Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  THREE

  Hannah Keller had just passed the hundred-page mark in Fifth Story. Book number five, the most recent outing for Erin Barkley. Thirty-one years old, Erin worked as a PIO for Miami PD. But that’s where the similarity between Erin and Hannah ended.

  For one thing Erin had a rich and varied sex life. A new man every book. Sometimes two or three in the same book, as footloose and lecherous as any guy. While Hannah, on the other hand, had nearly given up on men. In the last year there’d been a cop, a lawyer, an accountant, and two realtors. All washouts. Lately, she’d begun to wonder if maybe she needed an aura-adjustment. Sending out the wrong signals, Angry Broad Alert. Don’t Even Think About Flirting With Me, Asshole. Even after all these years she was still man-shy from her quick and disastrous marriage to Pieter Thomasson. Randall’s father had turned out to be a philanderer of the lowest kind, and that betrayal left her scarred, brooding, overcautious. And now the bastard had reappeared, as if he were determined to destroy what marginal serenity she’d managed to achieve.

  After six years as a single mother, six years living mostly inside her head, whatever adult social skills Hannah Keller once had were long gone. Ten hours a day she wrote the books, then spent what little free time she had with Randall. Most weekends she took one day off, coaxing her son out to a movie or the mall. Occasionally she managed to get him to go along on a bicycle ride into the Grove or out the long asphalt strip into Shark Valley, the edge of the Everglades. But it was such a chore to pry the boy away from his computer and out of the house that she’d all but given up trying to reignite Randall’s youthful enthusiasm for the outdoors.

  If it weren’t for Erin Barkley, Hannah would’ve completely lost touch with adult pleasures. Erin was a childless single woman. She drove her car fast and stayed out till dawn, dancing, bar hopping, jumping in and out of bed with virtual strangers. She had a smart-ass mouth and a renegade view of justice and was a gifted marksman. Erin wasn’t the least bit reluctant to pull the trigger when she needed to, and was willing to overstep the boundaries of the law if that’s what it took to nail the thugs and psychos who managed to elude traditional law enforcement.

  It was fantasy stuff, of course, Hannah indulging her vigilante yearnings, working off years of frustration from the job, and all that stored-up anger over her parents’ unsolved murders. Using the novels to get some small measure of emotional vengeance.

  In Fifth Story Erin Barkley was on the trail of the person who had twice attempted to kill twelve-year-old Jamie Newsome, a child model. A week after Jamie narrowly missed being struck by a speeding car, two high-powered rifle shots struck the wall of the fifth-floor balcony of her parents’ Grove Isle apartment only inches from where Jamie sat doing her homework.

  Of course, Hannah knew that Jamie was a stand-in for Randall. A kid in harm’s way who teetered uneasily between childhood and maturity. All Hannah’s anxiety about Randall’s safety and his fragile mental health was submerged in this fictional character. What Erin Barkley was trying to accomplish was something Hannah could only dream of doing, pry aside the defiantly bland adolescent mask to see what shadowy and desperate emotions might be percolating beneath it.

  So far, in those first hundred pages, Erin Barkley’s investigation had led her to a small-time hood named Owen Band who ran a seedy strip joint on Miami Beach, a half block from the headquarters of the modeling agency that represented Jamie Newsome.

  Hannah had no idea what Band had to do with the attempts on this young girl’s life. In fact, she usually had no clear notion of what was coming next in any of her books. She didn’t use outlines. She’d decided that she’d rather make a dozen wrong turns along the way than plan everything out so carefully that each day’s writing was ruled by the predrawn map. She was a reader first and a writer second. Why in the world would she bother writing the book if she already knew how it was going to turn out?

  Today, just before Hannah broke for lunch, Erin Barkley was questioning Owen Band in the office of his strip club when suddenly Owen lurched to one side and blood spouted from the side of his head. It was an amazing and totally unexpected moment. Hannah didn’t know who shot him or why. Perhaps the shot was actually intended for Erin, or was meant to implicate her. Or maybe, given the nature of Miami, it was simply stray gunfire from some botched holdup going on nearby.

  As Owen Band spilled his lifeblood onto the desk before him, Hannah got up, went to the kitchen, made a turkey sandwich, and took it out to the front porch table to eat.

  The house she’d bought after her parents were killed was more than eighty years old, ancient by Miami standards, with a glinting tin roof and a screened-in porch that ran the full length of the front. Edging the property was a tall, solid wood fence overgrown with purple and orange bougainvillea, totally blocking from view the surrounding neighborhood. The old house had oak floors, a coral fireplace, a dozen ceiling fans, and its several French doors opened out onto a wide yard of neatly laid out avocado and mango trees, remnants of the grove that early in the century had spread all over that part of Dade County. Some mornings when Hannah sat out on the porch in one of the wicker rockers sipping her coffee, she could hear the faint echoes of those tenacious New England pioneers who had cleared and tamed that harsh subtropical tangle. And whenever she returned home after any sort of journey, just the sight of that shady two acres and the solid old farmhouse soothed the clatter in her pulse.

  That afternoon the sky was clear and the last of the orange jasmine was still in bloom, cloying the air around the porch. As she finished her sandwich, she drew in a deep perfumed breath, feeling a ripple of energy and quiet pleasure. There were wild parrots squawking in the avocado trees and a blue jay scolding them in reply. She watched the birds fuss at each other for a minute, maybe something she could use, a little moment of atmosphere in her story.

  She had about an hour and a half before Randall got home from school. If she was lucky that was long enough for Erin to check Owen Band’s pulse, then run out into the alley behind the strip club and stumble on the next complication.

  Misty was parked among the mothers. Their vans and sport utility vehicles lined the street outside Pinecrest Middle School. The mothers visited with each other or talked on their cell phones while they waited for the afternoon bell to ring.

  Misty was in her powder blue Corolla with the peeling Naugahyde top. She was parked beneath a gumbo limb tree a half block east of the school. Nobody paid any attention to her. If they did, they’d probably think she was a maid, a housekeeper, someone like that, waiting to pick up young Travis or Michelle or whatever the hell cute names they were using this year.

  One of her derringers lay on her lap. Small, but heavy. Its mechanisms were reliable and made firm, satisfying clicks. The derringer was loaded with two .38 slugs. It was Misty’s belief that if you couldn’t bring down your target with two shots, you shouldn’t own a gun at all.

  Out her windshield she watched the mothers. They were dressed in summery outfits, creamy beiges or pastels, or else bright-colored workout clothes. These women had nothing but leisure time. They had expensive hair and subtle makeup and they moved with slinky assurance. They were married to lawyers or accountants or bankers or stockbrokers. Misty knew their husbands, because it was guys like them who frequented the downtown Hooters where she worked, and drank draft beer and stared at Misty’s breasts, always angling their heads to get a shot down her top, glimpse her nipples.

  Misty didn’t look like any of the mothers. First, she was very pale. Deathly white is how some people described her. She didn’t mind that. It was kind of a compliment really. Set her apart. Her white skin was smooth, tight, but it simply wouldn’t hold a tan. Her eyes were dark green, the shade of ripe avocados. Her hair was metallic red with a brassy orange undertone. It was her natural color, but it didn’t look as natural as some of the bottle blonds waiting for their kids.

  Compared to the mothers, Misty had a gawky body. Wide bony shoulders, long thin arms, pigeon-
toed stance, hefty tits, and a little slump in her shoulders she couldn’t seem to get rid of. She practiced sometimes in the bathroom mirror in her apartment, standing up on a chair so she could see herself. Pulling her shoulders back, lifting her head up, angling her hips this way or that, but everything she did looked phony, only made her seem more awkward.

  After they brought their kids to school each morning, these yummy mummies spent the morning at their health clubs burning off their few remaining fat cells in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Jazz dancing or doing karate moves, keeping themselves lean and taut. Then they went home, ate a stick of celery for lunch, had a sip of ten-dollar water, and came early to pick up their kids after school, and put on this fashion show for all the other mothers.

  After school some of their kids played soccer. Some went to karate class or tennis practice or golf lessons. These pampered kids, their perfect lives.

  Misty had been destined to be one of them. That was her birthright. To be married to a fast-track lawyer or a surgeon. Living in this part of town, or the Gables, or along the bay, a big boat bobbing out back. Waiting every afternoon at two-thirty for her cute blond kid to come rushing out of school and jump into her arms.

  But that’s not how it worked out. Not how it worked out at all.

  When the school bell finally rang, the mothers began saying good-bye to their friends. Some kept on talking on their cell phones as they craned around searching for their child in the throng of kids who poured out the doors. There was a lady cop directing traffic. All the lights were blinking yellow. It was a clear, pretty day, no clouds. Monday, early October, low eighties, low humidity. There was a white dog waiting outside the fence, a Labrador. It was fat and had a sway back and it stared in through the fence wagging its tail, looking for its master in that mass of kids.

  It took a minute but finally Misty spotted Randall Keller. He was wearing a black T-shirt and baggy blue jean shorts that hung below his knees. He had on red running shoes and a green backpack loaded with books. He was carrying his bright pink bicycle helmet. No other kids were talking to him. He wasn’t looking around for anyone. He didn’t seem depressed or happy or anything. He just walked over to the bicycle rack and rolled his bicycle out and got on it and started pedaling across the playground toward the gate.

  Misty started her car.

  She waited for a break in the parade of four-wheel-drive monsters, then cut out into the street. Going slow for the school zone. Staying back of Randall. Watching the blond hair sticking out from under his helmet. Watching him pump the pedals, not too fast, the pack heavy on his back.

  He rolled through a four-way stop and kept going straight. Misty waited her turn, then eased through the intersection and cruised up slowly behind him. He was on the sidewalk, taking it slow. Looking straight ahead, his face was red from the exertion, sweaty. She drove with her left hand and held the derringer in her right. Her passenger window was open. She wasn’t going more than ten miles an hour. Her speedometer was broken, but she knew it couldn’t be any faster than that.

  There was a big blue sports utility vehicle right on her ass. Tailgating mom with a car full of kids. Misty was out of the school zone now. Speed limit back up to thirty, but she held it at ten or so, creeping along beside Randall. Holding the derringer in her right hand. Thumbing back one of the hammers.

  Raise the pistol, aim, then fire. That’s all it took. A few seconds and it would be over, and the boy would be wounded or maybe dead, lying in the front yard of some stranger’s house. People screaming, running to where he’d tumbled off his bike. Blood spilling out of his fragile body. His perfect childhood over. Then the poor kid’s mother would spend the rest of her life grieving. Just like Misty was spending hers.

  That’s all it would take. Some kook. Some lunatic killer coming along and doing it like that. What was his mother thinking? Hannah Keller, sitting in her house ten blocks away, waiting for her boy to come home. Why didn’t she get in her car and go down with all the other mothers and wait for him? She was home. She didn’t have a real job. A fucking writer was all she was, sat in a room, made things up. Leaving her son to bike home on his own, vulnerable to any sort of disaster, to any kind of fucking maniac killer who might want to hurt him.

  The big blue four-wheel-drive beast behind her tooted its horn.

  Misty lowered the derringer. Eased the hammer back. She set the pistol on the seat beside her. Rubber foam was poking through the seat cover. She accelerated, headed up 124th Street, took the first right she came to, circled the block and came out onto 124th again, and there he was, Randall Keller, waiting for the light at Ludlam Road.

  Misty pulled alongside him. She could call out, say hi. But she knew what he would do. He would look over at her, then duck his eyes, and point them back down the street where he was headed. He’d do that because that’s what he and all the other little perfect kids his age were trained to do. Not speak to strangers. Like that would save them. Like that would make any difference.

  And the really ironic thing was that Misty wasn’t a stranger. She and Randall were old pals, intimate friends. Except that Randall didn’t know what Misty looked like. Wouldn’t recognize her sitting in her powder blue Corolla. And now wasn’t the time to pull the curtain aside and step out into view. She wasn’t ready for that just yet.

  So she didn’t say anything, but waited till the light turned green, then went on straight and turned down the street where she knew Randall was going to turn, and she went on past Hannah Keller’s cute little wood house in the middle of a mango and avocado grove with the high white fence and the red and purple bougainvillea, and Misty went to the end of the block, looking for some place to pull off, somewhere in the shade, out of the way.

  In the front yard of a big brown house at the end of Hannah Keller’s street there were a dozen cars parked helter-skelter. A tea party going on inside. Or maybe a bridge club. Trays of tiny sandwiches without the crust. Some of the women in white gloves. Fresh from the beauty shop, smelling of gaudy perfume. Women saying catty things about women who weren’t there. Whispering behind their hands.

  Misty pulled in among the cars, Mercedeses, Cadillacs. She found a place on the shoulder of the road, in the shade of an oak tree. She shifted the Corolla around so it was facing back down Pinecrest Lane, Hannah and Randall’s street. A good view of her driveway entrance. It would only be a half-hour wait before Hannah Keller and her eleven-year-old son headed out for Randall’s weekly meeting with his shrink.

  Misty’s heart was fluttering. The air had a special tremble. Something was just about to happen. She could feel it—something big and ugly rumbling down the tracks. A freight train, with Misty, wild and crazy, at the helm.

  FOUR

  Hannah heard the back door slam.

  She saved the chapter she was working on and leaned back in her chair, waiting for Randall to put his books down and come back to her study to say hi.

  But he didn’t come.

  She waited, listened for his footsteps through the house, but she heard nothing.

  So she pushed back her chair, got up and walked through her bedroom, out to the living room, then along a narrow corridor to Randall’s room. She pushed open his door and stepped inside. Posters of Star Trek villains and all-girl pop groups covered his walls. His bed was neatly made and his closet door opened on a carefully organized array of clothes. A couple of framed math and computer studies awards hung on the wall and in the old metal birdcage that sat on the far edge of his desk, Spunky was curled up in his bed of shredded paper. A former lab rat, Spunky was black and fat, getting bulkier all the time. An insatiable appetite for pepperoni.

  Randall was eleven years old and had his father’s thick blond hair and liquid blue eyes and knobby cheekbones. Sometimes on a groggy morning, when Hannah shuffled into the kitchen to find her son at the breakfast nook reading the newspaper and drinking orange juice, her pulse stuttered hard and she had to take a deep, calming breath, for this son of hers was more
than a rough approximation of his father. Randall was turning into his physical duplicate, as if Pieter Thomasson’s Nordic genes had prevailed in all the thousand microscopic battles for supremacy. At the oddest times her ex-husband looked out at her from Randall’s eyes, grinned at her from her son’s lips, and sometimes he even haunted her sleep as the two of them, Pieter and Randall, appeared in her dreams as terrifyingly interchangeable.

  Randall was wearing baggy jeans and a black T-shirt and his Marlins baseball cap was on backwards. He was tapping his right foot fast against the oak floor, probably keeping time to the infernal beat of his cursor.

  Hannah smiled and shook her head and ducked down to give him a kiss on the cheek.

  “Hey, pardner,” she said.

  “Hey.” A listless voice.

  “You didn’t come say hi. What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your writing.”

  “You can interrupt me anytime you want, Randall. You know that. I like it when you interrupt me.”

  A blade of sunlight from the west window cut across his desk and lit up the side of his face and she could see the faint dusting of peach fuzz on his cheek. He was going to have a beard as downy and inconsequential as his dad’s.

  “How was school? You do okay on that English composition?”

  “I got a B.”

  “B’s are fine.”

  “Not as fine as A’s.”

  “And did Miss Mays like the drawing of the osprey?”

  “She put it up on the board. I guess she liked it. Unless she was trying to make fun of me.”