Life or Death

by Michael Robotham

  ‘You’re mistaken.’

  Rabbit is mopping again, moving with far more energy than before, doing a foxtrot rather than a waltz. Moss steps closer. The mop swings towards his head. He ducks it easily and twists it out of Rabbit’s hands, snapping it across his knee. The girl looks up. The incident happened so quickly she missed it. She looks back at her phone.

  Moss hands Rabbit the two broken pieces and the janitor holds them like cheerleading pompoms.

  ‘They’re going to make me pay for that.’

  Moss reaches into his pocket and pulls out a twenty. He tucks it into the pocket of Rabbit’s Hawaiian shirt. Resigned to the situation, Rabbit takes a seat on one of the bleachers and pulls a flask from his pocket. Unscrewing the lid, he upends the metal container and swallows. His eyes go watery. He wipes his lips.

  ‘Y’all think you can frighten me. Y’all think I’m nothin’ but a broken-down wreck, but I won’t be intimidated. Do you know how many times people have come asking me about that robbery? I been threatened, beat up, burnt with cigarettes, harassed and victimised. The FBI still pulls me in for questioning every couple of years. I know they’re listening to my phone calls and checking my bank accounts.’

  ‘I know you don’t have the money, Rabbit. Just tell me about the robbery.’

  ‘I was sitting in a county jail.’

  ‘You were supposed to be driving the car.’

  ‘Supposed to be, but I weren’t there.’

  ‘Tell me about Vernon and Billy Caine.’

  ‘I knew ’em.’

  ‘You robbed banks with them.’

  Rabbit takes another swig from the flask. ‘I met Billy in juvie and we stayed friends. I didn’t know Vernon until Billy called me one day, out of the blue, and said he had a job. I’d just got laid off work and had car payments due. Vernon was the boss. He had this modus operandi where he and Billy would go into a bank separately and wait in different queues. They let people slip ahead of them, so that each reached a window at roughly the same time, carrying a folded newspaper or a magazine with a gun tucked inside. Only the teller could see it. They didn’t shout, or yell at people to lie on the ground, or fire shots in the air. Instead, they spoke very softly, instructing the tellers to fill the bags with cash. Then they walked out, cool as you like, and I drove off. We must have done thirty or forty banks like that, starting in California, moving east.’

  ‘What about the job in Dreyfus County?’

  ‘That was a whole other kettle. Vernon knew a guy who worked at a security company that had a contract to collect cash from banks and brokerages.’

  ‘Scott Beauchamp?’

  ‘I never met the guy.’

  ‘He was the guard who died in the robbery.’

  Rabbit shrugs. ‘Maybe he was the inside man, maybe he wasn’t. Vernon didn’t say. It was a perfect set-up. Twice a month the armoured truck visited the banks and collected the damaged bills – the ones that get torn or go through washing machines or get stuff spilt on ’em. The cash is taken to a data-destruction facility near Chicago. The Fed burns the money in a big fucking incinerator. Do you believe that? Vernon knew the timing and the route the truck took, so we planned to hijack the shipment, tie up the guards, blow the back doors and take off with the cash, which was unmarked and untraceable. Nobody even knew the serial numbers. It’s not like we were stealing from anyone. The money was gonna get burned anyway, right?’

  ‘How did Audie Palmer get in on the job?’

  ‘Vernon must have found him.’

  ‘You ever meet Palmer?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What about his brother?’

  Rabbit shakes his head. ‘I never heard of neither of ’em until the job went pear-shaped. I was cut up, I tell you, losing Vernon and Billy like that. Billy was a little spacey. He dropped some acid when he was a teenager and it made him paranoid, but he was a good kid. Dated my little sister for a while.’

  ‘What about since then – any word about Carl?’

  ‘I heard he was in South America.’

  ‘You think he took the cash?’

  ‘That’s what the cops said. I figure I must be owed at least half a mill.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Vernon promised me a cut even when I couldn’t do the job. Now look at me – I’m fucking cleaning floors and babysitting Princess Fiona.’

  The girl raises her head and calls out in a whiny voice, ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Get sumpin’ from the machine.’

  ‘I got no money.’

  Rabbit searches his pockets. There’s only the twenty. He looks at Moss. ‘Got anything smaller?’

  Moss gives him a five-dollar bill. The girl takes it and tosses her hair. Rabbit watches her go, paying too much attention to her hips.

  ‘Where did you say her mother was?’

  ‘Workin’.’

  ‘You might want to keep your eyes on the floor.’

  ‘Nothin’ wrong with looking,’ says Rabbit, grinning. ‘Then I go home and screw her mother with the lights off.’

  Moss grabs him by the shirt, popping buttons that bounce off the sprung floorboards. Rabbit’s toes are scrabbling for purchase. ‘It was a joke,’ he whines. ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’

  ‘I think I might have lost it up your ass. Maybe I should stick my boot up there and look for it.’

  Moss shoves him backwards over the bench and walks out of the gymnasium, passing the girl at the bottom of the stairs. She’s eating a packet of potato chips, licking her fingers.

  He stops. Turns. ‘He ever touch you inappropriate-like?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘What are you going to do if he does?’

  ‘Cut his pecker off.’

  ‘Clever girl.’

  36

  Audie has spent two hours waiting outside Bernadette’s apartment, watching the street and studying the darkened windows, half expecting to see SWAT teams crouching in stairwells and the silhouettes of sharpshooters on the rooftops. Dusk is gathering and the neighbourhood is marbled with shadows as rain clouds move sporadically across the sun.

  Residents have come and gone. A woman passes him now, walking a reluctant dog that is too lazy to sniff a hydrant or too fat to cock a leg. A tall thin man in a black suit is smoking on a stoop and staring at the ground between his shoes as though reading a chalk message scrawled on the concrete.

  Audie crosses the road, trying to look as though he belongs when he’s not sure where he belongs any more. There are cars parked in bays between the dusty shrubs and verdant strips of lawn that seem to be chemically coloured rather than natural. He stops beside a vehicle that is wrapped in a blue plastic cover that ripples in the breeze as though there might be something alive underneath. Crouching and reaching beneath the fabric, he runs his fingers across the top of each tyre, searching for the keys. Bernadette promised. Perhaps she changed her mind. He looks again, lying on his stomach. A flash of silver catches his attention. The key is lying on the bitumen behind the wheel. He crawls under the chassis.

  Behind him he hears footsteps on the pavement. He rises to his haunches, expecting to see a dozen guns pointed at him. The man from the steps is standing over him, blocking out the sun. He’s tall with a long nose and a ribbon of hair under his chin that must have started as sideburns and turned into a beard. The cuffs of his trousers are tucked into his boots.

  ‘Howdy.’

  Audie tries to smile and nod.

  ‘You lost something?’

  ‘My keys.’

  The man draws on his cigarette. The glowing end flares. Audie can’t see his eyes but instinctively he knows them to be dull and cruel – the sort of eyes he’d seen on prisoners in prison yards that nobody would approach unless accidentally and never more than once.

  Audie begins pulling the cover from the car, a Toyota Camry, almost new. The man crushes the cigarette beneath his boot.

  ‘I want you to throw me the keys.’

  ‘Why?’

/>   ‘Certain things have to be done. Don’t make ’em any harder.’ The man’s hand is in his jacket pocket. ‘If I pull this out, I use it.’

  Audie throws him the keys.

  The man walks to the rear of the car and opens the trunk. The lid hinges open.

  ‘Get in.’

  ‘No.’

  The hand appears, a gun at the end of it, the barrel like a small hollow black tube, aiming at Audie’s chest.

  ‘You’re not a cop.’

  ‘Get in.’

  Audie shakes his head and watches the gun rise from his chest to his forehead.

  ‘They said dead or alive, amigo. Makes no difference to me.’

  Audie bends toward the trunk and the gun swings into the back of his head. He doesn’t see flashing lights or fireworks. In that brief moment, the darkness narrows to a small white point and fades completely as though someone had turned off an old black and white TV set.

  Sometimes Audie imagines he is living somebody else’s dream. At other times, he contemplates the possibility of a parallel universe in which Belita is living in California, cleaning house for Urban Covic, sleeping in her master’s bed. In this parallel universe, Carl is fixing engines at their daddy’s garage and cigarettes aren’t carcinogenic and Bernadette’s husband isn’t a violent drunk and Audie is an engineer working for a foreign aid agency building sewage and water systems.

  People talk about there being sliding doors or forks in the road when lives take a different course. Sometimes it’s only later, in retrospect, that we recognise we even had a choice. Mostly we are victims of circumstance or prisoners of fate.

  When Audie looks back he can pinpoint the day when he came to such a fork in the road. It was a Wednesday morning in mid-October when he arrived to pick up Belita from the big house and she walked to the car wearing dark glasses and a straw hat. He opened the door. She took her seat. Then he noticed her left eye, which was swollen and half closed, already changing colour.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did he hit you?’

  ‘I made him angry.’

  ‘He had no right.’

  Belita gave him a pitying smile, as though he were a little boy who could never know the ways of the world, never understand what it was like to be a woman, to be her. She got out of the car, chose to sit in the back. They drove in silence, no ease between them, no warmth in each other’s company, no opportunity for Audie to relax and soak up her beauty.

  Had Urban discovered their affair? Had she been punished? Beaten? Audie felt his vision blur and he wanted to tear down Urban’s world – smash every gaming table, jukebox, liquor bottle and fruit tree.

  He and Belita spoke only a handful of words that day. She collected the money, filled out the receipts and wrote the deposit slips. By three o’clock they were back at the house. Audie opened her door and reached for her hand. She ignored it. Then he noticed she was wearing something new. Instead of her small silver cross on a chain, she had a pendant around her neck that looked like it could be an emerald.

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Did he give it to you? Was it before or after he hit you?’

  She refused to listen.

  ‘Did he fuck you first?’

  She spun around and slapped him across the face. She would have struck him again, but he grabbed her hand and tried to pull her close. Kiss her. She fought back. He screamed a question at her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He rescued me.’

  ‘I can rescue you.’

  ‘You can’t even rescue yourself!’

  She fought his hands away and disappeared into the house.

  For the next four weeks Belita put space between herself and Audie. She created traps, laid spikes, poisoned conversations. If she wanted distance, he would give it to her, he told himself, but his heart gave a different answer. He saw Belita everywhere … in everything. And the thought of anyone else having her made his cheeks burn and chest ache and it felt like the essence of his life was draining away.

  One Saturday at Urban’s house in the hills, he stripped to the waist and worked on the fountain, which had stopped running a few weeks earlier. Wading into the scum-coloured water, he reached the statue of a nymph with apple-sized breasts, wide hips and a wreath around her head.

  The tiles were bright blue, missing in places. He began to scrape the muck from the outlets, using the blade of his penknife. Belita watched him from the veranda. She told him to put on his shirt or he’d get sunburnt. It was the first time she had acknowledged him in a month.

  The blade slipped and sliced into his hand. He looked at the cut. Raised his hand. Blood ran down his wrist.

  ‘You idiot!’ she cried in Spanish.

  Moments later she appeared with a first-aid box. Bandages. Disinfectant.

  ‘You may need stitches.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  She cleaned the cut and staunched the bleeding.

  ‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘What have I done to upset you?’

  ‘You must keep this dry.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘I want to marry you.’

  ‘Stop! Don’t say it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I will be sent back one day.’

  ‘What does that mean? Tell me. Why are you so scared?’

  ‘I have lost everything before – it cannot happen again.’

  And then she told him the story, describing how the earth bucked and reared and people flipped over like tortoises trapped on their backs and buildings crumbled like biscuits and the sound was like the roar of a locomotive rushing through a tunnel. Forty seconds. That’s how long it took for the mountain to come down the hillside and sweep away four hundred houses in Las Colinas, east of San Salvador. The death toll was higher because most people were sleeping.

  Belita’s husband dragged her outside. He went back for her brother. And a third time for her sister, but neither of them came out. Instead four floors of reinforced concrete collapsed like a concertina, leaving rubble and a cloud of dust. For eight days they dug, pulling out occasional survivors from different buildings, but mostly bodies. They dug with their bare hands until the sidewalks were covered in corpses and the smell was an abomination. They pulled an eight-year-old girl from a basement. An elderly couple were found cradling each other, encased in mud like they’d been cast in bronze.

  Both of Belita’s parents were dead. Her husband, her sister, a dozen neighbours … all swept away. Belita and her brother were all who remained of the family. Oscar was sixteen. She was nineteen and pregnant. The bulldozers were still clearing the rubble when they decided to go north to America. What other choice did they have? They were homeless. Destitute. Bereft.

  So they crossed a thousand miles of jungle, mountains, rivers and desert, travelling in the back of trucks or by bus or walking. In Mexico they paid two ‘coyotes’ to take them across the border to guide and guile them through the desert into Arizona. They walked at night, carrying bottled water, blindly slashing their skin on fences of barbed wire and thorny shrubs. They ran from border agents and were captured. Tied up. Thrown into a van and then into jail, where they slept on a bare floor for three nights before a bus took them back to Mexico.

  The second time they tried to do it alone, but bandits found them as they waited to crawl through a hole in the fence. They were stripped naked and their possessions taken. Belita tried to cover her breasts and hide her pregnant belly. The men debated whether to rape her.

  ‘She’s pregnant, man,’ one of them said.

  ‘The pregnant ones are the best,’ replied the other. ‘They hump like minxes because they want a daddy to stick around for their baby.’

  He touched her stomach. Oscar threw himself across the gap. He died before he could strike a blow.

  ‘Shit man,
look what you did.’

  Oscar lay on the ground, blood crawling from his nose. Belita knelt in the dirt next to him, rocking over his body. The bandits left her. She looked at the hole in the fence and the desert beyond. She looked at the way she’d come. Pulling on her clothes, she crawled through the gap and expected to die that night.

  They were the darkest hours, crossing the desert without food or water, battling the night-time cold, the insects, the sharp stones; throwing her body into ditches when the border patrol ATVs came past. She walked until sunup and then midday, until a truck driver gave her water and drove her as far as Tucson. For two nights she slept in an abandoned car. Another was spent on a mound of sawdust at a timber yard and the next in a freight car on a railway siding. She ate dog food and went bin diving. She hitched rides and walked until she reached San Diego.

  A cousin had told her there was work picking fruit, but few of the foremen wanted to employ a pregnant teenager. She washed clothes and cooked at a pickers’ camp until her waters broke and she gave birth in a hospital corridor, waiting for a bed.

  That was three years ago. Since then she had picked crops, washed clothes, cleaned floors and worse, always sin papeles. Undocumented. Unregistered. Invisible.

  There were no tears as Belita told Audie this story. She didn’t seek his sympathy or try to shock him. And even when she spoke of the day two men took her from the field, blindfolded and gagged her, threatening her life unless she agreed to work in a brothel, she did not rail at the injustice. Her past was a life, not a parable, and no different to thousands of other illegals pushed by poverty and pulled by hopes.

  Audie held himself motionless as Belita spoke, as though frightened she might stop talking and equally frightened of what else she might say . . His hand rested next to hers, but felt too heavy to lift and take her fingers into his. And so she continued, her eyes saucer-like and full of a terrible gravity, drawing him into a story that was not his yet he feared losing himself in the details.

  She finished.

  A groan escaped his lips in a voice he did not recognise. ‘Where is your son?’

  ‘My cousin is looking after him.’