Life or Death

by Michael Robotham

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In San Diego.’ She ran her finger over Audie’s bandaged hand. ‘I see him on Sundays.’

  ‘Do you have a photograph?’

  She took him inside to her bedroom and opened a drawer, showing him a picture in a small silver frame of a little boy, nestled in her lap, her chin resting on the top of his head, his hair falling to just above his eyes that were browner than brown, just like his mother’s. Someone had scrawled a message across the bottom of the image: Life is short. Love is vast. Live like there’s no tomorrow.

  Belita took the photograph back and said no more. The story had been told. Now he knew.

  37

  Sitting at the window of a Fourth Ward motel Moss watches the peculiar mix of addiction and prostitution pass by – the people left behind by the latest boom or washed ashore like debris after a storm. In Texas, money doesn’t so much churn as trickle down, urinal style, and people will happily pat a man on the back if he’s lucky enough to make it, but resent any suggestion they should help him to get there.

  The motel room has paisley curtains and nylon carpets and black girls hanging from the adjacent balconies, watched over by pimps who are loitering in the street outside. A century ago Houston was full of bordellos and opium dens. Even the well-to-do women of the city would partake in a pipe to settle their constitutions. Now the drug dealers are usually black teenagers with faces full of arrogant self-regard and designer pockets full of the latest technology.

  At dusk Moss goes looking for a bar and somewhere cheap to eat. Cars and cabs are jostling like people ready to fight. He enters a place and orders a beer, taking a seat with his back to the door. This is the sort of dive he used to drink in when he was underage using his older brother’s ID.

  He watches the bubbles rise in the frosted glass and takes another mouthful, swirling it around in his mouth. The beer doesn’t taste as good as it did when he was a teenager, forbidden fruit and all that, but he finishes it anyway because it’s been such a long time between drinks.

  At some point Moss wants to be outside again. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he walks past factories and car yards and fast food joints that cling to the six-lane like grease. When he reaches an intersection, he glances at a newspaper vending machine. Audie Palmer’s face is staring out from the front page – the lopsided grin and floppy bangs.

  TWO DEAD IN HOUSTON MOTEL SHOOTING

  Moss can’t read below the fold and doesn’t have any change. He asks a passer-by, who steps around him like he’s contagious. Moss tries to force open the hinged lid of the vending machine. His frustration seems to reach a critical mass and he kicks the metal box. He kicks again and again, until the hinges buckle and break. He picks up a newspaper from the wreckage, shakes it open and reads the details, not wanting to believe that Audie could shoot dead a mother and daughter.

  Maybe he finally cracked, thinks Moss, aware of his own hair-trigger temper and how often he had seen it happen before. An inmate gets a letter from his wife or girlfriend. She’s leaving him. She’s shacking up with his best friend. She’s run off with his savings. That’s when some men lose the plot. They string a noose around the bars or saw away at their wrists with a razor blade, or pick a fight with the meanest motherfucker in the yard or take a run at the wire and get riddled with bullets.

  Maybe that’s why Audie Palmer broke out of prison. He was always looking at that photograph in his notebook, running his fingers over a woman’s face, or being woken by his own screams, his chest heaving and face dripping with sweat. Love will do that to a man – drive him crazy. It doesn’t make him blind or indestructible, it makes him vulnerable. It makes him human. It makes him real.

  The honky-tonk has a string of coloured electric bulbs that crisscross the outside courtyard, strung from a trellis with a gnarled grapevine. A band is playing, dressed in matching cowboy shirts, singing a Beach Boys song with a slide guitar that sounds like someone is stomping on a live cat.

  Moss weaves between shoulders, passing a table of women who are dressed in identical pink T-shirts and ballet tutus. One of the number is wearing a bridal veil pinned to her head and an ‘L-plate’ strung around her neck. She’s gyrating on the dance floor with a bottle of beer in each hand.

  Finding a spare foot of space, Moss leans against the wall, propping one foot on the vertical, nodding his head to the music. He feels a vibration in his pocket. It takes him a moment to work out that his cell phone is making an unaccustomed sound. He fumbles for the right button, his fingers too big for the small keys. Holding the phone cautiously to his ear, he listens, but can’t hear anyone over the music.

  ‘Hold on,’ he says, pushing through the crowd to the restroom. He takes a stall. The back of the door is decorated with graffiti and drawings of genitalia. Someone has scrawled: I had to overcome a happy childhood to get this fucked up.

  ‘You’re supposed to be looking for Audie Palmer,’ says a voice.

  ‘Maybe I am looking.’

  ‘He must be living with the Beach Boys.’

  Moss wants to drop the phone into in the toilet bowl and flush it like a turd.

  ‘Palmer has been located,’ says the voice. ‘I want you to pick him up.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I’ll text you the directions.’

  ‘You’ll what?’

  ‘Send you a message, dipshit!’

  ‘If you got Audie, why do you need me?’

  ‘Do you want to go back to prison?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then do as you’re told.’

  Ever since childhood Audie had been terrified of being trapped in confined spaces. Carl once locked him inside an old chest freezer during a game of hide-and-seek. Audie almost suffocated before being let out.

  ‘You were squealing like a girl,’ Carl said.

  ‘I’m going to tell Daddy.’

  ‘Do that and I’ll put you back in there.’

  Audie wakes now like a blind man entering his first day without sight, hoping the world might suddenly reclaim its colour and light. The drumming of the tyres on the road is sending vibrations through his shoulder and hip. His wrists and ankles are fettered with plastic ties and each breath contains a dirty mixture of exhaust fumes and his own body odour. Trying not to panic, he pictures a happier time – a game of baseball, high school, the regional championships, two home runs, both disappearing over left field. He punches the air as he rounds first base and high-fives his teammates on the run home. He can see his daddy sitting in the bleachers, accepting the plaudits of well-wishers and other parents, soaking up the vicarious fame. Another scene shimmers and takes shape – the state fair in Dallas; fireworks are exploding above the Ferris wheel and Butch Menzies rides a three-hundred-pound Brahman called ‘Frenzy’, sticking like a burr to its rippling back as it twists, rears and bucks.

  Periodically the car pauses, perhaps at stoplights. Audie can hear the radio playing: a country and western song about a lonely cowboy and a woman who did him wrong. Why do women always get the blame, he wonders. He doesn’t think Belita was the architect of his woes. She saved him. She took a boy with no prospects and gave him a reason to care. Why else would he still be here?

  The car dips off the edge of the road and bounces heavily along a track that rises and falls. The tyres are flinging small rocks against the wheel wells and chassis. Audie feels around for a weapon. The spare wheel is beneath him. Rolling into a ball, he uses his fingers to pull back the nylon matting. He runs his palms around the edges of the wheel rim, which is held down by a central bolt, screwed in place by a wing nut.

  He tries to loosen the nut, but the lurching of the car scrapes his knuckles against the sharp metal, stripping skin. He tries again, feels it slacken, but he can’t lift the tyre because his own weight holds it in place. It’s useless. Foolish. He can’t do it. He tries again. His left shoulder feels ready to pop.

  The car is slowing down. Stopping. The engine is idling. Boots move over the ground and
the latch pops open. The trunk lifts. Audie breathes in the cool nocturnal smell of a forest. The tall man is silhouetted against the sky and the trees. He grabs Audie by the collar and hauls him backwards over the lip, dumping him onto the dirt. Audie groans and turns his head, looking at the nearest trees, which are dull silver in the headlights. They’re in a clearing on the edge of a dirt road. Audie can see the old stone foundations of a house or a mill, long gone. Stringy weeds are pushing up through the rubble.

  The tall man cuts the plastic tie around Audie’s ankles, but leaves his wrists cuffed. Then he opens the passenger side door and pulls out a shovel and a twelve-gauge sawn-off shotgun. He motions for Audie to start walking, pushing him into the arc of light. They move through the knee-high weeds. A bird explodes out of the branches above them. The tall man swings the shotgun into space.

  ‘It’s just an owl,’ says Audie.

  ‘Who the fuck are you – Al Gore?’

  They reach a sandy wash behind the remnants of the house. The foundations consist of concrete blocks partially buried in the dirt. One of them has a metal ring embedded in one end. The tall man hooks up a chain and makes Audie kneel. He wraps the chain around Audie’s right ankle, securing him to the concrete block like a dog on a leash. Then he cuts the plastic on Audie’s wrists and steps back. Audie stands, massaging his chafed skin. The shovel lands next to him.

  ‘Dig.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’ll be your grave.’

  ‘Why would I dig my own grave?’

  ‘’Cos you don’t want mountain lions, coyotes and vultures predating upon your body.’

  ‘I’ll be dead – won’t bother me.’

  ‘That’s true, but this way you buy a little time. You say a little prayer. You say goodbye to your mama and your friends. You won’t feel so bad about dying then.’

  ‘That’s your theory?’

  ‘I’m a big-hearted guy.’

  Resting his foot on the top edge of the shovel, Audie grips the shaft with both hands and drives the blade deep into the soft sand. He can feel his heart beating against his ribs and a vinegary smell rising from his armpits. His mind ticks over as he digs, evaluating what can be lost or gained from using up his energy.

  The chain gives him about a fifteen-foot circle. Testing his boundaries, he feels the cement block move slightly as he reaches the end of the restraint. The tall man is sitting on a slab of stone, leaning back with his cowboy boots crossed and the shotgun resting in the crook of his left forearm.

  Audie pauses and wipes his forehead.

  ‘Did you kill them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The woman and her daughter?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘At the motel.’

  ‘Shut up and dig.’

  The moon breaks out from behind a cloud, creating shadows beneath the trees and a soft halo around the upper branches. The hole is getting deeper but the sides keep collapsing because the soil is coarse and dry. The tall man lights a cigarette. He seems to exhale more smoke than he inhales.

  ‘I’m just asking if you prefer shooting women and children,’ says Audie, pushing his luck.

  ‘I never shot no woman or child.’

  ‘Who do you work for?’

  ‘Anyone who pays.’

  ‘I can pay you more. Don’t you know who I am? Audie Palmer. You ever heard of the Dreyfus County truck robbery? Seven million. That was me.’ Audie shifts his leg. The chain rattles against the block. ‘They never recovered the money.’

  The tall man laughs. ‘They told me you’d say that.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘If you had that sort of money, you wouldn’t be living in shitty motels and you wouldn’t have done ten years in a federal prison.’

  ‘How do you know I was living in a shitty motel?’

  ‘I watch the news. Keep digging.’

  ‘I got friends who can pay you.’

  The gun muzzle swings across Audie’s chest and drops lower. ‘If you don’t shut up I’m gonna shoot you in the leg. You can dig and bleed at the same time. Dirt needs a bit of moisture.’

  The tall man’s phone is ringing. He keeps the gun trained on Audie, while he reaches into his pocket and flips it open. Audie ponders whether he could flick a blade full of sand in the man’s eyes. Maybe he could make the trees if he carried the cement block, but what then?

  He can only hear half the conversation.

  ‘When did you call him … and he’s coming here … how much does he know? Fine. Cost you double.’

  The call ends and the tall man steps to the edge of the hole.

  ‘It’s not big enough.’

  Moss follows the directions he’s been given, driving east out of the city before leaving the interstate and taking a series of back roads that grow more narrow and rutted. Eventually he enters an area of dense pine forest, crisscrossed by fire trails and dried-up creek beds. He checks the odometer. He was told it was three miles from the last turn-off. There are fresh tyre tracks in the dust. Slowing down he kills the engine and headlights and coasts down the next hill in neutral. As he peers into the darkness, his eyes pick up a faint flickering light through the trees.

  He pulls over and slowly opens the door. The engine makes a pinging sound as it cools. He takes the .45 from beneath the seat and tucks it into the back of his jeans before closing the door with a muffled click. His eyes become accustomed to the darkness as he sets off along the road, heading in the direction of the light. This feels more like an ambush than a prisoner transfer. Wetting his lips, he smells the pine needles and hears the sound of a shovel stabbing into earth.

  Moss is not a lover of the countryside. He’s city born and bred, preferring to know the proximity of his nearest takeout than seeing newborn lambs gambolling in a meadow or a field of wheat shivering in the breeze. The countryside has too many things that buzz, bite, slither or growl; and it also happens to be full of murderous hicks who think lynching black men should still be a recognised sport, especially in parts of the South.

  Ahead, he can see a clearing. A silver sedan is parked on the far side, shining headlights across a dry wash covered in stunted shrubs and weeds. Two men. One of them is sitting on a rock, the other digging a hole.

  Seeking higher ground, Moss climbs up a slope, concentrating on his footing. He can hear the shovel rise and then fall. A loose rock rolls from under his feet, triggering a small rockslide that echoes as it tumbles into the wash.

  The sitting man jumps to his feet and peers into the darkness, holding a sawn-off shotgun in his fists.

  ‘That weren’t no owl,’ he says.

  ‘Could have been anything,’ says the man digging the hole. Moss recognises the voice. It’s Audie Palmer. In the bleaching light, Audie’s skin looks sallow and the concavities beneath his eyes are like dark stains. But the eyes themselves are what shock him the most. Once almost fizzing with life and energy, they now stare out from some interior place like a frightened animal or a beaten dog.

  Moss lies on the crest of a ridge and peeks from between two boulders, still warm from the heat of the day. Audie is still digging. The other man is the same tall streak of misery that was outside Audie’s mother’s place, the ex-con with cruel eyes and a ridiculous beard. He’s moved to the edge of the light, still swinging the shotgun from side to side.

  ‘Is someone there?’

  Moss shrinks down, the rocks cutting his knees and the heels of his hands. He takes a stone and throws it over his head like he’s tossing a grenade. The tall man swings the shotgun toward the sound and fires off a shot that explodes in the stillness like cannon fire.

  When the noise dies, he crouches behind the crumbling foundations of the building.

  ‘I know you’re there,’ he yells. ‘I mean you no harm.’

  ‘Is that why you started shooting?’ replies Moss.

  ‘You shouldn’t sneak up on a man.’

  ‘I was told you were expecting m
e.’

  ‘Is that Mr Webster?’

  Audie has stopped digging. He stares up the slope as though trying to place the voice.

  ‘Why didn’t you just announce yourself?’ asks the tall man.

  ‘You looked a little trigger-happy.’

  ‘I mean you no harm.’

  ‘Then you’ll put the gun down.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘So you’ll see the sun come up.’

  Audie is still gazing up the ridge. ‘When did you get out, Moss?’

  ‘Few days ago.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were up for parole.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  ‘How you been?’

  ‘Good. I managed to see my old lady.’

  ‘Guess you had some catching up to do.’

  Moss laughs. ‘We tore up the sheets. I’m still feeling sore.’

  The tall man grunts. ‘What is this – a PTA meeting?’

  Moss ignores him.

  ‘Hey, Audie! They’re saying you killed a woman and child.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did you do it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I figured as much. Why are you digging a hole?’

  Audie motions to the tall man. ‘He said it was a grave.’

  The tall man interrupts. ‘I was only trying to keep him busy till you got here.’

  ‘I’m supposed to make it big enough for two,’ yells Audie.

  ‘He’s talking horseshit, amigo,’ says the tall man, who swings the shotgun at Audie.

  Moss is contemplating his next move as he works his way further along the ridge to get a better look at the tall man. He peers over the edge of a rock, trying not to create a silhouette against the sky, still pointing his .45, the hammer on full cock, the barrel trembling because he’s holding the grip so hard. From this distance, he’s not likely to hit anything unless it’s by accident.

  ‘You gonna pick him up, or what?’ yells the tall man, his voice bouncing weirdly off the trees.

  ‘We got some shit to talk about first,’ Moss replies. ‘How about you put the shotgun down? I conversate best when I don’t have a gun pointed at me.’