‘I’m driving,’ Rhees said.
‘Not for me,’ Amanda remarked.
Morgan Scholes said, ‘I’m in the company of lightweights,’ and fixed himself a second drink. Then he looked at his daughter. ‘Say. I just remembered. Some woman’s been phoning here for you, Mandy.’
‘Here? What woman?’
‘She called first time two nights ago, then last night again. I must speak to Amanda, she says. I’m in Tuba City, she says.’
‘Tuba City?’
‘That’s what she said. I tell her you’re not here, and before I can give her the number at the cabin she hangs up.’
‘She doesn’t leave her name?’
Scholes shook his head. ‘No, she doesn’t.’
‘Describe the voice,’ Amanda said.
‘It’s low, whispered. Kind of Hispanic accent. She sounds frantic and then she hangs up like she thinks somebody’s listening in, or she’s in a big hurry. Who do you know in Tuba City?’
Amanda looked down into her drink. Bubbles of tonic popped on the surface. A woman calls and hangs up again quickly. What did that mean? Her mind blanked.
She gazed at Rhees, who was watching her thoughtfully. She saw dying sunlight come in a pale-blue haze through stained-glass. ‘Why didn’t you call and tell me this, Dad?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been pretty busy what with one thing and another,’ Morgan Scholes said. ‘Who is she anyway?’
She finished her drink. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
11
‘I’m racking my brain,’ Amanda said in the car. ‘I don’t know a soul up in that part of the state.’ She lit a cigarette and inhaled smoke a little too quickly. Frantic was the word Morgan had used. I must speak to Amanda, Yours truly, Frantic, Tuba City. Hispanic accent. She didn’t want to think.
A shadow rolled through her head, the same smoke signal she’d expelled from her mind when she’d been discussing Galindez with Willie Drumm, the same little shiver of concern she’d felt in Bascombe’s office. She shut her eyes. Tuba City, the back-end of beyond. She thought of an endless arid landscape and a voice travelling through telephone wires and the way Galindez had been ferried downstream by the river.
‘Why would somebody phone you at your father’s number anyway?’ Rhees asked.
‘Maybe she tried our home number first, then when she got no response she looked up Morgan in the book. I don’t know.’
Rhees was driving towards Scottsdale from Phoenix. All that remained of the sun were a few spectacular streaks the colour of blood. Downtown Scottsdale was a sequence of traffic lights, all seemingly red. Rhees took a left turn off the main street. He drove until he reached the cul-de-sac where the house he shared with Amanda was located. He parked in the driveway and Amanda strolled ahead of him, unlocked the front door and turned on the lights.
Inside the air was stuffy. They’d been gone a little less than four weeks and yet she felt like an intruder. She went into the living-room, Rhees followed her. More lights. She looked round the room. Their possessions – books, TV, furniture – had that alien quality you sometimes experience when you come back after a vacation. The geometry of the house was all wrong, ceilings too high, windows too large.
Rhees said, ‘Weird.’
‘You feel it?’
‘Yeah, I feel it.’
‘It’s like somebody else’s house,’ Amanda said. ‘I expect if we go into the backyard we’ll find duplicates of ourselves emerging from giant pods.’
She walked to the answering machine, then remembered she’d disconnected it before they’d left for the cabin, an act of deliberate severance. Kill the machine. I don’t need and I don’t want messages.
‘You think this mystery woman will call?’ Rhees asked.
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘I need a drink. Want one?’
‘Please.’
Rhees went inside the kitchen. Amanda could hear him rummaging for ice. She sat on the sofa, glanced at the Adams prints on the walls, chilly black and white rock formations. Objects formerly charged with easy familiarity were shorn of meaning. Even the framed newspaper and magazine clippings that concerned some of her legal cases were related to a person other than herself. It was as if somebody had come here when the house was empty and stripped away the veneer of recognition.
Rhees returned with drinks. ‘We forgot to empty the refrigerator. Something disgusting is growing in there.’
‘Sit beside me.’ She patted the sofa. He sat down and touched her wrist. She sipped her drink. She was conscious of the silent black telephone located on the table at her back. She was suddenly uptight, jangled. She wanted the gin to relax her, numb her head a little.
In the distance the shrill whine of a cop car was audible. Night in the city. Deaths and accidents. Casual, drive-by shootings. She yearned for the forest.
‘We should be heading back soon,’ Rhees said.
Amanda didn’t move.
Rhees got up. ‘Maybe I’ll just defuzz the fridge to pass some time while you finish your drink and wait to see if the phone rings.’
He went back inside the kitchen. She listened to the sound of things being clattered around. Jars and bottles, glass knocked on glass impatiently. He didn’t want to be here any more than she did. She heard him say, ‘Sweet Jesus, was this sodden mass once a bag of carrots?’
Fifteen minutes dragged past before the telephone rang, and when it did Amanda reached for the receiver at once and spoke her name.
The woman said, ‘Manda, I been trying to phone for days, I can’t get you, Manda.’
For a second Amanda couldn’t speak. Electricity spiked through her. She was only dimly aware of Rhees materializing in the kitchen doorway with what looked like green compost in his rubber-gloved hand. She leaned forward on the sofa and tried to keep alarm out of her voice. ‘Where are you? Where the hell are you?’
‘It’s gone wrong, Manda, the whole goddam thing. This isn’t the way you planned it. I’m inside this nightmare where I don’t belong.’ The woman was crying and her words ran into one another in breathless little utterances.
‘Just tell me where you are,’ Amanda said.
‘God, where am I? Jesus, I don’t know.’
‘Calm down, calm down.’
‘They’re coming after me, Manda.’
‘Who?’
‘These two guys, they’re coming after me.’
Amanda’s fingers were rigid on the handset. ‘I’ll help, just tell me where you are.’
‘OK, where I am, this is,’ and her voice faded. Amanda heard the clank of a telephone being set down, then a creaking noise. ‘Where I am. OK, this is a place called, wait a minute, I’m looking at the sign, the Canyon Motel, off the interstate. It’s got a big blue light outside.’
‘Which interstate?’
‘What’s the one? Seventeen. I-Seventeen.’
‘Seventeen? You’re here in Arizona?’
‘Manda, help me. Come help me.’
‘You’re at a pay phone there.’
‘A pay phone, right. Say you’ll come.’
‘Stay where you are. Don’t move.’ Rhees was looking at her with curiosity.
‘How long it gonna take you?’
‘I don’t know. Fast as I can get there.’
‘Hurry, Jesus Christ hurry, please.’
‘I’ll be there.’ Amanda hung up. Rhees was thumbing quickly through the Yellow Pages.
‘The Canyon,’ he said, reading from the directory. ‘It’s near Black Canyon City.’
Amanda could hear the motion of her blood. ‘Even if I go like a bat out of hell, that’s still twenty-five, thirty minutes. Do me a favour. Call Willie Drumm, tell him to meet me there.’
She rushed towards the door before Rhees – who looked puzzled and anxious – had time to say anything. She was all haste, her brain locked in that space where thoughts don’t cohere and your head’s filled with a strident choir of panic. She blew a quick kiss back at Rhees
and said, ‘Tell him it’s Isabel Sanchez.’
12
She drove with concentrated urgency. The city thinned until there were no more orange lamps, only the unforgiving dark of the desert on either side. She tried to arrange her thoughts, piling them up like building blocks, but they wouldn’t balance. Isabel calls from a place called the Canyon Motel on 1-17. She’s in trouble. Why is she there to begin with? And what had she been doing in Tuba City before that? Think think – but the bricks kept slipping and tumbling, and the letters of the alphabet made no sense. The night was cracked, and the pieces didn’t fit, and Amanda couldn’t make them.
Out into darkness, out into space. Freeway signs that read like gibberish, a cluster of orange lights, then more blackness for miles, and oncoming traffic rushing past her into a void. When she saw the blue light of the Canyon Motel she realized she’d lost all sense of time and distance. She swung off the freeway and raced up the ramp and braked hard inside the parking-lot, opening the door and stepping out in one unbroken movement.
There was a pay phone located outside the motel office. Nobody was using it, no sign of Isabel. She went inside the office. The clerk, a kid in a baseball cap, stood behind the desk. Willie Drumm was also there, beefy in his usual tight-fitting linen jacket.
‘She’s not here,’ Drumm said. ‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘I got here a minute ago –’
‘You look around?’ Amanda asked.
‘I only just arrived, Amanda.’
Amanda looked at the clerk. ‘Did you see her?’
The kid said, ‘There was a woman out there making a phone call about ten minutes ago. Small woman, Mexican looking. She the one you mean?’
‘Where did she go?’
‘I wasn’t paying close attention,’ the kid said. He had a plump textbook open on the counter. Gray’s Anatomy. Amanda glanced at an elongated sketch that might have been a cross-section of gland.
‘Pre-med next month,’ the kid said. ‘I was studying actually.’
Amanda slammed the book shut. ‘What the fuck did you see actually?’
The kid, who had a sharp little face, looked at Amanda with annoyance. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you lost my place.’
‘I’ll ask again. What did you see?’
‘This woman came in and wanted to use the pay phone, so I made change for her, then she went out again. I saw her go to the phone. She seemed sort of wigged.’
‘Then what?’
‘I wasn’t really watching. I told you.’
‘After she was finished using the phone, what did she do? Did she drive away? Did she just walk up and down? What did you see?’
‘I heard a car start up. I assume she drove away. Then this other vehicle came screaming through the lot.’
‘What kind of vehicle?’
‘Land Cruiser, something like that.’
‘You heard this vehicle immediately after the first car?’
‘Seconds, that was all.’
‘You happen to see what direction these vehicles took?’
The kid pondered a moment. ‘I don’t think they headed to the freeway. I got the impression they were going in the other direction. Back there,’ and he gestured with his thumb towards the desert.
Amanda looked at Drumm. ‘We’ll take your car, Willie.’
‘Fine by me.’ Drumm moved to the door and opened it. Amanda rushed past him. The cop, his right leg stiff from an old gunshot wound, stumped after her.
Amanda was buzzing, uneasy. She opened the door of the Bronco, sat in the passenger seat, watched Drumm lower himself behind the wheel.
‘She can’t be far away,’ Amanda said.
Drumm backed up the Bronco, turned out of the lot, slid the vehicle into the road that ran at a right angle to the freeway, an unlit ribbon of blacktop. The blue neon of the motel faded quickly behind. The city became a remote yellow-orange constellation in the sky. Cacti loomed up in the headlights, some pock-marked by the gunfire of vandals at target practice.
‘You want to tell me what’s happening?’ Drumm asked.
‘She called me. She’s in a bad way. She said some men were after her.’
‘Did she say who these guys were?’
‘She wasn’t coherent.’
‘You think this other car’s chasing her?’
‘Sounds that way. All I can tell you for sure is she’s frightened and I want to find her.’
The Bronco dipped in and out of potholes and Drumm said, ‘This road is the pits. You look your side, I’ll look mine.’
‘I’m doing that.’
‘You can’t see shit around here. What if she drove off the road? Headed out into the desert?’
‘We’ll stick to the road for the time being,’ Amanda said.
‘I don’t see what choice we got. We go off the road, what direction do we take? People get lost in the desert all the time.’
Amanda beat a tattoo on the dash. She was trying to release tension, but it wasn’t working. She thought of Isabel, tiny out there in the wilderness. Left, right, east, west. Drumm was correct. If they left the road, they’d be going nowhere.
‘I thought she was long gone,’ Drumm said.
‘I thought the same thing,’ Amanda leaned forward, scanning the night, the puny reaches of the lights. ‘Stop the car.’
Drumm braked. Amanda rolled down her window and listened to a silence as big as a galaxy.
‘You hear anything?’ Drumm asked.
‘Nothing. Drive on a bit farther.’
Drumm slid the Bronco forward. The blacktop narrowed. The desert crowded in. After a mile or so, Amanda said, ‘Stop again.’
Drumm cut the engine. Amanda focused on the night, still and enormous. What she longed for were distress flares, great plumes of white light to illuminate the landscape. She listened as she’d never listened before. She heard only absences and silences and the quickened rhythms of her own pulse. The desert was a vast infuriating secret.
She told Drumm to drive again.
Half a mile down the road, Amanda heard dogs barking far off. Drumm slowed.
‘Coyotes,’ Drumm said.
‘They’re dogs,’ Amanda said.
‘I’m a city boy,’ Drumm remarked. ‘Dogs, coyotes. What do I know?’
Amanda opened the door and got out of the car. She stood on the edge of the blacktop and listened. The dogs yapped and snivelled. Hounds, hunting dogs, excited. She couldn’t tell where the sounds originated, how far away they might be. You could drive out there for miles and think you were heading directly to the source and you’d be wrong. Soundwaves zigzagged. There were acoustic distortions.
Drumm stood alongside her and surveyed the dark with a gloomy look. ‘What do you think?’
‘We may have to drive out there, Willie.’
‘Like two blind people.’
‘I don’t like the sound of those dogs.’
‘Maybe some good old boy’s out chasing jackrabbits or something.’
‘In the dark?’
Drumm shrugged. ‘Anything’s possible. You want me to drive off the road, I’ll do it. Christ only knows where we’ll end up.’
Amanda got back inside the Bronco. A mile away, five miles, ten – the dogs could be anywhere. Drumm turned the key in the ignition.
Amanda hung one arm out the window and Drumm swung the vehicle off the blacktop and steered between cacti that resembled stick-figures petrified into stillness by the white slash of the headlights.
13
She’s twisted her ankle and a heel has broken off her shoe and she’s running, stumbling, trying all this time to keep quiet, but she makes gasping sounds because her lungs are bursting and her ankle’s beginning to swell.
The dogs have the scent of her. They whine and yelp and she wishes she hadn’t abandoned the car, even with the flat tyre, because she could have sat tight with the doors and windows locked, but even then, even then what good would it do? The men are following the dogs i
n a jeep. Always the men, the men.
There’s no moon and the stars have gone out, and she finds herself scrambling up a slope. Dust rises into her nose and mouth and stings her eyes, and she wants to cry, but she’s been crying too much lately, and she thinks, there’s a time when you don’t have no more tears.
She climbs up the slope on all fours now. Loose stones slither out from under her, and what she wants is to lie very still and pretend she isn’t here and if she makes herself small maybe the dogs won’t smell her. She loses her hold and slips a few yards and thinks, the landscape’s against her, like everything else.
What she remembers is hitching rides from truckers who took her places she didn’t want to go: Gallup then Farmington, New Mexico, the wrong direction, but she wasn’t thinking straight for a while, and then she stole the car and drove back to Arizona.
The weariness, the car overheating, the air stuffy and stifling, this is what she remembers. Also how Manda’s telephone rings on and on and even when she decided to try the other number all she ever got was a man. Maybe Manda’s father. Maybe. You don’t know who to trust: cops, strangers, you don’t know. It’s the world, the way of it.
She should have kept her mouth shut, but she spoke up about Ángel, yeah, really bright of her, very smart, Ángel who she used to love. Ángel who screwed her over real bad and treated her like shit and one time, with his razor, cut her in a private place. She doesn’t want to think about him because love rots.
Running, driving long hours, panicky, drained, freeway lines painted inside her skull, one night in a small stuffy motel room and not knowing how long she can sleep because the men are always just behind her. She can’t stay ahead of them no more and she knows it, and she’s gonna die here and nobody gonna find her.
She wishes for moonlight, but then she thinks, maybe she don’t want to see what’s out there. Let it be this way, this dark. Better like this. She climbs again. Her fingernails are broken. One time she was proud of her nails and how long they were, she’d paint and buff and file them, when she wanted to look good for Ángel, when she loved him. When they had the big house and the conservatory, whatever it’s called. The plants, she smells the plants, it’s a dream of back then, that’s all. A dream rotting inside her skull.
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