One Got Away

by S. A. Lelchuk

  Coombs said, “Let her go. She’s done nothing to you. I got her into this.”

  If anything, his words seemed to make the fat man angrier. “Nothing? Look at this mess, these problems I have! All because of the two of you! In fact, why should she get an easy landing, after all this bellyache she caused?”

  He exchanged a look with the bodyguard, who nodded and set down his rifle. He took something out of a holster strapped to his thigh. The hatchet.

  The fat man said, “Teach her a lesson. Nice and slow.”

  Coombs didn’t move. “You’ll have to kill me first,” he said. “Maybe I have cared a bit too much about my own skin, all these years.” Under the forced insouciance his voice was dry. “Never too late to turn over a new leaf, I suppose.”

  “Keep him alive,” Mr. Z said. “But you can teach him how to behave.”

  The bodyguard stepped toward us. Eyes blank, white scar running down his temple, right hand cocked back. The steel blade was like a dividing horizon line. Life on one side, death on the other.

  “This isn’t fair,” I said, now standing next to Coombs. “It’s not a fair fight.”

  The fat man laughed. “What do you Americans say? Life isn’t fair. Start with their hands,” he instructed. He was grinning. Enjoying himself. He had taken another candy bar out of his pocket. Like he was at the movies.

  The bodyguard drew his arm back.

  At its apex, the blade paused for the slightest moment.

  The hatchet came down in a wicked swing as Coombs threw his hands up instinctively.

  I shot the bodyguard through my handbag. I’d practiced at much greater distances. Three or four feet was nothing. The bullet and muzzle flash tore a ragged hole through the bag’s fabric and, seemingly simultaneously, through his forehead.

  I shifted my aim a few inches and shot the fake clerk three times in the chest.

  Mr. Z dropped his chocolate, stunned. He was faster than his weight suggested. He lunged out the door as I sent two more bullets after him.

  I stepped cautiously into the hallway and then ducked back as bullets cracked down the corridor. There was movement in the interior stairwell by the lobby entrance. I ran, seeing a spotty trail of blood along the ugly flowered carpet. Heavy footsteps clanged up the bare metal of the stairwell.

  I started up the stairs, then flattened myself against the wall as another bullet ricocheted off the staircase. The footsteps resumed. I followed the ponderous thuds to the second floor. Mr. Z was lumbering away from me. Toward the end of the hallway. An exit sign marking the outside stairwell.

  I held my Beretta with both hands, sighted carefully, and pulled the trigger in a smooth, clean motion. His body jolted. His gun dropped from his hands as he staggered.

  I shot him again and he fell.

  Coombs had caught up to me. Together we approached the wounded man. He was making a pained, gurgling sound. Something wrong with his lungs, as though there was fluid filling them. He looked up at us as we approached and moved his lips like he was trying to speak. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just shot him twice more and he became one of the approximately hundred people in the world who had died in that particular minute.

  Coombs stared at me as though seeing something new. “Violence seems to come rather naturally to you.”

  I regarded him. Wondering how the harsh overhead light fell across my face. What lines and shadows it might reveal. Wondering whether I, too, looked like I had shed a mask.

  “I never said I considered violence the option of last recourse,” I reminded him. “Only you did.” I bent and found Mr. Z’s key card in his back pocket. “Now let’s see who’s staying here.”

  35

  We picked the closest room to us: 211. It seemed as good a place as any to start.

  I swiped the keycard. A light blinked green.

  The door clicked open.

  Room 211 looked identical to Coombs’s room. The same bare, bolted desk, blinds sealed with electrical tape, the same flowered bedspread and musty motel smell.

  Room 211 was occupied.

  A very young woman sat in a chair, watching us with dull eyes. The television was turned to some sitcom. Young woman was stretching it. She looked like she was sixteen or seventeen, her body girlishly thin, not yet filled out. Her black hair was long and straight and her dilated pupils were black pools. She wore pink sweatpants and a sleeveless top showing matchstick arms. I wondered what they had her on. Maybe a sedative. Maybe some antidepressant. Maybe just one of the countless opiates that was strangling the country at a rate of about seventy thousand deaths a year. Some pharmaceutical cocktail designed to make a person comfortable, plus a little extra. Compliant. Obedient. Untroublesome.

  Unlike Coombs, there was no metal bracelet on her ankle. Hard to consider this girl a flight risk.

  She spoke in heavily accented English, her voice sluggish. “Who are you?”

  “We’re going to help you,” I said. “Everything else, I’ll explain later. But for now, we have to leave this place as soon as we can.”

  * * *

  We went down the hallway door by door, first sweeping the second floor, then going down to the first. In total we found seven women. All about the same age. All radiating that gluey, pharmaceutical compliance. We helped them pack their scant possessions as fast as we could. I didn’t know when more of Mr. Z’s people might show up.

  The women obeyed robotically, barely asking questions, moving without urgency. As if only vaguely aware of what was happening.

  Ultimately, they’d need housing, and maybe immigration lawyers to help reunite them with their families, plus a dozen other things, but for now I only wanted to get them away from the motel as fast as we could. I had Hillman’s duffel bag. Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. More than ten thousand each. That would be a good start. But first, somewhere safe. Somewhere they could get medical attention, and food, and rest, while time flushed out whatever was in their systems. Somewhere safe. There was a shelter I had worked with once in Monterey. It seemed the best solution for the moment.

  When we got outside it was dark and chilly, the sky shrouded with clouds. One of the two white vans had been driven about a hundred feet from its original location and was now parked crookedly in the middle of the motel lot, engine on, idling. I walked up cautiously. Adidas slumped in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t breathing and the top of his tracksuit was soaked in blood. He must have taken a bullet in the hallway.

  I spent a few minutes wiping away any traces of my presence I could think of: door handles, the inside of the Mercedes. There didn’t seem to be a working security camera system. I could see why. Like Hillman avoiding notes and documents. Cameras created evidence. Evidence could be seized.

  We all crammed into the remaining van. I drove. Coombs sat next to me. I glanced one last time at the blue motel. Feeling like I should see a huge pyrotechnic burst, fire licking up its roof, walls crumbling, burning hard and fierce and bright until there was nothing but ash.

  Coombs seemed to have read my mind. “Feels like it should go up in bloody flames, doesn’t it?” he said as we pulled away.

  “It should.”

  Instead, the blue motel simply receded into the background and disappeared from view.

  * * *

  At the shelter I went inside with the girls. Coombs offered to come with us, but I told him it wasn’t necessary. “I suppose a strange man barging in isn’t ideal,” he said, understanding.

  I tossed him the keys to the van. “Go find a razor. And a pair of real pants. This will take a while.”

  I spent an hour getting the women situated, relieved there were enough beds at the shelter for all of them. I didn’t want to split them up. I explained the situation to the on-duty staff, giving them some of Hillman’s cash for any incidental expenses for the next few days. More would follow soon, I promised. There would be a lot to do. Authorities to file reports with. Long-term housing. Legal aid. But for now, most important, they were sa
fe.

  I borrowed the phone and after a flurry of transfers and holds managed to reach an on-duty nurse at the urgent care center where I had left Buster. “Sorry,” he said, “he can’t come to the phone—”

  The nurse was interrupted by Buster’s voice, in the background, announcing in the most definite terms that he would indeed come to the phone, immediately, and anyone trying to stop him or suggest otherwise might find themselves learning to fly.

  “Nikki?”

  “How you feeling?” I asked.

  “Right as rain. You okay?”

  It felt good hearing his familiar growl. “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You need me?” he offered. “I’ll leave without even changing out of this cute little hospital gown they got me in. I’ve always wanted to show off my legs.”

  I pictured Buster barreling down the sidewalk in a skimpy hospital gown. “I’ll see those sexy calves of yours another time. Just making sure you’re good.”

  “You liar,” Buster said. “Why don’t you admit the real reason you called?”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Admit it, Nikki Griffin. You missed the sweet sugar of my voice.”

  “Tell whoever’s in charge of your morphine that they should ease up. It’s making you loopy.”

  I hung up. A smile on my face.

  * * *

  When Coombs returned in new clothes, hair combed, with a fresh shave, he looked restored, newly vital. He was, after all, a man who made his living on appearances. We drove a short distance north to a beachside hotel I knew. The hotel sold little bundles of firewood at the front desk. Five dollars for guests, ten otherwise. We paid ten. We had picked up a pizza and a six-pack and carried the food and firewood onto the beach, taking off our shoes as we reached the sand.

  The beach glowed with small fires. Music drifted, faint, a guitar playing slow reggae. My mother had started taking guitar lessons a few years before her death, joking that, the way my brother and I ate, she’d have to go and become a rock star to feed the family. Rockmom! Brandon had screamed. The nickname had stuck.

  I arranged sticks and crumpled newspaper and struck a match. Flames flared, caressing the wood even as they chewed into it, tender and duplicitous, the way fire was. “I didn’t think I’d ever see this bloody ocean again,” Coombs said with great feeling. “Except the bottom.” He stretched out on the beach, not bothering to disguise his pleasure as he squeezed handfuls of sand between his fingers.

  I offered him a slice of pizza. “Hungry?”

  “Hungry?” He devoured the slice in several huge bites, then sat back. “I’ve eaten at some really first-rate restaurants, you know. Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester. Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or and L’Ambroisie in France, Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence. And yet this lukewarm sausage and mushroom pizza is perhaps the most exquisite thing I’ve ever had.”

  I cracked a can of beer and handed it to him.

  Opened one for myself.

  For a few minutes we didn’t say much. Just ate pizza and drank beer in comfortable silence. The fire crackled and the ocean swirled and foamed against the sand. I could hear the guitar, languorous, bouncy notes drifting down the beach.

  “How’re you feeling?” I asked.

  Coombs wiped his mouth. “I’ll live. A couple of days of rude mistreatment, but nothing I haven’t faced before.”

  I thought of Wormwood Scrubs but said nothing. Wondering, for the thousandth time, who exactly the man sitting next to me really was.

  Instead I said, “You made quite the impression on Mrs. Johannessen.”

  His smile was fond. “So you’ve met her. Marie is a firecracker, isn’t she?”

  “You tell me.”

  He wriggled his toes in the loose sand. “We get along.”

  “Unlike you and the rest of her family.”

  “I doubt they had the kindest words. But what do you think?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of me.” His eyes, warm with firelight, held mine. “That interests me more.”

  “I don’t know. Every time I form an opinion, something comes along to change it.”

  “Maybe you should trust your instincts, then.” He opened a second beer, placing his empty can carefully in the sand.

  “Says the man who devoted his life to deception.”

  He didn’t argue. “I’m a firm believer in identifying one’s talents early, working hard, and letting that take you as far as possible.”

  “And what’s your talent?”

  “You know. You just said so. Deception. I present myself in a certain light, tailored to what someone wants to see. And then I allow them to form their own assumptions.” He sipped his beer. “Same as you, I would imagine.”

  “You don’t have to use that to con people, though. I don’t.”

  He nodded. “True enough. I suppose I’ve always had a taste for the finer things. You happen to learn where I grew up?”

  “Edmonton, Canada.”

  “Northeast of there, actually, by enough to matter. Wandering River. A tiny little town, a hamlet, technically—not much of anything. For a boy with dreams and imagination, it seemed awfully far from anywhere. I had no wish to spend my life breaking my back in hard labor for a lumber company or oil conglomerate.”

  I opened a second can of beer for myself. “And that excuses you?”

  He picked up a handful of sand, opened his fingers, watched the grains fall. “Context, my dear. I offer context, not excuses. I could have lived my whole life without ever getting south of Edmonton. From up there, you know, Toronto seems like Miami Beach. I’ve worked in subzero weather on chainsaw crews for four bucks an hour. Can you blame me for realizing there’s a world of nice things out there and wanting my share?”

  “Your share? Or what belongs to others?”

  His eyes were penetrating. “You’ve never struck me as puritanical.”

  “I have morals,” I said. “Maybe different than some, but I have them. And they don’t blow over in a strong wind.”

  “I haven’t exactly gotten off scot-free.” He gazed out at the ocean. “Never get mixed up with old money or gangsters. If I ever write my memoirs, that would make a good first chapter. They’re both so damn prideful and unforgiving.”

  “You seem to have done pretty well for yourself,” I observed.

  “For a boy from northern Canada who was never fated to leave his postal code? Sure, I suppose.” He shrugged. “At least I avoided the oil fields and lumber yards.”

  “But you didn’t avoid everything,” I said.

  Coombs used a piece of driftwood to prod the coals glowing on the sand. A flurry of orange sparks swarmed up like ants, floated downwind. “What are you getting at?”

  “That Oxford dean. You killed him—why?”

  He placed the driftwood on the fire, his face expressionless. “Forks in the road,” he mused. “Funny to think about what could have been.” He picked up another handful of sand and squeezed, the grains trickling away. “I went off to Oxford on scholarship, knowing it was the chance of a lifetime. Ten lifetimes, with a background like mine. I threw myself into my studies. Was there wealth, privilege, class, the likes of which I’d never dreamt of? Of course—all around me. And I can’t deny I felt enchanted, intoxicated, by these glimpses at a more exciting world. But I still believed that diligence and merit would net me those things for myself. I had my wits, after all. And I’d managed to reach the right place to exercise them.”

  “Until you decided that murder would get you there quicker?”

  “Do you really think I’d embark on some kind of cold-blooded Double Indemnity scheme for a quick payday?” His eyes might have been disappointed.

  “You tell me.”

  Coombs tilted his beer to his mouth, then rested the can in the sand next to the first. “Very well. It began with a simple affair. As so many unfortunate things do. She was a married woman, twenty years older. I didn’t think any of that should matter. She said she was unhap
py, and I was a starry-eyed young buck with the whole world in front of him. We both went into things willingly enough—more than willingly, I should say.”

  “So why kill her husband? He found out?”

  “The night it happened he had been out at some reception—he felt unwell, I learned later, and came home early. When he found us, he seized a fireplace poker and charged me.”

  “And?”

  Coombs smiled without humor. “You think I brained him with it? I didn’t. Nothing nearly so dramatic. I grabbed it to keep from having my head knocked in. And then the next thing I knew he was having some kind of heart attack. He collapsed, hit his head on the way down, and died on his bedroom floor. His grieving wife decided she loved her husband considerably more in death than in life—and the authorities decided that a respected Oxford dean deserved vengeance against a troublesome Canadian hick. I had the bad luck to draw a particularly hard-hearted magistrate, and so off I went—”

  “To Wormwood Scrubs,” I finished.

  Coombs nodded, his eyes distant with memory. “And what I saw there convinced me that the world was a damn sight more dog-eat-dog than I’d realized. How did Hobbes put it—nasty, brutish, short? That summed up life at Wormwood Scrubs.”

  I was quiet. Thinking about parallels. Coombs had drawn a bad card. I had drawn a few myself. The two men who took my family; later, my foster father, Darren. And we had both learned how unpleasant life could be.

  “By the time I got out,” he continued, “I was a bit less trusting in Boy Scout ideals. I was a convict, too, of course, so no more school, no more studies. I couldn’t have gotten hired to slap sandwiches together.” His eyes locked with mine. “Broke, alone, and only my own wits to carry me through life—and not much trust in other people to help me get there.”

  “Susan Johannessen disappeared,” I told him. “Do you know anything about that?”