The Long Fall (21 page)

“That’s why I’m calling. There’s been a change in plans.”

“He doesn’t want to meet at the Plantation Coffee Shop?”

“No,” Limbe says. “He’s at my place. He thought it would be a good idea to stay off the streets for a while.”

“And he’s all right?”

“At least for the time being, yes.”

There’s a pause, then Evelyn says, “I just thought of something. You never told me your name.”

“Like I said, I’m a friend of Jimmy’s. My name’s Aaron. We go back, Jimmy and me. I owe him.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“I’m on my car phone, Evelyn. Jimmy asked me to pick you up and take you back to the house. He decided against the coffee shop. Like I said, he figured it’d be better to stay off the streets.”

“What’s the number at the house?”

Limbe gives it to her. “Jimmy won’t pick up though. People have been shot, and he’s in trouble, Evelyn. The cops are out looking.”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn says. “I’d feel better talking to him.”

“Look,” Limbe says. “I’m doing him a favor. If you don’t want to see him, we can forget the whole thing. That’s okay by me.”

“Of course I want to see him.”

“Then sit tight, Evelyn.” Limbe glances at his watch, then over at his car. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

J
immy watches Sammy Jr. of Teater Towing and Auto Service scratch his head and then look up at the office clock. Its hour and minute hands are two crescent wrenches, the numerals lug nuts. Sammy Jr. points out that it’s almost 2
A.M.

“I thought the sign said twenty-four hours.”

“For towing,” Sammy Jr. says. “You need a wrecker, you call and it’ll patch into my beeper. You need your car fixed, that’s regular hours.”

“But you’re here now.”

“That’s true,” Sammy Jr. says.

Jimmy slowly lets out his breath and then asks Sammy if he could fix the brakes on the truck now instead of waiting until morning.

“I might could,” he says, “if I had the parts. But that truck of yours is over twenty-five years old.”

Jimmy had figured the tranny or radiator would go first, but he’d nursed the pickup through the long steady ascent of the Mogollon on 17 North and had managed to clear the rim. It was the descent that had done him in, the brakes softening and then finally letting go completely by the time he made Cordes Junction, and Jimmy had detoured onto Route 69 and into Mayer, coasting into the service apron of Teater’s Auto and then letting his head rest on the steering wheel, his nerves mutinying for the second time that night.

Sammy Jr.'s watching him. Even though he changed before bolting Phoenix, Jimmy reflexively checks his clothes and shoes for blood.

Sammy Jr. palms a can of Dr Pepper and cracks the tab. “I might could put in a call to the original Sammy and see if he could scare you up some brake works.” He pauses and sips the soda. “The original Sammy don’t sleep any better than me most nights. The family line’s full of insomnias.”

“I’d really appreciate it.” Jimmy wants movement. That’s what he needs right now, movement, simple movement, to get his truck back on 17 North to Flagstaff, where he can pick up 40 East and keep going. You can lose yourself in movement, at least for a while. It’s stopping or standing still that’s unbearable. It feels then as if he’s a constant target.

“Insomnia or not,” Sammy Jr. says, “it’ll cost you extra.”

“I figured that,” Jimmy says. “How long do you think it’ll take?”

“Well, I got to put in the call to my pop, the original Sammy. He lives over at Prescott Valley. Got a salvage yard there. I’ll tell him get his flashlight and hunt some brake works. Then I got to drive up there and get them.”

Sammy Jr. tells him there’s a new Denny’s open twenty-four hours across from the Motel 6 about a quarter mile up the road and that Jimmy can wait at either one until the job’s done.

“I’d recommend the Six,” he says. “You look like you lost a few night’s sleep yourself.”

Jimmy leaves the service station and sticks to the berm, taking his time. It’s a clear night, and the air’s thin and chilly. There’s a bright half-moon over the old smelter mills in the hills to his left.

All night long he’s been alternating between an acid panic and a bone-deep numbness. Nothing at the toy store made any sense, and he still doesn’t have all the details, because the radio in the pickup quit working last year and it’s too early for the newspapers.

He’d run. He hadn’t known what else to do. Don had died, and when the shooting stopped and the ambulances and police cruisers started pouring into the lot of the convenience store, Jimmy had sprinted to the meat truck and quickly driven away. He’d abandoned the truck three blocks from Pete Samoa’s Pawn Emporium. He’d been halfway there when he remembered the bags of Beanie Babies and doubled back for them.

Pete, characteristically, claimed the shootings had cut into the market value of the Beanies, making it harder for him to unload them safely, and then had reluctantly agreed afterward to drive Jimmy back to the Mesa View Inn. Jimmy had taken a chance and called Evelyn, lucking out when she answered instead of Richard, and told her he needed to get out of town right away. She agreed to meet him at the Plantation Coffee Shop.

But she hadn’t shown up.

Jimmy had waited, sticking around an extra half hour, and then the panics had kicked in again, so he’d left, picking up 17 and heading north.

Jimmy checks into the Motel 6. He’s thinking he can call Evelyn in the morning after Richard goes to work and she can drive up and meet him here in Mayer. By that time, too, maybe there will be more news on the shootings.

There’s no chance of sleep. Jimmy doesn’t want to visit the sideshow his subconscious will work up if he closes his eyes.

So it’s the motel room, Jimmy, and the clock. A rerun from his days and nights at Perryville Correctional.

Jimmy waits it out.

The next morning, when he places the call, Jimmy is so used to Richard being Richard and leaving for work with the regularity of someone marching in formation, that he doesn’t realize at first that he’s just said hello to his brother.

That’s the first surprise. The second is that Richard doesn’t hang up on him. The third is the panic overriding the customary irritation and impatience in his brother’s voice.

“Where in the hell are you, Jimmy? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all night.”

“Uh, I’m in Mayer.” Jimmy takes it slow and careful, but his brother doesn’t even bother to ask why.

“Listen,” Richard says. “Get back here right away. Come straight to the house. No detours, Jimmy. Do you understand?”

“No,” Jimmy says. He doesn’t understand.

Then he hears something tear in his brother’s voice, and Richard says, “Evelyn. Something’s happened to Evelyn.”

It’s as if Evelyn is in the middle of a crime she can’t name. Some immense transgression with no clear boundaries.

She’s not even sure Aaron Limbe is his real name.

At first she’d assumed that Limbe had kidnapped her, but when she saw the photos of Jimmy and her thumbtacked to the living room wall, kidnapping didn’t make any sense and she started thinking blackmail; but even that dead-ended because if Limbe were going to blackmail anybody, it would have been her, and now she wonders if he’s planning to rape her; but even though he’s stripped her to bra and panties and tied her to the chair, she can’t quite believe rape is where things are heading, or if it is, she doesn’t believe it will stop there.

The room is completely dark except for the cone of light from the lamp he’s positioned at her left shoulder, adjusting its placement so that the light spills over the wall of photos ten feet in front of her and nowhere else.

She wishes she could wipe away the sweat crawling out of her pores. He’s running the furnace on high.

If she could see him, it would be easier to fight back, but he doesn’t step into the light. He remains behind her, hovering over her left shoulder, sometimes her right, his movements unpredictable and imperceptible. He’s nothing more than a disembodied voice squeezed out of the dark.

He leans in now and asks, “Did you ever pick up a batch of photos, Evelyn, you know, maybe of a special occasion, a family reunion, say, and you start looking through them, and you inevitably come across one or two shots of yourself that throw you off, and you immediately think, ‘That’s not me. I don’t look anything like that'? Hasn’t that happened to you?”

Evelyn slowly nods.

“Of course it has,” he says. “The image in the photo doesn’t match the one you carry around of yourself in your mind, and the easiest solution is to simply throw those unflattering shots of yourself away and forget about them. There are always enough others that fit what you want to see.”

Evelyn feels herself begin to tremble.

“Tell me what you see, Evelyn,” he says.

She’s conscious of the rope binding her ankles to the front legs of the wooden chair and its pull on her wrists behind her.

“Jimmy and me,” she says quietly.

“True,” he says. “And what are you doing?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Just tell me what you see.”

“We’re making love,” she says.

Evelyn hears him slowly let out his breath. “No,” he says. “You’re wrong, and you’re afraid, Evelyn, but it’s not the kind of fear that will take us where we need to go.”

A moment later, he leans over and pulls her hair away from her face and then stretches a wide swath of silver duct tape across her mouth.

It’s leaning on noon, and his brother’s been drinking. From where he’s sitting, Jimmy can’t tell how much of a dent Richard’s made in the bottle of Wild Turkey, but from the look of him, Richard must have been up all night, too.

They’re in the small office Richard maintains in the house at Scottsdale on the second floor, down the hall from the master bedroom. There’s a stripped-down military feel to the room, all right angles and neutral colors.

Jimmy’s trying to process what his brother’s just told him.

The words are still playing in Jimmy’s head, Richard’s maddeningly precise account of how he hired someone to kill his wife’s lover.

And then Richard giving him the details of act 2 when the whole thing backfired and the hired killer turned kidnapper and snatched Evelyn.

He wonders if his brother has drunk enough whiskey to find the courage to shoot him.

Because Jimmy figures that’s what he’s walked into. They’re in tabloid territory now, the finale to some third-rate tragedy destined to be supermarket-aisle headlines.

Richard picks up the bottle, hesitates, and then sets it down.

Jimmy watches his brother’s hands and eyes.

“He said it had to be you,” Richard says finally. “You had to be the one to deliver the money. No one else. Those were his conditions.”

Jimmy’s suddenly having trouble reading the compass.

“That’s why I needed you back here. He’ll only deal with you.”

“I don’t get it,” Jimmy says.

“He’s the type of people you associate with,” Richard says. “I just didn’t see it at the time.”

In a blink, he and Richard are back on familiar ground.

Maybe, but I’ve never hired out someone hit,
Jimmy thinks.

To Richard, he says, “There’s a lot of things you don’t see, basically because you’re so busy being right all the time.”

“You’d never understand,” Richard says, waving him off. “You can’t. You’ve never loved anyone.”

Richard leans back in his chair, closing his eyes and bridging his temples with his thumb and index finger. “We’re talking about Evelyn,” he says quietly. “Almost twenty years. You’ll never be able to understand a love like that. If I’d known who it was, I’d have gone after him myself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This.” Richard picks up a manila envelope from the desk and throws it at Jimmy.

Jimmy flips through a stack of black-and-white photos of Evelyn and him. In each, his head or face has been cut out.

“I had to,” Richard says.

Jimmy slips the photos back in the envelope. He thinks about being pinned down in the parking lot of the strip mall. About Don Ruger’s arm coming off at the shoulder.

“He never told you his name?” Jimmy asks.

Richard says no.

“What’d he look like then?”

Richard goes back to massaging his temples. “I don’t know. He was average looking. Medium build. Short black hair. He kept popping breath mints the whole time we talked. And he had these pale gray eyes, they made you nervous when he looked at you. That’s all I can remember.”

That was enough though.

“How much is the ransom?” Jimmy asks.

Richard sits back in his chair. He looks at the bottle of Wild Turkey. “Fifty grand. By the close of working hours today.”

“And you can get ahold of that kind of money?”

“If I have to,” Richard says. “I made a couple of calls and put a lien on the Dobbins parcel. The bank will come through with the money. All you have to do is deliver it.”

Sure,
Jimmy thinks.
That’s all. And give Aaron Limbe another chance to finish the job you hired him to do.

The muscles in her legs and back have begun to cramp. The floor vents are pouring heat. The room is dark except for the spill of light on the wall of photographs.

Aaron Limbe drops his hand on the back of Evelyn’s neck.

“I’m thirsty,” she says.

“Of course you are, Evelyn. Now tell me what you see.”

“Tell me what you want to hear,” she says, “and I’ll say it. Whatever it is, just tell me.” She closes her eyes for a moment.

“You’re missing the point. This is not about what I want to hear.”

“Why are you doing this?” Evelyn’s throat is parched, her voice scratchy. “You told me you were a friend of Jimmy’s.”

“Jimmy Coates is a mongrel,” Limbe says, “as worthless as any nigger or taco-bender, and I have numbered his hours.”

He puts one hand at the base of her skull and the other along her jawline and locks his fingers into place. Evelyn can’t move her head. He moves it for her.

“One at a time,” he says, levering and directing her line of vision. “Starting at the top left. And don’t close your eyes, Evelyn. If you do, we’ll have to start all over again.”