‘Maybe you figured wrong,’ Rhees said, and slung an arm around Amanda’s shoulder, a protective gesture. He wants to keep the world away from me, she thought. Especially that part of it where Willie Drumm belonged, that greased slope into despair. He doesn’t want me sliding back down into that abyss.
She said, ‘Willie’s come a long way. It would be bad manners, John.’
‘Far be it from me to be uncivil,’ Rhees said. He stared at Drumm, who was wiping his wide forehead with a handkerchief.
Drumm said, ‘Lookit, I don’t mean to cause a problem, John. This is awkward.’
Amanda said, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’
‘Oh sure, it’s just fine. Amanda says so.’ Rhees stepped away from her. With his hands in the pockets of his jeans, he slouched, staring at the ground.
‘What’s on your mind, Willie?’ she asked.
Drumm said quietly, ‘Something connected with our old friend Sanchez.’
‘Sanchez?’ She had an odd experience of darkness, as if the shadow she’d felt a few moments ago had lengthened in her head. A sensory malfunction. There was a kind of faltering inside her. Sanchez. The chill claustrophobic space of a courtroom entered her memory and she heard refrigerated air rush from a wall-duct and the sharp knock, knock of a judge’s gavel and the quiet tapping of the court reporter, babble she didn’t need, but it filled her head regardless.
She fumbled out a cigarette and lit it, aware of Rhees frowning and jingling coins loudly in his pockets.
Drumm said, ‘I didn’t want you seeing this on the eleven o’clock news before I had a chance to tell you in person.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Something’s turned up. Literally.’
‘Explain, Willie.’
‘I’m talking a fish,’ he said. ‘A very big fish.’
3
It was 23 miles to the morgue in Flagstaff. Willie Drumm drove slowly out of the pines. ‘John was pretty steamed up back there,’ he said.
‘He worries about me. But he gets over things quickly,’ she said. Where was the conviction in her voice? Rhees had stomped back to the cabin, having registered a couple of protests. Butt out of this. This hasn’t got a goddam thing to do with you any more. She imagined him walking up and down the small rooms, burning off his funk. The wonder of Rhees was his inability to maintain a bad mood. He might go through the motions, but he didn’t have the heart to keep a bad humour alive for long.
Drumm said, ‘I still feel like the guy who turns up at the banquet too late to tell everybody the soup was laced with arsenic.’
‘You were talking about a certain fish,’ she said.
Drumm slowed at a yield sign. ‘Right. Washes up in a shallow tributary of the Little Colorado River. No ID, nothing. Gunshot wound in the heart. So the body comes under the jurisdiction of the Navaho cops, but Sergeant Charlie House isn’t happy with non-native American bodies turning up on his reservation, so he ships the body to Flag, and a set of prints down to Phoenix. We run the prints, we get a match. Which is why I’m trucking up here to look at the body and talk with the coroner. Meantime, I’m thinking, it doesn’t add up. Make any sense to you, Amanda?’
She searched the breast pocket of her shirt for cigarettes and matches. ‘Reuben Galindez was supposed to be far, far away. He was supposed to be secure. That was the arrangement.’
‘Right. So what’s he doing in a river in northern Arizona? And who shot him?’
She lit a cigarette, shrugged the question aside. The morning had taken on a fuzzy dreamlike quality. One minute you’re fishing and the day’s sweet and rich with promise, the next you’re cruising off to the morgue to look at the face of a dead guy, and the axis of reality tilts and you wonder if this is hallucination. Who shot Galindez?
‘I couldn’t begin to guess,’ she said. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted to try. This wasn’t her business any longer – so why had she agreed to accompany Drumm to the morgue? Curiosity? A sense of disbelief that Galindez had turned up in a place where he didn’t belong? That maybe the ID made from a set of fingerprints was a mistake and the corpse on the slab would turn out to be that of a stranger?
Drumm drove a mile or two in silence, a toothpick parked at the corner of his mouth. ‘The only way I can figure this is that Sanchez is behind the slaying. Galindez turns State’s evidence and Sanchez gets a room in the Death Row Hilton. He’s going crazy in there, so he gets a message out and somebody does a number on Galindez. Revenge being sweet and all.’
‘Yeah. Just try proving it,’ she said.
They were in downtown Flagstaff now. The main drag was motels advertising waterbeds and cable TV, stacked alongside an abundance of fast-food franchises. Plastic flags hung motionless in the sunlit air outside car dealerships. Drumm rolled down his window and the smoke from Amanda’s cigarette drifted away.
He parked the Bronco and turned to gaze at her. ‘You don’t really need to come inside.’
‘I’ve seen dead men before, Willie.’
‘It’s up to you, Amanda.’ Drumm got out of the vehicle. Always courteous, he stepped round and opened Amanda’s door.
The room was chilly and windowless, lit by a grid of pale fluorescent lights. Charlie House was there, an enormous copper-faced Navaho whose tan uniform was immaculate. The deputy coroner, wearing a badge that identified him as T. Lavery, was also present. He was a lean man dressed in a starched lime-green smock.
It was Lavery who slid open the drawer and said, ‘Step right up, folks. See Moby Dick.’ He had an irksome chuckle. He’d clearly developed a barricade of insensitivity against death.
Amanda hesitated a moment before she looked at the bloated corpse on the metal slab. There was a hole in the area of the heart. Ragged, cleansed over and over by the river, it suggested a large embittered mouth. The left eye was blood-red, the right gone entirely. The socket was filled with sediment from the river. The lips and cheeks and throat had been gnawed and slashed by predators – rats, vultures, whatever. The man’s hair had the slimy texture of strands clogged in a shower-drain. On the middle finger of one plump, water-puckered hand was a ruby ring embellished with miniature gold leaves.
She looked away. She felt more tense than she’d expected. The smell of death became trapped in the back of her throat, a raw flavour of chemicals and decay.
Drumm said, ‘Galindez.’
Amanda thought, Galindez, beyond doubt.
‘Half his face is missing,’ Drumm said.
‘Sure, but you don’t see a ring like that every day of the week,’ she said. She remembered the item of jewellery, the habit Galindez had had of twisting it. Ruby and gold, flashy. He’d told her during one of their reviews of the testimony he planned to give that he’d won the ring in a game of poker with some fast company in Bullhead City. What the hell was he doing lying here in a morgue in Flagstaff?
Lavery said, ‘The way it looks, he’d been in the water maybe two or three days, could be more, could be less. A single gunshot wound to the heart. Size of the wound, I’d say it was a forty-five. A secondary wound, left arm. Killed upriver, floated down. Speed of the current, he might have been shot 30, 40 miles away from where Charlie found him.’
Drumm asked, ‘Anything else you can tell me?’
Lavery said, ‘I’ll give you a copy of my report. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here. Clothes washed clean, no clues there. Shoes missing. No unusual detritus under the fingernails. Facial lacerations consistent with predatory animals: buzzards, coyotes for sure. They made a meal of him when he washed ashore. Speaking of food, if you’re interested, this guy’s last meal was spaghetti and meatballs with a side salad that included radishes.’
Drumm said, ‘You don’t happen to know anything really useful, do you? Like the name of the restaurant?’
Lavery smiled and gazed down at the corpse. ‘Give me a few more days, Lieutenant, I might be able to tell you not only where he ate but also how much of a tip he left.’
‘Droll,�
�� Drumm said.
‘In this job, droll’s useful.’
Charlie House looked at Drumm and smiled. ‘He’s all yours, Lieutenant.’
Drumm said, ‘A gift from the Navaho nation.’
‘Render unto Caesar,’ House said.
Lavery asked, ‘Anybody mind if I stick Moby back in his box? These outings seem to fatigue him.’
Nobody objected. Lavery slid the drawer shut. Amanda heard the faint squeak of metal on metal. She thought of Galindez floating downstream, ferried by currents, spinning and spinning, and she wondered how far his body had really travelled.
Lavery said, ‘Next time you figure on sending us something, Charlie, make sure it doesn’t smell this bad.’
‘I got enough on my hands without corpses that come floating into the reservation from outside,’ House said.
Lavery looked at Willie Drumm. ‘I need you to sign some papers, Lieutenant. Papers, always papers, a goddam ocean of papers.’
Drumm followed Lavery out of the room.
Alone with Amanda, Charlie House asked, ‘You were the prosecutor in the Sanchez case, right?’
‘Right,’ she said. She was cold to the marrow. She moved towards the door that led out of the morgue and the big Navaho came up behind her.
‘I read you’d quit,’ he said.
She stepped into a corridor. It was air-conditioned space, but warmer than the morgue.
‘Yeah, I quit,’ she said.
‘Weary?’
She turned and looked at Charlie House. He had sympathetic eyes the colour of roasted coffee. Death was jarring. She hadn’t come all the way up here from the city to look at a corpse, especially that of Reuben Galindez. She’d abdicated her old life and was waiting, as if in a state of suspension, for a new one to present itself. She wanted to be weightless, unshackled by pressures, free of the past. When you don’t like your life you change it, Rhees had said to her about a month ago. Which was what she’d been trying to do, a purifying process, a reincarnation, a new Amanda restored from the ashes of the old.
But a dead man had been washed out of a river, a man who should have been somewhere else and long gone, renamed and reinvented, hidden in the secret places of the Federal Witness Protection Program.
‘Weary’s close enough,’ she answered House finally, and she heard a strange lifeless quality in her voice.
4
She thinks, I need wheels. She’s never stolen anything in her life, she doesn’t know how to begin. She’s imagining unlocked doors, keys dangling inside, maybe somebody running an errand inside the shopping mall, a forgetful person. Theft’s wrong, but maybe not when your life’s at stake, maybe there’s some kind of forgiveness under special circumstances and God makes allowances.
She walks up and down and she’s dog-tired and scared because she doesn’t know how long she’s got before they find her. And she’s sweating, she’s melting away under the hot noon sun. It ain’t pleasant, she needs a bath and a shampoo and perfume.
She stops, pretends she’s fumbling inside her bag, a canvas thing that holds all her sorry belongings. O Jesus, she’s come a long way down from the time she shared the big house in Carefree with Ángel, and the rooms all tiled blue and white, and fans that turned beneath the ceiling. And the greenhouse, the conservatory Ángel called it, where there were rows and rows of green foliage in pots, and the air was scented with herbs. But this is like a memory she stole from somebody else, a memory of mint and coriander.
She fumbles inside the bag, trying to look busy, because there’s a security guy in a blue uniform standing at the entrance to the mall and gazing out across the parking-lot and his gun shines in his holster. He’s all glinting metal and his sunglasses are mirrors and she knows, she knows, he’s watching her as she moves between the cars and glances in each one, looking for keys. She takes a Kleenex out of her bag and raises it to her forehead, and the security guy shifts his face a little. She wipes sweat from her brow and dumps the used tissue in a trash can.
People come out of the mall pushing carts. Kids and women, and she remembers Ángel once said, We’ll start a family, but that was before it all went to hell, which happened real fast in the end. Now she listens to the clatter of cart wheels and a kid singing a commercial jingle for some pizza joint and a mother calling out to a stray child, ‘Come back here, Terry. Don’t go wandering away, you hear?’
She watches the mother catch the kid and lift him inside the shopping cart. The security guy is moving out of the doorway and coming across the lot, and this is exactly what she don’t need. She rummages inside the bag again for something to do, and wonders if she looks like a bum because her hair’s not combed and she don’t have makeup on, or if she looks suspicious. What’s she doing in Farmington, New Mexico anyway? She holds her breath. She hears the guard’s boots on the tarmac; clack, clack, clack. She wonders what he wants. She wonders how long she’s got before they catch her up. You wonder a whole lotta things when you’re scared.
The guard says, ‘You OK?’
She looks at him through her grease-smudged sunglasses. ‘Yeah, yeah fine.’
‘I been watching you,’ he says. ‘You look kinda distressed.’
‘Distressed?’ She says the word deezteressed. Her pronunciation, it’s like giving something away. It’s all fear and sunlight and sweat. Ángel used to say, Learn how to talk right. Big shot Ángel, learn how to talk right. I learned how to talk well enough, she thinks. Too well. The sky is coming down on her, blue and heavy, squeezing her dry like an orange in a drought.
The guard says, ‘You sure you’re OK?’
‘Fine,’ she says. Go away, she thinks. Quit watching me.
‘It’s a hot one,’ the guard says.
She looks at him again. A hot one. Ah, yeah. He’s talking about the weather now, the goddam weather. This is all she needs.
‘It’s heatstroke weather,’ he says. ‘Drink lotsa water.’
‘Water, yeah.’ She walks away, the guard watches her, then he turns and strides back to the mall entrance and she keeps going between the rows of parked cars. She’s frantic, caught between the guard and the guys she imagines are maybe only a couple of blocks away. It’s like a whirlwind of panic around her and she’s dragged up inside it the way a leaf is sucked up in a cyclone.
Find a goddam car.
She crosses herself. Say a prayer. Ask for guidance. The saints are on your side. Except she has a sense they’ve abandoned her, because she wouldn’t be in this shit situation if they were around.
Up ahead she sees an aged Datsun slide into a parking-lot. An old guy gets out. He has a black wood cane with a brass handle and his white shirt-tail hangs out over his black-green herringbone pants and he moves slow, closing the door of his car, then turning and catching her eye and drawing one hand across the stubble on his chin. She looks away.
The old guy goes towards the mall. He uses the cane for support. He calls out to the guard. ‘Hot nuff fer you, Jimmy?’
‘Nah,’ says the guard.
She hears the old guy laugh and say something that sounds like, ‘Hot nuff to fry a damn ole egg on the sidewalk fer sure,’ and she moves a few feet towards the car, seeing a set of keys lying on the passenger seat.
This is where it goes right or it goes all wrong.
She runs a hand through her hair and waits. The tarmac shimmers. She feels heat rise up through the soles of her shoes. She feels the air is filled with invisible devils. Fuck you, Ángel. You put me in this place, you did that. And I loved you once, I gave you my heart, and what did you do with it?
She touches the door handle of the Datsun. The metal burns right through her. Her skin’s welded to metal. She stares in the direction of the guard. The old guy’s reached the mall and the guard’s laughing at something and she knows she’s not gonna get a better moment than this.
She opens the door, gets in the car, picks up the keys, tries until she finds one that fits the ignition, then she turns it and the engine makes a nois
e like karam-karam-karam. If this car had lungs they’d be bronchial. The vehicle shudders, roars into life and belches smoke. She pulls the seat forward, presses a foot on the gas-pedal, sticks the gears in reverse and backs out. She sees the guard come out of the entranceway shouting something, and the old guy poking the air with his cane and the black wood shining, but she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s moving, and although the guard is chasing after her she’s out of the parking-lot fast and onto the road. Then she’s looking for a freeway sign, even as she knows the demons are congregating in clouds behind her, and her world is about as secure as a house on stilts in a country of earthquakes.
5
On the drive back to the cabin Drumm said, ‘Ok, Galindez goes in the Program. Then what? He decides he can’t hack the confines of witness protection and wants to get back to his old haunts, only to be dusted by one of his old cronies. Or do we skip that and point the finger of blame directly at Victor Sanchez and consider the possibility that he managed to breach Program security and get Galindez?’
Amanda found herself remembering the sand and grit in the empty socket, the stench of dead flesh. ‘I’m not getting clear pictures of how he’d pull that off.’ Breach Program security. She didn’t want it to be that. Something at the back of her mind was sending up pale smoke signals she didn’t want to read. ‘How would he get inside information? How did he make the arrangements?’
‘First he’d need a paid informant with Program knowledge,’ Drumm said. ‘After that, a hired gun.’
Amanda gazed at the pine forest on either side of the highway. A paid informant, a hired gun. She felt the sun strike her face through the windshield. ‘I don’t want to go in this direction, Willie. It makes me queasy.’
Drumm looked regretful. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I don’t know why I didn’t go straight to Flagstaff, and why the hell I took a detour to find you. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘You didn’t exactly press-gang me.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Drumm said. ‘You don’t need good old Uncle Willie dumping the recent past on your doorstep. It was piss-poor judgement on my part.’
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