Liz waited as Arty came over and looked in the sack. She watched his face. It went from troubled to amazed in two seconds flat.
She smiled.
“I don’t believe this,” he said.
“Believe it.” Even though she could hardly believe it herself. There it was — a jumble of stones that had to be diamonds, some loose, some set in necklaces and rings. Three other sacks just like it were also in the saddlebag.
“Jewels,” Arty said.
Great observation! Liz wanted to scream. “Yes, jewels, and where do you think they came from?”
“I don’t know.”
“It looks real suspicious, doesn’t it? I mean, these are probably stolen.”
Arty said nothing. He was deep in thought.
“These are hot rocks,” she said.
“How do you know that?” Arty said.
“Please, Arthur, you know I was raised in a pawn shop.”
Arty nodded. “You’re probably right. Don’t touch anything. Let’s call the police.”
“Hold on a second,” she said. “Think about this, okay? Hot stones.”
His head tilted back slightly, as if he sniffed a bad odor. “You are not seriously thinking that we can keep any of these, are you?”
“I’m just asking you to think for half a minute.”
“There’s nothing to think about, Liz. We have to do what’s right.”
“What’s right? If these are stolen, they’re insured. The owners won’t care.”
“The insurance company will.”
“They’re the biggest con artists in the country,” Liz said. “Let them take a hit. They deserve it.”
“And just what do you propose to do with stolen jewels?”
“It’s not that hard,” Liz said.
“What’s not that hard?”
“To fence them.”
“Liz! This is crazy talk.”
Liz closed her eyes and tried to will Arty into submission. Or maybe he could just go away. Forget me, forget the jewels, forget the body. Go away.
She felt Arty’s hand on her shoulder. She wrenched away from his hold.
“They’re not ours,” he said.
“Well, they’re not his,” she said.
“It just isn’t right. We have to obey the law.”
Liz sighed as loudly as she could. “That’s the whole thing right there. Obey the law, obey God. Why don’t you think about me?”
“I am thinking about you. About us.”
“Right.”
“What you’re thinking is way too dangerous.”
“Life is dangerous,” she said. “Arty, listen to me, will you? You remember when you said you wanted to be worth two million dollars before you’re thirty-five? That was a great dream, a great goal. I was down with it. But now you act like you don’t care if we have any money at all. This could set us up.”
“There’s probably a reward,” Arty said.
Liz said, “And maybe not.”
Arty bit his lip, shook his head. “The longer we talk, the more we’ll have to explain to the police. If we call them now, there’s no problem. We’ll have done the right thing.”
Liz saw the phone on his belt. Without a moment’s consideration, she snatched it.
She thought Arty would get angry. Maybe try to take the phone back.
“Go ahead,” he said. “You make the call.”
Soft and understanding. It grated on her to hear him talk that way. Soft and understanding wasn’t the way you gained net worth. She started to climb. Back up the rocks, holding the phone, hoping Arty would stay with the body and never bother her again.
Divorce. Yes. She’d end it now. Bag someone else while she was still young. And hope he didn’t have a religious conversion.
“Liz, where are you going?” Arty shouted.
She didn’t answer.
“Liz!”
She surprised herself. She could really move when motivated. Even over rocks.
Arty kept calling to her, giving chase.
Now what? She was no match for Arty when it came to rock climbing. He’d get to her sooner or later. Probably sooner. If he put his hands on her, she knew she’d probably go a little crazy.
Maybe she was a little crazy now.
The diamonds were all she could think about. How much would they amount to when fenced? One heck of a lot more than she and Arty had now, after they burned through the last of the savings. More than they’d probably ever make legitimately with Arty on his new spiritual hayride.
Fencing the stones would be the challenge, but there were people she could track down, maybe back home, maybe here —
“Stop right now!”
Escape. That’s what she needed. Escape from Arty, from this marriage that had skidded and crashed into a religious wall she never saw coming.
Escape and money.
She was at the top now, lungs burning, and Arty was only a few yards away.
Liz opened the phone and snapped it in two, then threw the pieces as far as she could. She heard the pieces clatter on some rocks.
Arty was watching, openmouthed.
“What did you just do?” he shouted.
Figure it out for yourself. She put her hands on her knees to catch her breath.
“Liz, this is nuts,” he said.
She was too winded to reply.
“Let’s go home and talk about this,” he said.
“Shut . . .”
“We can talk — ”
“. . . up.”
“ — this out.”
She felt his hand on her back. She straightened and hit it away.
“Okay,” he said, “that’s enough. Just stop it.”
“Don’t . . . tell me . . . to stop it.”
“I am telling you,” he said. “You’re acting crazy. We are not going to take any of that stuff. We’re going back to the house and calling the police before we get into trouble.”
“We’re in trouble now!” Liz flapped her arms once, like a large bird that couldn’t fly. “We’re in trouble . . . because of you . . . throwing away your job . . .”
“I didn’t throw anything away that would last, that would make us happy.”
“Do I look . . . happy to you?”
“Honey — ”
“Find another name for me.”
“Come on.”
He took her arm. She took it back.
“Now look,” he said. “That’s enough. If you don’t come with me, I’m going to the house myself and make the call.”
“Good. You do that. I’ll see to the diamonds.”
“That’s it.”
When he grabbed her left arm this time, his fingers formed an iron grip. She tried to pull away, couldn’t. He pushed her toward the trail.
Nobody does that to me. Nobody, nobody, nobody.
She swung a roundhouse right and cracked him in the jaw.
He let her go immediately and put his chin in his hands.
She watched his eyes. The way she used to watch her stepfather’s eyes. The way she used to anticipate when it was coming. When he’d try to get her. His eyes would get mean.
Arty’s eyes had that same look now. At least she thought they did.
Nobody does that to me.
In her body, every muscle tensed and flamed, as if she were a storehouse of fireworks with a torch thrown in, the hissing starting as the first rocket ignites.
Then, explosion. Blind pinwheel rage and Roman candle fear.
Her eyes closed. She felt her hands shoot out in front of her. Her right-hand fingers scraped his cheek. Her left pounded his chest.
She pulled back, readied another strike. The faintest part of her warned her to hold up, to stop.
She hesitated and opened her eyes.
Arty wasn’t there.
“Where you been, MacDonald?”
Slezak was the last person Mac wanted to see. Especially in that made-myself-at-home position, waiting by his door. Slezak loved to wai
t. Or show up knocking when you least expected it.
Mac hadn’t seen him as he pulled his pickup into the driveway. The little guest house behind the church was Mac’s only home now. Pastor Jon waived rent in return for duties around the grounds and general fix-it tasks for the members. No, it wasn’t much at all, but it was Mac’s place. His, but not completely. Not as long as he fell under the jurisdiction of Gordon Slezak, parole agent for the California Department of Corrections.
“I need to get inside,” Mac said. His headache pounded like a drill bit in granite.
Slezak said, “Let’s get this over with quick, and I can be on my way.”
“Just let me get something, okay?”
“Drugs again?” Slezak said. “Turn around.”
“My head — ”
“Turn around or I’ll tag you for resisting, huh?”
Mac turned and put his hands on top of his head. Maybe if he squeezed his own skull he could keep the pain from overtaking him.
Slezak frisked him. Hard and slow, taking his sweet time.
“Empty your pockets,” Slezak said.
“Please.”
“Now. The more you talk, the less I like it.”
Mac pulled a flat leather wallet from his left front pocket, then untucked the pocket completely. He had a plastic comb in his back left, and two quarters, a dime, and a penny in his right front. He already had his keys in his hands.
“Just hand ’em over,” Slezak said.
Mac, with knots tightening behind his eyes, tossed the stuff on the chipped flagstone slab in front of the door. And knew he’d made a big mistake.
“Oh, now that is going on the report,” Slezak said. “Yes, indeedy. Attitudinal adjustment is slow in coming, huh?”
“My head . . .”
“Sure. On the ground.”
This was worse than prison. There, they didn’t care enough about you to single you out, as long as you knew the rules. You could play by the book and they’d leave you alone.
On parole, it was your PO that decided the form and texture of your life. Daniel Patrick MacDonald had drawn the short straw and gotten Gordon Slezak, a middle-aged man who seemed to be in a prison of his own, venting on other people as his only escape.
Just be still, Mac told himself. Lie facedown in the dirt as Mr. Gordon Slezak goes through your wallet. Pray that you don’t do anything stupid.
He prayed.
“You got a job yet?” Slezak asked.
Mac turned his face to the side. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t tell me. That’s great news, huh? Whereabouts?”
“Odd jobs.”
“Be more specific.”
“For the church.”
“Oh yeah, the church. You’re sticking that one out pretty good, huh? Got ’em snowed, do you?”
Mac said nothing.
“What’re they gonna say when you up and walk out, huh? Which you’ll do. Then you can go pull a con somewhere else, where I’m not there to call you on it. But they’ll know. They’ll contact me.”
Pause.
“You’re clean here,” Slezak said. “Your wallet’s got moths.” He laughed. “Up and at ’em. Let’s take a look inside, huh?”
He had to let Slezak inside. In California they made you waive your Fourth Amendment rights when you got out of the joint. For all the time you were on parole, your PO could search you or your house or your vehicle without probable cause. All they had to do was show up.
Gordon Slezak loved to show up.
Mac sat down heavily in the old, cracked leather chair that had come with the place and waited. This shouldn’t take long. His place wasn’t much. One bedroom, one bath. A bed and this chair that had once belonged to Pastor Jon. Only a little more than they gave you at Soledad. But it was his.
Mac rubbed the sides of his head, keeping the flames down.
Slezak took his time, opening drawers, looking under cushions, keeping up a line of patter.
“Yep, you got that old reverend snookered,” Slezak said. “You know what snookered means? My granddaddy liked that word.”
Mac said nothing.
Slezak paused at the scuffed desk that served Mac as both dining room table and storage for odd papers. The PO opened the top drawer and rummaged.
“Yeah, the old man worked vice in Kansas City, did you know that? I ever tell you that?” Slezak opened a second drawer, put his hands in it. “The confidence men he brought in, the stories he’d tell. Taught me one thing. You can’t trust anybody. You just can’t. His own chief of police he brought down.”
This guy is talking to himself, Mac thought. Or he might as well have been. All Mac wanted was for him to finish his show — because that’s what this always was with Slezak, a show — and get out. Get out so he could throw down some painkillers.
Slezak had stopped talking. He was holding something in his hand, looking at it. “So this must be what’s her name,” Slezak said. “Aurora?”
Mac stiffened. It was the photo of his daughter taken five years ago, when she was two.
“That her name?” Slezak said.
You know her name. He’d play along. “Yes,” Mac said.
“Pretty name,” Slezak said. “Real pretty. Pretty little girl, too. When’s the last time you saw her?”
You know that, too. “A few years,” Mac said.
“She and the mother, now what was the mother’s name again?”
“It’s in your records,” Mac said.
“Where’d they move to?”
Mac said nothing.
“She’ll be just fine, the little girl,” Slezak said. “Your wife remarries maybe, the girl gets a new dad. It’s all for the best. Things have a way of working themselves out.” He stopped talking then and lingered over the picture.
Mac clenched his teeth — a move that didn’t help his head — and tried to think of something other than Gordon Slezak. What Mac got was a memory of Aurora being born, back before he went to the slam. It was a hazy memory, in part because he’d been high, in part because he kept trying to remake the memory so he wasn’t high. So he could pretend he wasn’t a jerk who lost everything before he even knew what he had.
He told himself once again to keep cool. He prayed to keep cool. Because if he ever had any hopes of seeing his daughter again, of getting a court to let him, he couldn’t violate his parole and get sent back to jail.
Which seemed to be Gordon Slezak’s one goal in life.
Why?
“Now the girl you impregnated,” Slezak said. “What was her name again?”
Mac said nothing.
“Never married her. Am I right about that?”
Mac stared. Slezak knew he had married Athena. Yes, he had gotten her pregnant, but he also did what they used to do, what he thought was the honorable thing. He had married Athena and tried to make a go of it. Really tried.
And blew it.
“That’s the thing about responsibility,” Slezak said. “Most of you guys never learn that. You think you can go on through life day by day, no plans, no work. You know what that’s called? Recipe. Recipe for disaster. Another phrase my granddaddy liked.”
Slezak finally put the photo back in the drawer.
“Don’t want to see you follow that recipe, Danny Boy. But if you do, I’ll be right there to flush you down the toilet. You know that, right?”
Mac looked into Slezak’s dull, gray eyes.
“Answer me,” Slezak said.
Oh dear God, help me. Mac could feel it coming on again, one of the rages. Mac felt like the grip of rage was an enemy combatant. Pastor Jon told him the enemy was Satan.
Mac was beginning to think Satan was really one Gordon Slezak.
“I said, ‘Answer me,’ ” Slezak said.
Mac fell to his knees, grabbing his head as he went down.
Red blood on buff-colored rocks. As if a child had spilled paint on a light brown surface.
That was the first thing Liz thought of. She wanted it to
be paint, not blood that came from Arty’s head.
Arty’s body was facedown, legs splayed, twenty feet below the blood stain. A larger, darker blotch spread outward from his motionless head.
Maybe he could be saved. She could call 911 and . . . wait . . . there was no phone. She’d broken it. And by the time she got back to the house and made the call he’d be gone.
She could go down there and see if he was breathing, maybe put something around the wound to stanch the blood.
Or . . .
She looked around and listened. No one.
Time to think fast. Time to take control. Fully now. No one to tell her what to do or how to do it or when.
Keep moving.
“Get up.”
Slezak’s voice, from a distance.
No, from above. Mac looked up. He felt like his head had been worked over by a nail gun. He must have fallen from the pain.
“I got to take something,” Mac said. Tears were streaming down his face, and he was sweating.
“Get off the floor,” Slezak said.
Mac could only see immediately in front of him, as if staring through a small hole in a fence.
Enough to get to the bathroom.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Slezak said, his voice behind Mac now.
Mac ignored him. Shoot me in the back if you want to. It’ ll be a relief.
He got to the mirrored medicine cabinet, opened it, found the Vicodin. It was in his hand.
Then snatched away.
“What’s this now?” Slezak said.
“I got a prescription,” Mac said.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Slezak stepped out of the bathroom.
“You can’t take those,” Mac said.
“I wasn’t told about this,” Slezak said. “No, no, no. You can’t be taking narcotics now, huh? I’ll have to check with the doc about this. If it’s cleared, you’ll get these back. But not before then. May take a few weeks.”
The bits of metal in Mac’s head felt like they were shifting around. He grabbed his head and squeezed, then dropped to his knees on the bathroom floor. Tears from the pain continued to spill out. The desire to kill Slezak swelled so strong he could hardly fight it. He clenched his teeth to will it away but lost any capacity for will.
The front door slammed. Mac staggered to his feet and got to the window. Peeked out and saw Slezak driving away.
Back in the bathroom, he found aspirin, poured five into his hand and threw them into his mouth. He took water straight from the faucet, put his head back, and swallowed.
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