Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  Rhea would know that. The coppers had no idea. They’d be placing roadblocks south and north on Interstate 10 and combing the desert for her or her body while she’d be making the run to Yuma. I’d played right into her plan by provoking Bracknall. If I hadn’t, she’d have done him herself, then me, to leave no witnesses to the fact she’d gone west on the long rails. Or had she meant to do in Bracknall and take me along? She’d invited me before, after all.

  I pounded down a slope, swung in toward the tracks. I paused to listen, but I heard nothing but the clicking of the faraway train and the wind rustling in the brush. Desert growths threw spiny shadows. The smell of dust was in the air. I had lost her, or she had gone to ground.

  Then there she was, hovering in the lee of a paloverde. The moonlight lit her up, and she seemed calm. That was odd, for I’d never seen her calm. A polished surface, yes, but underneath she was always nervy. Not now. Now she was waiting without frenzy. And she’d exposed herself, which meant she’d stopped running. From me, at least. I noted the angle of the Beretta. She’d braced her right elbow against her hip so the gun projected--not for show. Rhea did nothing for show, though her weapon was right for it. The Beretta is a beautiful pistol with lines that loop and swirl, contoured sights, a satiny finish.

  “So you beat Bracknall, Michael. And now you’ve come for me.”

  “Always,” I said, giving the word a twist.

  “Always,” she said. “Why?” Her voice was unsteady. “Why are you always there when I don’t want you there?”

  To save you, to be with you, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. My insanity was plain, even to me. I felt the Colt in my hand.

  She made a hitching movement, stumbled and caught herself by placing her left hand on a boulder.

  “What do you want?” she asked huskily.

  “It’s just the chase,” I said.

  I had wanted a lot, to no point. In the end, it had come down to this. Two guns. A conversation. Two people. The harsh sound of breathing.

  “I never thought the chase meant much to you,” she said. “Otherwise, you would have run after me harder. Others did.”

  I knew what she was doing. She was justifying herself, preparing. Things were slipping away from her and she’d determined to kill me. She must kill me, to show she was not gone yet, that she still had some power, even with Robles out there in the darkness with his Savage Model 10 and his metal-jacketed bullets. Even with her sham exposed, and the skirmish line of deputies bumping and scuffling across the desert, slipping through the cactuses and the creosote and the yucca, closing in as the moon cut an empty yellow hole in the western sky. My heart was in my throat. How ridiculous that sounds. The ultimate moment reduced to a bromide. Still, the bad writer had gotten it right after all. I could feel my chest swell, my heart expanding, pushing up to choke me. And that feeling strangled whatever sense of style I had.

  “I was running as hard as I could,” I told her.

  And that was the truth.

  I wanted to explain, to make it clear I wanted her, not another headline, not another violent chapter in La Nota Roja. Perhaps she knew. An Irishman hopes that. We are good with all the words except those that matter. But I couldn’t read her and she didn’t reply. Her outline shook, her body out of control. And now I saw her difficulty. She shifted and made a keening sound, a lament for her own lost flesh. Her blood was liquid black in the moonlight, painting a wide course down from her left hip and through the khaki fabric of those odd African breeches she favored, that flared at the hip and tightened at the ankle and recalled a thousand white-hunter movies and lost-treasure movies and images of beaters in a line coursing across the veldt with huge-headed spears, bent on finding a lioness and surrounding her and stabbing her to death.

  Robles’ rifle bullet had found Rhea simply by chance, sailing on through Bracknall’s body and singing off something hard and seeking her out where she had hidden. I wondered that she could still stand, having taken that blow. A .300 Winchester Magnum bullet, coursing down that 24-inch tube and propelled out by 180 grains of gunpowder, reaching out even over a four hundred yards, does horrific damage. Bone and marrow explode and fly outward in a cloud of splinters, flesh sinks and expands and stretches until it can stretch no more, and some of it simply disappears as the projectile flies on, spinning out life-blood in a wet cartwheel. That’s what had happened to Rhea’s left hip, and she seemed to pale by the moment as she half-stood, gripping a rock, and determined to have a few last minutes with me as the planet revolved in inky space.

  “You are in a bad way,” I said. “Let me help you.”

  I didn’t move toward her, though. Instead, I eyed the distance between us, and kept the Colt low and well within my silhouette.

  “A doctor is the only chance for you,” I said. “We must move quickly, and even then it will be cutting it fine.”

  She gave a weeping laugh.

  “Cutting it fine,” she said. “Something the English say. Now you’re all stiff and regular and orderly. You spent too much time in England. Where are those Irish ballads now? All that undying love, and sacrifice, and life given up for a cause?”

  I imagined that the muzzle of the Beretta had moved, that she was seeking out my heart. Perhaps, though, it was only her unsteadiness. I chose not to decide.

  “Always looking out for me, aren’t you, Michael?” She kept using my name, turning it a bit each time. “You could have left me alone. You would taken care of me and saved Daly a lot of grief. Instead, you did your job, and you don’t even care about your job.”

  “Sometimes there’s only the job,” I said, hoping she’d deny it.

  Her breath labored. I tried to listen beyond her, to get a sense of whether the searchers were moving closer, whether they would take this decision from me. No chance. A light wind carried a clinking of rifle-slings, a scraping of boot soles on gravel and, now and then, a sharp curse, but the sounds were blurred and indistinct.

  “You had no reason to keep after me,” she said. “I gave you the perfect excuse to go away. When I was dead, you could have gone away.”

  I should have been thinking about jumping backward or dropping into a shadow, hoping to destroy her aim. But the moment held me.

  “I knew there was something beyond your death,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have followed up if it wasn’t for Daly. She believed in you, and that brought you back to life. Even though you meant to take her life.”

  She sighed with odd, genuine sadness.

  “It would have given me a chance,” she said. “I needed a chance.”

  Perhaps she was right. I grew tired trying to sort it out, trying to see Rhea as a monster rather than as someone who simply arranged things, who saw further than most. It was too great a puzzle, one that would not yield to facts and documents and attribution. I felt myself yielding to the mystery. That was my great danger, that I might simply give up and let my scrap of survival instinct float away. Rhea threw her head back, and the ripple of pain across her face melted the guile that had hardened her features. Her dark hair leapt, and her lips were full as salvation. Through the agony, her brow rose clean above her shadowed eyes. I felt my blood heat and quicken. How beautiful she was, and how much we forgive a woman for being beautiful.

  “You’ll die, too,” she said. “Don’t you want it to mean something?”

  She meant I should let her escape. A thrill rippled through me, for she truly believed she could escape. There was grandeur in that attitude, a belief that scorned her destroyed flesh, the circling hunters, the rough ground and the distance. There was no hope, yet she had hope. I could hear the train coming, the rattling wheels on the double band of steel, and I recalled the smoke of long-ago trains, rising to the night sky.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Yes, I wanted my death to mean something. The desert night exuded aromas, green resins rising in the dry-looking pl
ants, chlorophyll pungent in the narrow-edged leaves, the musk of scuttling creatures reminding me that there were lives struggling to continue. It wasn’t such a bad place to die. For years you resist the thought you ever will die, but acceptance comes and you begin to envision a suitable location. For me, it could be here. It was quiet, the world was far away, and I was with Rhea. Was there so much more to hope for?

  Her voice was soft. “Come and give me a kiss.”

  The freight train shrilled on the final grade, urgent for its purpose. I never wanted anything in life so much as I wanted that kiss. I don’t suppose you can understand if you haven’t endured mornings of waking in a cold bed, drinking your coffee alone, spending the last few hours of sunlight in living quarters that echo with emptiness, wondering what’s the point? Thinking, all the time thinking, alone with your thoughts. There are so few moments that mean anything, that you look back on and treasure, that you roll on your tongue like a child savoring sweetness. I wanted my lips on her mouth, to inhale her breath, to have her perfume all through me, and her warmth all over me, and to feel, for just a moment, immortal and right and certain.

  And at that point, I shot her.

  * * * *

  Later a story made the rounds that I had done it out of sympathy. I had simply meant to put her out of her misery, Robles’ bullet had crippled her, she would have been a husk of what she had been, and I took pity on her. Or perhaps, so the story went, I did it to save her from the endless trial, the public humiliation, the blood-chilling scene with the gurney and the poison-filled needle and the room beyond the thick plastic window, the smell of industrial cleaner in the closed space, the deadly look of the old brick, and the ranks of grim faces watching her and nodding with satisfaction as she slept her way to death.

  None of that was true. Or at least, trying to look back and read my own heart, I don’t believe it was true. Her gunshot crashed and mine crashed at the same instant. Hers found no mark, and mine did. She died very close to where she is buried now. And the truth is, I shot her simply to save myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  There was a fire that night in the high country up near the Mogollon Rim. A part-time White Mountain Apache firefighter seeking a day’s work at $8 an hour tossed a match into dry grass in a wash near Cibecue and the fire brewed up, spat and roared. On it rambled for 11 days, joining another fire started by a lost hiker, gobbling up pine forest, incinerating homes and out-buildings, leveling mountain towns.

  It was the greatest fire in Arizona history, and the story of it roared across every newspaper page and TV screen in the region. In those circumstances, small stories are cast aside like burning cinders, so a brief shoot-out in the deserts of Pinal County got little coverage. Even the capture of a drug smuggler dying from a botched kidney transplant couldn’t force that story any farther forward than page B-8 of the Local section in the Phoenix Scribe.

  It was all to the good. That’s the first thing Frye said when he was sent down from Phoenix to get the details and hide them well enough to save the newspaper from embarrassment.

  “Are they goin’ to charge you?” he bleated, as he paced around the waiting room in the headquarters of the Pinal County Sheriff. “If they charge you I don’t know what I can do. It will be a public record. Everybody has access to those public records, you know that.”

  I took time out from mopping dried blood off my face.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a hell of a thing about those public records. Now, if we were only in Stalinist Russia, or in the clutches of a banana republic, we wouldn’t have to worry about details like that. That’s the problem with this society. No control.”

  He was nodding. Unconsciously, I hoped.

  “Are they goin’ to charge you?”

  I looked at the bloody towel. “No, they’re not going to charge me. They are very informal here. In fact, they let me sit in on the interrogation of Dr. Aguilara, and he’s told the whole story. I will write it up at length as soon I’m sure I won’t need a transfusion.”

  Frye batted the air like a performer in a conga line.

  “Oh, you can’t do that,” he said. “You’re involved. We can’t have reporters getting involved, and if they do, we have to say they aren’t. You know that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do know that.”

  Then, suddenly, Frye shut his gob and turned away. He emitted a dolorous breath, put his hands on his hips and looked at the ceiling. I’d never seen him so pensive. It’s not a mood you expect from a Texan.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It really is a good story.”

  “It’s more than a story,” I said.

  His blue eyes weren’t bulging now, they were quiet. His Adam’s apple was under control, he wasn’t sweating, and he looked like a human being.

  “No it isn’t,” he said. “That’s not the way we are. It’s all the story. Sometimes we wish it wasn’t, but it is. We’re newsmen.”

  And we were indeed, him and me, though he kept trying not to be. Who would have believed it?

  “I’ll buy you a drink,” he said.

  I mopped my forehead, erasing the last bit of black, bloody dust.

  “Soda water,” I said.

  * * * *

  We held another funeral for Rhea, and buried her where everyone thought she had gone to rest before, deep in the sandy waste of Pinal County amid the white-thorn, the tarbush and the ocotillo, with the mountains rising in the distance, seeming close only because of a trick of the air. Daly and Handsome Dan made the decision. There was no one else to do it. Rhea had no relatives they knew of—not even the ones who had hurt her or left her or turned their backs on her. She had no friends except the other conspirators, and they were dead now or running or making deals, because the law was on and the money had fled. The actors had departed, the scene was struck. Only the prop people were left to care, and they did their jobs diligently. Circumstances helped. The grave was available, for the authorities had exhumed the woman who had lain in her place. That woman was buried respectably in Phoenix with a portion of Rhea’s money. The rest was ceded to the state to be used to build more schools, where presumably children would be taught a better way to live.

  For Rhea’s funeral, they used the same priest as before. Daly wept again, perhaps even more freely than before, but now she had Handsome Dan’s arm around her waist, and his shoulder to lean on. He wore his uniform well, and he was a sturdy fellow—not imaginative, but I had come to place far less stock in imagination. I did not weep for Rhea myself. It didn’t seem the right thing to do. She had been so cruel, and I had been so foolish. Instead, I let the heat seep into me, the sweat rise through my hair, the sun lance into my face. That was my penance. “We owe God a death . . . ” And we owe him a penance, to be satisfied before we offer him the death. We do not settle that debt in the Great Beyond. All of us must pay here.

  As the service broke up, Daly and Handsome Dan glanced at me, and we walked away from the grave. We paused near the highway to look back. Despite the heat, the sky was beginning to turn, and I could see that it would soon be autumn. The clouds were higher now, and drifting, and there was a lessening of the sounds of small creatures in the brush. Daly faced me. Her face had aged, but not in a bad way. Lines of wisdom crinkled her eyes, she lifted her chin, and her blue eyes were deep. The hot wind blew her green hair. Her mouth moved but she almost didn’t speak. The old Daly would not have. But this Daly wanted a real end. How many of us have that kind of courage?

  “You’re a bad man, aren’t you, Callan?”

  “It’s what I count on.”

  Her blue eyes were brighter now.

  “And you lied to me. About that man who came to see Rhea years ago, the one she thought was her father.”

  “I had to,” I said, and when I said it, something went away from me forever. “To explain what she’d lost, why her feelings were ruined.”


  Daly’s mouth blurred as she tried to keep her lips tight and failed, and the wisdom lines trembled and dissolved in grief.

  “Did you do right, doing that?”

  “I did,” I said. “I’m sorry for it, but I did.”

  * * * *

  And that was the end of it, or what you might think was the end of it. For weeks I sat up late and alone, listening to night-bird songs on my patio, ignoring the phone, playing the old ballads, watching the lights of Phoenix come and go against the dark sky. The newspaper, surprisingly, in an age of procedure and of damn-the-reporters and of sweeping under the nasty parts, accepted my malaise. The editors showed a forbearance born of uneasiness, and let me go my way.

  Eventually, I pushed away the black mood and the sleeplessness and the editors let me return and work on car crashes and lottery winners and sudden turns in the weather. On the daily stories, the ones that speed by like lightning, the ones that are over when the sun goes down. The ones you don’t have to think about. What I did think about, of course, was Rhea. About how beautiful she was, how mad she was, how mad I was, about how I had felt for her.

  In time, there would be other adventures, other battles, other women—one woman, in particular. I would take her to Ireland to exorcise the ghosts of my past, to visit the grave of the only true friend of my early days as a reporter, the editor Patrick O’Connell. There would be fine times and laughter and other stories. There are always the stories, aren’t there? But for good or ill, and I suppose it must be for the good, there would never be another one like Rhea.

  I speak as from a great distance, I know. All this occurred only a few years ago, but to me it seems long past. Arizona is a fast place, intoxicated by its speed. The newcomers surge in ignorant of its history, everyone looks to the future, memories die before their time. Perhaps that’s inevitable, and for the best, and correct. Perhaps the soul is soothed by the hurly-burly of going forward, the mind numbed by action. But that is not my way. I remember Rhea.