The Low Road (3 page)

Will he be alright?

He shrugged. Depends what you mean by alright. Infection is maybe the danger at this stage. Hard to tell if any organs were damaged, but I guess we'll find that out. What do you care, anyway?

Sylvia smoothed the front of her dress and made a sound in her throat. I don't like to see anyone die. Specially not a kid like this. How far is this place you're heading?

A day's drive, more or less.

When you leaving?

He hadn't thought about it. I might wait an hour or two. When it's starting to get dark. That OK?

Sylvia nodded, her eyes fixed on the kid on the bed. She looked depleted. Yeah. But no longer. I got to get rid of these sheets and scrub the place.

Wild indicated a suitcase on the floor beside the door. Is that his?

Yeah.

What's in it?

Sylvia shrugged. Don't know.

His nose and face itched. Trouble breeds trouble, he thought. Like those bloody organisms that divide and divide again until there's a billion of them before you know it. Still. He wondered why he hadn't thought of Sherman before. It would be the perfect place to stay for a while until things blew over, if they ever did. He was almost cheered at the thought of Sherman's crinkling half-smile, the way he rubbed his eyes without even removing his round glasses.

He wondered about Lee. It seemed unlikely he would be able to get him to Sherman's before he died. Inside the tiny bathroom he washed blood from his hands and considered himself in the mirror. Am I the kind of person, he thought, who could dump a man beside the road and keep on driving, or is that yet to come?

When Wild returned to the room, Lee murmured, stiffened slightly and sagged once again onto the bed. In the ghastly afternoon light, the kid appeared insubstantial, as if about to dissolve into the bloodied bedclothes. Wild detected a strange sensation within his chest, like a small animal turning in its sleep. It was, he was surprised to realise, pity.

He drew a chair up to the bed and lowered himself into it with a great sigh. Lee, now apparently conscious, raised a hand to his face as if checking on his existence. Dried moons of blood had hardened under his fingernails.

The kid's eyelids flicked open and he looked first at Wild and then Sylvia, his gaze sliding from one to the other. His brow furrowed and he gasped for air. I don't think I'm meant to be here, he said at last, in a slender voice.

Wild wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Despite the cold, his skin was damp with perspiration. Believe me. I know exactly how you feel.

3

W
ith one hand, Lee gingerly touched the left side of his torso, where the escarpment of ribs slid away to the softer flesh of his stomach. He felt the dark heat of a bullet wound and levered himself into a sitting position to see better. With a grimace he lifted his blood-soaked t-shirt to expose a black, peasized hole, fringed by a mineral crust of dried blood. The surrounding skin was swollen, tender. There was blood all over his hands and smears of it on his jeans. His own blood, presumably, although he couldn't be entirely sure. He flinched at the memory of that woman and the jump of her gun. That blunt truck of surprise. Her slow blink. Bang.

He sat on the edge of the low bed, to see what it felt like, preparing for a more committed movement. The linoleum floor was cool beneath his toes, almost like water, and he licked his lips. He would love nothing better right now than to dangle his feet in lake water, but that seemed a long way away now, more remote than ever. With one hand behind him on the bed for balance he eased back to relieve the pressure on his wound. He breathed heavily and gritted his teeth, now fully alert to the regiments of pain marching through him. He held his breath until the pain subsided. Perhaps he would die here, right where he was.

He inspected the backs of his hands, as if surprised to find them there. Small and bloodstained. He turned them over, unintentionally assuming an attitude of half-hearted supplication. The lines crisscrossing his palms. Once with his sister he visited a fortune teller at a country fair, a woman who wore a suit and smoked a pipe, a woman who, when Lee had inquired after his future, said—without the merest change in expression—
What makes you so sure you got one?
And it was her voice more than anything he could always recall, a sound like a knife shredding cabbage. That, and the look of horror on Claire's face as she dragged him by the wrist from the dusty tent.

His gaze travelled along his forearm, tracing the creamy plank of flesh with its submerged design of blue veins, the indecipherable map of his inner architecture. The workings of his own body were a mystery to him. He turned his hands back over and balled them into fists before splaying them as much as he could. The tendons and muscles slid and arched beneath the skin, creating tiny ramparts across his knuckles, an entire language of movement as unknown to him as Sanskrit or Ancient Greek, deep in conversation inside his body.

Awkwardly, Lee removed his leather coat and t-shirt, slung them on a chair and staggered into the bathroom to inspect his torso. Under the fizzing fluorescent light, he could see the skin around his bullet wound was swollen but also discoloured with what appeared to be disinfectant. Someone had attended to him while he slept. He caressed the yellowed smear and raised the finger to his face. A hospital sprang up within his senses, a kingdom of wards and machinery, of hallways and steel. He inhaled slowly, seeking damp mops and dry bandages, the odour of laundry and steamed broccoli and inside that again he expected to hear the squelch of nurses' shoes on linoleum as they made their rounds during the night. He rubbed his hands on his jeans and bent to the sink to slurp water from his cupped hand. The water tasted of mildew.

With thin and innocent fingertips he traced his surfaces, from the bony meat of his chest down across his stomach, searching for further signs of violence or distress. Nothing. Just skin and hair, the distinct fabric of human flesh with its topography of ridges and bumps. Some minor scratches and the strangely glossy scar from a childhood car accident that ran down his right side. Otherwise his skin appeared almost without texture. He angled his head and looked into the mirror with dark eyes, relieved to observe his hair had at last grown free of its prison severity. A squadron of mosquitoes hummed in the shower recess.

At the bedroom window, in the bruised afternoon light, he could see a car park below, around which the motel was constructed. Goosebumps rose on his naked skin. Lights were coming on in the distance. The world turned on its hinge.

Holding the curtain to one side, he could make out dislocated segments of walkway outside his room and the other rooms of the first floor. The windows of the rooms opposite his own, a slice of rusted roof. There were few signs of life, apart from the occasional flock of birds that spattered across the darkening clouds. The roofs that stretched into the distance were unfamiliar but not entirely foreign and he scanned the horizon for a landmark by which he could orient himself: a building, a hill, a neon sign, anything. But there was nothing. He wondered how long he'd been here.

A couple appeared below him in the motel car park, arguing in low tones. It was clear they had done this before, this arguing, perhaps many times. Their gestures were tired. Although the man had his back to Lee, he looked familiar. Perhaps this was the person who had daubed his stomach with disinfectant? He allowed the curtain to drop and stood as far as possible to one side of the window while still able to observe them. He waited for the man to turn around, but he never did. A trio of thick-chested dogs lay patiently at the woman's feet like luggage to be loaded into the car. The woman raised a hand to her mouth and looked away across the highway, perhaps hoping to see something on which to focus. It seemed a decision had been made, one she was only reluctantly agreeing to. She was small and wiry. Middle-aged. She wore a loose, white shirt, a man's shirt by the look of it, several sizes too large. It billowed about her waist in the wind. A tendril of dark hair bisected her features from one temple to the opposite side of her jaw. After a minute she shrugged, clicked her fingers at the dogs and walked to the car with them trotting around her, their tongues lolling like lengths of salmon.

Lee stepped away from the window and it was only then that he noticed the suitcase on the floor beside the door. He stared at it, disbelieving. Surely not. He looked around and swallowed. It was unmistakably the same one, the one he'd taken from Stella. His breath quickened. Brown and battered, with a rounded metal edge on each corner. A faded sticker on one side showed a woman frolicking in the shallows of a beach with a red ball. A grinning fish.
Je me baigne à Agadir
, whatever the hell that meant. He rested a hand on the aluminium windowsill. Again he remembered the woman with the gun, the way she shook her head and blinked slowly before pulling the trigger, before he could say even the tiniest word.
No
or
Don't
. No time for any sort of plea.

Ignoring the pain across his side, he lurched over to the suitcase. He crouched down, lay the suitcase flat and opened it. Inside, arranged head-to-toe like bodies in a grave, were coloured bundles of money. His gun, the one Josef gave him, rested on top of the cash. He skimmed a palm over the money, as if across water, and chuckled. I don't believe it. I don't believe it.

And then the scraping of the door against the linoleum, a blast of cold air on his naked back. He turned to see a large man in a tattered overcoat step into the room.

Ah, the man said in a deep voice. You're awake at last.

4

L
ee lost his balance and fell to his side, but was able to grab the gun. It seemed heavier than it should be. He fumbled with it and pointed it up at the man standing over him. Should he just shoot him? It was then that he realised that the safety catch was probably on, but it was too late to investigate. He wasn't even sure where the safety catch was. His heart beat about in his chest like an injured bird.

The man had a large black bag in one hand and held up his other hand, palm outwards. Whoa, fella. No need for that.

Who the hell are you? Lee asked. Fresh blood sumped from his bullet wound into the folds of his stomach. He withheld a grimace but was sure he'd betrayed the amount of pain he was in by the airless quality of his voice. He feared he might throw up.

The man shrugged but made no other movement. He seemed both grave and uninterested. He wasn't wearing shoes. The hems of his trousers were torn. Lee motioned with the gun for the man to close the door, which he did with his bare heel, still holding one hand at shoulder height.

That's quite a hole you got there.

Overcome by pain, Lee didn't answer but unwillingly inspected himself. His right hand, the one clasping the gun, was sticky with blood.

The man joggled his bag. You must be in quite a lot of pain? A bullet inside you, right beside your ribs? Got something here might be of help. Some bandages and disinfectant. I took a look before—

You what? Who the hell
are
you? Where are we, anyway?

The man dropped his bag to the floor with a thud and held up both hands. It's OK. I'm not armed or anything.

The man swayed, as if on a boat. It made Lee wonder if, in fact, the world itself were pitching slightly. It wouldn't surprise him. Nothing would surprise him.

Lee remained where he was on his haunches, shirtless, the gun in one nervous hand while his other rested on the floor. Microbes of grit pressed into his palm. It was an almost pleasurable sensation in the presence of such other enormous discomforts. The suitcase was open beside him. Some of the money inside was spattered with blood. He looked at this large stranger with his thin, greying hair, pale beard and doughy face.

Finally, Lee struggled to his feet, patted the stranger down and shoved him into the chair. The man smelled of alcohol and chalk. Lee grabbed the man's bag and emptied it onto the bed.

Hey. Don't do that—

Shut up.