Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Smoke?’ Amanda pushed the pack across the table. Her hand shook a little and she tried to still it.

  ‘I conquered the habit,’ he said. ‘This a social visit or what?’

  ‘No, not social.’ Isabel had often referred to her former husband as Ángel, pronounced Anyel. It was a stretch to think of Sanchez as anyelic. He was spun out of darkness, a creature of vicious whim. If he had wings, they took him on flights into dismal regions of his own making. Celestial destinations weren’t on Ángel’s itinerary.

  Amanda glanced at the guard, whose name tag identified him as Holland E. He was staring at a bare wall.

  ‘How’s prison life?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a ball. We got some real fuckwits there. Real clowns.’ Sanchez gave her his withering look. She was determined to hold the gaze and not flinch, even though she was thinking about the border guards Sanchez had executed. He’d made them kneel and then shot them directly into their open mouths. Galindez, whose evasive manner in court had made him a less plausible witness than Isabel, had testified to this. Sanchez had ordered the guards to pray for mercy, then slaughtered them anyway. Like a coupla lambs. Bleeding all over the place.

  ‘I guess it’s not easy stuck in here,’ she said. ‘You appealing against the sentence?’

  ‘I’m appealing any way you look at it.’ He was amused. His smile was lethal. The sculpted body and the bronze skin were just extra tinsel on the Christmas tree. In another reality he might have been a male model of the Latin variety, white linen suit and two-tone shoes, strutting his stuff on the catwalk.

  ‘What you here for anyway?’ he asked. ‘Talk about my sentence? Hey, maybe you got a pardon tucked in your pocket. You got a chit from the Governor or what?’

  ‘No pardon, Victor. Just some loose ends.’

  ‘I’m a loose end, huh?’

  ‘Tell me how you got to them.’

  ‘Got to who? You talk in puzzles, lady.’

  ‘You don’t have any idea what I’m driving at, I suppose.’

  Sanchez laid a hand flat on his thigh. ‘I like puzzles. I got this book with all these scrambled words in them and stuff, also join the dots and get a fucking donkey or eagle. I do crosswords. It gets pretty damn thrilling, I gotta say.’

  ‘It’s not crosswords I have in mind,’ she said.

  ‘You know what I think of you?’

  Amanda shook her head. ‘I don’t read minds.’

  Sanchez moved the hand on his thigh. ‘Kinda proper, kinda aloof. But hot in the sack. Whooeee,’ and he waved his hand loosely, as if his fingertips had been scalded.

  ‘Games, Victor. I’m not playing.’

  ‘What are you? Fortysomethin’? Late thirties? A lady in prime time, ripe and ready for plucking.’

  ‘Is this the bit where you grab your crotch?’ she asked.

  ‘I watched you in court. You gave me these looks.’

  ‘Chief among them was contempt.’

  ‘Contempt my ass.’

  ‘This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t see you as God’s gift.’

  ‘Know how many women I fucked in my life? Running close to fifteen hundred.’

  ‘I bet you got testimonial letters from all of them.’

  ‘I got no complaints. Most came back for more of the same, and some screamed with pleasure,’ he said.

  ‘Except when you were cutting off their nipples, I guess.’

  Sanchez made a snorting sound. ‘You believe that cunt’s story? She walks into court like a Madonna, and she sits there and every time she opens her mouth out comes another lie.’

  ‘She blackened your character, huh?’

  ‘She fucking charbroiled me,’ he said.

  Amanda was silent a moment. Sanchez had led her on a detour and she’d followed. She was being drawn into areas of no relevance. She said, ‘Let’s backtrack, Victor.’

  ‘You were talking puzzles, I remember.’

  ‘You were the one talking puzzles. I was asking you how you did it.’

  ‘I heard that tune already. Did what?’

  ‘Galindez. Your ex-wife. You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Pair of fucking vipers,’ he said.

  ‘How did you get to them, Victor?’

  ‘Get to them how?’

  ‘How did you have them killed?’

  Sanchez pushed his chair back. ‘Killed? You’re saying they’re dead?’

  ‘Galindez for sure. He was shot through the heart. Isabel maybe. That’s what I’m saying.’

  Sanchez tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. He moved his feet and the shackles rattled. He laughed, then he slumped back in his chair and his arms dangled at his sides and he looked serious. ‘How do you mean Isabel maybe?’

  ‘Just what I said. Isabel maybe.’

  ‘Explain that to me.’

  ‘Your people might have slipped up with her, I don’t know yet.’ A slim prospect, she thought, but sometimes you grabbed at such things because you wanted to hold on to a belief, no matter how marginal.

  ‘My people? Meaning what?’

  ‘The guys you hired. How did you arrange it? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Arrange it? That what you think?’

  ‘That’s my general inclination, Victor.’

  ‘Look, lady, I sit in a cell and I do these puzzles in the book I got. It’s a confined life.’

  ‘Somehow you got a message to somebody,’ she said.

  ‘Oh sure, same way they allow me to send out for Domino’s pizza and call-girls.’

  He propped his elbows on the table and stared at her. Discomfited by the troubling black of his eyes, she was silent a moment. Sanchez lied instinctively. He probably considered truth a form of weakness.

  She said, ‘You wanted vengeance. You had the motive, Victor.’

  ‘Sure I wanted vengeance. I sit in my cell and I dream up these real slow painful deaths for them, when I’m not joining fucking dots. If dreaming’s a crime, I ain’t been told. What you gonna do? Slap another death sentence on me?’

  ‘They were in the Witness Protection Program, Victor,’ she said. ‘So how did you reach them?’

  ‘Lady, you got a serious listening problem.’

  What could you tell from Sanchez’s expressions? What could you read into the body language? She shook a cigarette out of the pack and flicked her lighter. She was getting nothing here. She watched him tap his fingers on the table and had an impression of great energy held in check, but only just.

  ‘For the sake of argument, let’s take this big leap and imagine you didn’t do it,’ she said. ‘You got any idea who did?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Try a little harder, Victor.’

  ‘What you want from me?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘The truth is what I been telling you.’

  ‘I wonder why I’m not buying it.’

  ‘Like I give a fuck.’

  Sanchez smiled at her. She saw slyness in the expression, complicity even, or maybe he was a mirror in which you saw any reflection you wanted. ‘You say I done it. OK, you figure it out, you’re the brains. Me, I’m a common criminal. I’m lowlife.’

  Sanchez gestured for her to lean a little closer to him, as if he wanted to say something in confidence. She inclined her head warily and drew her chair nearer to the table. She was conscious of his overwhelming physical presence, the way he projected himself. She imagined how women would go for this. You could look into Sanchez’s eyes and see nothing there but romance and sea cruises and breezes blowing through chiffon and prolonged lovemaking, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, in the penthouse cabin.

  His hand rose and his fingertips touched her lips gently, and she didn’t move, she held his eyes, smelled cheap prison soap on his fingers. This touch might arouse some kid, a naive girl like Isabel or the 1,500 others he’d boasted about. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck go cold even as she knew it was important she didn’t move awa
y from him, that she meet him as far as she could on his own terms, whatever they were. Then he parted her lips and touched her teeth. He had long fingers. Those same fingers had taken a razor-blade to Isabel’s breast. Don’t forget that. She hoped he suffered in his cell. She hoped he had times of dread. She wanted him to have bad dreams. Seeing himself strapped down in a gurney and wheeled inside the execution chamber, the IV drip attached to an open vein, the lethal concoction entering his bloodstream, and then goodbye, good riddance.

  The maintenance of eye contact stressed her, and suddenly she was plunged back inside that foul courtroom, her head aching, nose stuffy, a drum pounding in her brain and the judge’s gavel striking wood.

  He whispered to her. ‘Say, maybe you could kinda accidentally drop something on the floor, and when you bend down and pick it up you could find some way of entertaining me, then maybe I’ll confess to anything you like …’

  The guard said, ‘Hey, Romeo. No contact. You know the rules.’

  ‘Yessir, Mr Holland.’ Sanchez drew his hand back with exaggerated slowness. It was the motion of a man who didn’t care about a goddam thing, who had nothing but disdain for authority, for the world.

  Amanda stood up quickly, walked to the observation window and crossed her arms. She could still feel the lingering impression of his fingertips. He can get to you even when you despise him. She ran the back of her hand across her lips: an act of erasure, a small exorcism. But she felt vaguely askew, thrown off centre by Sanchez and that strange unwanted intimacy. The way he’d whispered. The way he’d imposed himself. Drop something, go down on your knees, entertain me while you’re down there.

  She strolled round the table.

  He said, ‘I don’t have to answer your goddam questions. What’s in it for me anyhow? Half an hour’s exercise in the yard, maybe my own TV with multi-channels and a remote control? Big fucking deal. Suppose you gimme one good reason I should help you. You put me in this shithole.’

  ‘You put yourself here, Victor. I was only doing my job.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, your job. Instrument of justice. Blindfold bitch. Fuck you.’ Sanchez stared at her, challenging her.

  She watched him a moment in silence, but now she couldn’t hold his eyes because his look was hard and heartless and impossible to meet. She imagined that same expression on his face when he shot the border guards.

  She turned away, feeling a tightness in her head. ‘Let’s see if we can put together a scenario, Victor. Let’s say you managed to acquire some information. You got to somebody inside the Witness Program. Say you dangled the kind of money this somebody couldn’t turn down. In return, you get Galindez’s location, and Isabel’s.’

  ‘And I manage to do all this business from my fucking cell with no phone,’ he said.

  ‘You arranged it before the trial. You put it all together before the verdict.’

  ‘Wow. And how did I manage all this?’

  ‘I don’t know how, but I’m close, Victor. I’m on track. Right?’

  Sanchez laughed suddenly, then he stopped and his face was icy. He could go from tropical to arctic in a flash. She looked at him again, but it was still difficult to hold his gaze because it was as if he had some kind of electric force field around him, and if you listened hard enough you could hear a tiny little sizzle of danger.

  He stood up and gestured to the guard. ‘Holland, I’m through here. Take me home, country roads.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  ‘Wait for what? I don’t have a whole lotta time, lady.’

  She wondered how he could look that good and be so monstrous. Skin deep. Go down through the epidermal layers and keep going and you encounter a black heart, an unlit chamber.

  She said, ‘Nobody else had the motive, Victor.’

  ‘Motive ain’t proof, something you ought to know.’

  ‘You’re the only one,’ she said.

  He looked up at the ceiling a moment, then he moved. She hadn’t expected it, nor had the guard. Despite the inhibition of the shackles, Sanchez acted with surprising agility. He lunged, bringing his forehead down hard on Holland’s face. Amanda heard bone break and saw Holland drop to his knees, blood pouring from his nostrils. Sanchez turned quickly and with sheer brute strength forced her back against the wall, his solid forearm pressed like an iron bar to her throat. An alarm bell was ringing somewhere in the building. She heard it distantly because the pressure of Sanchez’s arm was squeezing the air out of her and there was a roaring inside her head. She beat against the sides of his face with her fists but he wasn’t troubled by her efforts, he just kept smiling, his expression one of – what? Some dark joy? A kind of twisted glee? He brought his face down close, his mouth almost touching hers. His breath smelled of toothpaste. She was conscious of how her knees touched his and the way he had his body pressed against her. Weird little lights fizzed in her vision.

  He whispered, ‘Bad things come in threes, lady. You ever hear that saying? Two down, you can guess the rest. Keep it in mind.’

  Holland had recovered his balance and taken his gun from the holster. His face was covered with blood. He said, ‘Motherfucker,’ and struck Sanchez on the back of the skull, but the blow didn’t alter Sanchez’s expression. The smile was fixed and immutable and dreadful. More guards were clattering into the room, three or four heavyweight types. One of them applied a stranglehold around Sanchez’s neck and dragged him away from Amanda, another battered his ribs with a night-stick. Sanchez, covering his head with his hands, fell to the floor and lay in a foetal position. The guards circled him, kicked him a few times, then hauled him to his feet. His body limp, he looked at Amanda, who was trying to catch her breath and fight against the sensation of blackness that raged in her head.

  ‘Remember,’ he said.

  She watched him being led out of the room. She heard the rattle and clank of the shackles and the sound of his laughter, then the swift crack of a night-stick, and after that there was silence from the corridor.

  Donald Scarfe had appeared. ‘Jesus. Are you OK?’

  ‘Shocked, I guess,’ she said. She coughed a few times into her hand.

  ‘You need a medic? I’ll call for one.’

  She shook her head. Her legs felt like they were made of air. ‘Nothing’s broken. I’ll be OK.’

  ‘I was in the observation room,’ Scarfe said. ‘Then it all happened so fast. I should never have given permission for this –’

  ‘Don, it’s OK, I’m fine.’ But it wasn’t OK. She leaned against the table, shaken, light-headed, breathing a little too quickly. She lit a cigarette anyhow, imagined smoke swirling round her lungs as if she were seeing a live-action X-ray of herself.

  ‘You heard the last thing he said?’ she asked.

  ‘He says things just to make your head spin.’

  ‘Bad things come in threes. You heard that.’

  ‘I’d take it with a pinch of salt, Amanda.’

  Two down, she thought. Bad things come in threes. You know the rest. Two down, one to go. She had images of Galindez’s white hand and his ruby ring and Isabel’s blood and her cheap pink barrette, and she thought of herself lying on a coroner’s slab and Rhees having to identify her. Bad things.

  In the corridor fluorescent tubes hummed. She felt they were buzzing inside her.

  ‘What now?’ Scarfe asked.

  What now. She wasn’t sure. She felt hot and run-down and something else, something new, scared, and she’d have to drive home through relentless sunlight in a world that had abruptly shifted and cracked under her feet. She looked at Scarfe, but she said nothing. She was thinking of the smell of Victor Sanchez’s breath and feeling the leaden weight of his arm and how the air had been crushed out of her. And she was hearing his words, over and over.

  22

  Dansk sat in his car in the cul-de-sac and watched the house. A dead-end street was a bad environment for surveillance. Traffic entering the street, eight houses on either side and one at the end, was usually loca
l. A stranger who sat too long in his car would draw attention. Somebody would jot down his licence number, maybe even make a phone call to the local cops.

  All the windows had little yellow or blue security stickers attached. Some were barred, others had steel shutters. This was profitable territory for the merchants of fear that sold home-safety systems.

  The house Dansk watched was the last one on the left. He was parked diagonally across from it. It was the only house with an unruly garden out front. Some care was needed here, a little pride. There were neighbours to think about, the general appearance of the street, property values.

  He looked at his watch. He didn’t want to spend more than twenty minutes max in this place, any longer was folly, even twenty was stretching it.

  He had a clipboard to which was attached a number of invoice sheets with the name of a dummy pharmaceutical company, and he started ticking items off with his pen and trying to seem occupied, like a salesman or a delivery guy catching up on a backlog of paperwork.

  It was a strange thing about people. If they saw you with a clipboard they tended to glaze you out, thinking you were on some kind of legitimate business and unthreatening.

  His cellular phone rang and he picked it up.

  Pasquale had a voice like somebody coming down from a helium infusion: high-pitched, a little husky. ‘On the way, Anthony. Maybe two minutes.’

  ‘Right.’ Dansk hung up and waited. He saw the car turn into the cul-de-sac, then it passed him and he watched it enter the driveway of the house with the overgrown garden.

  He saw her get out.

  She wore a navy-blue shirt and jeans. She swept a hand through her short brown hair. There was a slightly distracted frown on her face. Halfway up the path she stopped and plucked a leaf off a eucalyptus tree and sniffed it as if it were a rare perfume. Faces intrigued Dansk. This woman, for example. She wasn’t what Dansk would call conventionally attractive. Good-looking in an idiosyncratic way, determined jaw, cheeks a little fleshy. She wasn’t the type he went for. For one thing she had tits, and Dansk liked his women scrawny. He liked bones and angled structures and skinny hips. Another thing, she was outside his age limit. He preferred eighteen, seventeen. This one was what – forty?