Life or Death

by Michael Robotham

  Desiree unzips her boots. ‘You stay here.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out there.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  Desiree holds up her pistol. ‘I know how to use this.’

  ‘These guys aren’t going to swap phone numbers.’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  Moss watches her move away. Reaching below the seat, he finds the big revolver wrapped in the oily rag. He unfolds it gently on his lap and weighs it in his hand, remembering when he first held a firearm, aged thirteen. He liked the way it made him feel – six inches taller and forty pounds heavier, no longer weak or insignificant. The gun gave him gravitas. The gun made him more articulate. The gun gave him courage. This was imaginary and fleeting, of course, but it took a lot of lean years in prison for him to realise that.

  Desiree is thirty yards in front of him, moving further away. She looks twelve years old in her stockinged feet. Looking left and right, Moss scans the low shrubs and chooses to take the beach side, finding a path through the dunes.

  Feeling too exposed, Desiree navigates the shallow ditch and climbs a hummock. Down on her belly, grasses tickling her chin, she slithers across the clumpy ground to within thirty feet of the two Ford Explorers. At first glance the vehicles had looked empty, but now she notices a figure sitting in the passenger seat with the door partially open, smoking a cigar. Lying flat, she digs her forearms into the sand and aims her pistol at the man’s head, her finger tightening on the trigger.

  ‘FBI! Hands on the dashboard.’

  His head jerks around with an expression of amazement, as though the Virgin Mary had suddenly appeared before him. One hand rises, the other falls.

  Moss is watching from the opposite side of the car. He can’t see the man’s face, but senses what’s coming next. This guy is going to roll the dice. Maybe he thinks Desiree won’t fire. Maybe he believes that he’s faster.

  In one movement, the man raises a machine pistol above the level of the window. The weapon needs two hands to hold it steady, but he’s only using one. He presses the trigger and the pistol jumps, raking the grassy hummock with a staccato burst. Desiree fires twice, hitting him under the armpit and again in the neck. The man falls sideways, half in the car and half out, his face illuminated by the interior light.

  Moss sprints from his hiding place and leaps over the ditch. When he reaches Desiree she’s bleeding onto her blouse.

  ‘It’s only a nick,’ she says, showing Moss her forearm. Slightly deafened by the noise, she doesn’t realise she’s shouting.

  Moss looks at the body. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A man called Victor Pilkington.’

  More flashes pierce the darkness. The sounds arrive a moment later. Moss helps Desiree stand. She barely reaches his waist. She points to his .45. ‘You said you weren’t armed.’

  ‘I lied, ma’am.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Come on.’

  67

  Audie can’t see the shadows outside any more. They’re probably braced against the walls, waiting to come through the windows and the door. His shotgun is resting on the windowsill, aiming at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Get ready to run.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ says Max.

  ‘I’m sorry I made such a mess of things. I should have left you alone.’

  He hears a burst of gunfire in the distance. At the same time a dark shape appears on the deck. He pulls the trigger and hears someone grunt and collapse backward down the stairs. Audie doesn’t wait. He flings open the door and sprints across the deck, planting his good hand on the railing and swinging his legs over the top. The drop is about fifteen feet. He lands heavily, knees buckling into his stomach. Lying on his back, winded, he sucks in air.

  Stencilled against the horizon he sees the silhouettes of two figures breaking cover and running toward the house. Another shooter stands on the beach, arm extended, preparing to fire. Audie scrambles up and starts to run. Fear hums in his sinews. Reaching the dunes, he throws himself over the top and tumbles down the other side. The ocean is eighty yards away, the beach deserted with seaweed clinging to the tideline. What’s across the water? Cuba, Mexico, Belize. Places he’ll never see. A world of countless millions of people, living in the heat and the light, while he is a universe of one, alone on the beach, a lighthouse whose light cannot be relit.

  Looking up and down the sand, he’s filled with a desperate, almost suffocating sadness and sense of abandonment. Why does the world have so little need of him? What can’t it just be ambivalent?

  He groans, climbs to his feet and starts running along the beach. Bullets are kicking up sand and whizzing past his ears. They’re not firing wildly. There is a gap between each burst. These aren’t nickel-and-dimers, they’re professionals who take aim. They’ve come to do a job.

  He zigzags as he runs and falls into another swale, holding his useless arm, staring skyward, considering his choices or lack of them.

  Give up.

  No.

  Get up.

  Can’t.

  Glancing back the way he’s come, he sees shadows hiding in the ragged clumps of grass where the insects have gone silent. Spectres. Ghosts. Furies. Impatient gods. The men are reloading. Waiting for him.

  Moss and Desiree have reached the house and are crouching beneath the deck, smelling the cold mineral odour of cement and the tropical ferns. Someone is lying at the base of the stairs, holding his face. Moaning. There are voices above. Two people are coming down the stairs – a teenage boy and someone holding a machine pistol.

  ‘Do as you’re told.’

  ‘You shot him!’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Desiree recognises the older voice. Moss is standing directly beneath the stairs as they descend. He reaches through the bare wooden steps and grabs an ankle. Valdez pitches forward. Max has to leap out of the way. Desiree steps from the shadows and presses a gun to the sheriff’s head.

  ‘Don’t move!’

  ‘Thank God, you’re here,’ he says. ‘We found Palmer. He’s getting away.’

  Desiree looks at the boy. ‘Max?’

  The boy nods.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘You gotta help Audie,’ he cries, pleading with them. ‘They’re going to kill him!’

  Desiree has never heard a voice this fraught and desperate, this real. It makes her turn and look in the direction of his outstretched hand. In that instant Valdez reaches for the machine pistol and spins on his back, feeling for the trigger. But Moss has seen it coming. He pushes Max aside and fires a round into the sheriff’s chest. The .45 doesn’t penetrate the vest, but Valdez drops the pistol and curls into a ball, groaning and nursing his ribs.

  When Moss looks up, Max has gone, sprinting toward the beach.

  ‘Stop him,’ says Desiree. ‘He’ll get himself killed.’

  Moss picks up the machine pistol and gives chase, running hard through the soft sand. For the best part of fifteen years he has kept his temper under control, but now that genie is out of the bottle. It’s not about slaking a bloodlust or quenching a thirst; it’s about living instead of rotting away in prison; it’s about one crowded hour being worth more than a lifetime of the commonplace or the mundane.

  He hears the sound of an engine and ahead of him an ATV soars over the top of a dune, front wheel airborne and then the rear. They went back for a vehicle, which is now churning through sand, using a spotlight to search for Audie. The beam sweeps back and forth, briefly trapping a lone figure, running over the dunes. He looks like a wounded duck, flapping through the ragged grass.

  The shotgun dangles from Audie’s damaged arm. He has one shell left. Swapping hands, he turns and fires, almost falling. The round goes high. Stumbling into a swale, he gets a mouthful of sand as lights sweep above his head. These people aren’t going to cut and run. They’re going to hunt him down.

  Ahead there are fences erected across the beach in a staggered formation to stop erosion. Sea
weed has clumped at the base of them, marooned by the tide. Audie uses them as cover, running between each new section of fence. Closer to the water he notices an odd mound that looks like a beached whale until he realises that someone has pulled a boat onto the sand, or maybe it broke loose from a mooring and washed ashore. Audie throws himself down behind the fibreglass dinghy, holding his shoulder. The shotgun is still dangling from his useless hand. He has to pry his fingers open.

  The ATV has stopped further up the beach. The spotlight is searching for him, sweeping back and forth over the dunes.

  He hears footsteps … someone is running headlong toward him. He grips the shotgun by the warm barrel, ready to swing it like a club.

  I’ll take one of you bastards with me!

  He swings it hard, but at the last moment lets go of the shotgun, which spins past Max’s head and splashes into the water. The teenager collapses next to him, sucking air into his lungs.

  ‘You were supposed to go the other way.’

  ‘I think my dad is dead.’

  Audie doesn’t ask what happened. They’re not going to let either of them live now.

  ‘I’ll draw their fire. You head for the canal.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t swim.’

  Max looks at Audie’s shoulder, then at the boat. He stands and tries to drag the dinghy to the water, but it’s beached high and dry. He rocks it from side to side. Max pulls. Audie pushes. Slowly it begins to inch down the natural camber of the sand. The vehicle has reached the fences and the spotlight sweeps across the dunes and down to the water’s edge.

  Max is standing in the shallows. They wait for the next swell and make one last effort. The boat slides away and Audie falls flat on his face, swallowing a mouthful of water. Max drags him up and rolls him into the dinghy, before pulling the boat deeper, wading until he can’t touch bottom and then kicking his legs.

  Audie looks over the gunwale and sees the vehicle pull up. A moment later a beam of light fills his vision and a burst of gunfire splinters the fibreglass, creating a spider-web pattern across the stern. Audie yells to Max to get down and flattens himself against the bottom boards, lying in a puddle of rainwater. More rounds rip through the hull. He crawls back and yells for Max but can’t see him.

  The teenager appears on the port side of the dinghy, water dripping off his face.

  ‘We’re too close to shore.’

  Audie looks at the beach. The vehicle is no further away. The current is dragging the boat sideways. One shooter is running along the sand while someone else controls the spotlight. More bullets strike the hull. Audie lies face down on the deck, his shirt already wet, his cheek pressed into a deeper puddle. Salt water. They’re sinking.

  There’s a lull in the shooting. He rolls over the side, holding on with his good arm. He and Max both kick, but the boat is wallowing, already too heavy. Inexplicably, the spotlight swings away and the bullets start to miss. Audie looks at the beach and notices someone running across the sand like a broken field quarterback, crashing through bushes and grasses.

  Moss Webster is on the charge. It’s like that scene in True Grit where Rooster Cogburn puts the horse’s reins in his mouth and gallops into a blaze of bullets, with a rifle in one fist and a pistol in the other, yelling, ‘Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.’

  Ignoring the incoming fire, Moss looks like a man who doesn’t care, a man angry beyond reason. The spotlight tries to catch up with him, but the figure behind the light starts dancing like a puppet as bullets rake across his chest.

  The other shooter tries to counter, but he’s caught in the beam of the headlights, a human wraith exposed by the brightness. Moss fires until the machine pistol is empty and tosses it aside. He walks forward, aiming and firing, aiming and firing.

  The shooter is crouched in a classic pose, just like they teach the experts at Quantico, but it doesn’t do him any good. A bullet hits him in the throat and he flutters and falls, his blood finding the sand.

  Silence follows. Only the bow of the dinghy is above the water. Audie holds on with one hand, resting his chin on the edge. The water is very cold and the current is pulling at his legs, trying to drag him under.

  ‘We have to swim,’ says Max.

  ‘You go. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘My shoulder is a mess.’

  ‘You can kick.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you here.’

  Audie remembers what his father told him about clinging to the wreckage. He had to hold on like a limpet but he didn’t know what a limpet was.

  ‘OK, you hang on like a one-armed man clinging to a cliff while he’s being tickled.’

  ‘I’m ticklish.’

  ‘I know.’

  You got to hold on like a frightened kitten on a sweater.

  You got to hold on like a baby being breastfed by Marilyn Monroe.

  So he clings to the dinghy until his fingers grow numb and his good arm can’t hold on any longer. Exhausted and barely conscious, he doesn’t feel his fingers release and he doesn’t scrabble for a handhold or grope for one more lungful of air. Instead he slips beneath the surface, tired of fighting, wanting to sleep.

  He drifts downward, looking up at the dinghy, wondering if it’s possible to see the stars from under the water. Then she appears, the same angel that came to him on the night he escaped from Three Rivers and swam across Choke Canyon Reservoir. She’s dressed in a translucent white robe that floats and sways around her as though she’s falling in slow motion.

  His heart soars. As long as she’s here, he won’t die alone. Belita wraps her legs around his waist and pulls his head to her breasts. He can feel the heat of her body and the softness of her hair brushing back and forth across his face.

  Their future unfolds before him – waking on cotton sheets, listening to the ocean breaking against the shore. Breakfast at a café in the mercado, eating tortillas and fried plantain. Swimming in the bottle-green waves and lying on the sand until the sun drives them indoors to the cool of a shuttered room where they will make love under the blades of a spinning fan …

  ‘You have to go back,’ she whispers.

  ‘No. Please let me stay.’

  ‘It’s not time.’

  ‘I kept my promise. He’s safe now.’

  ‘He still needs you.’

  ‘I’ve been lonely.’

  ‘You have him now.’

  She kisses him and he sinks deeper, happy to drown in her arms, but a fist grabs hold of his shirt collar, a forearm reaches around his neck and strong teenage legs drag him upwards, kicking hard for the shore.

  Epilogue

  It’s a strange thing for a man to sign a visitor’s book and enter a prison where he has spent nearly a third of his life. And even stranger to walk down the long narrow visitors’ room, past Perspex screens where prisoners are waiting to meet wives, mothers, sons and daughters.

  Audie feels quite nervous as he takes a seat and looks up and down the rows, where children are fidgeting on their mothers’ laps or being held up to the screen to plant kisses on the clear plastic.

  Moss appears and pulls up a seat, hunching down to fit his big frame in the viewing window. He picks up the telephone, which looks like a toy in his fist.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘How you doing, big fella?’

  Moss grins. ‘Cooler than a polar bear’s toes. How’s the shoulder?’

  Audie holds up his left arm, which is still in a sling. ‘My NBA career is through.’

  ‘You white guys can’t jump anyways.’ Moss leans back in his chair, resting his legs on the narrow table. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Agent Furness drove me.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Talking to the chief warden, but she’s going to come and say hello. She thought we needed some time together.’

  ‘I hope she doesn�
�t think we’re gay.’

  ‘You, maybe.’

  ‘Yeah, you try saying that when I’m out of this place.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘I got a good chance of early parole, according to my attorney, especially after I gave evidence to the Grand Jury about Valdez and Pilkington.’

  ‘How early?’

  ‘Before I’m fifty, which ain’t that long relatively speaking.’

  ‘Speaking of relatives, how’s Crystal?’

  ‘Oh, she good. You just missed her. She wore one of my favourite dresses – one that showed off her titties.’

  ‘Don’t let Special Agent Furness hear you talking like that.’

  ‘Hell, no.’ Moss grins. ‘You see the TV news?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He’s talking about Senator Dowling’s arrest. Surrounded by TV cameras and baying reporters, he was led across the pavement by two FBI agents, one of them so small you could only see the very top of her head. A Grand Jury had just charged him with judicial corruption and perverting the course of justice.

  Clayton Rudd had rolled over faster than a rotisserie chicken, giving evidence against Dowling and Valdez. Pilkington and Senogles were the architects, according to Valdez, who told the Grand Jury he was a mere pawn in the robbery, under the spell of his uncle, who threatened him with exposure and ruin. ‘I didn’t kill anybody,’ he shouted to reporters as he was led away from the courtroom.

  It could be another year before he comes to trial. How many other people will be caught in the net by then? Or maybe the establishment will close ranks and try to limit the damage.

  Max is back living with Sandy, but only because Valdez was denied bail. She claims she knew nothing about the robbery and the cover-up and Audie believes her.

  ‘You’re going to be a rich man,’ says Moss. ‘Ten years for a crime you didn’t commit – they’re gonna give you millions.’

  ‘I don’t want their money.’

  ‘Sure you do. Shit! Give it to me.’

  ‘Look what happened the last time folks thought I had money.’

  ‘Yeah, but this time it’s different. You’re innocent.’