The Terror of Living (28 page)

    "But there is someone to blame."

    "You think that's it."

    "Yes. That's how it works."

    "You know that's not how anything works. To that couple, the man with the gun wasn't the threatening part. It was the girl overdosed in their bed. You think either Hunt or the couple would have sat by and watched her go like that?"

    "Yes, I do."

    "Don't be stupid, Bobby. You've been spending too much time with Driscoll. It's always the injury. You think this guy Hunt was up in those mountains because he's something evil, something just bent on doing wrong. He's like that girl you got in that hospital, just someone with an injury, someone needing to be healed."

    Drake sat on the bench, turning to watch the nurses in their smoke circle. When he turned back, he said, "What have you been doing, reading the self-help section in the bookstore?"

    "Come on, Bobby, when you're hungry, you eat. When you're thirsty, you -"

    "When you're broke you smuggle ninety thousand dollars worth of heroin into the country," Drake interrupted.

    "You know that's not how it is."

    "That's what we prosecute them for."

    "Yes, but that's not the problem, is it?"

    "No," he said, taking a while with his words. "I don't think it is."

    "Did you ever think the girl up in that hospital room needed this more than she cared about her own life?"

    Drake didn't say anything.

    "You know, if you're going to save that man's life, it's not really about the gun chasing him, or even you."

    "No, I suppose it's not."

    "There's probably something that's been chasing him for longer than you've been alive, and it'll be chasing him longer still, no matter what happens up there."

    "You think you're right on that?"

    "I know it."

    "How do you know it?"

    Sheri was quiet for a moment. "I see it on you." "What do you see?"

    "I see it - anyone who gives you a good look can see it. Why'd you go up there into those mountains in the first place?" "Hunting. I told you that." "That's not true. You know that." "All I know is what I did."

    "That's the heroic answer, but I bet the truth has to do with that car, and somewhere deep down your father. But I don't think you'd admit that, would you?" "Come on."

    "What do you want me to say? I'm telling you the truth. How come you haven't come home yet?" "I'm working."

    "When did you become part of the DEA?" "Driscoll needs me." "Where's Driscoll now?" "Upstairs."

    "Why aren't you up there with him?" "That's not fair, Sheri."

    "You're still up in those mountains. That's where you are."

    GRADY LANDED FACE-FIRST ON THE BASEMENT FLOOR. So much blood he didn't know what belonged to him and what belonged to the men he'd killed. He groaned, forced himself up. His hands slick with it. Red handprint on the gray floor. He still carried the.22, pushing himself up on his closed knuckles. He screamed, feeling the torn muscles in his side. White-hot pain all through him. Up through his spine and into his head.

    He knew the men were coming after him. The whole situation was fucked and he knew there was no time for Nora. He crossed the room, holding his side, blood between his fingers. The dead man was blocking the doorway. He reached down with his hand and dragged the man out of the way, took his bag off the workbench, and opened the door. Gray, overcast light, rain, and the mossy taste of wet earth.

    He rounded the house, holding his bag, clutching his closed fist over the wound, the silenced.22 growing slippery and warm in his grip. Pain anytime he lifted a leg, anytime his muscles moved. It was all through him now.

    In the drive, on his way to the Lincoln, Grady flattened himself to the side of the house and listened. On the porch he heard the last of the men enter through the front door, following his path. A neighbor appeared at her window and then quickly disappeared. He pushed forward, got to the Lincoln, and pulled the door open. It hurt to sit. His shirt and pants were covered in a mix of human blood, suctioned to his body and weighted with it. He felt around in his pockets for the keys and brought them out.

    This hadn't been in the plan.

    The back window blew out. He dropped his head and turned the ignition over. The engine started and he hit the gas, head ducked beneath the dash for cover, not looking, estimating a turn and scraping off a car as he went. Gunshots. A puckering of buckshot along the body of the car.

    Gas pedal. Gas pedal.

    Nora, he thought.

    ALREADY, THROUGH THE TREES, HUNT COULD SEE the dark ash smeared like grease across the lawn. All he could see of his house were the bricks of the chimney. He drove past and parked a quarter mile down the road. Rain showers had come through, and the whole place had a look of gloom and growing desperation. He sat in the car and he knew the truth, that it was over, that there had been a point when he thought he might make it out, that Nora and he might have a future, but he knew it was over now. He had seen the yellow police tape stretched around on all sides, like the shape of an imagined house, now just standing in his memories.

    He took the survival bag from the truck and walked across the road to the small horse trail that led through the woods and out onto his property. For a while he stood in the trees and took the whole thing in. It looked like a bomb had dropped: where the house had been was nothing but a blackened crater. When he was sure there was no one around, he walked up through the trees and followed the fence toward the house. The patches of blood where Grady had shot the horses were dark holes amid the grass. He stood for a while with his arms up on the fence and stared into the pasture. Even if he did escape, what would be the use? But even as he thought this, he knew that there were still three horses waiting for him in the mountain field. Although they were not his, he could possibly breed them and make a decent profit. He knew, too, that the owners of those horses would never see them again, not unless he was killed, but he tried to put that thought aside.

    The closest he went to the remains of the house was the edge of the scorched grass. On the ground he could see the dirt where the fire had burned everything away. And even the earth had the appearance of being baked until nothing could be distinguished except the flatness of the spot he had once walked and the small bits of blackened gravel that had once caught and stuck between the treads of his shoes.

    He felt the emotion rise in him again and he took his time and forced it back down into his stomach, where he felt it tighten. He opened the survival bag, took from it the heroin, and went to the stables. On the floor he found the loose board under which he had sometimes kept shipments. With his fingers at the edge of the wood, he pulled it back and sat looking down into the black hole below.

    He knew this was either the safest place he could put it or the stupidest. He wasn't sure which, but at a certain point he knew that all that had happened in the past couple of days seemed to be a matter of chance. He thought his chances were better this way, if not very good. Having all the heroin with him felt like death sitting there beside him.

    After he was done and the board had been put back and the dust had settled once again across the hiding place, he took his phone from the bag and tried the hospital again.

    WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED, DRAKE exited onto a floor of cream tile, walls the color of eggshells, and rooms consumed by the last light of day. What Sheri had said to him was still there, floating along with him as if pulled by a string. Twice he had brought the phone from his pocket, wanting to call his wife back, but then reconsidered and put it away. At the nurses station he presented his star and asked about Driscoll.

    "Not much reason to be in there," the nurse said.

    "Why's that?"

    "I just don't know what information he's going to get out of her."

    "I'm sure she'd be able to say something."

    The nurse gave him a look Drake didn't understand at first. "She's nearly brain dead with all that heroin in her system."

    "Brain dead?"

    "In a coma," the nurse said shortly, looking down the hall. Drake followed her gaze but saw only the eggshell walls and the cream floors, every ten feet a door, the outdoor light coming in onto the floor. "When she came in she was already going, and no one to tell us who she is."

    "Her name is Thu," Drake said. "She has two kids."

    "See," the nurse said, "that just doesn't make one bit of sense."

    "Doesn't that make the most sense?"

    "Not if you end up like this."

    Drake looked on down the hall. He needed to see Thu for himself, see if she was the same woman he'd seen in the picture. "Will she recover?" he asked.

    "They've been pumping her full of a medicine that counteracts the drug."

    "Like an antidote?"

    "She's absorbed most of it already, but the dose of heroin in her system should have killed her right off. When they brought her in she was showing signs of cyanosis in the nail beds, bluish skin like she wasn't pumping oxygen into the bloodstream. It wasn't a good sign."

    "Would you mind walking me down there?"

    "I can do that. But I'm telling you there's not much to see."

    When they reached the room, Driscoll was already inside. The doctor had an X-ray held up and he was circling a white bump near the hip bone. "You see what I mean," the nurse said. What Drake saw was a small girl lying faceup in bed; her skin seemed to be drawing away from her, as if the climate had hurt her, something shrinking up inside her and pulling all of her along. She was pale, her eyes closed, the dark fall of her hair on the pillow seemingly the only living thing about her.

    Something in the room began to give off low beeping noises, and the doctor and the nurse turned to the bed. Drake stood by, held at the doorway to the room. He was pushed aside and out into the hall as a few more of the staff came to assist. He did not see Driscoll but assumed he was in there, pressed to the corner while the staff tried to save the girl in the bed.

    From the doorway it was obvious what was going on, there was no need to watch, but he was drawn to it as one is to an accident passed on the highway, with the same morbid fear of what he might see. Down the hall the phone rang. For a moment it was just part of the background, nurses and doctors scrambling for syringes of epinephrine, the shock and rattle of the crash cart. He felt himself fade back, the outcome now set, the future decided. He was aware again of the phone. He didn't know how long it had been ringing, but he knew there was no one on the floor to pick up. He walked to the desk, reached over the lip of the counter, picked up the receiver, and said hello.

    A brief pause, then: "I'd like to know about the girl brought in a couple days ago, the overdose?"

    Drake looked back down the hall, now empty, and all he could hear were the muffled voices of the staff and the constant warnings of the machine in the girl's room. "I can take a message," Drake said, feeling foolish, but in the same moment reaching for a pen.

    "No," the voice said, "there's no need, I was just checking in. If you could just tell me how she is?"

    Something about the voice, a roughness, like stones gargled in the throat. "Hunt?" Drake said, lm sorry?

    A pause. "Don't hang up. I met your wife a few days ago."

    "What about her?" Hunt said.

    Drake could hardly believe it. "I met her a few days ago. I was looking for horse-riding lessons. It was before we knew anything about you."

    "What do you know about me now?"

    Drake told him. "I was the one in the mountains," he said. "You're in a lot of trouble here, Hunt. More than I think you know."

    "I think I've got a pretty good picture of it."

    "You've been to the motel. Have you been to your house?"

    "I've been there."

    "Then you've seen -"

    "Enough."

    "Yes, I bet you have."

    Hunt didn't say anything. He didn't hang up, and Drake listened. There was something lonely and fractured to the way Hunt hung on the line, and in the air that escaped his lungs and rasped across the receiver of the phone.

    "I read about you in the paper," Hunt said.

    "I didn't ask them to print any of that."

    "But they did."

    "Yes," Drake said, "there was a good amount written about the past that should have stayed in the past."

    "It's odd," Hunt said.

    "What's odd?"

    "I knew your father, Sheriff Drake, up there in Silver Lake."

    "You mean you used to run drugs with him?"

    "No, I mean I knew him. Just competition, that's all." A pause, the sound of Hunt's breathing on the other end of the line. "We had a beer once, smoked a cigarette, nothing to get friendship rings over. He was nothing to be ashamed of."