Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  Charles finally stops, distributes maps, sends everyone out, tells Abe to take care of Elena, tells me to wait in the back, kisses Amber, sends her with Abe. He pulls on a tan jacket and gives me an umbrella. It’s hardly raining now, and I say it’s ok.

  “Take it, this isn’t like Ireland, it might really start pouring later, we need it, a good downpour,” he says.

  I take the umbrella, but the rain has already gotten under the plastic cover on my clipboard, dampening the fact sheets—nothing I can do about it. Charles grins at me and we walk over to the first house. He seems younger now. He likes doing this.

  I look around. It’s a fairly affluent area. New cars, and the houses have big gardens and fences. The difference from Ireland is that the houses are made of wood, not brick.

  “Ok, Alexander, this is how it goes down. Each person is to get one zone to cover in an evening. Usually it’s about a hundred and fifty houses. Average you can get is about seven members an evening. Seven out of a hundred and fifty, but at the others you can leave leaflets, so it’s still doing a bit for the cause.”

  “What town is this?” I ask him as we walk toward the first big house in the street.

  “It’s called Colorado Springs. Nice place, the Air Force Academy’s here. Good hunting ground for us. Ah, there they are.”

  Three men come out of a dark green Range Rover. Two are in hooded raincoats carrying a camera and a boom mike, the third is wearing a baseball cap that says Broncos on it. They are all in their thirties. Charles does not introduce me and this pisses me off a bit. He shakes the Broncos guy’s hand.

  “Bill, I thought you wouldn’t show up because of the rain,” he says.

  “Typical, first rain we’ve had in months, but it’s good for us, shows your dedication. Main problem’s the light, we’re losing light fast, Charles, I think we should get started.”

  “Ok, what do I do?” Charles asks.

  “You do your normal thing, and don’t worry about us,” Bill says.

  “Ok, come on, Alex,” Charles says to me, “just ignore them if you can.”

  We walk up to the first house.

  “Now, Alex,” Charles says, “I’ll do the talking and you just watch. Later I’ll let you do a couple of houses on your own. But for now just let me show you how it’s done. We’re in a pretty affluent area as you can see. Volvos and BMWs, so I’m gonna ask for hundred-dollar memberships and, if it goes well, maybe try for a couple of life memberships. That’s five hundred dollars. We’ll see. Are you ready? Are you psyched?”

  “Yeah,” I lie.

  “I said, are you ready?” he says more loudly.

  “Yeah,” I say with more enthusiasm.

  We go through the gate and walk up the driveway, crunching our shoes in the gravel. The camera crew follows us and starts filming. Next door a dog starts barking and in the living room a TV comes on. It’s cold and I suppress a shiver. Charles pushes the doorbell and pats me on the back.

  “It’s gonna be great,” he says, grinning from ear to ear and for some reason giving me the Spock “Live long and prosper” sign from Star Trek.

  “Great,” I say, giving him Churchill’s V for victory sign as a response. Charles beams, unaware that the V sign means something totally different back in my neck of the woods.

  Man in his late thirties comes to the door. Charles gives him the rap. The man resists, looks at the camera crew, baffled, Charles keeps at him for a painful amount of time and finally the man agrees to join the CAW at the thirty-five-dollar rate.

  We do two dozen more houses and Charles signs up two more people, leaves leaflets at the rest, smiling the whole time. Bill stays behind with the ones that were cooperative and gets them to sign a release form, then races to catch us up again.

  “You think you can do a door on your own now, or do you want me to stand there with you?” Charles asks.

  “I can do it,” I tell him.

  “Great. We’ll try down this street, might be a little trickier. I’ll do this side, you the other, meet at the end, ok?”

  I nod. It’s a side street, Toyotas and Hondas, rather than BMWs and Volvos, but it still looks ok. Mock Tudor houses, some with gardens, picket fences.

  My first house, I ring the doorbell.

  No one home, I write “N/H” on the clipboard.

  I walk down the path of the second house, knock the door.

  “Coming,” someone says.

  The door opens, and it’s an elderly man in his seventies. Pale, white, wearing a dressing gown, smoking a cigarette.

  “Hi, I’m from the Campaign for the American Wilderness and we’re in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save the ancient forests…. Er, is this an issue that concerns you at, er, all?”

  “The what?” the man says.

  “The CAW, we’re an environmental org—”

  “Nope,” the man says, and closes the door in my face. I hear him muttering as he walks back down the hall.

  I write a zero beside his door number.

  Next house. One-floor bungalow, painted a kind of frostbite blue. Creepy-looking dolls in the window. In this house there’s a screen door and a porch. I open the screen door, it shuts behind me, trapping me between the two doors in the tiny porch. It’s filled with potted plants and an enamel plaque of a fat man drinking beer that says on it “Bavaria the Beautiful.”

  A black woman comes to the door. Early fifties.

  “Hi, I’m in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to preserve the ancient forests of—”

  “Wait a minute,” she says, “I’ll get my husband.”

  She goes off and calls into the back room. She returns to the front room and closes the door. Meanwhile, the kitchen door opens and a man wearing dungarees comes down the hall. There is oil all over his hands, and he’s sweating. His eyes are opaque gray and dead tired.

  “Whadda ya want?” he asks suspiciously.

  “Hi, I’m from the, uh, Campaign for the, uh, Wilderness, we’re in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save the forests.”

  “Yeah?” he says, and I show him the literature on the clipboard. The pictures of the trees before and after deforestation. The quotes from logging company executives and politicians. The list of endangered species in the Amazon.

  “What are you selling?” he asks gruffly.

  “Nothing. I, er, I’m campaigning to save the trees, the old growth forests. There’s only—”

  “Do I have to pay anything?”

  “No, not really. It’s a—”

  “Ok, where do I sign?”

  I give him the clipboard and he takes a pen out of his lapel pocket and signs the sheet next to his door number. He gets oil all over the acetate cover.

  “Ok?” he says.

  “Yes, and if, er, you’d like to, um, make a donation?” I say to him, with a great deal of embarrassment.

  “No, don’t think so.”

  “Ok, well, thanks again.”

  “My pleasure, glad to help.”

  I turn and walk down the path. He closes the screen door behind me.

  Shit, I say to myself, and mark zero on my sheet. I walk to the next house. I ring the bell and no one answers and I write down “N/H.”

  No answer in the next four houses and in the fifth house an Asian girl comes to the door, wearing a Girl Scout uniform.

  “Are your parents in?”

  “Not allowed to talk to strangers,” she says bravely, and shuts the door.

  I turn and walk back down the path. Smart kid, I say to myself.

  Next house, no one home. Next house, no dice. Next house, old white guy in a crumpled suit, standing behind a patched screen door.

  “Rain, finally, cool us down,” he says.

  “Yeah, listen, I’m in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save—”

  “Blue steel .44,” he says. “Used to have that.”

  “What?”

  “You know what gun I got now?”

  “No.”

&nb
sp; “A Walther PPK,” he says, his eyes narrowing.

  “Really?” I say.

  “Uh-huh. Never be too careful opening the door to strangers,” he says.

  I look down and I notice, sure enough, that he’s holding a firearm in his left hand, bouncing it there on his hip.

  “You know who has that gun?” he asks.

  “Uh, no. No, I don’t.”

  “James Bond. That’s James Bond’s gun,” he says, and gives me an off-putting smile.

  “Well, that’s terrific, thank you very much, I’ll have to go,” I say.

  “What do you want, boy?”

  “I just wanted to leave you a leaflet, here you are.”

  “Are you Scottish?”

  “Irish, Irish. Well, look, thanks very much.”

  “Irish, Scottish, isn’t it all the same thing?” he says.

  “No, no, quite different. Well, thanks anyway, have a good night,” I say hastily, and back down the path.

  When I meet up with Charles at the end of the street, I have signed up no one. I don’t tell him about the man with the gun in case he thinks I’m hysterical. But I take twenty bucks of my own money and pretend that I got two donations of ten bucks each.

  “That’s pretty good, Alex, that was a more difficult street, tough test. Look, we’ll do a few more houses together and meet up with the others, ok?”

  “Where’s the film crew?” I ask him.

  “Oh, they ran out of light, but I think they got enough for tonight,” Charles says.

  He doesn’t elaborate about who they were or what they were doing, so I let the matter drop.

  Charles takes us back down to a more affluent street and I wonder if this was all a deliberate ploy to blood me on a lot of rejections to see if I got downhearted.

  Sure enough, back in the richer street we get three more memberships and even a life membership.

  The rain has eased and when we pick up the others, everyone is excited and happy. They’ve had a good night and a third of the money they raised will be going to them. We drive back to the city, everyone talking, laughing. We stop for pizza in a grungy-looking place on a slip road close to the highway.

  We scrunch together several tables. The lights flicker. The pizza bakes.

  Charles is in high spirits. He talks and, eventually, the attention turns to me, as the new boy.

  “Alexander, what would you be doing right now in Ireland?” Charles asks.

  “Well, it’s five a.m. there, so I’d probably be sleeping,” I say.

  “No, no, no, that’s not what I mean, what do you do over there, at night, for fun, are there pizza places like here?”

  “Uh, not that many and they’re expensive, pizza is more of a restaurant thing,” I say, a bit disconcerted to be the center of attention.

  “So what would you do?” Charles asks.

  “Go to the pub, I suppose,” I say.

  “Are the pubs really full of musicians and music and stuff?” Amber asks.

  “Some of them, but most aren’t, they—”

  “I was in this pub in Dublin and it took forever for my pint of Guinness to come, I thought they’d forgotten about me,” Charles says. “They were so slow.”

  “It’s supposed to be slow, Guinness has to be poured very slowly,” I explain.

  “Well, it was slow, and the smoke in those places, terrible, I felt sorry for the bar staff, really awful,” Charles says.

  “Don’t they play that game with the sticks?” Abe asks me.

  “Hurling,” I say.

  “Do you play it?” Abe asks.

  “No.”

  “Charles was the lacrosse champ at Bright,” Abe says. “Kind of a similar game, no?”

  Amber and Charles look briefly at each other.

  “What’s Bright?” I ask.

  “You ever read A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, any one of those?” Abe asks.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s a bit like their school, Colorado version, Charles and Robert both went there. Very snooty, play cricket and everything,” Abe says. Clearly, he’s trying to get under Charles’s skin, wind him up a bit, tease him, but he’s overstepped the line somehow. Amber scolds him with a look that stops him in midsentence.

  “Alexander, do you have any hobbies or anything like that?” Amber asks, questioning me with those big glacial eyes.

  “No, not really,” I say. “I go to football matches, soccer matches, I mean, sometimes, I’m not very athletic or anything.”

  Mercifully, the pizza finally comes.

  I don’t eat any. Instead, I find myself staring at Amber Mulholland as she spills Coke on her white blouse. I hand her a napkin and she thanks me with a beautiful smile. Something about that smile, though. Beautiful like a sun-drenched cornfield above a missile silo.

  How much does she know about what happened to Victoria? Would she even care if her husband or brother-in-law was a murderer? I examine her closely. Maybe I’m wrong. There’s something vulnerable about her too. A touch of the Marilyn or the Lady Di.

  We drive back to Denver. I’m freezing, but no one else is. I try to get warmth from a cup of coffee. Charles is talking, but I’m not listening, ticking off the seconds till I can get home. We’re all exhausted. Amber, in a whisper, asks Charles how the filming went. He says it went great and gives her a kiss. The kiss makes me wince.

  They drop me on Colfax Avenue.

  A few hookers, a few gypsy cabs, their lemony headlights distorting in the rain.

  I stand under the overhang at Kitty’s East Porno store. Still a few blocks to our apartment, but I’m so tired. Junkie tired. Drizzling still. The last rain for weeks to come.

  From now on a continuation of the drought. Drought until August, when freezing rain would fall in Fort Morgan. And I would beg it to come down, invoking Vishnu, Storm Bringer, Lord of Night, begging him to cover me up as I lay there in the graveyard with gunshot wounds, wondering if it was too late then, to live, to survive, to avenge yet another horrible murder in this sorry, sorry excuse for a case.

  8: AIR, WATER, EARTH, FIRE

  Patrick and I are both irritated. It’s hot, dry, we have the fan way at the other end of the room so the cards don’t get blown over and John and Areea are not taking the game seriously at all. John has his hand on her lap, Areea has her hand at the back of his shorts.

  I look at Patrick and shake my head in disgust.

  “The one thing, John, that I can’t stand is people not taking poker seriously when there’s money in the pot.”

  “It’s only two dollars,” John says, and winks at Areea.

  Areea giggles for no reason at all.

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” I say.

  I can tell Patrick feels the same way. For him in particular, whose weeks remaining on planet Earth can be counted in the few dozen, minutes are precious, seconds are bloody precious.

  “Are you calling or not?” I say.

  “No, then,” John says impatiently, throwing down his cards.

  “Your hand, Patrick,” I say, annoyed.

  He picks up his winnings.

  “I think maybe we’ll take a martini break,” he says.

  “Good idea,” I say, looking significantly at John, who has started snogging Areea on the lobe of her ear. It’s been two hours since I shot up and another rule I have is that ketch and spirits don’t mix, but what the hell, anything to get away from those two, who have been carrying on like this for the last few days.

  I follow Patrick all the way along the corridor and into his apartment, which is minimally decorated with a few photographs of friends and a bookcase filled with art books. CD player and CDs of all descriptions but mostly classical. He puts on a piece by Stravinsky, which does nothing to soothe my mood.

  It’s July 10. I’ve been going to CAW for more than a week now, making about a hundred and fifty bucks a night, commuting downtown, buying the groceries, and also attempting to look discreetly into the Victoria Patawasti mu
rder. John, by contrast, has been hanging out on the fire escape smoking pot, eating potato chips, drinking beer, and making out with Areea when she’s off her shift. It’s starting to get on my nerves.

  “It’s starting to get on my nerves,” I tell Pat.

  “Me, too. You know, I was bluffing that hand, I had nothing,” Pat says.

  “I know.”

  This is one of Pat’s good days, in fact since we showed up, he says he’s been doing much better. He was perishing through loneliness: the lawsuit’s pissed off most of his old pals in the DFD, and his only family lives in Wyoming.

  Stravinsky’s violins start screeching at one another and Pat puts ice into the martini shaker. Pat makes a dry martini, a very dry martini. He informs the Bombay Sapphire gin about the existence of a substance called vermouth before he pours it in the shaker. He takes two glasses from the freezer, adds an olive to each, and asks me to do the shaking, which I do.

  We retire to the fire escape.

  “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Pat says.

  “She is, Pat, gorgeous face, great legs, honestly, I don’t know what she sees in that big ganch.”

  “Well, it’ll all end in tears,” Pat predicts, as we lean forward to watch two men attempt to beat each other senseless at a brown, grassless park on the corner.

  “John and Areea?” I ask, unsure if we’re still on the same subject.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Because of her parents?”

  “She says she’s eighteen, but I think she’s much younger,” Pat says.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really,” he says.

  We sip our martinis.

  “What about you, is there a special someone in your life?” Pat asks, the vowel sounds making his cheeks hollow sickeningly.

  “Nope. There isn’t.”

  “Back home, I mean.”

  “Answer’s still no. I can’t seem to hold on to a steady relationship.”

  “You leave them or they leave you?”

  “They leave me, Pat.”

  “You think maybe the smack doesn’t help?” Pat asks.

  “I’m sure it doesn’t. I’m sure it does not,” I say.

  Pat looks at me. He’s not going to lecture me or give me grief. He’s just pointing out the obvious. And it’s that question yet again. And the answer. I must release it from me. Let it go. I don’t have to do heroin now, I don’t have to. So why am I doing it?