in her hand and she had to marshal all her resolve to raise it and begin to fire.

  With her heart still knocking out of rhythm, Hannah Keller raised the yellow shooting goggles to her forehead and mashed the button on the wall beside her station, and the paper silhouette slid toward her along its stiff wire.

  As the target drew near, Marcus Shoenfeldt leaned around the partition from the adjacent firing station, lifted his ear protectors, and shook his head in wonder. There were no perforations in Hannah’s target. All six rounds had sailed wide.

  “A little rusty,” she called out.

  “I’ll say.” Marcus showed her a tight smile. “They find out about this, they’re going to take back all your marksmanship medals.”

  These days Marcus Shoenfeldt had trimmed down to around four hundred pounds. Two hundred off his peak, when he was forced to spend most of his days reclining in a specially reinforced bed.

  Back in high school before he’d bulked up, he and Hannah had been friends. They’d even dated once or twice, Marcus a shy kid, tongue-tied and clumsy. But a latent hunk nonetheless. All the girls could see it. He had the potential to turn into a matinee idol, a TV star, one of those square-jawed, dark-eyed men who haunted their girlish dreams.

  By the time they met again, Marcus had tripled his weight and was barely able to navigate the halls of the Miami Police Department, where he did consulting work for the Crime Scene Division, a graphology technician. When she’d called him last night Marcus told her that Tuesdays were his gun days. It was part of his new regimen. On medical leave now, he’d adopted a rigid diet and an equally rigid schedule. For two hours on Tuesday mornings he did his target practice, then headed for the cafe a few doors down at the same shopping center and had a single cup of beef bouillon. She could come along if she liked.

  Hannah slipped the .357 into its leather holster and she shook out her shooting hand, tried to massage away the bruising jolts from the deep tissues of her palm. Two booths down a uniformed Metro cop began firing a semiautomatic pistol and Hannah watched the flakes of paper flying from his target as the cop’s bullets riddled the torso of the silhouette man.

  Marcus stepped around the edge of Hannah’s booth.

  “Is that it?” he said, motioning at the copy of First light that lay beside her leather holster. The novel was sealed inside a plastic Ziploc bag like a piece of crime scene evidence.

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s it.”

  Marcus turned the book over to look at the jacket photo.

  “You’ve aged,” he said without a trace of humor.

  The man wi
th the semiautomatic was reloading, and the gallery was momentarily quiet.

  “It happens,” she said.

  He shrugged—a man who’d long ago come to peace with his lack of social grace.

  Marcus gave her a quick look, then picked up the Ziploc bag and held it up to the light and squinted as if it contained some rare and lethal specimen. His curly black hair was in a ponytail and ran halfway down his back. He wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt and denim dungarees and heavy brogans. The man who had been emerging those last two years from the husk of fat was darkly handsome, a Byronic dreamer that might adorn the cover of some historical romance novel. But it would probably take at least two more years of steady discipline before that handsome man stepped free of the corpulent giant before her.

  “Thought you didn’t believe in graphology,” Marcus said. He turned the book over and studied Hannah’s photograph again. “Hocus-pocus, I believe you called it once.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Oh, you said it. You told a goddamn reporter for Channel Six that a lot of people considered handwriting analysis hocus-pocus. And then he asked you if you were one of those people and you just smiled. That’s the same as saying you believed it.”

  “Marcus, I need your help. That’s why I called. If I thought it was hocus-pocus, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “It’s impulses in the brain,” he said, “the little twitchy electrons that give you away. Stuff you can’t control that reveals to the trained professional eye all sorts of things about what’s going on inside you. Like body language. You can’t control your tics, your gestures. Everything that’s hidden away inside you, your thought patterns, your character, your criminal tendencies, it’s always leaking out in subtle ways. Like the way the hand moves when it’s writing. There’s a scientific basis for this, Hannah. Yeah, sure there’s a certain amount of subjectivity in analyzing handwriting. But goddamn it, it’s not magic. It’s not hocus-fucking-pocus.”

  “If you were so angry over what I said, why’d you agree to meet me?”

  Marcus smoothed his palm across his cheek as if he were checking his shave.

  “You don’t like this place, do you?”

  She asked him what he meant.

  “This place, the gun range. All this shooting.”

  “I used to like it fine.”

  “But not now. This place gives you the creeps, all the bullets flying.”

  “Maybe not the creeps,” she said. “But close enough.”

  “But you came here anyway to meet me. Whatever this is about, it’s that important.”

  Hannah glanced down at her paper target riffling in the air-conditioned breeze.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s that important.”

  The patrons of Garcia’s Café were mostly Cuban and they were in high spirits, eating and talking with the boisterous gusto of a fiesta crowd. Marcus withdrew a tiny sugar spoon from the breast pocket of his overalls and dipped it carefully into his bouillon. He brought the spoon to his mouth and inhaled the fumes rising off it, then with his eyes going dreamy, he closed his lips around the broth.

  Hannah dabbled with her Caesar salad and watched Marcus as he pored silently over the pages of First Light, making noises in his throat that sounded like the moans and grumbles of a sleeping dog. Out of his pants pocket he fished a leather pouch and opened it and withdrew what looked like a jeweler’s magnifying glass. He bent to various pages and peered at the mad scrawl. After a while, he came to the inside front pages where the numbers were written. He studied the scribbles for several moments, then drew a long breath and lifted his eyes and stared at her.

  “What?” she said.

  Marcus Shoenfeldt set his magnifying glass down next to his saucer. His gaze roamed the café for a moment as if he were surveying the place for eavesdroppers.

  For a moment Marcus stared down at his steaming cup of bouillon, then he suddenly bent forward, leaning his heavy forearms against the small wooden table and glowered into Hannah’s eyes.

  “This some kind of trick?”

  Hannah drew back in her chair.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about this.” He thumped a thick finger against the cover of her book. “I’m talking about loops and tilts, pressure, size, width of margins, crossing t’s and dotting i’s, rhythm and regularity. I’m not some amateur, Hannah. This is what I do for a living.”

  “What’s going on with you, Marcus?”

  “Is this some kind of test the department put you up to? Somebody wants to put a turd in my file, so they send you out here with this little joke. Test my reflexes, see if I’m still sharp.”

  “No, Marcus. This is me and you. It’s no setup. This is a book I found with some strange writing in it. And it’s very important to me. I want to know everything I can about the guy who wrote this. Anything that might help me find out where he’s hiding.”

  He sat back in his chair, not fully convinced.

  “A guy didn’t write this,” Marcus said.

  “What?”

  The waitress came to the table and asked Marcus if his bouillon was okay.

  “Terrific,” Marcus said. “Best damn bouillon I ever had.”

  The waitress gave Hannah a pitying look and stalked away.

  “Talk to me, Marcus.”

  He peered into her eyes with a cagey look. Then he stared at the waitress hurrying between tables.

  “It was written by a woman, a badass woman,” he said. “From the tiny size of the script, the intense pressure, the extreme rightward slant of the letters, it’s clear she’s agitated, defiant, probably intensely disturbed.”

  “Disturbed as in unstable?”

  Marcus looked at her with a hint of a smile.

  “I’d say this lady is about as stable as a gyroscope on its last revolution.”

  “What else?”

  “The buckle on her uppercase K indicates a strong ambition. A woman who’s tough and resourceful, and willing to do whatever it takes to get where she wants to be.”

  “All that from the K?”

  “Don’t mock me. Not just the K. It’s her full, clean lowercase e loops, the openness of the o’s and a’s. And the big hooks on the H and E show a hypersensitivity. A woman who can be badly wounded by destructive criticism. A dangerous combination, warring sides of her personality. Tough and ambitious, but hypersensitive. Insecure.”

  “A woman,” Hannah said.

  “That’s right,” said Marcus. “A hateful woman. Not much sympathy for others. Very smart, very cold.”

  “But why did you think this was some kind of trick?”

  “Because this isn’t real,” he said.

  “Isn’t real?”

  “The handwriting. It’s faked.”

  “I’m not following you, Marcus.”

  “A person who writes something like these numbers, say, they’ll have certain characteristics in their handwriting, certain things that show up over and over. And there’s some of that here. That’s how I can tell you a little about the woman who wrote this, because despite what she did to conceal herself, some of it leaks through. But there’s a lot more of this that’s artificial. It’s inconsistent, like she was writing it for effect, trying to create an illusion.”

  “What illusion?”

  “Like maybe she wanted you to think she was in a highly agitated state. But this wasn’t written that way. It was composed very carefully. Written slowly and thoughtfully. If you ask me, someone’s trying to con you, Hannah. Dupe you into believing something that’s not true.”

  Hannah turned her head and looked at the next table. A heavy woman in a flowered dress was sitting with two young girls in pink frocks who appeared to be her granddaughters. All three were eating roasted chicken, laughing between bites, their hands greasy.

  Marcus picked up his sugar spoon, licked it off, and dropped it back in his breast pocket. He slid the magnifier into its leather case and stood up.

&nbs
p; “Well, I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “Already? We just got here.”

  “I should’ve told you when you called. I don’t get out in public much. I can only take it for an hour or two, then I get these attacks. Panic things. Something happens in my belly, my timer goes off, I start getting dizzy and weird. I need to go home.”

  “Well, sure, okay. I understand.”

  “I’m trying to get better, but it’s not easy.”

  “It’s all right, Marcus. Really, it’s fine. I need to go pick Randall up after school anyway.”

  “How’s the little guy making out?”

  “Randall’s fine.”

  “He’s talking now?”

  “He’s talking, yes.”

  “He’s a good kid. It’s sad he got traumatized like that.”

  “It was pretty bad,” she said. “But he’s just about over it now.”

  Marcus took a deep swallow and smiled at the back wall of the restaurant.

  “I’d watch out if I were you, Hannah. The woman who wrote that shit in your book, she’s serious trouble. She’s one tricky customer.”

  “I’ll be careful, Marcus. Thanks.”

  Without looking her way, he nodded mechanically, then turned and trudged toward the door.

  SIXTEEN

  Hal was in the waiting room of a dentist’s office. Armando Lopez-Lima, DDS. Over the years he’d discovered that doctors’ offices were good places to wait. No one bothered you. No one cared if you were there or not there.

  He was sitting with five other people, all of them with toothaches. No one looked happy. Everyone was reading a magazine except for one young woman who was on a cell phone, talking in loud Spanish. He sat next to the window of the dentist office so he could see the door of the restaurant where Hannah was eating lunch. She was eating with a fat guy. A very fat guy. They had been in the gun range down at the shopping center and then they went to the restaurant and now the fat guy was walking out the door of the restaurant and heading across the parking lot.