Borderline (3 page)

“Yes.” She found the word somewhere in her vocabulary and offered it up on her tongue. It tasted alien and sounded far away. “Killing will do that to some people. For guys like him, killing is all that would do it. I stopped him: stopped him from preying on women, stopped him from killing me, stopped him from taking up space and breathing good air.” The anger eating her from the inside out seared the words and she knew she sounded even more heartless than she was.

“This wasn’t the first person you’ve . . . stopped . . . in your career as a law enforcement ranger, is it?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” In that moment Anna couldn’t remember if she had ever killed anyone else or not. She remembered parks and jobs and broken bones and wounds slashed into her body with fish gaffs and pine branches. She remembered animals slain and people bloody and covered in flies. She remembered hurting and hurting others. But, as she stared into the face of Vinny-the-shrink, she couldn’t remember whether or not she had taken the life of another human being.

Shaking her head, she struggled up from the hammock of leather, pushing against the cold chrome of the chair’s arms. “You’d think a girl would remember something like that, wouldn’t you?” she said, and laughed. “It’s not like I have to count the notches on my gun to know how many. You can’t notch a Sig-Sauer—they’re all metal.” She turned as if to leave, and fixated on the desiccated grasses in their square silver vase. “I suppose you could mark the kills with scratches,” she said absently. The grasses were supposed to be beautiful, the pale rust-colored stalks and the tawny feathered tops. “Dead,” Anna said. “The grass is dead. Can’t anything live in this room? The chairs made of the hides of dead cows, the walls of dead trees.” She turned back to the psychologist. He was standing now, as well, his glasses back on his nose. “What’s the desk made of? Plastic? Dead dinosaurs? I can’t remember if I killed anyone else.”

Her eyes gushed with tears, her nostrils poured mucus; Anna could feel the sides of her mouth pulling down in the wild howl of a child. She was imploding, exploding, her body and mind were turning their blackened insides out and she felt dams breaking and bones melting, steel bands tightening, bowing her spine, puppet strings of piano wire forcing her hands to flap feebly.

“I want to go home,” she screamed at the shrink.

Dr. James was around the desk, a hand outstretched toward her. On his face was a look of deep and genuine concern. In his eyes she could read pain for her suffering. She had misjudged him, been unfair, unfeeling and cruel. The knowledge should have made her kinder, but rage would not let it. More than anything she wanted a fight, a hard fight with knuckle bones and edged weapons, an excuse to strike out, to let the pressure smash into a deserving target. James was closing in on her, both hands out now as if he was going to fold her into an embrace.

Time chose this moment to do its petty pace thing and all but stopped. In the grip of this psychic stasis the tears in her eyes acted as lenses that didn’t distort but magnified. She could see the wear under Dr. James’s eyes, the fine lines growing into folds from too much worry and too little sleep. Patches of stubble smudged beneath his right ear and along the jawline because he had shaved in a hurry or been distracted by thoughts of other than his own vanity. The fingernails on the outstretched hands were clean but short and the hands themselves calloused from hard labor.

Dr. Vincent James was a human being. Barricaded behind her brittle carapace of anger, Anna had neglected to note that.

The need to strike out, the fury of the volcano, the wild lash of rage stopped flowing outward and, with a suddenness that brought her to her knees, turned on her. The burning place beneath her sternum was extinguished by the blast and, where the fire had been, only a great empty hole remained.

Anna felt herself tumbling into it.

D
arden White caught himself doing it again. His hands were folded loosely in front of his crotch. Years in the Secret Service had ingrained the classic pose into his bones. Left to its own devices his skeleton settled into watchful cop stance. The Secret Service was misnamed, he thought. They wanted to be seen and identified to let those with sinister intent know the subject was being protected by the best. A visual presence didn’t deter serious criminals, but it helped keep amateurs with big dreams at bay.

Darden no longer needed to be that obvious. Not to mention the addition of his gut didn’t lend itself to the pose with any grace or dignity. Since he’d retired he’d put on a pound a year, give or take. Wanting a hobby—and trying to get his mom to eat something other than Pepperidge Farm white chocolate chunk cookies and peanuts—he’d taken up cooking and gotten too good at it.

Darden sniffed. At sixty-three, a man should be able to have a gut if he wanted. Along with graying hair worn just long enough to make it look like he needed to see a barber, the extra pounds lent him an avuncular look that he found useful.

As a bonus, his doctor told him the added weight, carried out front under his heart, could take years off his life. Darden’s mother had changed the way he looked at death and longevity. At eighty-five, as fit and strong as ever, she only had enough mind left to know she hated being locked up.

Poor old bird
, he thought, as he did whenever his mother came to mind.

Darden had lived most of his life ready to take a bullet for somebody else—often somebody he didn’t much like—and death didn’t frighten him overmuch. Alzheimer’s did. Idly he considered taking up smoking again to help the gut along, but decided that would be overkill.

Letting his hands fall to his sides, he continued watching the waiters setting up the Chisos Mountain Lodge’s dining room for the event. The view couldn’t be beat. The lodge was nestled in a ring of ragged peaks. On the southwest side of the tiny valley where the lodge’s rooms and cabins were built a mountain was missing, like a tooth pulled from a line of molars. Through the gap one could see the desert below roll out into a misty distance stopped by the mountains of northern Mexico.

When it came to security, the lodge wasn’t what Darden would have chosen. Judith had her own reasons, and they were politically savvy, but she left herself open too often. Politicians he’d guarded fell into two categories. Either they were so paranoid there was an assassin slavering after their worthless little lives that he had to check every space big enough to hide a cat before they’d enter a building, or they were like Judith, believing themselves immortal and beloved. Most were like Judith. The good ones anyway.

An elderly couple came and stood at the entrance looking confused as the dining room they’d been using was being rearranged. A young whip of a man, working summers in the parks while going to college, Darden knew—he’d interviewed all the employees working the cocktail party—stopped them from entering. Darden watched the kid’s face move plastically through the permutations of a young man who had grown good at telling people they can’t have what they want without endangering his tip.

The couple, in their seventies or maybe early eighties, was holding hands. They leaned in toward each other as if they’d grown together until their limbs became indistinguishable, one from the other, like two ancient trees. Darden smiled at them and nodded at the waiter. Judith could afford to feed a few strangers. Fundraising came naturally to her. Looking relieved, the young man led the couple to a table by the window.

Darden had never married. His job didn’t lend itself to family life. Sometimes he wished he was gay. Another man would be a better fit for the home life of an agent: sex and companionship, somebody to grow old with and no worries about who’d call the plumber or shovel the walks or scare away the burglars when you were away on assignment.

In the service gay would not have been a plus. A lot of the guys he worked with were flat-out homophobic. It was a moot point. Darden was not gay. Whoever said it was a choice had never considered making it. Men were born wired for a socket or a plug. At least that was how it was for Darden.

Judith Pierson walked in. She was small, five-foot-five, with a boyish figure. In baggy khakis and Converse high-tops she should have looked about as imposing as any mall rat, but the straightness of her spine and the military bearing of her shoulders made her seem bigger, a person to be reckoned with.

Another woman would have been sequestered in her room worrying about her makeup or her dress. Maybe Judith worried and maybe she didn’t, but she wasn’t one to trust the details to other people. It was why she was going to make it. She was going to be Texas’s next Ann Richards, but without the liberal trappings.

“Hey, Darden. Everything okay for the meet-and-greet?”

“I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble. Big Bend is too far from anywhere for the uglies to bother making the trip. I’m just making sure the tees are dotted and the eyes are crossed.” He winked at her.

The hard facial lines of the polished politician softened and he glimpsed his little girl. Judith was forty-three. Darden had known her forty of those years. When she was little her mom used to drop her off at his mother’s house to be looked after while she was working, and she was always working. It was from her mom Judith inherited her ambition. Darden was living at home then, going to night school, and he babysat her as much as his mom did. Half the time he’d wake up around ten and there’d be Judith, lying on her stomach, her bare feet in the air, legs crossed at the ankles, pointed chin in her hands, watching him as if his snoring and drooling was more entertaining than anything she could have seen on the television.

She looked around at the preparations like a general assessing his troops and nodded slightly. Darden had learned to watch for the small movement, her delicate chin jerking down infinitesimally. It meant all was as she would have it. When he didn’t see that chin go down he knew the fur was about to fly and he’d have to spend a good half hour smoothing somebody’s feathers to get them to go back to doing their job.

“Thanks, Darden. Keep your boys to the shadows. This is just an informal party so the good people of Texas can see what a down-to-earth, caring, witty woman I am. Tonight I’m winning hearts. Day after tomorrow we go for the jugular.”

“Kev and Gordon will be as ghosts,” he said.

“Right,” Judith said, and laughed. “You’d have better luck making ghosts of a couple Brahman bulls.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll keep them in the paddock.”

“You don’t need me,” she said. “I guess I’d better go start making myself look gubernatorial.”

“And lovable.”

“Goes without saying.” She gave him a mock salute and walked away, her back straight, her head balanced high on her neck. After a few steps she stopped and turned back. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He’d never had terrific feet and the job demanded so much standing around it never mattered how much money he spent on shoes or fancy insoles, because they still hurt most of the time.

“You can sit down, you know,” she said with a wry smile.

“I’ll stand.”

Laughing, she shook her head. “Of course you will. Suit yourself.”

Head of security for the mayor of Houston, Texas, wasn’t the same as running alongside limousines in parades. There was no code insisting management couldn’t sit. The one time he’d been tempted he’d not even gotten his tush on the seat before he felt like a damn fool and a goldbrick and stood up again.

Security stood and they watched and if their feet hurt that was just too damn bad.

Later in the week Judith was going to announce her candidacy for governor of Texas. She’d chosen to do it at Big Bend National Park. It was a good time to put on the cloak of environmental concern, and the sobriquet “friend of the parks” impressed conservationists. Judith was already known in Houston for her work with environmental concerns, but Big Bend would give her visibility in West Texas.

But it was border control that was going to launch her into the big time. Chisos Lodge housed a lot of seminars every year. Because of the park’s renown—and because it was a vacation destination—they were well attended. The seminar Judith was using as her spring-board was on the environmental and social effects of the Mexican drug wars on people living in communities along the border. Drug wars scared the good citizens. Ditto immigrants. America no longer wanted anybody to give her their tired, their poor, and their huddled masses made people’s blood run cold.

Judith planned not only to announce her candidacy at a dinner in a couple days but to start her campaign. She was gutsy; the audience wasn’t handpicked to cheer the way it was usually done at these things. Every heavyweight with a bone to pick or a cross to burn was at the convention. Belief systems ran from open arms to our Mexican brothers and sisters and amnesty for all to building a great wall with sentry towers and drones flying the canyons to keep out the southern hordes and their drug overlords.

Judith decided to open her campaign with fireworks instead of bunting. Reporters from Houston and Dallas, Fort Worth, Alpine, Beaumont, El Paso, Midland, Austin and San Antonio had made the trek across the desert to capture the event. Judith was sure enough of herself that she invited them personally. It was risky, but if she pulled it off, the big boys would have to take a long hard look at her when it came to national party politics.

Darden glanced out the window to the patio where the gentlemen of the press milled around smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes and salivating, he thought uncharitably. There were two women in the bunch: a skinny bleach-blonde from Austin, and Gerry Schneider. Gerry was an old warhorse in her late fifties. She’d covered the last year of the Vietnam War from Saigon, one of the few women they let get close to the front lines. He’d met her in D.C. when Hinckley had taken a potshot at Ronald Reagan. Darden liked Gerry. She was tough. With a woman like her a man wouldn’t have to check every darn thing that went bump in the night. From what Darden had heard, a while back, she’d gotten out of the fast track and moved back to Houston to get a job at the
Herald
.