Almost Midnight (21 page)

Added to this, Mary was growing increasingly homesick. It was
December now, Christmas was coming, and she’d already told Darrell that she wanted to spend the holidays with her folks back in Branson.
Branson! As in Taney County!
Just about the last place on earth Darrell wanted to be seen right now. Nevertheless, he’d assured her that they’d try to work something out.

The next day they didn’t get up until past noon. This had been their pattern of late, sleeping ten or twelve hours at a stretch and always feeling it wasn’t enough, always tired. They’d talked about it a few days earlier, their chronic oversleeping, and Mary had volunteered, “You know, I think it’s because we’re depressed.”

“I know,” Darrell said.

They might have stayed in bed even longer just now if it weren’t for Harold dropping by. They’d met him when they first moved in, a thin sour alcoholic in his late fifties with an endless repertoire of sad stories, shattered hopes, big plans gone badly awry. He was living in the trailer across the way and Mary had bummed a pack of smokes off him. A couple of weeks later he was evicted for not paying his rent but he still liked coming by every few days to chat. Normally they didn’t mind him visiting but today they weren’t in the mood. After sitting there a half hour listening to Harold going on about his ex-wives and bitter divorces and his two-year stint in a state prison for busting up a billiards parlor, Darrell said that he and Mary had plans for the day and they’d have to cut the visit short.

“All right,” Harold said. Then, looking right at Mary, he added: “You know, you can’t do thirty years. You can’t handle it.”

They were flabbergasted. Where had this remark come from? Harold knew nothing about their past. They’d been exceedingly careful not to reveal anything he might be tempted to use against them. So what was this? A premonition? Or just a shot in the dark? Either way, it was damn unsettling.

“I can’t do thirty years in prison,” Mary said after he left.

“Don’t worry,” Darrell said. “You won’t have to.”

They really didn’t have plans for the day, beyond scrounging something to eat. They drove two miles to Reid Park, a large attractive
greensward off 22nd Street with playgrounds, snack bars, and a small zoo. They’d been coming here three or four times a week, foraging for food in trash bins by the zoo. The pickings were usually pretty good. School kids on day trips would sometimes discard entire lunches: unwrapped sandwiches, apples, pieces of cake. The trick was being alert and retrieving the stuff before it had a chance to spoil.

Sitting on a bench finishing off his share of the day’s haul, Darrell saw those black ducks again. There were plenty of ducks in the park but it was those beautiful black ones, Cayugas, native to upstate New York, which always caught his eye. If he could only find some way to steal a couple of them, a male and a female, he thought, he could start breeding them and maybe make some money putting them up for sale. Running the possibilities through his mind, he was suddenly struck by the absurdity of it. Here he was, a guy with all the trouble in the world, banking everything on a couple of ducks.

Back at the trailer Darrell and Mary decided to break into their supply of meth. The meth again: their comfort, their torment, their near-constant companion. Meth had helped bring them together and then done its best to pull them apart. It had strung them along, plunged them into disaster, and vandalized their hopes. It had been there almost every step of the way, alternately grinning and grimacing, never shy about asserting its mastery.

Once, just a couple of weeks earlier, it had even stopped them from getting married.

They’d seriously discussed getting married a few times since hitting the road the previous December. The first time was in California. Mary was all for it but Darrell talked her into waiting. He was a bit gun-shy after Joyce and Donna, and, besides, he still wasn’t legally a free man. The divorce from Donna hadn’t yet come through. Nevertheless, he’d signaled his intentions by taking some of the money Lexie had sent them and buying Mary a gold ring inlaid with three diamond chips. In the ten months since then she’d worn the ring every day, except for their first week in Tucson when
they’d been forced to pawn it for grocery money. After they’d gotten the ring out of hock, she’d started talking about marriage again and then two weeks ago they’d made their decision. Forget about waiting any longer—waiting for the divorce to be finalized, waiting for some elusive upturn in their fortunes. They’d drive over to Tombstone and find a justice of the peace and get married right on Boot Hill. Boot Hill, the fabled graveyard of the Old West, final resting place of gunslingers and desperadoes and no-account bad men: this was where she wanted it done. Darrell didn’t argue. He knew that graveyards held a certain romance for her. She’d grown up next to one in Branson and had played in it as a child on warm summer evenings. He remembered her telling him, not long after they first met, that she’d actually thought of becoming a mortician.
Boot Hill
. After all they’d been through, there was something almost poetic about it. So late one night they headed out for Tombstone and pulled off on a side road halfway there. This was the plan: catch some sleep in the car and then arrive at Boot Hill early the next day and round up a justice of the peace. Except Darrell wasn’t in the mood for sleeping. He sat in the front passenger seat watching Mary drop off and then he stayed up all night cranking. Once he’d started in, there was no turning it off. When Mary awoke she took one look at him and knew that he’d had his snout in the trough again. After promising her—swearing up and down—promising that he was through with the stuff, he’d been going at it all night long. She didn’t say a word. She simply pulled the car off the side road, made a left-hand turn, and headed back to Tucson. So much for the Boot Hill wedding.

So here they were, back at the trailer after their excursion to Reid Park, and still upset over being blindsided by Harold earlier in the day. Getting high was the only avenue of relief they could think of. It didn’t work out any better now, however, than it had at the old Star Tungsten Mine in Nevada several months ago. Once again Mary complained of feeling sick and later on, lying in bed, she started to cry and told Darrell that she was afraid of him.

Darrell was devastated. He’d suspected as much from time to
time but hearing her actually say it was more than he could bear. He put one of their guns in her hand and told her that he loved her and that he’d sooner die than see any harm come to her. If she didn’t believe him, he said, he wanted her to shoot him right now. Shoot him in the head and throw his body somewhere out in the desert.

At daybreak he placed all the drugs they had left on the counter, two plastic bags each containing roughly an ounce of crank. He snipped off the ends with a pair of scissors and flushed the stuff down the toilet. Mary waited a few days to make sure he wasn’t holding anything back. When she finally saw he meant business she said, “Darrell, I love you.”

One evening the next week Darrell was killing time over by Santa Rita Park off 22nd Street near 5th Avenue. He was waiting for Mary to get ready so they could go to a little carnival that had set up in a vacant lot nearby. A young Mexican woman with two small children and a shopping cart full of groceries approached him and asked if he’d mind escorting her to the other side of the park. A big tough-looking guy with long hair was lurking in the shadows halfway across and she feared for her safety. Darrell had seen the guy walking into the park from the street a few moments earlier and he felt she had every reason to be afraid. He escorted her across, his cold-steel combat knife under his jacket, and smiled at the guy as they passed.

He told Mary about the incident when he picked her up at the trailer. “You really are a good man,” she said, sounding like she meant it.

At the carnival they stopped by a booth and watched as one guy after another tried unsuccessfully to knock down three pins with a dart gun. Mary asked Darrell to give it a go. She wanted him to win the prize for her: a miniature teddy bear. On the first string, three shots for a buck, he ciphered it out. The gun shot about six inches high and five or six inches to the left. On the second string he nailed the pins and won the teddy bear. You would have thought he’d bagged a grizzly: it was one of his proudest moments.

Going out the door of their trailer the next morning Mary said, “I want to spend eternity with you.”

“You will,” Darrell answered, though in truth he hadn’t a clue how this could happen. The only eternity he could imagine for himself was something very different from what Mary must have had in mind. In his view he was a sinner beyond reprieve, bound for no place but hell.

Part III

CHAPTER EIGHT

S
KID ROW, PHOENIX:
not quite hell, Darrell thought, but it couldn’t be far removed. He hadn’t wanted to return to Phoenix, it was too big and intimidating, but toughing it out in Tucson had proven a losing proposition. He hadn’t come close to finding work and just before Christmas Mary had lost her job at Arby’s. They’d been forced to eat Christmas dinner at a shelter that Harold had turned them on to. So much for Mary’s dreams of making it home for the holidays.

“I can’t go on much longer like this,” she had said one afternoon in late December.

So they had packed their things and moved here. Why not? It was worth a shot. So far, however, it hadn’t been a winning move. They were still jobless and, what’s more, Phoenix had them spooked.
After dark, with the downtown office workers safely ensconced in their suburban homes, the city center was like an open morgue, a prowling ground for zonked-out addicts and prostitutes. Out on Van Buren, a seamy east-west thoroughfare not far from where they were staying, you’d be hard-pressed most evenings finding somewhere to buy coffee and a sandwich. Everything was locked up, bolted down, a sinister feeling in the air.

For the past week they’d been paying ten bucks a night for a room in a flophouse on the western edge of downtown. From the street the place possessed a certain lubricious charm: ancient neon sign, tall unwashed windows, a fringe of palms around the corner. Inside, however, the charm rapidly gave way to gloom and decay, the paint in the fetid lobby cracked and peeling, the furniture and drapes in the upstairs rooms carrying the long-gathered stench of bitterness and despair. Back in the 1940s it might have been a decent, moderately priced hotel; now it was a haunting place for the broken-down and dispirited. On some level Darrell and Mary must have known they were near the end of the line. The fight had been knocked out of them. Staying here was almost a gesture of defeat.

At the moment all Darrell was hoping for was some peace and quiet. They were lying in bed trying to watch a movie on the old TV set by the window but the neighbors weren’t cooperating. There was shouting and cursing from the adjoining rooms and loud vomiting from the bathroom down the hall. Every few minutes someone pounded on their door, probably a hooker or a john checking on the room’s availability.

Despite the distractions, Darrell found himself really getting into the movie. It was an old Vincent Price flick,
The Baron of Arizona
, about a middle-aged guy in 1870s Arizona who manufactured a huge land fraud giving him and his much younger wife control of the entire territory. He was eventually found out and narrowly escaped being hanged. Sentenced to prison, he told his wife that he’d only been interested in acquiring land and money so he could treat her right. She replied that money meant nothing to her provided she had him by her side. The movie ended with the guy
walking out of prison and getting picked up by his young wife in a buggy.

The next morning, braving the stink of puke and urine and disinfectant, Darrell broke a piece of clear glass into tiny fragments and spread them on the floor of the shared bathroom down the hall. He’d already decided they wouldn’t be staying here another night and this was his way of getting even for the constant disturbances of the past week.

Late afternoon, sitting over coffee and a newspaper in a small café, they saw an advertisement for jobs at a warehouse not far from downtown. Darrell phoned and the guy in charge said the two of them could start the next day. Mary wanted to celebrate this stroke of luck by renting a motel room for the night but Darrell said they should conserve their money. They’d pawned the Benelli for a C-note at a place on North Central a few days earlier and they only had about thirty dollars left. He said they should drive out to the desert and spend the night in the car.

After dark they drove up through Cave Creek and down Pima Road. They found an isolated spot off Shea near 142nd Street a little bit east of Scottsdale. They backed the station wagon off the road and went to sleep, Camelback Mountain behind them to the south, the McDowell Mountains invisible in the night sky to the north. Parked out there in the desert, with the plastic suburbs of Scottsdale close at hand—their fancy shopping malls dressed up in pretty desert frills, red tile roofs, stucco façades, but otherwise no different from the shopping malls you’d see in Los Angeles or Boston or Chicago—Darrell was about as far away from the Ozarks backwoods as he could possibly be.

T
WENTY-SEVEN, SLIGHT OF
build, brown-eyed, and boyishly handsome, Deputy Gary D’Agostino, a two-year veteran of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, was working the graveyard shift in the boondocks. At that time the sheriff’s office ran a satellite station out of a trailer near Fountain Hills, and D’Agostino was one of two
deputies assigned to it overnight. It was two in the morning, not much happening, so he thought he’d swing by his favorite stakeout spot, a little cutoff by Shea near 142nd Street. He’d had success in the past catching speeders going down a knoll here on their way to Scottsdale. Pulling onto the cutoff now, his headlights splashed against an Olds station wagon backed into the desert. He was surprised—he’d never seen anyone parked out here before—and more than a little annoyed that someone was on his turf.