Life or Death

by Michael Robotham

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Out.’

  He laces up her sneakers and leaves the room, walking down the stairs and past the swimming pool, which has tunnels of smoky blue light beneath the surface. They walk between the rows of parked cars and the palm trees, along the main road to the gas station, where he buys her a popsicle and watches her eat it from the bottom up.

  ‘Why’th my mom alwayth crying?’ she asks.

  ‘She laughs too.’

  ‘Not tho much.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s not easy being who we’re meant to be.’

  ‘Don’t it jutht happen?’

  ‘If you’re lucky.’

  ‘I don’t underthtand.’

  ‘One day you might.’

  At some hour after midnight, Audie feels Cassie slip beneath the covers and press her nakedness against his. Sliding one leg across his body, she gets to her knees and straddles him, letting his whiskery chin rub against her cheek and her lips brush against his.

  ‘We have to be quiet.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks.

  She searches his eyes. ‘We’re going home tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  Letting out a whistling breath, she lowers herself onto him, squeezing her pelvic floor muscles and making him groan.

  Eleven years without a woman, but the muscle memory is there. Perhaps that’s what people mean by animals behaving instinctively, knowing what to do without ever being shown. Touching. Kissing. Moving. Sighing.

  And after it’s over, she slips away, returning to the other bed. Audie sleeps and wakes, wondering if it could have been a dream.

  The first time Audie made love to Belita they were in her room at Urban’s house in the mountains. Urban had gone to San Francisco on ‘family business’, which Audie thought could be a euphemism for something else. Urban said San Francisco was full of ‘fags and bumboys’, but he could be equally insulting about Democrats, academics, environmentalists, TV evangelists, vegetarians, umpires, wops, chinks, Serbs and Jews.

  For two months Audie had been taking Belita on Urban’s money runs, picking up and dropping off cash. Her job was to make a note of the amount, write a receipt and take the money to the bank. Some days they had time to picnic at La Jolla Cove or Pacific Beach, drinking lemonade and eating sandwiches Belita made in the morning. Afterwards they would walk along the boardwalk past the souvenir kiosks, bars and restaurants, mingling with other pedestrians, cyclists and rollerbladers. Audie offered up information about himself, hoping she might do the same, but Belita rarely mentioned her past. Lying on a picnic blanket above La Jolla, he pushed his fingers into the air, making shadows that played across her eyelids. Then he picked wild daisies and threaded them together to form a crown that he placed upon her head.

  ‘Now you’re a princess.’

  ‘With weeds on my head?’

  ‘Flowers, not weeds.’

  She laughed. ‘From now on they’re my favourite flower.’

  Each afternoon he would drop her home, opening the car door and watching her walk up the path. She didn’t turn or wave or invite him inside. In the hours that followed he would try to remember every detail of her face, her hands, her fingers, her chipped nails and the way her earlobes seemed to beckon his lips. But he kept changing small things depending upon how he felt that day. He could make her a virgin or a princess or a mother or a whore, not hallucinations but different lovers in the same woman.

  Faint-hearted as usual, Audie didn’t say anything. Afterwards, alone, he would speak his mind, eloquently, passionately, making his arguments. Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow would be the day.

  Finally, one afternoon, he opened her door and before Belita could slip away, he grabbed her wrist and drew his body against hers, crushing her lips with an awkward kiss.

  ‘Enough!’ she said, pushing him away.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Don’t talk such nonsense.’

  ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘You’re lonely.’

  ‘Can I kiss you again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to be with you.’

  ‘You don’t know me.’

  He put his arms around her. He kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips but they were pinched closed. He refused to let go and slowly he felt her body surrender and her teeth part and her head tilt back and her arms circled his neck.

  ‘If I let you sleep with me, will you leave me alone?’ she asked, as though terrified of what might happen if she ceded even that much territory.

  ‘No,’ he replied, picking her up and carrying her into the house. Stumbling into her bedroom they undressed urgently, clumsily, unbuttoning, unhooking, shaking, pulling, kicking, dancing on single feet, unwilling to let go of each other for even a moment. He bit her lip. She pulled his hair. He grabbed her wrists and held them above her head, kissing her like he wanted to steal her breath away.

  The act itself was easy, quick, passionate, sweaty and frenzied, yet everything seemed to slow down and Audie was struck by how time seemed to drop away. He had been with women before, mostly ridiculous, fumbling encounters in dorm rooms beneath movie-star posters and photo collages of families. At college they tended to be arty girls who dressed in grungy clothes and read feminist treatises or Sylvia Plath poetry. He would spend the night and slip out before dawn, telling himself that they wouldn’t mind if he didn’t call them or text.

  Other girls he had met had always tried to make themselves important with their flirting and their clothes and their secrets, but Belita wasn’t trying to impress him or anyone. She was different. She didn’t have to speak. They didn’t have to know each other’s thoughts. Yet with the barest movement of her eyes, or curl of her lips, or flash of her smile, she could move Audie, who felt as though he was staring into the depths of a well. All he had to do was fall.

  What else does he remember? Everything. Every detail of her molasses-coloured skin, her smell, her haughty nose and heavy eyebrows, the faint sheen of perspiration on her top lip, the single bed, their clothes spread across the floor – her cotton dress, bleached by repeated washings, her sandals, her cheap blue panties, a chain around her neck with a small silver crucifix, how her breasts filled the hollow of his hands. How she mewled like a stranded kitten when she came.

  ‘I am Urban’s,’ she said, absent-mindedly stroking his wrist.

  ‘Yes,’ Audie replied, without really listening. Her touch electrified him and paralysed him. Her hand in his, fingers entwined, all life reduced to that one soft, warm point of contact.

  They made love again. She worried that Urban might come home and catch them together or that Audie would think her a whore, yet she seemed to crave the weight of his body between her thighs and the quickening of his breath against her ear and every slippery buck of his body.

  Afterwards she got up to use the toilet. He sat on the edge of her bed, his eyes accustomed to the darkness. When she returned, he ran the tip of his finger along the nape of her neck and down the length of her spine, rising and falling over her vertebra. She shivered and her whole body seemed to ripple. She mumbled tiredly and curled into a ball. Slept. He did too, waking in the small hours. He could hear water running. She emerged from the bathroom, half-dressed. Pulled on her panties.

  ‘You must go.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Now!’

  28

  The Greater Third Ward in Houston has a small commercial district populated by moneylenders, taco stands, churches, skin joints and joyless bars, secured behind meshed windows and reinforced doors.

  Moss pauses outside one of them, which has a sign above the window: FOUR ACES BAIL BONDS. Below is the poetic addendum – Your baby’s daddy sitting in jail? Sell your gold and post his bail.

  Cupping his hands around his eyes, he peers through the heavy-duty mesh. He can see display cases full of jewellery, watches and electric goods. A big Latina woman is washing the floor with a
mop and a bucket of soapy water. Moss knocks, rattling the double locks. The cleaning woman opens the door a crack.

  ‘I’m looking for Lester.’

  ‘Mr Duberley ain’t here.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  She hesitates. Moss peels a ten-dollar note from his wad of cash. She snatches at the money like it’s about to fly away in a non-existent breeze and points across the road to a honky-tonk with a single neon sign shaped like a naked cowgirl wearing a Stetson and twirling a lasso.

  Moss turns back to the door, but it’s already closed.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he says to nobody. ‘Pleasure to meet you, too.’

  He crosses the road and steps into the darkness of the bar, stumbling down the final two steps into a large room ripe with the smell of sweat, beer and deep-fried flatulence. The long counter runs the length of a mirrored wall with shelves holding bottles in all shapes and colours, some round, some slender, some with red wax seals or screw-tops.

  Lester Duberley has both elbows on the bar and is hunching over a glass of crushed ice darkened with bourbon. He’s a fat man with large-knuckled hands and clumps of grey hair sprouting from his ears. A paisley waistcoat cannot button over his gut.

  Behind Lester’s head, a topless girl in a sequined G-string and stilettos is gyrating on a ramp, her skin painted pink by the lights. She has large breasts, sagging slightly, bearing soft spidery stretch marks, whiter than the rest of her skin. Half a dozen men are sitting at tables in front of her, more interested in a second girl, similarly undressed, who is bending forward and peering through her spread knees.

  Lester doesn’t act surprised to see Moss. He barely reacts at all.

  ‘When did you get out?’

  ‘Day before yesterday.’

  ‘Thought you were doing the full stretch.’

  ‘Change of plan.’

  Lester holds his glass against his forehead. Moss orders a beer.

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘Fifteen years.’

  ‘You must be noticing a lot of changes. I bet you never even heard of an iPad or a smartphone.’

  ‘I been in prison, not Arkansas.’

  ‘Tell me who Kim Kardashian is.’

  ‘Who?’

  Lester slaps his thigh and laughs, showing his gold fillings.

  One of the drunker patrons makes a lunge for the bendy stripper and the bouncer puts him in a headlock and drags him outside.

  ‘I can’t understand why they do that,’ says Lester. ‘The girl didn’t mind.’

  ‘Did you ask her?’

  ‘This place has been raided twice in the past six months. Waste of taxpayer money if you ask me.’

  ‘I didn’t know you paid taxes.’

  ‘I’m being serious. What people do privately is nobody else’s business. If they want to spend their money on overpriced drinks in skin joints like this, why stop ’em? These guys are helping some poor girl feed her kids or put herself through school. What’s so morally wrong with that in these tough economic times?’

  ‘You want smaller government.’

  ‘I’m a capitalist, but not the prissy, pussy-whipped form of capitalism they practise in this country. I want to see a pure form of capitalism. I want to see an America where if you have the money you can do whatever you damn well please. You want to concrete Kansas and you got the money to pay for it – go ahead. You want to frack for oil and gas? Pay the money and you can do it. Instead we have these rules and regulations and God-damn greenies and trade unions and Tea Party Neanderthals and bleeding-heart socialists. Let the fucking money decide.’

  ‘Spoken like a true patriot,’ says Moss.

  Lester raises his glass. ‘Amen to that!’ He drinks and rolls his shoulders back. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need a meeting with Eddie Barefoot.’

  ‘Are you crazy? You just got out.’

  ‘I need some information.’

  Lester crushes ice between his teeth. ‘I can get you a phone number.’

  ‘No, I want to see him.’

  Lester looks at him dubiously. ‘What if he don’t want to see you?’

  ‘Tell him I’m a friend of Audie Palmer’s.’

  ‘Is this about the money?’

  ‘Like you said, Lester, it’s always about the money.’ Moss raises his beer and drinks it a long slow swallow. ‘There’s sumpin’ else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need a .45. Clean. With ammo.’

  ‘Do I look like your regular punch?’

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  ‘Yes you will.’

  29

  Valdez parks his pickup away from the motel and walks the final two blocks, washed by swirling air from passing trucks that are rumbling along the six-lane. Huddled in his jacket against the chill, he pauses at the entrance where the tops of palm trees are bending in the wind and the moon looks like a silver plate behind the swaying fronds.

  The night manager is a middle-aged Hispanic man, sitting with his feet propped on the counter, watching a small TV showing a Mexican soap opera where the actors have hairstyles and clothes that are twenty years out of date and they talk as if they’re about to fuck or fight each other.

  The sheriff flashes his badge and the night manager looks at him nervously.

  ‘You seen this guy?’ asks Valdez, showing him a photograph of Audie Palmer.

  ‘Yeah, I seen him, but not for a few days. His hair looks different now. Shorter.’

  ‘Did he rent a room?’

  ‘His girlfriend did. She’s on the second floor. Got a kiddie with her.’

  ‘What number?’

  The night manager checks the computer. ‘Two thirty-nine. Cassandra Brennan.’

  ‘What sort of car does she drive?’

  ‘Honda. Beat to shit. Loaded with stuff.’

  Valdez points to the photograph again. ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘I don’t work days.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Night before last. What’s he done?’

  ‘He’s a wanted fugitive.’ Valdez pockets the photograph. ‘The rooms on either side – are they occupied?’

  ‘Not since two days ago.’

  ‘I need a key.’ Valdez takes the swipe card. ‘If I’m not back in five minutes I want you to call this number and say an officer needs help.’

  ‘Why don’t you call?’

  ‘I don’t know if I need help yet.’

  Audie wakes with a strange certainty that he’s been dreaming but with no memory of the dream. He feels the familiar ache of something that has just dropped off the edge of his consciousness, almost glimpsed but now lost. His past feels like that – a swirl of dust and litter.

  He opens his eyes, not knowing if he has heard a sound or felt a change in the air pressure. Out of bed, he goes to the window. It’s dark outside. Silent.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Cassie.

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to leave now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s time. You stay put. Don’t open the door unless it’s the police.’

  Cassie hesitates and bites her bottom lip, as though trying to stop herself from saying something. Audie laces his boots and grabs his rucksack. He opens the door a crack, looking both ways along the breezeway. Nothing seems to move in the parking lot, but he imagines figures lurking unseen all around him. The reception area is partially visible but he can’t see anyone behind the desk.

  The breezeway angles to the right. Keeping close to the wall, he moves toward the stairs but hears someone coming. The nearest door is marked HOUSEKEEPING. Audie tries the handle, which rattles loosely. It’s a cheap lock. He forces it with his shoulder and steps inside, pulling the door closed. There are wet mops and brooms standing upright in a trolley.

  A shadow passes the slatted door. He waits a few more seconds; fear trapped in his throat. At that moment he hears someone yell ‘Police!’ and a woman scream. Audie is already running. At the bottom of the sta
irs he turns right and scurries crablike between parked cars until he reaches the rear wall. Up. Over. He lands heavily on the other side. Running again, he crosses a factory yard, finds an open gate to a slip road. He can hear people yelling. Popping sounds. Alarms. Curses.

  Valdez had always subscribed to the belief that the course of a person’s life is dictated by a handful of choices. These aren’t necessarily right or wrong decisions, but each of them plots a different path. What if he’d joined the marines instead of the state police? He could have finished up in Afghanistan or Iraq. He could be dead. What if he hadn’t been working the night Sandy was raped? He might never have met and comforted her. They might not have fallen in love. What if Max hadn’t come into their lives? There are so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘maybes’, but only a handful of them had ever really counted, because they had the power to change a life.

  Pausing outside the motel room, he checks his service revolver but makes the decision to put it back in his shoulder holster. Instead he pulls a second weapon that he keeps strapped to his leg below his right knee. It was something he was taught early in his career by a sheriff who had survived the cost-cutting purges and political correctness of the nineties – always have a throw-down because you never know when it might come in handy. His is a small semi-automatic pistol with a broken handle wrapped in plastic tape. Without a history. Untraceable.

  He looks over the balcony. The parking lot is empty. Palm fronds are waving dark shadows on the concrete around the pool. Pressing his ear to the door of 239, he listens. Nothing. He slides the swipe key over the panel. A red light blinks green. The handle turns and opens a crack on a dark room.

  A woman sits up suddenly, clutching a sheet around her. Wide-eyed. Wordless. Valdez scans the room, the beds, the floor, swinging the gun from side to side.

  ‘Where is he?’ he whispers.

  The woman’s mouth opens. No sound emerges.

  A shadow steps from the bathroom. Valdez reacts instinctively and yells, ‘Police!’ Brightness leaps from the muzzle. The little girl gets thrown backwards, her blood spraying across a mirror. Her mother screams. He swings the gun. Fires again. A hole appears in her forehead. Her body slumps sideways, slipping off the bed, pulling the bedclothes with her.