Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  TWENTY-THREE

  Anna had mentally rolled her eyes when Lisa told her the story of Freddy sleeping under the crib for a week. Now it wasn’t so droll. Crib death. Another thing not to think about. There were too many things in Anna’s brain that she didn’t want to think about, that to think about brought her closer to the edge of the abyss. Not thinking was exhausting her. Trying to sleep with her fingertips resting on Helena’s back to make sure she was still breathing was exhausting her. Paul, as always, slept the sleep of the innocent.

  Eventually she must have slept because whimpering dragged her from its murky depths. The clock on the bed stand, plastic molded into the shape of a football helmet, said three twenty-seven. For a groggy second she was confused and terrified, then she remembered the formula Lisa had left for Helena. The baby wasn’t dying. She was hungry. This is a good thing, Anna told herself, and threw back the covers.

  The pajamas she had brought were pink with little yellow ducks on them. Not an outfit she’d ever intended to wear in public. She pulled them on to make herself decent and lifted Helena from her cardboard box.

  The baby was so warm and, for the first time since Anna had ripped her from her mother’s womb, so alive. She wriggled and waved tiny fists and made angry little sounds. Anna reveled in this show of spirit and strength as she carried Helena from the bedroom to the kitchen. As good as her word, Lisa had prepared the formula. Helena clutched to her shoulder, Anna retrieved the bottle and put it in the warming pan and turned up the heat.

  From an ancient race memory or an old movie, Anna remembered women testing the temperature of the baby’s milk on the inside of their wrists. With Helena in her arms this wasn’t feasible. Anna put the nipple to her lips and squeezed.

  “No wonder babies cry,” she whispered as she transferred the nipple to Helena’s mouth. “This stuff is vile.”

  Helena evidently thought so as well. She was having none of it. She shook her head to escape the intrusion of plastic and cried. Anna sat in a chair and settled the baby more firmly in the crook of her left arm.

  “Got to eat,” she told the baby. “Keep your strength up for what’s to come.”

  Helena looked at her, eyes wide, and Anna knew the baby saw her, understood, and she laughed out loud. When Helena accepted the nipple and began to suck, a marvelous sense of triumph poured into Anna, and for a moment she wasn’t tired or sore or scared. Dragged into living in the moment as babies do, there was nothing she didn’t have to think about.

  When half the bottle was gone, Helena refused to drink any more.

  This was the first time Anna had ever fed a baby. Had the survival and continuance of the human race been left up to her, overpopulation would not have been an issue. Helena was looking at her with expectation, or so it seemed to Anna.

  “What do you want, little girl?” Anna asked helplessly.

  Helena’s face was screwing up as her disappointment in Anna grew.

  “More milk? A kitten? Two kittens?”

  Burping. Babies needed to be burped. Everybody knew that. Relieved at having an action to take, Anna put Helena to her shoulder the way she’d seen it done and patted her back gently. Soon the baby quieted and spewed a warm substance down the collar of Anna’s ducky pajamas.

  “What a good girl,” Anna said, and: “Ish.” The baby’s face relaxed and then grew beatific. An unpleasant odor let Anna know it wasn’t her child-care skills that had brought on the moment of pure joy.

  “We’ve got to teach you to use a litter box,” Anna said.

  Lisa had said the changing room was down the hall near the master bedroom. Anna had never changed a baby’s diaper. As she carried Helena down the hall following the spill of light from the kitchen, she envisioned stabbing the baby with huge safety pins, great squares of inexpertly folded white cloth falling off the child.

  Anna switched the light on in the laundry room. Lisa had laid a soft mat over the top of the washer and dryer, creating a changing table. On a shelf above were boxes of disposable diapers. Nobody had folded a cloth diaper in over thirty years, she realized. She should have known this. She’d carried enough soiled disposable diapers out from the shorter loop trails off the roads in the parks where she’d worked. Rotten parents would shove the things under logs or in bushes rather than pack out their child’s mess.

  “You have been saved by modern technology,” Anna whispered as she laid Helena on her back on the de facto changing table and began unsnapping the yellow onesie. “I am untrustworthy with stabbing weapons.” To Anna’s eye, Helena smiled and she wondered if it was anthropomorphism if human traits were attributed to neo-humans. All needful things had been left ready to hand, for which Anna was grateful. Helena was clean and a new diaper with nifty Velcro closures was laid out and ready when the bubble of her and Helena’s nocturnal aloneness was broken by a voice, sharp and close and scorching with intense emotion. “Crucified on broken branches.”

  Anna gasped. Hands spread, knees bent ready to fight or grab Helena and run or scream, Anna spun around to face the intruder.

  Nobody was there.

  It crossed her mind that she had, indeed, gone over the edge, but she didn’t dwell on it. Of the many things in her head of late, strange voices were not among them. And this voice wasn’t altogether strange. It sounded like Freddy Martinez amped up about a thousand volts. This was the voice of a man who could have stood on a canyon’s rim and shot the fish in his own personal barrel and deemed himself justified in doing so. Nice stories about sleeping under cribs and kissing his wife and giving Anna and Paul and Helena shelter suddenly didn’t outweigh the fact that it had been Freddy whom she had found in the place of the shooter who had murdered two young women while the rest of them watched.

  Barefoot, in pink pajamas, a naked baby behind her, Anna knew the unique sense of helplessness that many women lived with all the days of their lives. She hated it.

  A murmur. Lisa.

  The laundry room and the master bedroom shared a wall, which obviously hadn’t been soundproofed.

  “In the dream it was all happening again,” Freddy said, his voice less fraught but still clearly audible. “The water taking her, her trying to grab on to anything, and I just stand on the bank and do nothing. Can’t do anything. Man,” he said so low Anna could barely hear. Then a sob, the kind that men turn into an aborted bark rather than give in to tears.

  Anna was eavesdropping on the late-night bedroom conversation of a married couple who had been kind enough to take her and her husband and Helena in out of the cold and she hadn’t a shred of guilt or any intention of stopping.

  Murmuring again—Lisa—and Anna stepped across the narrow utility room to shamelessly press her ear against the wall. Ranger Martinez might or might not be the shooter who’d killed Carmen and Lori, but he was connected to the woman in the strainer in a way that woke him in the wee hours with nightmares and honed his voice sharp as a razor.

  “The hell it wasn’t!” was shouted so loudly Anna jumped, her butt hitting the washing machine with a thump.

  Silence echoed from beyond the plywood separating her from Freddy and Lisa Martinez. Then came the sound of a drawer opening, followed by the unmistakable metallic swallow of a round being chambered.

  Anna flicked out the light of the laundry room, grabbed up a naked Helena and moved soundlessly toward the faint light spilling down the hallway. When she reached the kitchen she turned that light out as well.

  The door to the master bedroom opened and stealthy footsteps crept down the hall. Baby in arms, Anna didn’t know what to do. If she ran to Paul she would be leading an armed and mentally disturbed man to his bed, yet she couldn’t leave him. Backing into a corner formed by two kitchen counters, she put her hand over Helena’s mouth and waited. The steps reached the doorway to the kitchen and stopped. In the city there would have been ambient light from streetlights or next-door neighbors. Here, with the moon long since set, there was nothing but perfect night, the stars too faint to penet
rate curtains and shading eaves.

  Darkness was her friend. Anna sank into a crouch, making herself as small as she could, and hoped Freddy would pass through without seeing them. Moving as quietly as a hunting cat, he was through the kitchen before she’d known he’d left the hall. She could see the dark outline of his shoulders against the big windows in the living room.

  She was preparing to breathe again when Helena, displeased with the hand over her mouth, made a small cranky noise.

  The light came on with blinding suddenness and Freddy Martinez, wearing nothing but old sweats and unlaced sneakers without socks, was pointing his Glock at her head.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I want him fired. Tonight.”

  Judith was pacing in a room that was barely four paces wide. Watching her stalking like a beast in a cage was getting to Darden. At three-thirty in the morning thinking was difficult at best. Trying to do it with a wild woman wearing a hole in the carpet was proving impossible.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Judith?” he said reasonably. “Let me get you a Coke or something. There’s a machine at the bottom of the steps outside.”

  “I don’t want a Goddamn Coke,” she hissed, but she sat, her narrow behind barely perched on the edge of Darden’s bed. He sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, one of two, one more uncomfortable than the other that flanked a small rectangular table, the kind they used to cram into kitchens before breakfast nooks became the fashion.

  “Now tell me why you want Kevin fired,” he said.

  Judith sprang up again and began the pacing. She hadn’t changed since the party and still wore the tailored blue linen trousers and white silk blouse, but they no longer maintained their pristine lines. Matter of fact, Darden thought, it looked like she’d slept in them. Or rolled in the hay in them. Her manicured fingers had run through her manicured hair so many times the latter was standing in blond spikes like sheaves in a wheat field. “Frankly, Darden, it’s none of your damn business why I want him fired. It’s your business to fire him.”

  She might as well have slapped him in the face. The sting of her words burned through his tough old hide till he could feel the faint acid burn in his tear ducts where tears had once resided before he’d replaced them with ash. Darden pulled himself straighter in his chair and tried to suck in his gut. Tonight it wasn’t his friend; it was a sign of how little respect he or anyone else had for the man who used to be Secret Agent White.

  Before he could think of a rational way to fall on his sword, Judith stopped pacing and threw herself to her knees on the carpet in front of him, her narrow hands on his knees, her head in his lap. “I didn’t mean that, Darden. I am so sorry. Please don’t hate me. God, I doubt I could stand it if you hated me.”

  He stroked her short hair. When she was little it had been a sweet gentle brown and as soft as a puppy’s belly. It probably still was when she didn’t fill it with goop and spray and dye and whatever else women did to make themselves look younger and more appealing. At her age he doubted it would be that same soft brown but a nice color, maybe a little gray but not much. Her mother hadn’t had a single gray hair at sixty. He knew; he’d seen her in her coffin. Ambition had run her heart out. Ambition and speed and cigarettes.

  “Don’t ask me why I want you to fire him.” Her mouth against the soft folds of his flannel robe, she sounded so young. Darden continued to stroke her hair absently but he didn’t answer. Firing problem employees was only a good idea if they were all of the problem. If the boss was half of it—especially the half that the tabloids would love to buy an exclusive story about—the aftermath usually cost more than it would take to turn a bad employee into a good retainer.

  “Please?” Judith looked up at him through wet eyelashes.

  Darden was surprised. He doubted she’d cried any more recently than he had, but it was a night for realizing she no longer told him all her secrets.

  “I don’t want to pry into your personal affairs,” he said, and heard the stiffness in his own voice. Had he missed it for some reason her deep sigh would have enlightened him as to its existence. “I really don’t, Judy. You’re a grown woman and can do what you like. I’m asking because why’s going to dictate how. We fire him out of hand right now and he goes running to the press or—if Gerry’s around and gets wind of it—the press runs to him and the governor’s mansion might as well be on Jupiter for as close as you’re going to get to it.”

  Judith pushed herself to her feet, using his knees for leverage. The old plaid robe fell partly open and Darden could see his leg from knee to beat-up slipper. A white leg with dark hairs, skinny at the shin and heavy at the knee, where muscles had melted away and bones had taken over: it was the leg of an old man. A year ago, a month, even a week ago and he’d known he was in his sixties, he’d known he wasn’t in the best physical condition, and he’d used it to play old to put people off their guard. When in the past seventy-two hours had playing old slid into being old?

  “I can’t have him around me, Darden,” Judith said. She’d walked over to the bathroom counter and was looking at herself in the mirror. From where he sat he could see her in profile.

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “Tell me this: Can it wait a day or two or better a week or two? At least till we can get off this godforsaken mountain and back into civilization where I can get a handle on what he’s likely to do if we fire him?” Though Judith was besotted with her worthless husband—or maybe because she was—she’d had several affairs over the years. Very discreet, very upscale—Darden had known about them but only because she had wanted him to for security reasons. Out of respect for him—or so he’d once thought, now he wasn’t sure, maybe it was because she didn’t trust him anymore, not like she did when she was a little girl and he was the biggest, strongest, bravest, handsomest man in her world—she’d not asked him to shuttle lovers in and out of back doors or watch outside hotel rooms. He’d done that kind of work for other politicians and always felt like a bit of a pimp when he did.

  Judith’s liaisons had always been upper crust; rich, married men with as much or more to lose as she had if the secret were to get out. He’d always believed her too smart and too cold to go the route Clinton or Edwards had and get mixed up with somebody who could use the affair to blackmail her one way or another.

  Kevin didn’t seem like a likely candidate for her first try at slumming. Except that he looked like Charles had when he was young. A rough and dirty version of Charles; what better way to get even with him.

  “We’ll get rid of him,” Darden promised. “I’ll fix it so he won’t be able to come back at you and do you any damage.”

  “It might be too late,” Judith said, still staring at her reflection in the mirror. She picked up Darden’s hairbrush and began brushing her hair methodically, her hand following the bristles, smoothing the spikes down into a neat gold cap.

  When it was all flat and tidy, she dropped the brush and closed her skull between her hands as if it might blow apart if she didn’t.

  “Where is Charles?” Darden asked gently. He might not care much for his boss’s husband but if Judith needed him, Darden would get him for her, if he had to drag him out of bed with a Supreme Court justice to do it.

  “I don’t know.” Judith didn’t move, didn’t stop holding her brain between her hands.

  “Did he get another room?”

  “I think so.”

  “He knows that’s verboten on these junkets,” Darden fumed.

  “I think this time things are different,” she said. Dropping her hands to her sides, she turned from the mirror and he could see all of her face. The sadness he’d expected was there, and the fury, but what shone naked and cruel was fear.

  Judith was absolutely terrified.

  She’d been afraid when she’d come into the chief ranger’s conference, he recalled. The fact had gotten lost in the myriad other emotional currents he’d been following. At the time he’d thought it was fear of the unknown, of the rumors that were fl
ying and how they would affect what she was trying to do by spending a week in the Chisos Mountains instead of running the city that had elected her mayor.

  There was more to it than that. Judith was scared of Kevin, one of her own security men. By the depth of terror he read in her eyes, Kevin must have threatened her with murder—either of herself or her career, a kind of murder that she couldn’t protect herself against with money and connections.

  “What has he threatened you with?” Darden asked softly.

  Judith shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “But you want him fired?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you won’t tell me why?” Darden sighed in exasperation and stood, folding his bathrobe closer around him. The window was open and the night had grown cold. The smell of pine and sage came in with the cool air. Darden would have preferred the smells of diesel and rain-washed pavement.

  “No.” Her face grew less rigid and her eyes took on the shine they did when she wanted something. She walked across the room and leaned against his chest, her arms around his waist.

  “What is it? What do you want, Judy?” he asked warily.

  “This isn’t going to go away. Not if we pour money on it or shake our big guns.”

  For a minute they stood without moving, her head on his chest, his arms loose at his sides. Darden had known what she was asking for from the minute she’d started across the worn carpet toward him.

  For once he didn’t want to give her what she wanted.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Oh. It’s you,” Freddy said.

  The Glock was lowered but still held at his side. Anna had never been on the wrong end of a gun when it was this close. The bore, not much more than a quarter inch in diameter, if that, had appeared the size of a fifty-cent piece when it was pointed at her. Witnesses left alive after being threatened with guns were notoriously unable to tell law enforcement anything useful and now Anna knew why. With that terrible black eye of a death Cyclops staring one in the face, it took in the entire world for that instant. Everything outside the hole’s perimeter disappeared in a fog of incipient mortality.