And West Is West (21 page)

“We'll need the box,” Daugherty says—a suggestion for Pyle to get the polygraph, which Daugherty deliberately left in the car before meeting with Wagner. Best not to let the warden in on his plans.

Pyle pushes into the visitation room and stops. “That may be a problem,” he says, not unhappily.

“Hell,” Daugherty replies while examining the room.

Long and narrow, it contains a row of stalls with bolted stools and glass partitions. This is not going to be a contact visit.

Going back to Wagner to request an interrogation room is a nonstarter. So Daugherty makes an executive decision. One of the things that had impressed him about Pyle was the man's military record; he had done interrogations for army intelligence in Afghanistan.

“You be the lie detector. You ask the questions,” Daugherty says, while telling himself that this is
his
idea, that he's not an old man capitulating to the next generation, that he's not Pyle's sock puppet.

THE CONVICT IS
a big man with receding hair slicked straight back. His complexion shines and his green jumpsuit radiates sweat halos from the armpits due to his time in solitary. Peering through the security glass, past Pyle and Daugherty, Donald Alan Aldridge seems to be searching for someone else. When he realizes that only the agents are visiting, he bares his teeth. They are remarkably even and white, probably state provided.

Pyle signals the prisoner to pick up the handset. Fortunately, this is not a public visitation day. Nobody is around to overhear state secrets.

Aldridge lifts his handset, and his mouth starts moving before it nears his face. The glass muffles his shouts, but Daugherty makes out “feds,” preceded possibly by “goddamn.” After Aldridge gets off this rant he settles onto his stool and talks calmly into the phone. “Sure am glad to see you boys.” Daugherty can hear Aldridge speak because Pyle is holding his handset at an angle. Pyle absorbs the convict's mood swing in silence.

Daugherty is beginning to think that Aldridge's comment has confused his partner, as it has him. Then Pyle responds. “And why would you be glad?” It's that same nastily sardonic tone Pyle has recently used with a stubborn waitress and a reluctant motel clerk.

“Simple, ace,” Aldridge says. “You guys being here means you haven't nailed my little girl. Why else would you visit?”

“Mr. Aldridge,” Pyle says shaking his head, his tone turned grim, “I wish that were so. We're here to tell you that your daughter has been in an accident.”

Aldridge retracts his cock-of-the-walk grin. A twitch settles into one side of his mouth. “You must be talking about my kid in New York. I know about it. She drowned. I know about it.”

“No,” Pyle says. “I mean your other daughter. Jessica. Jessica's been severely injured.”

As this untruth seems of little value other than for sadistic purposes, Daugherty wonders if Pyle's lying, in general, might simply be sociopathic.

“Bullcrap,” Aldridge says. “What are you talking about?”

“She was hitchhiking in Texas. It was the middle of the night. A driver with one headlight sideswiped her. She's in intensive care,” Pyle says.

Aldridge doesn't look convinced. But perhaps to support his crumbling confidence, he leans one of his big shoulders against his stall's side partition. “So you guys came all the way down here just to tell a convict about his hurt daughter. Ain't you humanitarian. Like I said, bullcrap.”

“We think she was on her way here, to visit you. There are a few details we need to clear up. Thought you might help. If you do, maybe we'll fly you to Dallas for a mercy visit. Does that interest you? By the way, I'm Agent Pyle and this is my boss, Agent Daugherty.” Pyle, seated on a bolted stool, winks at Daugherty with the eye hidden from Aldridge.

The prisoner scratches his chin stubble. “You're going to get me out of here for a trip?”

“Like you mentioned, we're feds. We can make special arrangements for cooperative witnesses.”

“Yeah. Witnesses to what?”

“To what your daughter might have told you. At this point we just want to undo any accidental harm she did to national security. Any information would help.”

Aldridge's expression reverts to a sneer. “You expect me to rat on my girl? There're two words for that.” But with his boldness deflating, Aldridge doesn't say them. “Anyway, you already have everything she wrote me.”

“But you have phone privileges. You don't mean to tell me that in all the time you've been inside you've never spoken with your daughter?”

“Spoke to her? Not since she was a kid. She just started writing to me a couple of years ago. I'm lucky to get letters, let alone a call.”

“Mr. Aldridge. You'll have to try harder for us.” Pyle's tone is calm, absent of emotion. Somehow this sounds crueler than if he were shouting. “You have a few more days in solitary. Search your memory. Maybe we'll try again.”

“Come on, man, be straight with me. If you really have Jessica in the hospital, why aren't you asking her your questions?”

“If she were conscious, we would,” Pyle says crisply and hangs up the handset.

“Hey!” Aldridge shouts, his voice muffled by the glass barrier. “How bad off is she?”

Pyle turns away as if ignoring a chained, barking dog.

“Hey!” Aldridge shouts.

And now Daugherty, too, is leaving. But he glances back when the pounding starts. Aldridge is beating the glass with his handset.

“Tell me about Jessica, you lousy fucks!”

At the obscenity Aldridge's face plunges forward into the barrier between prison and freedom. For the second or two that Daugherty watches, the prisoner's eyes display their whites and his lips smear blood against the glass. A guard, Daugherty sees before turning away, is pressing a stun gun into the man's neck.

OUTDOORS IN THE
prison parking lot, Daugherty is too angry to talk.

“Well, that went well,” Pyle says without sarcasm.

“Did it?” Daugherty says, just able to contain his fury. “Aldridge told us nothing and we got him zapped.” Daugherty has said
we
because
he
took Pyle off his leash. “You can take to the bank we'll be called out on this one.”

“I doubt it. Wagner was looking to punish Aldridge beyond solitary. We did the warden a favor. He won't complain.”

“Maybe so, but the prisoner didn't deserve a stun. You set him off with the lie about Jessica.”

“It was a good tactic considering he's just lost his other daughter.”

“No. It was just sadism.”

Coming to the red Impala, the agents separate. This time Pyle is not interested in driving and grimly goes straight to the passenger's side. Daugherty's downer attitude is getting to him.

“I appreciate your being old school. But the world has changed.” Pyle is speaking patiently. He might be a caregiver spooning oatmeal into the mouth of an invalid. “These days, boss, you've got to push hard or get pushed over.”

“The voice of experience,” Daugherty says.

“Just of five years in Talibanistan.”

“Pissing on the bodies of your enemies?”

“Screw you, Daugherty.”

Daugherty gets in the car and it's a pizza oven. After cranking the engine, he elevates the air conditioner to gale force. But the vents blast humidity for a good minute and he's sopping before they clear out.

Pyle remains standing outside the car—waiting, Daugherty realizes, for its interior to cool. Daugherty is beginning to sense in this minor thing, as in possibly all their interactions, that Pyle is manipulating him. This realization, that he no longer trusts his partner, that he in fact
hates
Pyle, takes Daugherty like a sucker punch.

“I guess it's out of this swamp and back to California,” Pyle says after buckling up beside him.

Daugherty, behind the wheel, reads Pyle's comment as a test of suggestibility. Maybe Pyle expects, now that Daugherty's been cued, that he will chauffeur them to the airport and book them on a return flight home to LA. But this is not how it will go. Daugherty still has authority. “We're not going home empty handed,” he says.

“I'll bet you're thinking about hooking Aldridge up to your lie detector.”

In fact, Daugherty is considering this. But he can't let Pyle know he's floundering for ideas. “After what just happened I doubt Wagner will grant us another interview. But if he did, I'd use the polygraph on Aldridge. Why not?”

“Because it would make no difference. Aldridge could turn Boy Scout and not tell us anything we don't know. Look, chief, I've done enough military interrogations to read a man like him. We broke him today. We took all he has.”

“Fine. Forget the old man.” Daugherty is burning to show that he, too, can think two moves ahead. “We'll pick up his daughter when she pays him a visit. Did you see how he looked when we walked in? He was expecting to see his daughter, not us. I think she's planning a visit.”

Pyle stays quiet while Daugherty backs from the parking space. When Pyle's sure his partner can manage driving and thinking simultaneously, he points out a flaw in Daugherty's thinking. “If our person of interest is bright enough to elude you for a year, she's not likely to visit a prison where she'll have to show ID.”

“Why else would she come to Florida if not to see her father?” Daugherty snaps.

“Maybe she's coming back because this is where she started out.”

“So she's a salmon?”

Pyle isn't baited by the mockery. “I'm saying that there's other people she'll be more likely to visit. Her mother for one.”

“And you have that address?”

“I'm working on it.”

Of course Pyle is, since he always seems to be two steps ahead of Daugherty's two steps. And Pyle's logic has possibilities. But this case is no longer about locating ex – Technical Sergeant Aldridge. It's about Daugherty and Pyle.

“We're not chasing shadows up and down Florida,” Daugherty tells him. “We're coming back here to stake out this parking lot. Let's assume Jessica Aldridge doesn't know she has to sign in to visit a prisoner. Or maybe she's going to try a false ID. In any case, I'm not letting a correctional officer take the credit for collaring her.”

“All right,” Pyle says. “That's not unreasonable.”

“Why thank you,” Daugherty tells him. “If she doesn't surface we'll look into the mother and follow up on the New York side. I hope you took down that detective's information.”

Pyle doesn't need to flip open his notebook. “Chen. Seventh Precinct.”

“Maybe she can tell us if the sisters were in touch.”

“I doubt they were,” Pyle says. “But you're the boss.”

And though Daugherty is, his heart is fibrillating again, a bird beating its wings against a cage of bone.

CHAPTER 39

New York City

“
Bonjour
, Ethan,” Juliette says. It is a pleasant September afternoon and she has arrived at the Jamba Juice on Houston and Mercer, where he had texted her to meet him. “This is a little out of our way, no?”

“I first met Zoe there,” he says, nodding across the street to a corner. “Almost exactly two years ago.”

“Ah,” says Juliette. She busses Ethan on both cheeks, noticing that his face is closely shaved, his hair cut, his shirt fresh. It is as if he's going on a date. Or perhaps he is just a man intent on his own rehabilitation—he
is
carrying a gym bag. It's as if Juliette's proposal to engage Ethan as Alex's financial adviser has snapped him out of his depression.

Inside they order flatbreads, Juliette to be amenable, and they sit to discuss Alex, still at work on Sergei's mural five thousand miles away. “He is very happy you've decided to help,” Juliette says, putting away the documents Ethan had brought for her to send to Alex—papers he must sign to cede Ethan control of the rubles Sergei has deposited for him in a Sevastopol bank.

“He's always been bad with money, with planning for his future.”

And what about your future?
she wishes to say.
Sergei will not wait forever for you to take up his job offer
. But it is not her place to be the shopkeeper with Ethan. “Yes, artists are impractical,” she says. “But what you do, isn't it also a work of art?” Ethan frowns and she corrects her overstatement. “At the least it is magic.”

“No, just a bit of timing,” Ethan replies. “Maximizing an exchange of rubles.”

“Surely it is more than this,” Juliette says.

“Not really.”

Now Juliette frowns. “But I'm sure you know what you're doing.”

When later they rise to leave, with Juliette disposing of her flatbread, she sees that Ethan is standing straighter than he normally does. He is looking more in control of himself and this eases her concern about Alex's rubles. “You are going to a gym now?” she asks, seeing him holding the duffel from which he'd removed the banking documents. The bag has a large Nike swoosh.

“Oh, this?” he says of the duffel. Then he unzips it and shows her the metal urn inside.

Juliette takes a breath. “Is that . . . ?” she says.

“Zoe,” Ethan says. “I've been taking her back to all of our spots. Here. Washington Square. Battery Park. I've even shown her some new places. I don't think she'd ever been to Liberty Island before.”

“That's . . . very romantic.”

“I was a homebody. But Zoe always liked going out. I hate thinking of her cooped up. Now we're going on a trip. Florida.”

Juliette smiles tightly. She is thinking of how to tell Alex that his friend has gone just a little mad.

HOMECOMING

September 2013

CHAPTER 40

Pompano Beach

The wa
v
es roll in, lick Jessica's heels, soak the butt of her jeans. Rolling out, they siphon sand through her toes. To the north, beneath a lighthouse, a sport fisher breaks from an inlet that is pointing a diagonal path in front of her toward the Bahamas. Already the boat has raised outriggers so it won't be traveling that far, 150 miles. Jessica has never been to the islands and doesn't precisely recall how she knows the distance and triangulation. Having grown up nearby, she must have absorbed a local nautical chart. One of the reasons she did well in the drone program is her memory for spatial data. She had been proud of this ability until it had been misused. Now she wishes she never had it.

Skittles behaves as if it's her first time before an endless expanse of water. Jessica can believe this since Newt and Shelly were definitely not beachgoers. Their dog chases sea foam and barks at hovering gulls.

“Quiet, girl,” Jessica says, though there's no one else around to complain about the yelps. Jessica retracts her legs and wraps her arms around her shins. She tracks the fishing boat against the haze on the horizon. It is a humid, airless morning and the sun is a disappointing smear, a wet lozenge instead of the orange fireball she had hoped to watch rise.

The familiarity of the area behind her—the flat expanse of the landscape, the wind-bent palms, the canals and quarry lakes, the low concrete houses, the midrise hotels and condo developments, even the grungy strip malls—makes her nostalgic. She shouldn't feel so at home here in her hometown. She's been in exile too long.

By age twelve she was long fatherless but unprepared to be completely orphaned. That was her age when her mother explained to her how lucky Jessica was to be alive, that six months before she was born, on the day her mother was scheduled for a D&C, her father convinced her to marry him. The biggest mistake of her life, her mother added cutting a lime for her second gimlet of the morning.

Only later did Jessica grasp why her mother had told her these things. Joanne wanted her to understand the inconstancy of her mothering—the disappearances, the empty refrigerator, the infrequently washed clothing. Despite this neglect, through Jessica's unconditional love, Joanne remained a goddess. Until, to keep a boyfriend who disliked children, she abandoned Jessica at her sister's.

Jessica's aunt lived in central Florida and was raising as devout Christians a quartet of boys. She took in her sister's girl to save that “lost child's soul.” But Jessica thought her soul was fine and, not a month after she moved in, vowed that she would get away from her aunt and her aunt's church—Martyrs of the Lamb—as soon as she could. Five long years later, after graduating from high school, it was the Air Force that saved her—at least from her family.

Cawing gulls draw Jessica's attention down the beach, to where a lifeguard is striding toward her. With his rescue buoy he fends away Skittles' curious approach.

“She's friendly,” Jessica shouts, not wanting the guard to hit Skittles.

“No dogs on the beach,” he says.

“Sorry. I didn't know.”

“Read the signs.”

The guard is typical—young, tan, ripe with muscular health, hair bleached to a white-sand blond. In comparison Jessica feels like a carcass washed ashore. Especially given her weariness, the journey from California, the breakdown in the desert, the resurfacing of her pursuers and her flight from them.

After the Claytons had dropped her in San Antonio, Jessica met a night-shift trucker at the McD by the motel where'd she'd taken a room. She'd gotten worried about staying the night—the call Mr. Clayton had taken kept replaying in her head. The trucker brought her and Skittles to New Orleans, where a trio of broke coeds, or so they claimed, let her hitch to Gainesville for gas money. Jessica risked a withdrawal from an ATM and that leg of her trip took two days while the women tanned on the beach in Panama City. After this she had less luck on the road; her inked arms attracted loners whose stares demanded more for a ride than she was willing to spend. The tattoos, no doubt, also discouraged regular folks from picking her up. She was closing in on her aunt's country—the wary Koran-burning Christian heart of Florida.

Traveling on foot, Jessica was more concerned about being detained than happy to see any police cruisers. Those that did track her must have discounted her ability to violate any criminal statutes with a dog in tow. Or maybe the authorities just didn't want to confront Skittles, who, like Jessica, was starting to look feral. On the eastern edge of Gainesville she came upon a campground amenable to pets.

After a brushing for Skittles, a shower for herself, and a night under a lean-to, a retired couple with an RV gave the young woman and her dog a lift to Daytona. They said goodbye at a gas stop near the speedway, and at a Dunkin' Donuts Jessica tied up Skittles in the shade. When Jessica returned with her coffee and a cup of water for Skittles, a lean, tough-looking woman was kneeling there stroking the dog.

“You from Oregon?” the woman asked.

“No.”

“Kids with tats traveling with dogs remind me of Portland. Great city,” said the woman.

Jessica didn't balk at being called a kid. She figured she must have lost years along with her weight. “I'm from California,” Jessica told the woman. “The Inland Empire.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And where ya going?”

The woman, Nell, drove a pickup with a kennel in the bed. She was heading to Miami after her dog's evening races. That night, after Flying Pumpkin earned only participation fees, Jessica chipped in for gas, handing over her last twenty, and they were traveling. Two hours later, near Fort Pierce, Nell pulled in at a rest area and Jessica thought,
Uh-oh
. But all Nell wanted was sleep. The downside was her snoring. So Jessica kept company with Skittles and Pumpkin in the pickup bed.

Before dawn they were rolling again and soon Jessica's exit drew near. She mentioned a desire to see an ocean sunrise and Nell drove to the beach, where she wished Jessica and Skittles luck.

And now Jessica is back to where she started—this time facing an unfriendly Adonis.

“Cops see your dog out here you'll get a fine,” says the lifeguard.

Jessica pushes herself up from the sand. “C'mon, Skittles,” she says, and they start off.

“Your pack!” the guard calls, angry as if Jessica were purposely trying to trash his beach.

Jessica walks back to get her worldly belongings.

On the path to the road there's a shower tap. Jessica waters Skittles and checks to see if the guard is going to yell again. But he's already forgotten them. He's striding in the sand toward his little tower.

THE MULTISTORY BEIGE-AND-OCHRE
buildings on this barrier island seem unchanged from when Jessica was last here, a dozen years ago. The structures were old then, dating from the sixties. It's hard to believe, after a decade of foul coastal storm seasons, that so much of the past remains unmolested.

On the road to the mainland drawbridge stands a newer structure—low, slablike, windowless, a United Imperial Bank. There's a flagpole planted there, too, but no American flag is flying from it yet. Too early. Gathering courage, Jessica locates the bank's cash machine and feels her heart thump as she thinks about her pursuers—Daugherty and that other younger, meaner agent. Pyle. Though it's not really them she fears. It's their bosses who can put her away. Maybe for good. There's no parole for souls imprisoned in psych wards. That her skinny, tattered spirit is so obviously wrecked gives them a perfect excuse to commit her, to lock away whatever secrets they fear she might reveal.

Looking into the ATM mirror, Jessica considers the hidden camera taking her picture. Some day such monitoring will be tied to a network that instantly sends ID and facial data to whatever authority might want it—much the way she once transmitted coordinates and imagery from circling drones to ground troops on missions.

But already she knows that she can't completely hide. Without friends like Newt and Shelly, she is going to have to surface a little. She dips her bank card.

As usual, Jessica doesn't know if it is good or bad news when out come fifteen twenties. Maybe her trackers don't really want her that desperately, not desperately enough to lock her account. Maybe they're not using unlimited resources to hunt her. Maybe she's
not
public enemy number one. Jessica decides to go with all these maybes.

Then, as if the future of ATM surveillance has already arrived, a police cruiser pulls up. Jessica is stuffing the money in her knapsack when the officer approaches. He's not smiling. With his mirrored sunglasses he resembles an emotionless movie cyborg.

“Morning,” he says to Jessica and passes on to the cash machine.

“Morning,” Jessica says, and then, “C'mon, Skittles.” They start walking toward the drawbridge, a block away.

Coming over it, a pack of Harleys growl and fart. The riders acknowledge Jessica with whoops as if she's some kindred spirit, probably due to her tattoos. After the last bike passes, the drawbridge rises, stopping Jessica on the sidewalk. And the police cruiser pulls alongside her. They wait. As Jessica watches a sailboat motor by, she can feel the heat of the officer's lenses. Then the bridge lowers and the officer drives off.

HOMECOMING NOSTALGIA, OR
something opposite—that human impulse to pick a scab—guides Jessica's steps over the sticky tarmac to her old neighborhood. It is less than a mile from the drawbridge but over twelve years back in time. When she comes to the sandstone building where Joanne and she lived, her pulse quickens. This is not because Jessica fears that
she
will be there, sipping her gimlet and peering through the slats of a jalousie window. Joanne, or so wrote her berating aunt two summers ago, is still unrepentantly drinking. But she has long since departed Pompano, has been migrating between West Palm Beach and Port Saint Lucie—between her two Medicare-eligible boyfriends.

The news left Jessica colder than usual. For by then she had not spoken with Joanne in six years. And before that she could count her mother's combined visits and phone calls to her on fingers and toes. The piety of her aunt was partly to blame. She called Joanne a sinner, said it was her duty to enlist Jessica into the army of God. Thus, in the eyes of Jessica's legal guardian, the less often Joanne phoned Jessica or came to see her, the better. And so, trying to ignore the sisters' dispute, Jessica became numb toward the women in her family, which eventually rekindled her desire to know her father. Jessica was in the Air Force by then. No longer a child, her reality could not so easily be upended by family, or so she thought. She would be the one in charge now. That the relationship would be conducted through letters to a person who couldn't visit didn't hurt either.

Joanne's old building recedes, and so do Jessica's memories of her. What remains is Jessica's responsibility to Don: she's the one who started communicating with him. If she abandons him altogether, or even if she doesn't write to him soon, won't she be doing what her mother did to her?

“YOUR PUP LOOKS
overheated,” calls out a shirtless, big-bellied man in a straw hat. He is holding a watering hose over a hibiscus hedge and Skittles, tongue hanging, pulls toward him. As the man seems more comic than dodgy Jessica also steps off the tarmac and onto the healthy lawn.

Skittles laps at the water the man is running into his cupped palm. “You're a good girl, aren't you? Aren't you?” the man says to her.

In the meantime Jessica studies the property—a pink two-story apartment building. She counts maybe a half-dozen units and has already noted the
FOR RENT
sign in the yard.

“They allow pets here?” Jessica asks.

“We're pretty flexible, me and the wife. Got a furnished efficiency upstairs just vacated. Wife's cleaning it now. Care for a look?”