Life or Death

by Michael Robotham

  A woman and young girl enter the restroom, both blonde and both dressed in jeans and canvas shoes. The woman is in her mid-twenties with her hair bunched on the back of her head in a high ponytail. She’s wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt that hangs on the points of her breasts. The little girl looks about six or seven, with a missing front tooth and a Barbie backpack looped over her shoulders.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says the mother, ‘they’ve closed the women’s restroom for cleaning.’

  Setting a bag of toiletries on the edge of the sink, she takes out toothbrushes and toothpaste. She wets paper towels, peels off her daughter’s T-shirt and washes under her arms and behind her ears. Then she leans her over the sink and wets the girl’s scalp with running water, using soap from the dispenser to wash her hair, telling her to keep her eyes closed.

  She turns to Audie. ‘What are you staring at?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Are you some kind of pervert?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Don’t call me ma’am!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Audie leaves hurriedly, wiping his wet hands on his jeans. In the street outside the bus station there are people smoking and loitering. Some are dealers. Some are pimps. Some are predators looking for runaways and strays; girls who can be sweet-talked; girls who can be shot up; girls who stop yelling when hands close over their throats. Maybe I’m jaded, thinks Audie, who doesn’t usually look for the worst in people.

  Circling the block, he finds a McDonald’s, brightly lit and decorated in primary colours. He buys himself a meal and a coffee. A little while later he notices the mother and daughter from the restroom. They’re sitting in a booth making sandwiches from a loaf of bread and a jar of strawberry jelly.

  Audie’s enjoying the scene when the manager approaches them.

  ‘You’re not allowed to eat here unless you buy sumpin’.’

  ‘We’re not doing any harm,’ the woman says.

  ‘Y’all making a mess.’

  Audie takes his tray and walks to the booth. ‘Hurry up, girls, what did you decide you wanted?’ He slides onto the bench seat opposite and looks at the manager. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good to know, maybe you could get us some extra napkins.’

  The manager mumbles something and retreats. Audie cuts his hamburger into quarters and slides it across the table. The girl reaches for the food but gets a slap on the wrist from her mother. ‘You don’t take food from a stranger.’ She looks at Audie accusingly. ‘Are you following us?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Do I look like an old maid?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t call me ma’am! I’m younger ’n you are. And we don’t need your charity.’

  The girl lets out a squeak of disappointment. She looks at the burger and then at her mother.

  ‘I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to win my trust so you can do terrible things to us.’

  ‘You have a paranoid mind,’ says Audie.

  ‘I’m not a junkie or a prostitute.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that.’ Audie sips his coffee. ‘I’ll go back over there if you want.’

  She doesn’t say anything. The bright neon lights show up the freckles on her nose and her eyes that are – what? – green or blue or something in between. The little girl has managed to sneak a quarter of the burger and is eating it behind her hand. She reaches out and takes a French fry.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asks Audie.

  ‘Thcarlett.’

  ‘Did you get something for that tooth, Scarlett?’

  She nods and holds up a Raggedy Anne doll, which looks pre-loved but much-loved.

  ‘What do you call her?’

  ‘Bethie.’

  ‘That’s a pretty name.

  Scarlett covers her nose with her sleeve. ‘You thmell.’

  Audie laughs. ‘I’m fixin’ to have a shower real soon.’ He holds out his hand. ‘I’m Spencer.’

  Scarlett looks at his outstretched palm and then at her mother. She reaches out. Her whole hand fits inside his fist.

  ‘And who might you be?’ Audie asks the mother.

  ‘Cassie.’

  She doesn’t take his hand. Despite her prettiness, Audie can see a hard shell around Cassie like scar tissue covering an old wound. He can imagine her growing up in a poorer quarter, conning boys into buying her snow cones for a flash of her knickers, using her sexuality but never quite understanding the dangers of the game.

  ‘And what are you ladies doing out so late?’ he asks.

  ‘None of your business,’ says Cassie.

  ‘We’re thleeping in our car,’ says Scarlett.

  Her mother hushes her. Scarlet looks at the floor and hugs her doll.

  ‘Do you know of any cheap motels nearby?’ asks Audie.

  ‘How cheap?’

  ‘Cheap.’

  ‘They’re a cab-ride away.’

  ‘Not a problem.’ He slides out of the booth. ‘Well I best be off. Nice meeting you.’ He pauses. ‘When was the last time you had a hot shower?’

  Cassie glares at him. Audie holds up his hands. ‘That came out the wrong way. I’m sorry. It’s just that somebody stole my wallet on the bus and I’m going to have trouble getting a motel room without identification. I got plenty of cash, but no ID.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘If you booked the room – I’d pay for it. I’ll pay for two rooms. You and Scarlett can have one of them.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘I need a bed and we both need a shower.’

  ‘You could be a rapist or a serial killer.’

  ‘I could be an escaped convict.’

  ‘Right.’

  Cassie focuses hard on his face as though trying to decide if she’s about to make a stupid decision. ‘I got a taser,’ she says suddenly. ‘You try anything funny and I’ll zap you.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  Her car is a beaten-up Honda CRV, parked in a vacant lot beneath a Coca-Cola sign. She rips a ticket from beneath the wiper blades and crumples it into a ball. Audie is carrying Scarlett in his arms with her head resting against his chest. Asleep. She feels so small and fragile that he’s frightened she might break. He remembers the last time he carried a child – a little boy with eyes so brown they gave the word brown meaning.

  Cassie leans into the car, shoving sleeping bags into corners and clothes into a suitcase, rearranging their possessions. Audie slides Scarlett onto the back seat and puts a pillow beneath her head. The engine turns over a couple of times before it fires. The starter motor is almost shot, thinks Audie, remembering the years he spent in the garage watching his daddy working. The chassis scrapes on the kerb as they reach the deserted street.

  ‘How long you been living in your car?’ he asks.

  ‘A month,’ says Cassie. ‘We were staying with my sister until she kicked us out. She said I was flirting with her husband but he was the one doing the flirting. Couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I swear there’s not one decent guy in this freakin’ city.’

  ‘Scarlett’s father?’

  ‘Travis died in Afghanistan, but the army won’t pay me a pension or recognise Scarlett because Travis and me weren’t married. We was engaged, but that don’t count. He got killed by an IED – you know what that is?’

  ‘A roadside bomb.’

  ‘Yeah. I didn’t know when they told me. Amazing what you learn.’ She scratches her nose with her wrist. ‘His parents treat me like some sort of welfare witch who popped out a baby just to get a government handout.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘Don’t have no momma. She died when I was twelve. Daddy kicked me out when I got pregnant. Didn’t matter to him that me and Travis were gonna get married.’

  She keeps talking, trying to overcome her nerves, telling Audie that she’s a qualified beautician with ‘a diploma and everything
’. She holds up her nails. ‘Look at these.’ She’s painted them to look like ladybugs.

  They take an exit onto the North Freeway. Cassie sits high in her seat with both hands on the wheel. Audie can picture the person she expected to be – going off to college, spring break in Florida, wearing bikinis and drinking mojitos and rollerblading along the beachfront; getting a job, a husband, a house … Instead she’s sleeping in a car and washing her kid’s hair in a restroom sink. That’s what happens to expectations, he thinks. One event or wrong decision can change everything. It could be the popping of a car tyre or stepping off a sidewalk at the wrong moment or driving past an IED. Audie doesn’t hold to the view that a person makes his own luck. Nor does he even consider the notion of fairness, unless you’re talking about a skin colour or someone’s hair.

  After about six miles, they take an exit onto Airport Drive and pull into the Star City Inn, where palm trees are standing sentry by the main doors and the parking lot glistens with broken glass. A handful of black guys in baggy jeans and hoodies are loitering outside one of the ground-floor rooms. They study Cassie like lions looking at a wounded wildebeest.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ she whispers to Audie.

  ‘They won’t bother you.’

  ‘How do you know?’ She makes a decision. ‘We get one room. Twin beds. I’m not sleeping with you.’

  ‘Understood.’

  A single room on the first floor costs forty-five dollars. Audie puts Scarlett in one of the double beds, where she settles into sleep, sucking her thumb. Cassie carries a suitcase into the bathroom and fills the tub with hot water, sprinkling in washing powder.

  ‘You should get some rest,’ says Audie.

  ‘I want these to be dry by the morning.’

  Audie closes his eyes and dozes, listening to the gentle sloshing of water and clothes being wrung out. At some point Cassie crawls into bed next to her daughter and stares across the gap at Audie.

  ‘Who are you?’ she whispers.

  ‘Nobody to fear, ma’am.’

  10

  The ballroom is crowded with a thousand guests – men in black tie and women in high heels and cocktail dresses with swooping necklines or exposed backs. These are professional couples, venture capitalists and bankers and accountants and businessmen and property developers and entrepreneurs and lobbyists, and they’re here to meet Senator Edward Dowling, newly elected, grateful for their support, their man in the Texas upper house.

  The Senator is working the room like a seasoned professional, with a firm handshake, a touch of the arm, a personal word for each and every guest. People seem to hold their breath around him, basking in his reflected glory, yet despite his gloss and obvious charm there is still something of the used car salesman about Dowling’s interactions, as though his boundless self-confidence has been learned from self-help tapes and motivational books.

  Ignoring the trays of champagne, Victor Pilkington has found himself an iced tea in a frosted glass. At six foot four, he can look over the sea of heads, making a note of which alliances are being formed or who’s not talking to whom.

  His wife Mina is somewhere in the crowd, wearing a flowing silk gown that plunges in elegant folds down to the small of her back and between her breasts. She’s forty-eight but looks ten years younger, thanks to tennis three times a week and a plastic surgeon in California who refers to himself as the ‘body sculptor’. Mina grew up in Angleton and played varsity tennis for the local high school before going to college, getting married, divorcing, trying again. Twenty years on, she still looks good, on the court and off, whether playing mixed doubles or flirting with younger men in the Magnolia Ballroom.

  Pilkington suspects she’s having an affair, but at least she’s discreet. He tries to be the same. They sleep in separate rooms. Lead separate lives. But keep up appearances because it would be too expensive to do otherwise.

  A man brushes by him. Pilkington raises his hand and grips the passing shoulder.

  ‘How are things, Rolland?’ he says, to Senator Dowling’s chief of staff.

  ‘I’m a bit busy right now, Mr Pilkington.’

  ‘He knows I want to see him.’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘You said it was important?’

  ‘I did.’

  Rolland disappears into the crowd. Pilkington gets himself another drink and makes small talk with several acquaintances – never taking his eyes off the Senator. He doesn’t much like politicians, although his family had produced a few. His great-grandfather, Augustus Pilkington, was a Congressman in the Coolidge administration. Back then the family owned half of Bellmore Parish, with interests in oil and shipping, until Pilkington’s father managed to lose it all in the seventies oil crisis. The family fortune had taken six generations to build and six months to trash – such are the vagaries of capitalism.

  Since then Victor had done his best to restore the family’s name – buying back the farm, so to speak, acre by acre, block my block, brick by brick. But it hadn’t been without personal cost. Some people succeed because of their parents and others in spite of them. Pilkington’s father spent five years in prison and finished up cleaning hospital toilets. Victor despised the man’s weakness, but appreciated his fecundity. If he hadn’t impregnated a teenage shopgirl in 1955 when he raped her in the back of his vintage Daimler (specially shipped from England), Victor would never have been born.

  It’s strange how one family can celebrate its greatness, tracing its genealogies back to the founding fathers of Texas, their political offices and companies and dynastic marriages, while another family’s principal achievement might simply be survival. It had taken bankruptcy and his father’s imprisonment for Victor to appreciate what an achievement it was to rise above the common people, but tonight, in this room, he still feels like a failure.

  On the far side of the ballroom Senator Dowling is surrounded by well-wishers, sycophants and political fixers. Women like him, particularly the matriarchs. All the ‘old money’ families are here, including a young Bush who is telling college football stories. Everybody laughs. Anecdotes don’t have to be funny when you’re a junior Bush.

  The doors to the kitchen open and four waiters emerge carrying a two-tier birthday cake with candles. The Dixieland band strikes up ‘Happy Birthday’ and the Senator presses his hand to his heart and bows to every corner of the ballroom. There are photographers waiting. Flashguns reflect from his polished teeth. His wife materialises beside him, dressed in a black diaphanous evening gown with a sapphire and diamond necklace. She kisses his cheek, leaving a lipstick imprint. That’s the shot that will make the social pages of the Houston Chronicle on Sunday.

  Three cheers. Applause. Somebody jokes about the number of candles. The Senator wisecracks back at him. Pilkington has already turned away and gone to the bar. He needs something stronger. Bourbon. Ice.

  ‘How old is he?’ asks a man leaning next to him, his bowtie unfurled and dangling down his chest.

  ‘Forty-four. Youngest state senator in fifty years.’

  ‘You don’t seem that impressed.’

  ‘He’s a politician, he’s bound to disappoint eventually.’

  ‘Maybe he’s going to be different.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘That’d be like finding out there was no Santa Claus.’

  Pilkington has had enough waiting around. Moving through the crowd, he reaches the Senator, interrupting him mid-anecdote. ‘I’m sorry, Teddy, but you’re wanted elsewhere.’

  Dowling’s face betrays his irritation. He excuses himself from the circle.

  ‘I think you should be calling me Senator,’ he tells Pilkington.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s what I am.’

  ‘I’ve known you since you were jerking off over your momma’s JC Penney catalogue, so it might take me a while to get used to calling you Senator.’

  The two men push through a door and ride the service elevat
or down to the kitchens. Stainless steel pots are being scrubbed in the sinks and dessert plates are lined up on benches. They step outside. The air smells of recent rain and yellow slicks of moonlight reflect from the puddles. Traffic is backed up in both directions on Main Street.

  Senator Dowling undoes his bowtie. He has fine, feminine hands that match his cheekbones and small mouth. His dark hair is trimmed neatly and wet-combed to create a part on the left side of his scalp. Pilkington takes out a cigar and runs his tongue over the end, but doesn’t attempt to light it.

  ‘Audie Palmer escaped from prison the night before last.’

  The Senator tries not to react, but Pilkington recognises the tension in the younger man’s shoulders.

  ‘You said this was under control.’

  ‘It is. Tracker dogs followed his trail to the Choke County Reservoir. It’s three miles across. Most likely he drowned.’

  ‘What about the media?’

  ‘Nobody has picked up on the story.’

  ‘What if they start asking questions?’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘What if they do?’

  ‘How many people did you prosecute as a district attorney? You did your job. That’s all you need to say.’

  ‘What if he’s not dead?’

  ‘He’ll be recaptured and sent back to prison.’

  ‘And until then?’

  ‘We sit tight. Every lowlife in the state is going to be searching for Palmer. They’re going to string him up and pull out his fingernails trying to find out what happened to the money.’

  ‘He could still hurt us.’

  ‘No, he’s brain-damaged, remember? And you keep telling people that. Tell ’em Audie Palmer is a dangerous escaped convict who should have gone to the chair but the Feds fucked it up.’ Pilkington clenches the cigar between his teeth, sucking on the chewed leaf. ‘In the meantime, I want you to pull a few strings.’

  ‘You said everything was under control.’

  ‘This is extra insurance.’