Her ankle feels like a crab is pinching. She’s dragging the foot and it gets in the way of her movement, and the dogs are coming. She imagines them bounding through the dark towards her. She thinks of their hot breath, paws, sharp teeth. She thinks, the dogs gonna get me, no matter how hard I try to get away, the dogs are coming, and then the men behind them. They’re coming at her in the night, and all she did was say what was in her mind, because all Ángel did was cause pain – he deserves what he got. But he don’t roll over just because he’s been put away, no, he don’t do that: he sends out men and dogs to hunt her. Nobody else would send men and dogs after her. She can’t think. She never hurt a soul. She was always kind, right from the time when she was a little girl and her grandmother dragged her from town to town selling those crazy herb potions for warts and insomnia and flatulence – dry towns and villages, Camargo and La Esmeralda and Ceballos. She remembers the cracked roads and her grandmother carving strips of yucca and muttering the secret holy words. She remembers the withered old bronze woman saying, You’re a good girl, Isabella. Always say your prayers and tell the truth and brush your teeth. And when a handsome young man talks to you, smile at him like you mean it.
Manda you promised me. Manda you said everything gonna be OK. Just tell me this one thing, what good are your words now?
She slips again, clutching at nothing. She rolls over and over down the slope and dust chokes her and she’s dizzy and the sky’s off-centre and the dogs are louder all the time, and she feels the way a hunted rabbit would feel: all fear and wild impulses and thinking how to survive, how to get out of this place and just live.
Then suddenly the dogs are on her, out of the dark they come snarling, and she smells the meaty breath of the animals, and they whine and bark, snapping at skin and clothing, quick and savage. She sees their eyes gleam. She tries to cover her face and kicks at the beasts. The stench of their fur is strong and sickly, their bodies feel moist and hot against her skin. ‘Mother of God,’ she says. ‘Mother of Christ.’ Fangs, jaws, saliva, claws. She curls herself up into a ball. The dogs snap and bite and whine, how many: three, four, who can tell? Her leg is slashed, her hands are bleeding, the dogs are crazy for her blood. She tries to crawl out from under the pressure of their bodies, but they cling to her, they dig into her.
The sound of a vehicle. Slamming doors. A man’s voice. ‘Back, back. Get back.’
The animals retreat, sniffling, whimpering sullenly.
She looks up into the bright disc of a flashlight.
‘Bitch,’ the man says.
She knows this voice. Knows it.
Another man says, ‘End of the road, sweetie.’
The first man says, ‘I’ll do it myself.’
The other man reaches down, grabs her hair and twists her face to the side. ‘You don’t look so good any more. You look tired and weary.’
He thrusts her face away. She’s on fire where the dogs have lanced her skin. She says, ‘You gonna do it, do it quick.’
‘Think you’re a brave little number,’ the first man says. He kicks her straight in the heart and she moans. ‘Huh? Huh? I’ll show you brave, conchita.’ He bends, pulls her skirt up, inserts his finger under her panties and thrusts it deep inside her and moves it up and down. Then he laughs and draws his hand away and she hears him sniff his own fingers. He laughs like the dogs bark.
‘Get it the fuck over with,’ the other man says.
She sees a gun, silver in flashlight. Jesus save me. She crosses herself with one bleeding hand.
‘Adiós,’ the first man says, and presses the barrel of the silver gun to the side of her head. And there’s a click, a friction between her skin and metal, and then the flash.
14
Willie Drumm said, ‘I’m tired, Amanda. It’s gotta be at least two hours since we heard the gunshot, and I haven’t heard the dogs either. The smart thing would be to quit, come back in the daylight with more help, give the area a thorough search.’
Amanda stared into the dark beyond the headlights. Her eyes ached. She knew Drumm’s proposal was sound, and if she’d been looking for anyone other than Isabel she would have agreed to call it a night.
‘Keep in mind Sanchez was my case too, Amanda, and I worked it long and hard. So don’t take what I have to say the wrong way, but some might call this compulsive behaviour.’
‘Maybe that’s what it is.’
‘I know we owe the woman big time. I understand your feelings.’ Drumm indicated the wall of dark, moving his hand in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘I heard of needles in haystacks, Amanda, but this …’
Amanda smoked a cigarette. She’d gone through almost a pack in the two hours since the gunshot. Two hours of ruts and ravines and cacti, 120 minutes or more in which she’d tried unsuccessfully to attribute the gunshot to another cause altogether – some jerk camper’s kerosene stove exploding, a demented gold prospector’s pick-up truck backfiring. There were all kinds of loonies drawn to the desert in the quest for gain, spiritual or material, God or gold.
But she was fooling herself. It had been a gunshot, unmistakable and dreadful. And just after the shot, she thought she’d heard a vehicle droning in the distance. She’d scanned the night but hadn’t seen headlights. The landscape was pocked, hollows and canyons, a million hiding-places.
‘I’m getting sick of cacti,’ Willie Drumm said. ‘They’re starting to develop personalities. Any time now, one of them’s gonna say you again?’
Amanda was hunched forward in her seat. She’d been locked in this position a long time. ‘Give it another twenty minutes, Willie. Then we’ll go.’
‘You think you remember the way back to the road?’
‘We’ll find it.’
Drumm edged the Bronco between stands of cacti. A jackrabbit ran mazily ahead of them. Once, a cactus wren darted in front of the vehicle, a feathered ball of light. Amanda barely noticed these disturbances. Her mind was elsewhere, probing her own private wasteland.
The Bronco bumped, thudded, bottomed out in a shallow arroyo Drumm had seen too late to avoid. ‘Shit,’ he said. He backed the vehicle up and the rear tyres span, and dust, thrown up by the wheels, clouded the air.
Amanda saw something then, metal and glinting. ‘There,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’
Drumm parked, removed a flashlight from the glove box. He left the headlights on, and they illuminated a late-1970s Datsun with a punctured front tyre. Drumm opened the passenger door and switched on the flash. Inside the car was a clutter of discarded fast-food wrappers and styrofoam coffee cups and empty Camel Light packs and crumpled Kleenex.
Amanda looked at the debris. ‘Flash the back,’ she said to Drumm.
Drumm moved the beam. In the back Amanda saw a heap of crushed clothing. Some of it was deadeningly familiar. A candy-striped blouse, a pair of jeans with a designer label, a blue T-shirt with a palm tree and the word Malibu.
‘Hers?’ Drumm asked.
Amanda nodded. She noticed a small pink thing among the clothing and she reached for it and held it in the palm of her hand.
‘What’s that?’ Drumm asked.
‘A barrette. A hair-clasp.’ Amanda wrapped her fingers round the thin strip of plastic.
Drumm played the light on the ground around the Datsun. ‘She had a flat and decided to hoof it,’ he said.
Amanda studied the ground. There were footprints scuffed by paw-marks. Drumm was the first to see the shoe, which he picked up. ‘You don’t run too good in high heels,’ he said.
Amanda took the shoe and noticed it was missing the heel. She tried to reconstruct the scene, but she didn’t like the pictures she was coming up with. Isabel runs, her heel snaps, the dogs are after her.
‘You want to keep going?’ Drumm asked.
Amanda didn’t. This was a trail she had no heart for. She felt empty and depressed. ‘Sure,’ she said.
Drumm trained the flashlight on the scuff of prints, Amanda followed. She didn’t know how far she and Drum
m walked: a quarter mile, a half, more. The desert was beyond measurement.
‘She comes this way.’ Drumm stopped suddenly at the foot of an incline. There were indentations, disturbances, and blood.
Amanda squatted on her heels, picked up a handful of grainy dust and ran it through her fingers. She saw bloodstains in the grains, wet still.
‘This is where it ends,’ Drumm said quietly. He swung the flashlight around the general area. ‘I see some tyre tracks over there.’
Amanda didn’t look in the direction of the beam. She was thinking of dogs, wondering what it felt like to be hunted by them, trying to gauge hysteria, the sense of doom. This is where it ends. Drumm’s sentence resonated in her head.
Drumm said, ‘The dogs get her, they bring her down, then it happens. The gunman steps in and calls off the dogs. Boom.’
‘And her body?’ Amanda asked.
‘He removes it.’
‘Why not leave it here? You couldn’t find a more isolated place for dumping a goddam corpse.’
‘You got me,’ Drumm said. ‘What the hell. This whole goddam thing gets me. Two go in, two come out again.’
Two go in, two come out. Amanda listened to the desert, silent now, and eerie, where the dark land seamlessly met the dark sky.
15
During the trial of Victor Sanchez, Randolph Hanseimer, defence attorney, had tried to club Isabel Sanchez into submission. His tactics were crude, and once or twice Isabel had closed her eyes and swayed a little in the witness stand as if she were about to faint. Aren’t you just trying to get back at your ex-husband because he left you? Aren’t you just mad at him for dumping you because you didn’t live up to reasonable expectations as a wife? Isn’t this just a seriously malicious case of sour grapes?
Objection, objection, objection.
Amanda was replaying the trial in her head. She kept seeing Isabel in the stand, clenching her hands into small fists. Hanseimer tried to break her, but she always found the resolve to come back at him. The jury admired her. The jury saw an unassuming young woman abused beyond reason by a husband who was a cold-blooded killer.
Amanda stretched one arm across the bed. Her thoughts raced and her throat was raw from cigarettes and the desert still clung to her, the dread she’d felt, dread she was still feeling. Drumm’s flashlight, the jackrabbit running, blood in the dust. The dogs, the goddam dogs: she kept hearing the way they yelped and whined. Isabel running from them, that fear, that solitude, just her and terror under an unyielding black sky.
She sat up. ‘Two people I entrust to the Program. New names, identities, the whole Federal package. So what the hell were they doing back in Arizona?’
Rhees propped himself on an elbow. ‘Maybe they were lured back somehow.’
‘Lured?’
‘Who would stand to get satisfaction from their deaths anyway?’
‘Only Victor Sanchez. Lured though? I don’t see how.’
‘Sanchez wants revenge, but he wants it in a very special kind of way. What’s the point of killing them in Idaho or wherever? That’s remote. Better to draw them back here somehow and kill them where they’re going to be discovered. Where you’re going to know about it because it’s your state, your own backyard so to speak. He’s giving you the finger. He wants to show you he can cut through the Program like cream cheese, but he also wants you to be aware of it. He wants you to know that although you have him under lock and key on death row, he can still call the shots.’
She thought about this, then said, ‘Explain why we couldn’t find Isabel’s body. If Sanchez was giving me the finger, why wasn’t the body left right there?’
‘Maybe you just didn’t see it in the dark. Maybe she wasn’t killed.’
‘Drumm’s going back in the morning with some help,’ she said.
‘Then he’ll find her. If she’s there to be found.’
Amanda didn’t want to think about Drumm and his search-party. She remembered the many hours she’d spent with Isabel in a hotel room on the outskirts of Phoenix, where she’d been sequestered during the trial. Armed guards at the door, unmarked cop cars in the parking-lot. She hadn’t been taking any chances. She remembered how fragile Isabel had been. Her small face, dainty in its pale-brown perfection, had been taut most of the time. The atmosphere in the room had been a mix of tension and uneasy allegiance. It had been difficult for Isabel to testify against her husband, because even if the marriage had been a kind of crucifixion, even if Isabel had been hammered nail by nail into the splintered wood of matrimony, and Victor a bundle of unspeakable cruelties, there was still some stunted form of vestigial loyalty. At times Amanda had held Isabel, telling her she was doing the right thing, Victor belonged in jail and she could put him there for a very long time. Don’t think of it as betrayal, Isabel. I promise you’ll be safe afterwards.
Promise. Empty words, dry kindling.
She got out of bed, walked around the room, arms folded. She paused in front of a full-length mirror and caught her reflection in the faint moonlight. She looked frazzled, and she was 4 or 5 pounds too heavy, which was visible even under the oversized black T-shirt she wore. She turned away from the image and sighed.
Rhees was watching her. ‘Sanchez has the key to all this. It’s obvious.’
‘There isn’t supposed to be a key, John. The doors are meant to be locked tight. Nobody is supposed to be able to open them.’
‘Sanchez found a way.’
‘How?’
Rhees scratched his jaw. ‘Come back to bed.’
‘We’re talking about something so secret even a guy like Bascombe doesn’t know how the machinery really works. We’re talking about sealed documents and secret codes. You don’t just pick up a phone and ask for information about the new names and whereabouts of witnesses.’
Rhees flipped the bedsheet back and patted a pillow. ‘Lie down,’ he said.
‘OK. I’ll lie down.’ She stretched alongside him, held his hand and brushed it with her lips. But she couldn’t relax, couldn’t begin to relax. ‘I talked her into it, John. I persuaded her to go into court.’
Rhees stroked her forehead. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘I need to smoke. I know we have a rule about smoking in our bedroom but I’m about to break it.’ She lit a cigarette. The sulphuric smell of the exploding match was awful. ‘She wouldn’t have testified if I hadn’t forced her.’
‘Forced? It was her decision in the end. Nobody shackled her and led her inside the court, she went of her own free will.’
Amanda shook her head. ‘I bought her ticket. I put her on the justice train, which happened to be going nowhere.’
‘Now you’re choked up with remorse and you want to do something about it. But you’ll be a damn sight better off going back to the cabin first thing in the morning and letting Drumm get on with it. Let Bascombe do what he has to do, you’re out of it. It’s not as if you have an official job these days anyway.’
‘Bascombe said the same.’
‘He’s right. Now try to sleep.’
‘How the fuck can I sleep, for God’s sake?’
Rhees opened the drawer of the bedside table and removed a prescription bottle, took the lid off, slipped a red and yellow capsule into his palm. ‘Take it.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Do I have to stuff it down your throat?’
She opened her mouth reluctantly. He placed the capsule on her tongue and gently clapped a hand over her lips. She swallowed.
‘Great bedside manner,’ she said. Dalmane again. She hadn’t used it for weeks and weeks. She’d been working hard to relegate the Sanchez trial to a basement room at the back of her head, and she’d almost managed to bury it.
Rhees said, ‘I wonder what she ever saw in Sanchez.’
‘That’s easy. She was young, naïve and poor, John. Sanchez is a handsome guy, wads of money, knows how to blind her with flash. Flash loses its allure, so he comes up with other ways of getting her attent
ion. He was careless with lit cigarettes when she was around. Once, just for the hell of it, he cut off one of her nipples with a razor blade. This is not a pleasant man.’
She’d seen Sanchez day in day out for the best part of eight weeks in court, and what she remembered was the way he’d stared at her with a concentrated look of contempt. She remembered the trick he had of seeming not to blink. He emitted some very powerful waves of animosity, like a transmitter sending out a constant stream of malice. It had reached a point where she’d dreaded going into the courtroom and feeling the dangerous laser heat of his eyes.
‘I don’t mean this to sound callous, but you don’t owe her,’ Rhees said.
‘I gave her my word, John.’
‘Yeah, but it wasn’t you that broke it.’
‘That’s not really the point,’ she said. ‘I came to like Isabel.’
‘I know you did –’
‘She survived a very damaging marriage, and she needed serious reassurance to go in that witness-stand. Thrown together in that kind of situation, you feel close to a person. We talked about a bunch of things: families, friends. We talked a lot about our fathers. I told her about the time Morgan gave me a brand-new car on my seventeenth birthday. The only birthday gift she could ever remember from her father was a cheap plastic barrette when she was twelve, which she kept. That made me feel kind of sad and kind of angry. I had this privileged upbringing I didn’t ask for and she had nothing.’
Amanda felt the pill begin to kick in slowly. She could hear a slight echo around the edges of her words. There was a dryness in her throat. Rhees said something she didn’t catch because she was drifting towards the peculiar numb darkness of drugged sleep.
She dreamed of Sanchez. She dreamed she was taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer. He was bent over, thighs splayed, and he was grinning, and the grin was terrifying.
She woke at dawn. The sky was the colour of a pale vein. She tossed the bedsheets aside. The inside of her head was like sludge at the bottom of a cafetière, but she knew where she was going.
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