Liquid Smoke

by Jeff Shelby

  She stood. “I will go wake the boys.” She left the room.

  Carter watched her go down the hall. “You’ll be alright here?” he asked. “If he shows up, you’ll be alright?”

  I waited for Lucia Vasquez and her boys to return, not knowing how to answer that question.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  For three days, I wandered around the Vasquez home, looking at pictures, checking closets, waiting. Periodically I called Carter, making sure all was okay. They were twenty minutes away, in a hotel in Yuma, safe. The kids thought they were on vacation. Lucia seemed concerned but was making the best of it.

  On the fourth day, I was beginning to think that what Carter had suggested was true. Maybe Keene was just coming down to attend to other business and I’d overreacted. Maybe he’d assumed that Liz’s death had sent me into a downward spiral since I’d disappeared and he was in the clear. Maybe I had unnecessarily disrupted the Vasquezes’ lives for my own agenda. But I’d told him about my conversation with Klimes and he’d gone through the trouble to blow up Carter’s car. I just didn’t think he’d run. It didn’t fit with everything else he’d done.

  I decided to sit through one more night. Then, if nothing had happened, I’d call it off.

  The house was mortuary quiet for most of the evening, just like all the previous nights. A few creaks and hums in the dark, but nothing more. I sat in the far corner of the living room, listening to the tiny sounds, wondering if Keene was coming.

  It was just past four in the morning when I stopped wondering.

  At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard anything. I listened hard and it was quiet. But then I made out the faint scrape of a footstep outside the front door.

  I lay down next to the couch, pressing myself into the floor. My eyes had adjusted enough to the dim light that I could see the doorknob move. It jiggled, the hand on the other side slowly working it back and forth. Finally, it gave.

  I steadied the 9mm in my hands and aimed right at the door.

  The door inched open, and initially it seemed no one was there. But my eyes focused, and I could see Keene dressed entirely in black. He’d made the mistake of coming in without his gun drawn. He shut the door behind him, not a sound coming from him or the door.

  He turned away from the door and eyed the hallway. If Lucia and the boys had been there, Keene would’ve smiled and thought about how clever he was.

  I squeezed the trigger and the quiet of the house exploded. The bullet hit Keene’s thigh with a wet thud, and he collapsed.

  I vaulted off the floor and was on top of him immediately. His hands were grasping at his leg, and his eyes were wide with shock. I dropped my knee onto his thigh where I thought the wound was, and he howled. I slapped a hand across his mouth.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” I said, grinding my knee harder into his leg.

  He strained against me, ugly groans echoing against the palm of my hand.

  “See you in a little bit,” I said, then dropped the butt of my gun into his temple.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  I drove east on the highway, then south without a road, until we were out in the middle of the dark desert. Keene was still unconscious in the passenger seat. I opened the door and threw him to the ground.

  He rolled over with a grunt, his left thigh decorated with a wide swath of dark blood. I pulled out the garbage bags I’d lined the interior of the rental car with and tossed them in a pile next to him.

  His eyes opened slowly.

  I fired the Sig Sauer Carter had obtained for me about a foot from Keene’s left ear. He jerked and rolled hard to his right. He came face up again, dirt and sand now caked in the bleeding gash above his eye.

  “You killed Darcy,” I said and fired again at the ground, this time to his right. My voice sounded unusually loud in the silent and lonely desert.

  He yelled and rolled in the opposite direction. He pushed up on his hands and sat up, his breathing ragged.

  “You left my father to rot in prison,” I said.

  Keene tensed, waiting for another shot. I surprised him with a roundhouse kick to the jaw and felt the bone snap as I drove my foot through the kick. He fell to the side, his hands coming to his face.

  I dropped to my knees and pulled him up. He grunted, and a weird smile came over his busted-up face. Even knowing he was near the end of his life, Keene was arrogant.

  I held onto his shirt, our faces two feet apart. “And you killed the only person who has ever really mattered to me.”

  The tears welled up in my eyes. I looked away for a moment, angry that I was showing him how much he had hurt me and that I couldn’t get a handle on my emotions. I waited, willing my control to return.

  I took a deep breath and looked at him through my blurred, salty vision.

  I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe that I would drag it out, make him tell me more things that I wanted to know. But we were beyond that.

  I tugged on his shirt and brought our faces together, shoving the gun against the middle of his sternum. He was gasping but too weak to pull away. He coughed, and the sound echoed across the desert floor.

  And yet the uncomfortable smile remained on his face, letting me know that no matter what was about to happen, he had still won part of the battle.

  For a second, I thought about ending it. Leaving it all and walking away. Be the stronger person. Do the right thing, like Liz had said.

  But I no longer had a grasp on the difference between right and wrong. It all melted into one big mountain of hurt and pain and emptiness.

  The smile on his face grew a fraction.

  I squeezed the trigger and emptied the gun into Landon Keene’s chest.

  SIXTY-NINE

  “I don’t see it,” Carter said. “Me either.”

  We were standing in the middle of the desert. I’d called him and told him they could come back. He’d taken the Vasquezes to their home and then found me.

  I’d buried Keene, and we were looking for any visible signs that there was a grave in the middle of nowhere.

  “Then we’re good,” Carter said.

  That was about as far from the truth as we could get. “We should go separately,” Carter said. “Call me when you get there.”

  I nodded.

  He walked to the truck and slid in through the passenger side. The engine started with a low rumble. He nodded at me, drove up onto the road, and disappeared.

  I turned to the valley and stared hard.

  The sun was coming up.

  Just like before.

  I stared again. It was a remote location, not a place people went hiking or off-roading. But people would start looking for Keene. Even assholes have friends.

  The sand and isolation would hide him for a while. I just wondered for how long.

  SEVENTY

  I drove back to San Diego feeling numb and empty. All of things that I had vaguely hoped I might feel once Keene was gone were non-existent. And I kept thinking of Liz, somewhere, watching me and shaking her head, telling me I’d screwed up.

  I knew I needed to bring the whole thing full circle, to find some sort of closure, no matter how forced or pointless.

  I went straight to the airport and bought a ticket to San Francisco. Simington had about twelve hours left in his life, and I thought I needed to be there for one of them.

  The fact that the sun was shining in San Francisco when I landed completed the whole reverse axis the planet seemed to be spinning on. No clouds, no fog, no haze. Just sunshine lying across the water in some sort of alternate universe.

  I called San Quentin and managed to arrange a visit for mid-afternoon. I rented a car and, with some time to waste, drove to a place I’d always wanted to see.

  Forty-five minutes later I was perched on a cliff watching waves the size of buildings rise out of the ocean. A group of six was out in the frigid water, along with two more guys on jet-skis toting huge cameras.

  Maverick’s was arguably one of the most dangerous surf spo
ts on the planet. It had gone undiscovered for a long time until a guy named Jeff Clark paddled out and realized he’d found a gold mine, albeit one laced with dynamite. The waves rose out of the harbor in monstrous heights and then broke onto a wall of rocks that were sharpened like razors and axes. If you managed to survive a fall onto the rocks, you were just as likely to get your board tangled in the jagged reef beneath the surface of the water. All the while, the massive waves kept breaking on your head like hammers.

  Brutal.

  But the waves looked like they were drawn by an artist, with faces like ski slopes. Hard to resist.

  I didn’t have any plans to get in the water. I didn’t have the right equipment nor did I have the right mindset. You had to be totally dialed in to paddle out, and as pretty as the waves looked, I knew that my head was too much of a mess even to give it a shot. But sitting on the cliff, watching those who knew what they were doing, felt like a brief escape from the rest of my world.

  There were maybe twenty of us watching. The rare sunny winter afternoon had brought out folks who knew there’d be a show. Any other time in my life, I would have called Carter on my cell and told him what I was watching. He’d been talking about Maverick’s for years. Knowing that I was sitting above the water would have killed him, and I would have enjoyed hearing him whine.

  But even that didn’t sound fun.

  Two boys, maybe sixteen, came up and sat down on the rocks next to me. Shorts and T-shirts with surf company logos. Uncombed hair and year-round tans. Probably what I had looked like at their age. They were pointing and grinning. Their excitement was tangible.

  The nearest one glanced at me. “Any idea who’s out there?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. Just got here.”

  “We heard Mel was gonna be out,” the other one said, scanning the lineup.

  Peter Mel was a local and one of the greatest big-wave surfers of his era. He had helped get Maverick’s onto the map. Among other surfers, he was a rock star.

  “Really?” I said, looking to the water. “Didn’t know that.”

  “We saw him out here two weeks ago,” the nearest one said, his face busting into an electric grin. “Man, he was just awesome.”

  I smiled, and it felt awkward. “I’ll bet.”

  “I don’t see him,” the other one said.

  “Bummer,” his pal said, but he didn’t really seem that disappointed.

  The waves smashed to the surface with a ferociousness I had never seen. It sounded like a train wreck every time one of them closed out, a mixture of chaos and beauty. We watched a surfer paddle into one that looked twenty-five feet high. The wave picked him up and launched him down the face. Against the huge wall of water, he looked like a flea on a dog’s back. He raced along the bottom of the wave, the water crashing behind him on the fall line. Right before the wave closed out over him, he shot up its face and jettisoned over the lip, saving himself the torture of being caught beneath the falling behemoth.

  Several of the spectators on the cliff clapped. The boys high-fived.

  A cell phone rang, and the kid nearest me reached for his pocket and extracted the ringing phone. “Hey.”

  He listened for a few seconds, kind of rolled his eyes. “Yeah. No. Me and Denny are out at Maverick’s.”

  Denny laughed on the other side of him.

  “I know,” the kid was saying. “Yeah, but … I will. I swear.”

  Then he held the phone out as far away as possible and made a face at it.

  He pulled it back to his ear. “I’ll call you as soon as we leave, okay?”

  He punched the phone off and slid it back into his pocket and glanced at me. “My girlfriend.”

  “Ah.”

  “She doesn’t surf,” he said with a sigh. “She doesn’t get it. Thinks we’re just wasting time out here.”

  I thought about my own experiences. Liz hadn’t always surfed. It was just beginning to become something we shared. But she’d never acted like she didn’t understand.

  A sudden pang of loneliness struck my gut. She and I weren’t ever going to be in the water together again.

  “Sometimes it takes awhile,” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” the kid said, a skeptical look on his face.

  I watched one last wave pulverize the rider, crushing him beneath a falling wall of white water.

  I stood and put my hand on the kid’s shoulder.

  “Give her time,” I said. “Or she’ll be gone before you know it.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  The prison looked different.

  When I’d visited last, it had looked sullen and isolated. Now, it resembled a shopping mall on the weekend.

  Gathered near the main entrance were maybe five hundred people holding signs and candles. They seemed to be equally divided between those calling for Simington’s death and those who were opposed. The scene was calm at the moment, but I knew as the day wore on, the tension would grow.

  I spotted Kenney lurking at the perimeter of the crowd. He saw me, too, nodded in greeting, and walked toward me.

  “Surprised to see you,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not really sure why I’m here.”

  “They letting you in to see him?”

  “I called earlier and set it up.”

  Kenney shoved his hands in his pockets and lifted his chin in the direction of the cameras and crowd. “These clowns know who you are?”

  “They did in San Diego. Hoping they don’t up here.” “If they swarm you, I’ll come run interference,” he said. “Thanks.”

  We stood there, awkwardness filling the space between us. “I’m not sorry for him,” he said. “But I’m sorry you have to go in there.”

  I understood what he was getting at, and I appreciated the effort. But at the same time, if he’d known what I’d done earlier in the day, I didn’t think we’d be having the same kind of conversation.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “I’m gonna head in.”

  He held out his hand. “Good luck.”

  We shook, and I nodded without saying anything. Kenney turned and walked back to where I’d first spotted him. He put his arm around a woman whom I’d failed to see initially. She leaned into him, her head on his shoulder.

  His sister.

  One more victim.

  I looked at the prison and went in for the final time.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Security was tighter. I was patted down twice, and my ID was checked three times. I was led to a different area this time, a room off the hallway past the usual visitors’ area. The room was about twenty by twenty, with a table in the middle and several folding chairs.

  Simington sat in one of the chairs, a plate with a huge hamburger and a pile of French fries in front of him. Two guards, at opposite ends of the room, watched him with the same pleasure they might watch a late-night infomercial.

  He smiled and gestured at the plate. “All day. I get pretty much whatever I want. I’ve got a pizza, a lasagna, a plate of pancakes, and a six pack of Pepsi coming in tonight for the last one.”

  When I’d called to arrange the visit, they’d told me he’d be in a different room, but I wasn’t prepared to be so close to him. Not having the glass between us was unnerving. The barrier had provided a buffer for me, something that kept me from realizing he was a real person. Without it, I couldn’t escape that he was a living, breathing human being.

  About to die.

  I slid into the metal folding chair across the table from him. “That’s great.”

  He stuffed a fry into his mouth and nodded. “Like they’re trying to make up for what they’re about to do to me. Oh well, huh?”

  There was no anxiety or nervousness about him. His repeated statements that he was fine with all this seemed proven by his attitude and his appetite.

  “I guess,” I said.

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Surprised you came back. Thought we were done the last time.”

  “Me, too.”
r />   He folded his arms across his chest, the tattoo on his wrist flashing at me like a neon sign. “So. You take care of things in San Diego?” I hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah.” “Good for you,” he said, his voice lower now. “Not really.”

  “Yes, it is. It needed to get done.”

  Discussing a murder in a prison was doing nothing to alleviate the tension in my body and my mind.

  “Been a long time coming,” Simington said. “Never thought it would happen, really.” A thin, dry smile appeared on his face. “Almost didn’t, I guess. But I knew I could count on you.” He reached for one of the hamburgers.

  Knew I could count on you.

  It had been sticking in my skin for the previous two weeks. Why had he sent Darcy to me in the first place when he’d had no intention of fighting his sentence? Why had he talked to me when he’d spoken to no one else? Why had he thrown out Keene’s name in the first place? His answers had always seemed hollow, but I’d accepted them at the time. Maybe because I’d been looking for some sort of connection with him. Maybe because I’d wanted to believe that some part of him was good. But somewhere in my head and in my heart, I knew there was something else, something much less altruistic, in his actions. And now, finally, I heard it in his words.

  “This is what you wanted from the first day, isn’t it?” I asked.

  The hamburger was halfway to his mouth. “What?”

  “You didn’t give a shit about me,” I said, seeing it all again in my head. “You wanted Keene.”

  He set the burger back on the plate and wiped his hands on the thighs of his pants. “What are you talking about?”

  “You were never going to work with Darcy,” I said. “You sent her to me to get to Keene. And then you sent me after him.”

  He leaned back in the chair and said nothing.

  “Gave me just enough to keep me going,” I said, shaking my head at how stupid I’d been. “Just pointing me in the right direction.”