The Terror of Living: A Novel

by Waite, Urban

  “Yes, they do,” Eddie said. “And the sickest thing is, it makes them happy.”

  HUNT PUSHED THE THROTTLE FORWARD ON THE BOAT until the speedometer read fifteen knots. Twenty years he’d been making this run. And he could do it now almost without a second thought. It was strange to him that over all those years he had thought of himself as independent. He had Eddie. He always had Eddie, but they were more partners than anything else. At the age of nineteen he’d been a prisoner. Just a year out of childhood, just a year beyond the watch of parents and the guidance of teachers and coaches, people who had at one point or another meant something to him. He laughed a bit at the thought, remembering how they’d all considered themselves prisoners in school. But it wasn’t a thing like prison or being held captive. He had disappeared in Monroe. Stood in one place and just disappeared, like a magician doing a magic trick. One moment there, the next gone.

  It hadn’t started all at once. His lawyer was the first one to disappear. Hunt could understand a thing like that, where a man doesn’t come because he’s not being paid anymore. That made sense. A few friends would visit. They’d hold their baby pictures up to the glass so Hunt could see. They’d write him letters from exotic places and Hunt would lie in his bed and smell the paper. He would run his fingers along the envelope and look at the postmark. He liked to know where something had been. He liked to see that it had a location and a date and that it had traveled that long distance to him.

  The last letter he taped to his wall was dated sometime in the early eighties. What could they say to him anymore: Tough break, better luck next time? There was nothing to say about the thing he’d done, nothing that would ever make it better for him. He felt this, lying there in the cell at night with the pages of the letter drifting there on the wall. He felt that loneliness of disappearing, of fading away. The letter hung there for a year before he took it down.

  A high school coach came once to see him, the man dressed not as Hunt remembered him but in a simple pair of jeans, a striped polo shirt. It made Hunt sad to see him like this. To see the expression that crossed his face. Nothing filled Hunt with more despair than seeing a look of pity streak across another’s face. That had nearly done it. That had nearly killed him. Beat him better than anyone could ever have beaten him physically. Pride was a mass murderer in prison, and many nights, the men alone in their cells, it took who it could.

  His mother would write letters because she could not see him. She tried several times to visit, but every time she came, she cried, and Hunt could do nothing but sit there and watch her pain. To know that he had caused it and that there was nothing he could do about it, no comfort or help he could give, was, of all the things he endured, the worst.

  WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE, EDDIE?”

  Eddie eyed Nora. She’d just come back in from seeing Bobby Drake off.

  “What are you doing, Nora? Giving tours to strangers?”

  “He was just a boy looking for some riding lessons.”

  “He could be anybody.”

  “Him?”

  Eddie walked to the window and put a finger to the blinds and looked out on the front lawn. “Yes, Nora, him.”

  Nora went into the kitchen and he could hear her pouring a glass of water from the faucet. When she came back into the room, he was still standing at the window. “Why are you still here, Eddie?”

  “I’m looking out for you,” he said. “I’m looking out for Hunt.”

  “Do we need looking after?” Nora walked over to the table and sat down. She wouldn’t meet Eddie’s eyes.

  Eddie didn’t say anything. He was trying to decide if he should leave. If he should just get out now, if he could leave the two of them, leave them like he’d left the kid, waiting in the cell, waiting to get his head smashed in. Eddie couldn’t do it. Not to Nora, at least. He couldn’t leave her. All she had done to be wrapped up in this was love Hunt. Eddie couldn’t punish her for something like that. There would be punishment enough.

  “You ever think what would happen if you lost your vision?” Eddie said. He hadn’t meant it to sound threatening, but it had, like he was going to do it. “You know what I mean, go blind. You ever think of that?”

  “Doesn’t seem like a very nice question.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Not a question, or not nice?”

  “Not a question. Forget it, Nora. I’m just thinking out loud, that’s all.”

  “Well, then no. No, I’d expect it doesn’t feel very good.”

  “I’m saying I feel like that. I feel like I’ve gone blind, and I have everything I went into it with but I can’t see the walls, and I reach out to touch them and I’m just feeling my way along. That’s how I feel. That’s where we are, just feeling the walls, and I don’t like it, but it’s the best thing for us, for you and me, and Hunt. The best way we know how to go on and the only way we’re ever going to find our way.”

  IN THE EARLY EVENING, SHERI ANSWERED THE PHONE and, after a quick greeting, handed it across the table to Drake. They were playing Scrabble and drinking red wine out of the water glasses from the bathroom. “Yes,” Drake answered. He listened for a time, then got up from the chair and wrote down an address.

  When they arrived at the restaurant, they realized they were underdressed. And immediately Drake wanted to get back in the taxi and leave. Agent Driscoll was sitting there, and when they approached, he stood up and greeted them, holding his tie back as he leaned and shook their hands. “No hat today?” Driscoll asked.

  “No. I got tired of wearing it. Everyone wanted to know when the rodeo came to town.”

  “That’s funny. Though I’m not that surprised. You look the part.”

  “This is a very nice place,” Sheri said.

  “Don’t let it fool you,” Driscoll said. “Company card.”

  Drake made the bad joke: “Crime does pay.” And immediately he was sorry he’d said it. He felt like a fool. But Sheri laughed to be nice, and Driscoll smiled, though Drake got the impression he’d heard it a few times before.

  After they’d taken seats, Driscoll asked about the paper.

  “I picked up a copy from the lobby,” Drake said.

  “Front page of the local section. Not so bad, eh?”

  “I didn’t read it,” Drake said.

  “Why not? It’s not every day you get to be a hero.”

  “Is that what they’re saying?”

  Driscoll turned and spoke to Sheri. “How does it feel to be married to a man like this?”

  “Dreamy,” Sheri said.

  “I bet,” Driscoll said. He turned back to Drake. “You didn’t read it?”

  “There was a lot of that when my father went away. It burned me out.”

  “Sheri,” Driscoll said, “you must have read it?”

  “I peeked at it a little.”

  “And?”

  “I just want to know if my husband has anything to worry about,” Sheri said.

  “No,” Driscoll said. “Nothing.”

  They ordered their food, and when it came, Driscoll dropped the news about the kid.

  “That’s horrible,” Sheri said.

  “In the cell? With the guards standing by?”

  “No one seems to have seen it.”

  “There were ten men in that cell last I saw it.”

  “There’s nine now,” Driscoll said dryly. “Not one of them says he saw anything or heard anything. Nine men in a cell that’s fifteen by fifteen.”

  “How could that happen?” Sheri asked.

  “Unless the kid had a heart attack, it couldn’t.”

  “Did he?”

  “Not unless his heart bounced up and broke his right arm, beat in his face, and then snapped his neck.”

  “Easy,” Drake said. He looked at Sheri.

  Driscoll gave a quick laugh.

  “Is this something we should be worried about?” Drake asked.

  Driscoll went on chewing, and when he was finished, he said, “The only person
who needs to be worried is that second man. The case we have is gone. We have some two hundred kilos of coke and no one to charge it on. I’d guess if he hasn’t been shot, drowned, stabbed, or otherwise eliminated, it’s coming to him soon. It’s certainly easier to kill him than it is to kill someone like you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re a deputy. That’s an automatic death penalty in some states.”

  “Not this one,” Drake said.

  “Look, there’s nothing here to worry about.”

  Sheri gave Drake a worried look.

  “I’m just trying to say good-bye,” Driscoll said. “In style.” He lifted his cutlery and gave the room a little homage.

  “About that second man, I went down and checked out a few different stables today. Can’t say I turned up much.”

  Driscoll paused, fork held in his hand, frozen midway to his mouth. “Are you a detective now?”

  “No. But I can’t just sit around with nothing to do.”

  Driscoll gave Drake a cold little smile that said just about all Drake needed to hear. “We have absolutely no case. Unless that man decides to turn himself in, which I’ll tell you now would be a tragic idea, considering. We might as well just file this one away and burn the evidence.”

  “We still have the horses,” Drake offered.

  “One is dead. And unless the other one learns to talk…”

  Drake chewed his food. Sheri was watching him. “Did anything come of the saddles?”

  “The saddles are too common. The map was unmarked and the GPS looked to be just as clean. No fingerprints from the second man on any of it. There was a set of keys on the kid, just a key ring and an ignition key.”

  “I’ll bet that key fits the lock of a car up near Silver Lake,” Drake said.

  “Already picked it up and brought it down to Seattle. Nothing there. It looks like it was just transportation. The kid had only been out of Monroe for a week when you picked him up.”

  “No kidding.”

  “It’s probably better this way. He would have been on the return flight for sure. Better not to waste the money on the ticket.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say,” Sheri said.

  “It’s the truth,” Driscoll said, pushing his plate away. He asked if they wanted dessert.

  Sheri looked disgusted. “I’m actually a little tired. I’d like to get back to the hotel.”

  “That sounds fine,” Driscoll said, “but do you mind if I hold on to your husband an hour longer? I’d like to talk him up a bit, see what his thoughts are on the whole thing.”

  “If we’re leaving tomorrow,” Drake said, “I think we should get back to the hotel.”

  “Don’t be like that, Drake,” Driscoll said, cleaning the food from his teeth with a toothpick he’d produced from his pocket. “Put her in a taxi and we’ll talk.”

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “It’s fine,” Sheri interrupted. “You can talk a bit more. I’ll be fine. Like he said, there is no danger now that the kid is dead.”

  Driscoll waited for Drake to put Sheri in a cab. When Drake came back in and sat down, Driscoll said, “I don’t think she liked what I had to say.”

  HUNT SLOWED THE BOAT AND WATCHED IN THE DISTANCE as the ferry crossed on its way to Victoria. The sun had fallen, and for an hour he waited in a small cove south of the border. Light faded slow to the west, and for a while he simply sat and watched it go, the black coming over him, and where the sky and ocean met, a violet haze.

  Though Eddie had given it to him straight, Hunt didn’t like the idea that he owed someone his life, or that everything they had worked toward had now become someone else’s. The thought that someone could just reach out and shake him down like that. Could control him and tell him how things would be. Eddie had told him it was just one man, a lawyer, someone like Eddie, who arranged out-of-the-way deals. It didn’t seem that this was the whole story. Hunt had his suspicions. What did one man control that had them doing all this? He knew the lawyer was just the spokesperson for something larger, some international group. People who controlled it all, people who could make him and Eddie disappear. He wondered about this, watching the sunset and waiting for the dark. He’d never know who the lawyer worked for, and perhaps it was better not to know. And now they would be running drugs for this man, running them whenever they were told, with no particular claim in the deal. The thought of it made his chest crumble. He put a hand to his sternum and breathed in, feeling the air enter his lungs. He was fifty-four years old. What was he doing here? Most men his age had put away their retirement already. Lived good lives, saved, and felt a kind of satisfaction from the family and home he’d never known.

  Hunt needed to make a decision. He knew his life would never be the same as it had been just days before, with everything worked out, everything clear. Nora had told him to run. She had made him promise. But he needed a way out. He needed money, he needed Nora to be there with him.

  He hadn’t felt this way in many years. Not since his time in Monroe, when his life had not been his own and he had answered as best he could for the thing he’d done. It was not a good feeling, and he sat in the boat and felt the rock of the water beneath him. He watched the sun, the faded crown of it on the horizon, the night coming over him and the feeling inside him as heavy as granite.

  DRISCOLL DROVE HIM BACK TO THE HOTEL. FROM THE lobby, Drake watched as the unmarked patrol car turned out from the drive and sped east along the length of the lobby windows, as if Driscoll had a plane to catch, though Drake knew he was only headed back up the street to the office. Drake stood there, half-drunk from dinner. He was feeling out of sorts, feeling dismissed and lost. Everything had gone fine. In his half-drunken stupor he actually thought Driscoll could be a nice guy. Driscoll had told him he was still part of the investigation. Where it would go from this point, Driscoll didn’t know, but he was happy to have Drake along if he could be of assistance, identify the odd body that popped up, as Driscoll had said, that sort of thing.

  There was a funk to him, he smelled this now, something like whiskey mixed with a glass of port he shouldn’t have had. He looked around the lobby. He almost couldn’t find his bearings, too buzzed and tired to even look for the elevator or the key to his room.

  In the elevator he thought to take his hat off when a woman his mother’s age entered, but then he remembered he wasn’t wearing it. She rode with him for several floors. He studied the woman’s reflection in the brushed metal doors. Old as his mother would have been. His mother, an elementary school teacher, lost to leukemia when Drake was just a child, his father standing by, a faraway look coming into his eye. All the time he’d spent with his mother, and this is what he remembered. He couldn’t turn it off. He couldn’t turn away. Perhaps this was why he searched for his father, the man not there in the way he’d used to be, not the man Drake remembered at all. His mother gone, slipped away in that long-ago time of half-remembered childhood, but his father simply disappearing.

  Drake didn’t speak to the woman in the elevator. When she exited, he caught her eye looking back at him before the door closed. He wondered how he appeared to her, what rough thing he presented. Had she had a son like him? Someone his age, someone still young, still learning that things could disappear, be taken and never given back. He certainly didn’t appear to be an officer of the law, but something wholly different, something of the opposite, more vagabond, more loose, like the kink of a rope after the strength of the knot unties.

  When he reached his floor, he used the key card from his wallet to open the door to his room. Inside, nothing but darkness, the cool, open feel of the windows, the city beyond, and a light drizzle falling through it all. Everything a kaleidoscope of water crystals and light. He heard his wife turn over in bed. “Bobby?” Filled with sleep.

  “Yes,” he said, but nothing more. Knowing she was only looking for confirmation. He took his holster from his belt and laid it across the dresser. His bo
ots he dropped to the floor, and then, walking, his shirt, his jeans, and, as he sat on the opposite side of the bed looking out on the city and its lights, his socks. Getting under the sheets, he reached into the depths with his toes, the feeling almost swallowing him down. The cleanness of it.

  Too tired now to brush his teeth, to clean the scum off him, the day, the ruined lives that had been left behind over the course of the past few days. He wanted to but couldn’t let it go, brought it all with him to bed, down into the sheets, lingered in it and felt it not on his skin but somehow beneath it, like a layer had been added, thick and gummy, to the insides of his person.

  “Sheri?” he said, the city lights like starlight on her turned body. He reached out to touch her, felt his cold fingers on her warm back. She turned and for a moment clutched the sheets to her chest, her eyes looking at him, the dull blue-silver light of the city on her. “Sheri,” he said again, putting his arm beneath her pillow, his other around the bend of her side, his hand to her back, feeling the warmth. “Tell me I’m a good man,” he said.

  “You are.” Her eyes open, unblinking, looking back at him.

  He knew he was drunk, acting foolish, but it seemed to matter to him then, all of it, all of what had passed in the last couple of days. He couldn’t explain it. He just wanted someone to tell him he was a good man, that he’d done his job, that somehow it mattered.

  He pulled her closer and put his lips to the underside of her chin, his arms tightening around her. Sheri let him, arching her neck until he could put his nose and lips beneath her head into the warmth of her body, clean and smelling of apples and soap. It felt to Drake like two worlds coming together, the past and the present, like his father’s small orchard. Shooting apples off the branches with the old .22. All of this before he’d gone away to college, before a lot of things, all of it mixed up together, gun smoke drifting through orchard light, broken apples in the wet evening grass, the smell of cordite and freshly fired rifles.

  THE LAWYER HAD GIVEN GRADY THE TIME AND LOCATION of the meet. He had only a set of coordinates and a GPS. Grady checked the GPS. The wind came bristling over the cockpit and pulled his hair back, his skin red and irritated with the speed. All around he heard the clap of the water underneath the hull. He was doing about thirty-five knots, white water leading off in a trail behind him.