The Between (27 page)

“Sunshine Gun Shop,” a man’s voice answered. The shop’s name sounded familiar. Of course. He’d bought his shotgun there just after New Year’s, when Dede received the threat at her office, but that was more than two months ago. How could the shop find him? Even Dede and Raul didn’t know where he was.

“Is Stan there?” Hilton asked, uncertain.

“You got him.”

Hilton explained who he was, that he’d received a message at his hotel. “Oh, yeah, Mr. James. Just calling to remind you that your waiting period is over. Everything’s checked out. Come pick her up whenever you’re ready.”

Jesus. Hilton didn’t speak for a moment, searching his mind for a recollection. Involuntarily, his breathing was already more shallow. “Pick up . . .”

“We’ve got your Colt forty-five. Paid for, ready to roll.”

At the shop, two miles south on South Dixie Highway, Stan showed Hilton where he’d billed the gun to his American Express card and signed for it. Hilton searched his wallet and found his own copy of the receipt, dated the week before, two days after he moved out. His own signature. He’d bought the gun somewhere, somehow. He remembered entertaining the idea of getting a new gun after Curt took his shotgun, but he’d never gone through with it—as far as he knew. But then again, he had. Here he was.

The nickel-plated military-style revolver looked huge to Hilton, and it sat heavy and foreign in his hand. He felt like a sleepwalker during the transaction, as though he’d snap awake at any moment. Stan asked him if he remembered how he’d shown him to load the clip. Remind me, Hilton said.

That was how Hilton came to have a loaded gun tucked in his denim-jacket pocket the next time he made the drive to North Dade to park in front of Charles Ray Goode’s trailer park. Whenever his mind began to dwell on the impossibility of a purchase he couldn’t even remember, he forced himself to think about other things. There were too many other incidents that needed explanations. What’s done is done is done, he told himself. Someone used to tell him that all the time, a long time ago.

It was Goode’s cigarette day, Hilton remembered. At 5:30 exactly Goode jogged down his trailer’s steps and walked through Poinciana Havens front gate, looking neither right nor left. He waited at Biscayne for a pause in the traffic flow, then he crossed the street and disappeared inside the Circle K.

On impulse, Hilton jumped out of his car. He glanced back at the Aries K to see if the agent had seen Goode, but he couldn’t tell. The agents face was buried in his newspaper. Fucking useless. No wonder Goode had been able to slip away that night, and who knew how many other times before and since.

Without realizing it, Hilton slid his hand inside of his pocket until it was wrapped around the cold butt of the gun. He was alarmed by his actions as he waited for an empty schoolbus to speed past him so he could cross the street. No wonder people testified in court they’d had no control, that they were moved by something larger. Maybe he really was schizophrenic, like Raul said. What was he doing stalking his stalker with a gun he had no recollection of buying? I’ll just watch him, he vowed. That’s all.

Goode must have decided to stock up on more than Marlboros, because he wasn’t standing in the line at the front counter to ask for cigarettes. A young black woman in a red-and-white Circle K uniform manned the register, ringing up an old man’s six-packs of beer and lottery tickets. Hilton glanced up at the security mirror at the rear of the store and saw the red from Goode’s plaid shirt. He was standing at the magazine rack.

Hilton stole to the row beside Goode’s, standing purposely close to the shelves, and pretended to scan the canned goods as he edged toward the back of the store. Just like the night in the backyard, his heart was shaking his frame with the intensity of its pumping. His palm felt clammy against the gun, so he let go of the steel to wipe his hand on his jeans. The next time he glanced up at the mirror, Goode’s reflection was gone.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t eat vegetables from a can,” a voice said next to him. “I like things natural, simple. That’s best.”

Goode was running his fingers along the cans’ labels, not looking at Hilton. Goode’s sharp jawline needed a shave today, and his clothes smelled of cigarette smoke. He and Hilton were the same height, roughly the same build. Beside him, Hilton felt strangely at ease. Today he had the advantage. He felt a swell of power taking the place of his fear.

“Useless, ain’t he?” Goode went on. “I call him Goober. Sometimes I wake him up to let him know when I’m going to work. I think he’d sleep all day, otherwise. He and a second man switch off. You’re a better tail than both of them put together.”

“I guess my stakes are higher,” Hilton said.

Goode smiled at him, sizing him up. Hilton felt swallowed by his eyes again, which seemed kind but glistened with something else beyond the pale, pale blue.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Goode said. “Someone is paying Goober a salary to protect you from me. But in the end, it turns out he’s really only protecting me from you. Except at night, of course. You leave at night. I don’t blame you. Goober sleeps, so that’s when I like to roam. But you know that already, don’t you? Good thing you have shitty aim.”

Validation, for the first time. Hilton had allowed himself to believe he really might have only imagined Goode was in the yard that night, but now he knew. Finally, in all the haze and confusion, a truth he could seize. “How do you know I’m not wearing a wire?” Hilton asked.

Goode didn’t even glance back his way, lifting a can of creamed corn to read the back label. “Because you’re not smart enough for that. You’re a lone wolf now. You’re sick of the system’s way, and so you’ve come up with your own way. Chances are, you’ve bought yourself a little number, maybe a thirty-eight, maybe a forty-five, and you sit there with it in your glove compartment waiting for the right moment. You already missed once, and you’re itching for your chance. You might have even brought it into the store with you right now. In your pocket, maybe? I see the bulge.”

His heart’s thumping was jouncing Hilton’s brain by now. This was bigger than a fanatic’s death threats, he began to realize as he listened to Goode read his thoughts. This was bigger. It was part of something he wasn’t allowing himself to understand.

Hilton could barely speak. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Goode laughed, carefully replacing the can of corn and picking up another. “I learned a lot from some pals of mine who were in ’Nam, and I never forgot what they told me. You know, it was mostly niggers they sent over there. And my buddies had to live with them, fight with them. They said you never scrap with a nigger. You know why? They don’t have anything to lose. They can beat your ass. I never underestimate a nigger. Never.”

“You did once,” Hilton said.

Goode glanced at him over his shoulder and shrugged. “That? Yeah, I ate some dirt that night. That’s what I get for deviating from simplicity. I didn’t trust myself. I was trying to think of a way maybe I could fuck your wife first, have some fun. I wanted to play with the little niglets. I even dropped by Kessie’s place to see them after school.”

Hilton’s face changed abruptly, and he lost his sense of grounding. The upper hand he’d felt with Goode vanished as his face grew hot. Goode smiled, watching him. “I asked her if she needed someone to cut her grass. She said to come back next week. You niggers sure have some names, don’t you? Did I pronounce that right? Kessie Campbell. That was the name on her light bill. What tribe is that name from?”

Hilton slid his trembling fingers back inside of his jacket pocket, once again finding the gun.

“Uh-oh. Pissed him off now,” Goode said, amused, noticing Hilton’s movement. “I’ve got to admit, I admire you. You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to piss on my parade. It’s almost sad, in a remote way, because we both know I’m going to win.”

“What makes you so sure?” Hilton asked, his fingers grasping the butt. He carefully slid his index fingertip across the trigger, and he felt his molars clamp together tightly.
Now,
his mind screamed. Get it over with now.

Goode grinned at him, a beyond-human grin that chilled him. “I saw it in a dream,” he said, speaking slowly to emphasize his words. “You know how I’m going to do it, and you know when. That’s a fact. And when the time comes, it’ll be so simple it’ll blow your mind. Literally. You think you can change fate? Then shoot me. Do it.”

I’ll show you fate, you son of a bitch, Hilton thought as his chest heaved. He yanked his hand from his pocket, snagging the gun against his jackets lining. He struggled to free it, hearing a jangling from the Circle K’s front door. “Excuse me,” came the old man’s voice. Someone else must have entered the store as the old man left, Hilton realized.

“Too late,” Goode said, still grinning. “That’ll be Goober. He’s wondering what’s taking me so long, if I slipped out back like I did once before. I don’t suppose you’re up to shooting it out with the FBI, are you?”

The agent, still wearing his sunglasses, strolled casually past their aisle, glancing at Goode and making brief eye contact with Hilton, who quickly shoved his hand as far back into his pocket as it would go. Hilton couldn’t tell from the agent’s face whether or not he even recognized him as the man Goode was threatening. Apparently, the agent hadn’t seen the flash of metal from the gun.

“That’s a real shame, bro,” Goode said. “You were so close. Things just aren’t working your way, are they?”

“I can still shoot you.”

“I know. That’s the beauty of it,” Goode said, dropping a can of black-eyed peas into Hilton’s free palm. “You can. But you won’t. That’s what I said about fate. Personally, I like it a hell of a lot more when it’s on my side.”

Goode turned his back to Hilton and walked away. He didn’t glance back, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Hilton saw Kaya’s face in his mind, imagining her horror if her father were shot dead by the FBI in a convenience store. This was not the way. This was not the time. There might not ever be a time.

Hilton heard his murderer ask the cashier for two packs of Marlboros, calm and easy as could be.

Kessie’s voice raised a half octave in surprise when she recognized Hilton on the telephone. “Dede just left here with your children,” she said. “She still calls me crying at night.”

Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown me out of my own goddamn house, Hilton thought, but he suppressed his anger when he remembered his reason for calling. “I want you to listen to me, Mama Kessie.”

“I won’t pass messages. Don’t put me in the middle.”

“A white man came by your house, about six feet tall with light brown hair. He might have needed a shave. Do you know the one?”

“A white man?” Kessie was silent a moment. “There was a lawn man . . . Hilton, what are you saying to me?”

When Hilton told her about his conversation with Charles Ray Goode, she became nearly hysterical. How did he find us? Did he follow us from the children’s schools? I live here alone, she cried. Hilton did his best to assure her that Goode probably would not be back, that he had an FBI tail and couldn’t simply come and go as he pleased. He’d already complained to the agent, so the visit was a fluke, Hilton said. Just please be more careful. He wants to scare us.

“Hilton, please go back home,” Kessie said. “See a doctor, do what you have to do, but you must go back to your family as long as that man is out there.”

“I will, Mama Kessie,” he promised.

As soon as Hilton hung up his phone, his red message light was glowing for the first time since he’d lived in the hotel. He didn’t even have to check to see who it was.

Finally, Andres Puerta was home.

Andres sounded much younger than Hilton expected, with an easygoing and jovial tone that contrasted with Raul’s deliberate thoughtfulness. He had hardly any trace of an accent. Andres explained he’d been out of town at a terminal caregivers’ conference upstate, or he would have called sooner. The more Andres spoke, the more certain Hilton felt that he’d reached the right person. His stomach was tight, nervous.

“So you want to know about Marguerite Chastain?”

“Yes. Raul mentioned her,” Hilton said. “Is she—”

“We need to meet in person,” Andres interrupted. “How about lunch tomorrow on the beach? Do you know the News Cafe?”

Tomorrow was an eternity. Hilton would feel the maddeningly slow passing of each hour until then without the luxury of sleep, but he agreed nonetheless. Noon. The News Cafe on Ocean Drive.

“Will you bring Marguerite with you?” Hilton asked.

“I can’t do that,” Andres said. “I’ll explain tomorrow.”

Their scheduled meeting was the last day of February, which found South Beach thronging with northern and European tourists and modeling-production trucks despite a noontime chill that prompted Hilton to wear his jacket over his shorts and T-shirt. The sun flamed against the restored Art Deco architecture up and down Ocean Drive, enlivening the paints of lime green, salmon, peach, and pale yellow that distinguished the strip. To the east, where the beach stretched to the shoreline, the ocean was dyed turquoise, balancing sailboats and more-distant cruise ships.

hilton, you get back here, boy

The scene from his sidewalk table at the News Cafe was at once breathtaking and unnerving to Hilton. He rarely came here. In his regimented existence between his hotel room, his home street, and Goode’s trailer park, he’d forgotten that he lived in a region that inspired photographers and drew the snow-weary with its charms. As he studied the bohemian and self-consciously hip people passing by, he realized that much had changed since his last visit to South Beach. A different place had sprung up while his back was turned. The world had gone on without him.

Hilton had been waiting since eleven, working on his second glass of iced tea despite complaints from his stomach, and he was tired of scanning faces for Hispanic men who looked like Raul. He had no idea what Andres looked like, and he had been fidgeting since his yellow Timex sports watch flashed noon ten minutes before. It was after five o’clock in London, after six in Madrid. No matter what the time zone, Andres was late.