Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  She stood at the door and took a last look at her apartment. On her computer monitor, her father had awakened and a nurse was taking his blood pressure. She watched the screen and felt the prickle of cold radiating through her arms and legs. He was saying something. Her father was speaking.

  Misty set her suitcase down beside the door and walked over to the computer and turned up the volume. Her father was moving his lips but the words coming from him were inaudible. She had to roll the volume knob all the way up. His eyes were half-open. He seemed dazed. Not the cocky man he’d been only yesterday.

  With the volume all the way up, his words were filled with static from her cheesy speakers, but she could hear him now.

  “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”

  Then he halted. He took a long raspy breath and began again, slower this time.

  “Our Father who art in Heaven …”

  Misty had never heard him pray. The Fieldings hadn’t attended church. Sundays they used to sleep in, get out of bed in the afternoon, toast bagels, and read the New York Times. Misty was surprised the old man even knew the words to the prayer. But there he was, getting a little of it right, then losing his way, starting over again.

  “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done …”

  Misty said, “On earth as it is in Heaven.”

  Her father lay there squinting into the camera trying to talk to God. Death was shriveling his body. Death was eating his organs, swallowing his tongue, sucking the juicy marrow from his bones. His skull beginning to show through, the shape of it so much like her own. Her father, J. J. Fielding, was peering head-on into the eye of the camera. Saying the words over and over, what he knew of the prayer, what he could remember.

  The poor fucker. Dying alone like that, nobody to talk to but a camera. Driven into exile by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Keller, sent running from the two people on earth who cared about his ass. And now look at him. Lost, lonesome, and hopeless, calling out to a God he’d never believed in before. That poor old man who’d thought that four hundred million dollars would substitute for what he had, the love of his wife and child. A man who thought he could do the impossible, escape his own destiny. As if anybody could. As if running from it ever worked.

  Misty stood there for a long while watching him fumble around with the Lord’s Prayer. Then she went back to the doorway and picked up the suitcase and turned around and carried it to the bed. She opened it and began unpacking it, piece by piece, putting everything back where it belonged.

  Hal made it to shore by eleven-thirty. He climbed out of the kayak, left it bobbing in the surf. He tramped down the beach and found his clothes beneath the curved palm tree where he’d left them. In the shadows he peeled off his sopping underwear and buried them in the sand. He slipped on his jeans and the dark T-shirt and his white Nike running shoes, then he cut through a patch of scrubby grass and headed to the parking lot.

  The thunderstorm he’d paddled through had blown away and now the asphalt lot was glistening and full of puddles. There was steam in the air. Raindrops trickled off the tips of the palm fronds.

  Back inside his rental car, Hal sat watching the big parking lot. There were people arriving and leaving, walking to the thatch-roofed tiki bar, stumbling back to their cars after too many drinks; some were leaving the little glassed-in restaurant down by the beach.

  Hal watched a white car over near the motel. Two men sitting in the front seat. The men wore dark shirts and sat without moving. In the next row over, there was a woman standing behind a brown panel van. She was talking on a cell phone. He saw two men in tie-dyed shirts go into the motel unit above the FBI agent’s, then a little later a mother and father and their little girl arrived in a car and walked down to the beach. He saw two slender men with short hair holding hands near the tiki bar.

  When the woman on the cell phone was finished with her conversation, she tapped on the back door of the brown van and it opened. She climbed inside.

  That was all Hal needed to see. The needle in his chest had been quivering. Now he had seen a woman climb into a van and two men sitting in a parked white car. He had all the information he needed. It wasn’t conclusive, but it was enough for Hal. Someone was shadowing Hannah Keller. They were waiting in the parking lot for her to return. They were either hoping she would lead them to J. J. Fielding so they could recover the stolen money, or they were hoping Hal would appear and they could catch him. Or maybe they wanted to do both things at once.

  He sat there a while longer, slumped down in his car behind the steering wheel. He would stay there all night if he needed to. He wanted to watch, wanted to see what was going to happen when Hannah and the FBI agent finally made it back.

  The motel tiki bar was busy. There were people dancing in the glow of the Christmas tree lights. It was more than two months until Christmas but they’d hung strings of colored holiday lights already. Just like the last foster home Hal lived in. He was fifteen. In that foster home outside of Evansville, Indiana, his mother left her Christmas decorations up all year long. A plastic Santa Claus sat on top of their yellow trailer, blinking through the summer nights. The trailer was planted on a small lot beside the main highway and Hal’s foster mother decorated the yard for every holiday. She said it cheered up the travelers, particularly the longdistance truckers. His foster mother loved long-distance truckers. She’d married one of them and she slept with others when her husband was away from home. A lot of truckers honked as they passed by on the highway. At Easter his foster mother filled their yard with plastic bunnies and poked cutouts from Styrofoam egg cartons onto the tips of their tree limbs. At Thanksgiving there were cardboard replicas of pilgrims and lots of plastic turkeys spread around the yard.

  When Hal’s foster father was off on the road in his own eighteen-wheeler, Hal never knew who was going to come walking out of his mother’s bedroom in the morning. Sometimes it was a trucker in his underwear. Sometimes it was a trucker with another woman. Sometimes it was two truckers. Once or twice one of the truckers tried to get Hal to join them.

  When Hal came back to the trailer in Evansville to kill his foster mother there was a trucker sleeping late in her bedroom. She was frying eggs and bacon. In the year he’d been away she’d gotten old, Hal had already killed Harry Bonner and his wife, Eloise. He’d killed Sarah and Johnny Mitchell and Trudy and Simon Shallows. Now there was only his last foster mother left. Her husband had died in a highway accident, so Hal didn’t have to kill him. When this last foster mother was dead, no one would know Hal had ever existed. He would be free to come and go as he pleased. He would be completely unrooted, no longer existing in anyone’s mind.

  Hal was fifteen years old and he’d been surviving on the road for a year. Run away from school, run away from the trailer beside the highway with the blinking Santa Claus on the roof. Judy Terrance’s trailer.

  Judy was standing at the stove frying eggs in her pink see-through nightie when Hal came into the trailer. She turned and saw him and something in her eyes went very still. She seemed to know exactly why he was there but she couldn’t make herself scream or run away or anything. She stood there with a spatula in her hand. The bacon was sizzling and the sunny-side-up eggs were almost done in the big black iron skillet.

  Her hair was gray and her old breasts hung loose, dark nipples staring down at the linoleum floor.

  Hal took the spatula from her hand. He turned off the burners.

  “I did the best I could,” she said. “You was the way you was when I took you on, and there wasn’t any changing it. I tried the best I knew how.”

  “You did all right,” Hal said. “You did fine. I was a handful.”

  Then he reached up, spread his hands around her throat, and he strangled her. She stood there looking into Hal’s eyes until she was unconscious. He laid her on the kitchen floor, then he lifted her nightie and tore an opening in her chest below her sternum, then he put his hand inside her soft
old body and squeezed her heart till it was quiet.

  When Hal looked up he saw the trucker had come out of the bedroom and was watching him from across the breakfast nook. His name was Hector Ramirez and he’d been visiting Judy Terrance for as long as Hal could remember, bringing her the white powder that got her through her empty days. Cocaine usually, but when he could get it, Hector gave her heroin. The man always had plastic bags of the powder in his truck, tucked among the lettuce and corn. He didn’t use the stuff himself, but he sold it to other truckers and to people along his route. That’s how he paid for the jewelry he wore, the diamonds on his hands and in his earlobe. Hector was a big man with a mustache that curved around his mouth and ran down to his chin like a Mexican bandit. He had a large belly and his tattooed arms were big and thick. Hal had seen the man wrestle the giant tires off his truck, so he knew how strong Hector was.

  That morning Hector was naked. He came close to Hal while he was stooped over Judy’s body, his right hand still inside her warm chest. Hector was a foot taller than Hal with big snaky muscles in his neck and shoulders. He bent close to see what Hal was doing. Hal drew his hand out of Judy Terrance’s body.

  “Now I gotta kill you, too, Hector.”

  “You could try, boy, but there’s not a chance in hell it’ll work out in your favor.”

  “I gotta do it, Hector. I can’t let you live.”

  Hector stepped back, pulled out a chair from the kitchen table, and sat down in it. He fondled his long penis and studied Hal.

  “What’d you do, reach in there and grab hold of Judy’s heart?”

  “I squeezed it till it stopped,” Hal said. He was looking at Hector’s big chest, wondering if his arm was long enough to reach all the way inside him.

  “You seem to know what you’re doing, boy.”

  Hal nodded.

  “I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you killed somebody that way, is it?”

  “No, sir. This is my seventh. You’ll be number eight.”

  Hal rose to his feet. He wiped his bloody hand on the leg of his blue jeans.

  “I know some people,” Hector said. “They might be interested in talking to a boy like you.”

  “What people?”

  “You got a trade? Some kind of work you do to make money?”

  “I know about embalming,” Hal said. “Preparing the dead.”

  Hector smiled. He looked over at Judy, lying on her back in her pink nightie.

  “She was a good woman, old Judy, but she was starting to dry up a little. I liked her, though. We had some laughs. When she wasn’t stoned out of her gourd.”

  He fiddled with his penis, not making it hard, just stretching it, scratching his balls. Hal watched him and said nothing. His hands were sticky with blood.

  “So tell me, boy. You think you could kill somebody you didn’t know? Some complete stranger? You think you could do that? Kill somebody without the heat of passion driving you to it.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, if you want, I’ll make a phone call, see if these people I know might be interested in talking to you. There could be a future in it, boy. There’s always somebody needs killing. And you seem to have a knack for it. There’d be a lot of travel, I’d expect. How you feel about traveling?”

  “Traveling is okay,” Hal said. “I don’t mind traveling.”

  Hector made his phone call and Hal went to work a month later. By the time he was fifteen, he’d killed fourteen people, the first seven for free, the next seven for pay. Most of the ones he was hired to kill were people like Randy Gianetti, men who’d stolen money from the drug dealers, men who thought they were smart. There were a couple of women, too. Hal made good money. Enough to live in motels wherever he was, order room service, watch whatever movies were on the pay-per-view. The number of people he’d killed was much higher now. He’d stopped counting. Keeping score made it seem like a game, and it wasn’t a game. Hal didn’t play games.

  In the dark motel parking lot, Hal watched those Christmas lights twinkle. Green and gold and red and blue. Little Japanese bulbs like fireflies trapped in plastic. Same kind Judy Terrance liked, only she always set hers so they’d blink. Two seconds, then a blink. Two seconds, then another, as regular as a heartbeat.

  Hal sat in his rental car and watched the motel until somewhere around two-thirty he saw Hannah Keller and the FBI agent come walking past the tiki bar. The agent had his arm over Hannah’s shoulder like he was too tired to walk on his own. Both of them were hunched over, trudging. It was a long swim back from the stilt house. Hal’s arms were still tired from the trip out and the paddle back. There was probably a bruise on the FBI agent’s throat where Hal had chopped him with the paddle.

  Hal Bonner waited in his car till the two of them went into his motel room and closed the door. He waited a little longer, then a little longer after that. She didn’t come out. A while later the gray van pulled out of the lot and then the white Ford left a while later. A silver Taurus with two men in it pulled in right afterward. Neither of the men got out of the car.

  Now Hal knew he needed to act. To do something to distract the men who were following Hannah Keller. And he needed to do it pretty quick before J. J. Fielding had a chance to die and the money he’d stolen disappeared forever. He sat there for another few minutes hatching a plan. He put Misty Fielding into the plan, then took her out, then once more he put her back in.

  When he could see the whole thing in his head, all the details bright and clear and perfect, he started his car and backed slowly out of the space, and pulled out of the lot. He was going to visit Hector Ramirez, his old friend. Hector would be just the distraction he needed. If these men in the parking lot were searching for Hal, trying to trap him, his plan would lure them away.

  Hal started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. His mind was tired. He’d been thinking more than he ever had before. He had never been involved in an assignment that required so much of him. It was a challenge, perhaps too great a challenge. All he’d ever had to do in the past was locate someone and kill them. But this was far more complicated and Hal was starting to tire. Starting to feel a knot of muscle tighten inside his head. Then he thought of Misty Fielding, and he felt the knot relax. He thought of her some more and the pressure continued to ease.

  All the way across the city of Miami, Hal saw Misty’s green eyes staring at him out of the dark.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Hannah took a long, hot shower in Frank’s tiny bathroom. After drying off and slipping into a pair of his fleecy sweatpants and a white sweatshirt, she was still shivering. Her hair was damp but at least the sticky, salty feel was rinsed away. Her legs were weak. She felt faint and dizzy, as if she were hovering out-of-body a foot or two in the air above herself. The marathon swim had totally drained her, pushed her beyond any limits she’d ever known.

  She opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the efficiency apartment. Frank was brewing coffee. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, his hair in a madman’s tangle.

  “How’s the throat?”

  “Great.” His voice was a painful croak. “Just great.”

  “You sound like you’ve been smoking three packs a day for twenty years.”

  “I must’ve swallowed a half gallon of seawater.” He poured them each a mug of coffee. “Black or what?”

  “Black’s fine.”

  She took the mug and sat down at the small dinette table. She blew on the coffee, then had a sip.

  “I should go, let you rest.”

  He had a sip of his coffee, came over, patted her on the back, and pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.

  “You saved my life.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “I respectfully disagree.”

  “You should probably stop talking, Frank. Save your voice.”

  “I probably should.”

  He downed half his coffee, grimacing as the hot liquid passed through his throat. He
set the mug down between them.

  Hannah was still hovering near the ceiling, watching herself. Her stomach wobbling. Something clenching and unclenching deep in her gut.

  “That guy,” he said. “Did you get a look at him?”

  “Not much of one.”

  “Same guy you saw at the deli? One with the motorcycle helmet?”

  “It was dark, Frank. I didn’t get that kind of look.”

  “He had a buzz cut, though.”

  “You saw him better than I did. You were in his face.”

  “Well, he was one strong little weasel, I know that much. Jesus, if you hadn’t been there, Hannah, I’d be floating facedown about now, drifting with the tide. I’d be in the morning paper, another body washes ashore.”

  She finished her coffee, stood up, and took the mug to the sink and rinsed it.

  “What the hell’s going on, Frank? Somebody’s taking shots at me. A few hours later, this guy steals our kayak, leaves us out there to drown.”

  Frank shrugged.

  “I thought you’d quit. You were just going to walk away.”

  “I’m still considering it.”

  “I wish you’d hang on a little longer. We’re almost at the finish line.”

  “Look,” she said, leaning against the sink. “I’m going to need to go.”

  “What? You gotta pick up Randall?”

  “Randall’s okay. He can sleep over with Gisela.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be fine there.”

  “You made arrangements for that, a sleep-over?”

  She shrugged.

  “So, were you planning to spend the night with me?”