by Ray Garton
The man who slapped her said, “Get up.”
Never forgetting the two guns in the room, Fara ignored the fiery pain in the right side of her face and scrambled to her feet.
“They’re not test subjects,” the man said, voice soft and level. “They’re human beings. And we’re here to get ’em. I suspect my men have probably found them by now.”
“You can’t,” Fara said, timidly and with a cracked voice. Then she lost the timidity and said with urgency, “I’m serious, you cannot do that, you’ll—”
He used the other hand this time and hit her with the gun.
Fara lost consciousness before she hit the floor.
PART TWO
Hurricane Quentin
11
“Some experts are predicting that Hurricane Quentin will make landfall significantly earlier than we’ve been told,” the woman on the radio said. She still sounded professional and calm and oblivious to the wind slamming into Latrice’s Highlander.
“Earlier?” Latrice said, glancing at the radio. “How much earlier?”
The drive had taken longer than Latrice had expected because the weather had been worse than she’d expected, which made her wonder what the hell she’d been thinking, anticipating anything less than the worst possible weather with a hurricane on the way. It helped that she knew the route.
When she was nineteen, Latrice had driven that route a few times to visit a guy she was seeing at Humboldt State University. They’d met in Sacramento, where he lived before enrolling at Humboldt. His name was Geoff and he was studying oceanography so he could become the first black Jacques Cousteau, and he was the best sex Latrice had ever had. She couldn’t understand why he kept asking her to come back for more, why he was drawn to her. When she looked in the mirror, she did not see the kind of young woman she would expect to be with someone like Geoff. She’d dropped in on him unannounced once and found him in bed with a stunningly beautiful blonde, all legs and tits, creamy tan skin, bright white teeth. Latrice was crestfallen and began, for just a moment, to cry, something she hadn’t allowed herself to do since she was a very little girl. But she stopped herself, sucked it up, and turned around to leave.
“Wait, Latrice!” he shouted as he came after her. She slowed her pace a moment when she realized he sounded happy. He stepped in front of her, naked and with an erection, grinning like a happy child. “Come join us!” he said.
And Latrice’s life had not been the same since. That was when she learned that monogamy wasn’t for everybody, that some people were more suited to having multiple partners—sometimes at the same time!—and she learned that she was one of those people. Latrice had little self-confidence in life and her self-image was a work in progress, but when she was in bed with someone, she felt sexy and not only assured but assertive, even brazen. It was the only time she ever felt strong.
Every therapist she’d ever had told her that she was repeatedly trying to win her father’s love and approval, that her promiscuity was an attempt to resolve their relationship. There probably was some truth to that, Latrice conceded, but as far as she was concerned, her relationship with her father had been resolved long ago. He’d been a mean, hateful, drunken prick and she’d cut him out of her life like a tumor. Relationship resolved.
She loved her mama, a sweet and selfless woman, but she’d never managed to find it in herself to respect Mama’s decision to stay with Dad. Latrice had tried many times to talk her into getting a divorce, but Mama’s religious beliefs didn’t allow that. Because it wasn’t enough that she had a mean, violent drunk in her life; she also needed a bunch of crazy-ass religious rules to live by. The best thing that had ever happened to Latrice’s mama was the death of Latrice’s dad. But by the time he finally fell over dead in the kitchen while pouring vodka into a little Sunny D at nine-thirty in the morning, he’d already done plenty of damage to his family, especially Latrice, the youngest of their three children.
The verbal abuse had been so relentless and had started so early that she quickly grew accustomed to it as a little girl and stopped reacting or responding. But she didn’t stop absorbing. Dad never had anything good to say to or about anyone, but he seemed to store up venom for Latrice, criticizing everything she said and did, telling her she was stupid, fat, useless. He hit her a few times, but that didn’t stand out in Latrice’s memory. The things he said, however, never went away.
She reached the end of her tolerance at the dinner table one evening shortly after her seventeenth birthday. She and Mama were quietly discussing Latrice’s future when Dad made a sound like coughing. He was laughing. He’d been staring at his plate as he ate, and now he lifted his head somewhat and aimed his bleary eyes at Latrice over the top of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose.
“Here’s why you ain’t got no future,” he said.
“Clifford,” Mama said pleadingly.
He ticked them off on his fingers: “First, you’re black. Second, you’re female.”
“Clifford,” Mama said scoldingly.
“Shut the fuck up. And next, you’re fat. You got no future. Might as well open your wrists right now.” He scooped some mashed potatoes into his mouth, chewed noisily, then raised his right hand and wagged it urgently as he gulped the food. “But for Christ’s sake, go do it in the tub, or something, okay? We just cleaned the carpets.”
“What’s this we?” Mama said.
“Shut the fuck up.” He continued eating, head down, staring at his food.
Something happened inside Latrice at that moment. It made a sound inside her head: Snap! Like a great big rubber band that had been stretched too far. Next thing she knew, she was on her feet with a knife greasy from rib meat in her hand, blade jutting from her fist, and in her mind she heard her own voice shouting, What are you doing? What are you doing? Whatareyoudoing? She honestly didn’t know and her lungs filled with panic, but on the outside, she was perfectly calm and steady, without so much as a tremble as she walked around the table.
Dad raised his head at the sound of movement and his eyes grew large and suddenly alert and he sat up straighter and straighter as Latrice closed in on him, until finally, she stood beside him and towered over him.
“I’m not just fat, Daddy. I’m big. Almost half a fuckin’ foot taller than you.” It was true. Dad was a squat five feet five. “You might want to remember that, you human mistake.” He flinched. “Yeah, that’s right. You waste of space. You drunken piece of shit.” His eyes began to narrow. “You ever speak to me that way again, I’ll take your fuckin’ head off and shove it up your ass where it belongs. You understand me?” He glared at her. Latrice bent down, pressing her face toward his, and he nearly fell off his chair trying to back away from her. “Do. You. Understand?”
His eyes were wide again as he nodded.
Latrice walked out of the house and never went back inside for the rest of her father’s life. She had her girlfriends Lizzy and Kate pack up her things and bring them to her. Kate still lived with her parents, but Lizzy was a couple of years older and had an apartment. She offered to put Latrice up until she found a job and got on her feet, but after five months of enjoying the hell out of each other, they found a bigger apartment together.
But that was a long time ago, when there was a lot less worry and responsibility in her life. Now she had Tamara and Robert, who made her life better than she’d ever thought possible. But along with them came all the responsibility that caused so much worry. She rarely heard other parents talk about that—the weight of being solely responsible for whole human beings, keeping them safe from the stormy sea of dangerous possibilities that awaited them every day beyond the front door. She supposed they didn’t talk about it because, if they were anything like her, they didn’t like thinking about it for very long at a time. If she thought about the weight of that responsibility for very long, she started feeling it. It was a lot less stressful to focus on one thing at a time.
That weight was heavy enough when everythi
ng was going well, and everything had been going well for them lately—they were broke as hell, but they had the things they needed and they were healthy and still together. Latrice knew plenty of people who were unable to have everything they needed and weren’t healthy. A couple of them recently had become homeless and no longer had much of anything beyond the goodwill of their relatives. Everything had been going well for them. Until four months ago.
Robert complained of numbness in his left leg. As it worsened, it became accompanied by weakness and tremors. To Robert, it was an annoyance, but it terrified Latrice. She didn’t let him know how much it worried her, though. She made an appointment with their family doctor.
Latrice couldn’t afford insurance and she made too much money to qualify for Medi-Cal on her own. Because she was a single parent, her children automatically qualified regardless of her income, but she chose not to apply for it. She was still trying to build a life for herself and her kids after divorce and she didn’t want to do that by relying on any kind of assistance unless she absolutely needed it.
She had managed to make sure they all had annual physicals and dental check-ups, including her mother, by going to a community health clinic that charged on a sliding scale according to income. As long as they were healthy, that was enough.
The doctor told her that tests would be needed to determine the cause of Robert’s symptoms. It could be a number of things, including multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, a spinal problem—he did not want to speculate until the tests were done and he knew more.
Latrice knew she could not pay for the tests and applied for Medi-Cal immediately. But the process took time. Robert began to have the same symptoms in his left arm, numbness, weakness—“Like I slept on it all night and now it’s just starting to wake up again,” Robert said.
To apply for Medi-Cal, Latrice had to provide a pile of paperwork within twenty days, but her work schedule made it impossible for her to deliver it in person. She mailed a package of bank statements, pay stubs, copies of her and her children’s social security cards, and other forms of ID. All of it would be imaged into the system, and then destroyed. Ten days later, she received a notice from the Department of Health and Human Services that they did not have the material they needed. She called them on her lunch break and explained that she had sent it in. Two days later, she learned that her material had been imaged into the system and destroyed, and then it had disappeared. She would have to resend all of it, which would take more time. Meanwhile, Robert was rapidly getting worse. Then Leland Salt had offered her an opportunity to make five thousand dollars very fast.
Latrice had been doing a lot of temp work lately because full-time jobs had gone the way of four-leaf clovers and virgin brides. The last one she’d had, senior grievance coordinator at an insurance company, had been eliminated in a fit of downsizing. For the last few weeks, she’d been working at Instant Liberty Bail Bonds. She’d been employed there for a week last year and they had been pleased enough with her work to specifically request her this time. A flu virus had ripped through the office, sending half the employees to bed, and Latrice had been doing the work of two, sometimes three people. The boss, a round little bald man named Ed Cooper, had told her twice how impressed he was with her work and had hinted at permanent employment, so Latrice worked even harder.
She’d met Leland the first time she’d worked there. He’d come in twice in one week, but Latrice suspected the second time was to ask her out, which she’d declined. He was still a regular client at Instant Liberty, and he was still trying to get her to go out with him. She’d had lunch with him a couple of times at a Subway across the street, but that wasn’t a date because she was still working, just on her lunch break.
Leland was on the high side of fifty, thin, with silver hair neatly combed, parted on the side, thin mustache carefully trimmed. He claimed to have some Native American blood, and it showed in his cheekbones and nose. He always wore a sport coat, slacks, and shiny shoes. But in spite of how presentable he was, he still managed to look like trouble, like he might be up to something.
He’d told her he was a thief by trade but had gotten too old for that kind of work, so now he mostly did odd jobs. Bailing friends out of jail was one of them. Leland managed to manipulate every topic of conversation with Latrice, no matter how obscure, back to his favorite, which was his intention of getting her into bed, always playful and sweet about it, but always blunt, too. And Latrice always declined. She thought Leland was a sweet guy, but she didn’t find him attractive, and even if she did, she wouldn’t get involved with a former thief who was always bailing his friends out of jail. But she couldn’t deny that she enjoyed Leland’s attention. She enjoyed his company, too. She’d told him how afraid she was for Robert, that she feared his problem was something serious. He was a good listener and could make her laugh when she didn’t feel capable of laughter.
Yesterday morning, he’d come into the office looking rushed and harried. He told her to meet him for lunch at Subway, then left. He was late for the lunch, and when he showed up, he looked weary and distracted.
“I’m gonna have to cut out of here,” he said.
“You just got here. Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I mean Sacramento. California. Hell, the country.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
He shrugged. “There’s always something wrong, I guess. But this is because I took advantage of an opportunity that’ll get me killed if I stick around.”
“What have you done?”
“One last score, that kinda thing. Unplanned, spur of the moment. I saw an opportunity and jumped on it. Anyhow, I’ve gotta get out of here today, but I’ve got a job I committed to doing tomorrow. I won’t be able to do it if I leave. I thought you might be interested. It’ll make you an easy five grand.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. All you gotta do is deliver a package to Eureka.”
“A package? What kind of package?”
“You know, a cardboard box. That kind.”
“I mean, what’s in it?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. You don’t need to know. Look, it ain’t gonna blow up or hurt you in any way, that’s all you gotta know. Just take it to the address I’ll give you, give it to the guy, and he’ll pay you.”
“What’s he going to do when I show up instead of you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure he knows you’re coming. I called him a little while ago, but he didn’t answer. By the time you get there, he’ll be expecting you, not me.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“That’s it, nothing else.”
“And he’ll give me five thousand dollars?”
“In cash. You can get those tests going on Robert while you’re waiting for the Medi-Cal people to pull their heads out of their asses.”
She nodded. “I’m in.”
After work, she’d met Leland in the parking lot of a nearby Denny’s and he gave her the package.
“Who’d you steal from, Leland?” she said as they stood between their cars.
“Somebody who will end my story soon as he figures out I’m the one did it. But that might take a few days. I’ll be long gone. Don’t you worry about me, Latrice, honey. I’m just sorry we never got horizontally acquainted.”
Now she was driving slowly down a road flanked by tall redwoods, clutching the steering wheel in tight fists as she steered against the force of the wind. Her windshield wipers were slashing at the rain at top speed and still couldn’t keep up with it. Streetlights were rare on this road, but she saw one coming up and considered pulling over near it and then hoping the rain would lighten up a bit.
She sighed, shaking her head. “Hurricane’s on the way. The rain’s not gonna lighten up, you dummy. Jesus.”
The streetlight was in front of a small clapboard building on the right with a sign that read CUPPA JOE’S DINER, which appeared as a brief flash of civilization in the utter blackness a
ll around her. Her headlights didn’t reach very far in the storm and she saw nothing else ahead but more road, more darkness.
A few minutes later, the voice of her navigation system told her to take the next right. She had to slow way down to find the next right because there was no light or road sign. That turn put her on a narrow dirt road that went through the dark woods. There were lights ahead, but she couldn’t tell what they were until she got closer. The road had ruts and potholes, so she drove slowly. She came to several trailers on both sides of the road, tucked away as if hiding. For all she knew, that was what they were doing.
At the end of the road was a two-story redwood house that blended nicely with the rich greens and rusts and browns around it. The porch light was bright, but the windows were boarded up for the storm. There were a couple of SUVs and a pickup truck parked in front of the house and a few other cars parked by the trailers. Latrice parked her Highlander and killed the engine. She got out, leaned in and grabbed the package and her umbrella, then stepped back and closed the door, revealing the barrel of a shotgun which a hooded man was aiming at her face.
“Who are you,” he said, “and what do you want?”
12
Andy paced the length of his living room, waiting for Ram. Trees creaked as they were blown by the wind outside and rain was a dull roar. Every now and then, Dickens released a shrill series of barks from the bedroom.
He’d boarded up the windows and cleared the front and backyards of anything that could cause damage while being blown around. His miniature schnauzer, Dickens, hated loud noises, and when there was a storm, he hid under Andy’s bed, where he spent much of his time barking at the sounds of the weather.
Now Andy waited, pacing, feeling strangely numb. Nothing about the situation felt real. It had the texture and scent of a dream, the feeling of something that was happening inside his head. He could not believe what he was about to do, and that he was doing it with Ram made it even weirder. More than weird—hallucinatory.