‘Look at me,’ he said again.
But she didn’t.
He thought, You don’t want to see the face of your executioner, lady. You don’t want me to be the last person you’ll ever see. Carrying Anthony Dansk’s image all the way into eternity with you.
She was thinking of dying. She’d hear the explosion of the gun. She wasn’t sure. How could she know what she’d hear?
‘Fucking look at me,’ Dansk said.
‘Dansk,’ Rhees said hoarsely. ‘Wait –’
‘For what, John? The lady dies, then it’s your turn. These are the facts. Face them.’
She felt the gun against the centre of her brow. She was linked to Dansk and the gun was a bridge. She heard the sound of the generator, the clunking and the asthmatic whirring noise which sometimes flared into a roar. Or maybe it was just the noise created by the broken dynamo of her brain. Outside, inside, there wasn’t any difference, you knew you were going to die, you knew this was an ending.
She raised her face and looked at him finally.
He gazed into her eyes and saw what he wanted to see there, and it excited him. Defeat and despair, the pits of anxiety. It was how you looked when you turned the last page in your own history book.
‘This is where curiosity gets you,’ he said. He was the dispenser of darkness, the tourist guide to the other side.
‘Hey, Anthony! Check this out!’
Surprised, Dansk turned. Amanda looked towards the doorway, dropped to the floor and shut her eyes.
The sound of automatic gunfire roared, shot after shot kicking up clouds of dust and splintering the wall behind Dansk. Amanda lost count, confused between the gunfire and the echoes it created. There was no spatial logic to the acoustics, just noise and more noise, until the place sounded like a shooting-gallery where all the clients had gone insane. Dansk was punctured everywhere, arms, legs, chest, skull. He took a series of staggered steps, and when he fell he rolled over and over, and was finally motionless a few feet from Amanda.
Two men in shadow. They walked to where Dansk lay and studied him, as if they half expected him to have survived the fusillade. One of the men kicked Dansk in the chest. The other said, ‘Hey, enough.’
She couldn’t see their faces. She didn’t want to see them. The generator failed. The big room was suddenly quiet and dark, and the silence was strange and terrifying.
One of the men said, ‘We ought to do surgery on this pair, you ask me.’
The other said, ‘That ain’t the way it was spelled out by Loeb.’
‘No names, asshole.’
She heard them walk to the door where they stopped. She held her breath because she knew they were going to turn back and use their guns against her and Rhees. A bad moment, dust in your throat and the bitter taste of panic, but they stepped outside. Then a minute later she heard the sound of a car kick into life and then fade in the distance.
She moved to Rhees and held him for a long time, his face against her body, her arm round his shoulder. She sat until her body was numb and the sun had climbed high enough to send light through the open doorway into the room.
She wiped the gritty ash from her clothing and went to where Dansk lay. She searched his jacket for the car keys but didn’t find them. Instead she found a notebook held shut by a thick red rubber band. She removed it, then rummaged in the pockets of his pants and found the keys, which were wet with blood.
The side of his skull was shattered. She could see bone and more blood than she would have thought possible. She had the impression he was turning to liquid. Hair sodden, mouth open and crooked. The eyes stared into nothing, but were curiously bright. A strange vigilance. She imagined some elementary form of life lingered in Dansk, that he was watching her, that when she turned and walked to the door with Rhees he was still following her movements and somehow in his ruined brain recording them.
She wondered how long it would take to liberate herself from this feeling, or if it was going to stalk her a long time. But she knew.
It wasn’t going to go away.
76
Rhees sat in the passenger seat with Dansk’s notebook in his lap, flicking pages in a listless way she found distressing, as if he’d used up too much of himself and had nothing left inside to give. The small arid towns they passed through had an air of despondency. In Holbrook they used the rest rooms of a gas station to clean themselves up. In Winslow she bought a pair of sunglasses and telephoned Kelloway from a pay phone outside a liquor store.
‘I’ve been waiting,’ he said.
‘Let’s meet in Flagstaff.’
‘What’s wrong with Phoenix?’
‘Because I don’t think I can make it without falling asleep at the wheel. I’m a road hazard, Kelloway.’
‘Yeah, you’re a hazard all right. Forest fires, serious loss of life. Name a location.’
‘The airport.’ It was the first place that popped into her head.
‘I’ll be there in a couple of hours,’ Kelloway said.
She hung up and went back to the car. She sat behind the wheel. Weariness was like woodworm tunnelling through her. But you’re alive because Loeb had issued certain instructions. Maybe he’d come to the conclusion that enough was enough, no more killing after Dansk, because the whole sick clandestine business was coming apart.
Rhees hadn’t even raised the subject. He seemed to accept the fact that he was alive without any curiosity. He was slowly turning the pages of the notebook as if he were reading text in a language he didn’t know, one that held no interest for him.
Dansk’s notes were centred on the pages, framed by sequences of tiny crosses and arrows and jagged lines that suggested thorns. One page contained a single word with a question mark: ‘friends?’ She couldn’t imagine Dansk having friends.
Rhees continued to flick pages and sometimes read Dansk’s notes in a disturbing monotone. In obscure ways, in phrases and fragments, Dansk had recorded his impressions. People were referred to by initials. L had to be Loeb. Dansk had written, ‘I wish I could cut L’s fucking throat like a pig.’ She had no notion of the identities of Mc and P, initials that recurred. Willie Drumm’s name was inscribed inside a rectangle, like a crude coffin.
Pages were crammed with letters, followed by abbreviated place names. BNDenv McKSeat FSaltLk RMDenv QDalbu RDalbu PROgd JROgd. In the back, the pages were covered with a series of digits, some of them phone numbers, others that looked like PIN codes for bank cards. You needed a key to unlock the significance of all these numbers. You needed another kind of key to reveal a different kind of accounting: the numbers of the dead.
A cryptic notebook, a cryptic life. She wondered what could be deduced from these pages, from the abbreviations and the numerals, the mysteries in Dansk’s world.
Something slipped out of the notebook into Rhees’s hand. It was a folded newspaper clipping. He opened it.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
Rhees gave her the clipping and she read it.
LOCAL WOMAN SLAIN. Under this headline was a terse story:
Mrs Frederica Danskowski, aged sixty-seven, of 2343 Drake, was killed yesterday by unknown assailants in broad daylight outside her apartment building. She was stabbed several times. She was taken to County Hospital, and pronounced dead on arrival. Police are asking for information from anyone in the vicinity of Drake Street between three and three-thirty yesterday afternoon to call the Patterson Police Department. Mrs Danskowski is survived by one son, Anthony, a surveyor for an oil company.
It was dated April 1994. A surveyor, she thought. She remembered the photographs Dansk kept. Mother and son. Anthony Danskowski, shortened to Dansk, a surveyor.
Somewhere between Winslow and Flagstaff she drove 100 yards off the road. She got out, opened the trunk, found Dansk’s case and set it down. She battered it open with a tyre-iron, sweating as she smashed the lid, the hinges, the lock again and again. She went down on her knees in the dust and rummaged through the contents, looking f
or papers, documents, files, any text of substance that might yield intelligible clues to Dansk’s world. All she found were his clothes, folded neatly. His toiletries. But no papers. She kicked angrily at the stuff, scattered it around, then went back to the car. Sweat dripped into her eyes, blinding her.
She took the notebook from Rhees’s slack hand, shut it and imagined this simple act might silence Dansk’s voice, which had seemed to issue from the pages in whispers and incomprehensible asides. But it didn’t quieten Dansk at all, because she could still hear him. Check the destruction in your own wake before you pass judgement on me. You’re like some kind of fucking Typhoid Mary spreading a deadly plague.
Flagstaff marked a change, mountains and high green forests and a soft breeze. Amanda drove a mile or so beyond the town, where the airport was located. A small terminal, it served mainly short-hop commuter flights north to Las Vegas or south to Phoenix. A couple of picnic tables were situated at the edge of the parking-lot.
She parked and bought two large sodas in the cafeteria and took them to one of the tables. Rhees sipped his in silence. Amanda smoked a cigarette and watched cars come in and out of the lot. A Cessna rose up from the runway. She imagined being inside the small plane, floating in a kind of light membranous sac through blue skies, where consciousness was suspended and amnesia a possibility.
She saw Kelloway step out of a car. He noticed Amanda and Rhees immediately and walked briskly to their table. He sat, waving smoke from Amanda’s cigarette away from his face. She removed her sunglasses and looked at him, searching his expression for an indication of his mood. It was hard to tell.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s start with Tom Gannon.’
‘Dansk shot him,’ she said.
‘And the other cops?’
She didn’t say anything. She felt an unexpected reluctance to tell Kelloway anything else, but she wasn’t sure why. Speech was an enormous effort suddenly. Words congealed and darkened like scars in her head.
‘So he kills four cops in one swoop and burns down half a forest,’ Kelloway said.
Amanda looked beyond Kelloway a moment. The breeze fluttered briefly, then faded. The wind-sock nearby deflated. This situation had the pitch of a dream, or of that moment when you experience the first slide towards sleep.
‘And then where did he go?’ Kelloway asked.
Rhees said in his flat way, ‘Dansk’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘There were two gunmen,’ Rhees said.
‘Where?’
Amanda said, ‘A place we never want to go again.’
Kelloway looked into her eyes. ‘What place?’
‘I’ll draw you a map,’ she said. But all she could remember was wilderness and gunfire. The geography was missing.
Kelloway leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘These gunmen shot Dansk and left? You saw their faces?’
‘It was dark,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t see them.’
‘So you can’t identify them.’
Amanda said, ‘Frankly, we weren’t really looking. My best guess would be they were the same pair who attacked John.’
‘Dansk’s own people turned on him.’ Kelloway swatted a fly from his arm. ‘And left you two alive?’
‘Maybe Loeb can explain that,’ she said.
Kelloway made one hand into a tanned fist. ‘Loeb was shot at close range outside a roadside tavern on I-Seventeen. We don’t know who killed him. Nobody in the tavern heard any gunfire. You never find witnesses in these sawdust joints.’
She absorbed this information. No witnesses, she thought. No Loeb to answer questions. No Dansk to interrogate. Silenced voices. ‘How much background have you looked into?’
‘Ralph Loeb was with Justice for sixteen years. Terminal lung cancer, so he was going to retire one way or another pretty soon. I imagine he expected to croak in a hospital bed with tubes up his nose, but fate’s a real joker. He told me he’d never heard of Dansk.’
‘Surprise.’
‘I have calls into various people. Top guys in Justice. The US Marshals Service. The Director of the Witness Protection Program. I’m also talking with the State Attorney-General’s office. I have forensics examining the late Mrs Vialli for exact cause of death. The description of the guy you saw in the Hideaway Knolls has been circulated.’
‘You’ve become a believer, have you?’ she asked.
‘Let’s say I’m leaning,’ Kelloway said, ‘but I need anything you can give me by way of solid evidence.’
She thought of Dansk’s notebook. She thought of the drums and the labels on them. She had the unsettling feeling that Kelloway was keeping something back from her and Rhees. She didn’t know what.
Her attention was drawn to a car entering the parking-lot and cruising close to the table. She saw the driver’s face half in shadow, and she had a sense of recognition. The car moved past, then slid into a space about 50 yards away and the door opened.
The breeze came up again. The man who stepped out of the car put a hand to his scalp. His necktie, caught by a current of air, flapped up against his face and he smoothed it back into position. In his left hand he carried a briefcase.
Kelloway said, ‘I’m looking at the possibility of a serious investigation here. One that’s also very delicate.’
Amanda turned away from the man fidgeting with his necktie. ‘Does the prospect scare you, Kelloway?’
‘I don’t scare, Scholes. I’ve got balls of steel. All I’m saying is, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill affair. This is something you piece together, and if there’s a case I’m gonna have to convince some pretty influential people I’ve got something worth pursuing. This one leads in all sorts of directions. Justice. The US Marshals Service. I can see FBI involvement. Beyond that …’ He shrugged.
Amanda stared past Kelloway at the man who was struggling once more to keep his tie in place against the renewed mischief of the breeze. When he reached the table he smiled at Amanda.
She said, ‘Lew Bascombe. Got a plane to catch?’
‘No, no plane,’ Bascombe said. He sat, opened his briefcase, took out an opaque plastic folder and laid it on the table. It was red and shiny, buttoned shut.
Kelloway nodded at Bascombe, then said to Amanda, ‘I want everything you can tell me. A to Z.’
She wondered about Lew Bascombe’s presence. She looked at the red folder. Lew was drilling his fingers on it. She leaned back, sluggish. When Kelloway spoke his voice came from a cloud of ectoplasm. ‘I got some real thick doors to knock on and some heavyweight characters I’m gonna have to talk to. I need good stuff to show them, and where am I gonna find this stuff if I don’t get it from you and Rhees? Not from Loeb, and not from Dansk, that’s for sure.’
She said, ‘Loeb and Dansk weren’t working alone: they had support. People with access to information. People who knew what buttons to push on their keyboards. Others who specialized in violence. I don’t know how many or how deep this whole sickness runs.’
‘These are exactly the people I want to fucking nail.’
‘Have you thought that Loeb had time to start covering his tracks before he died?’ she asked. ‘Maybe he made a few phone calls right after his talk with you. He realized things were beginning to fall apart, so he sent out messages. Eliminate certain files and records, et cetera.’
Kelloway said, ‘You can’t wipe out everything, Scholes. There are always traces left somewhere, and I’ll find them. When I get my foot in the door I’m like some fucking Jehovah’s Witness on Benzedrine.’
Kelloway looked at Bascombe, who unclipped the folder and opened it. He started to pull papers out.
Bascombe said, ‘I’ve arranged a complete set, Amanda. Two birth certificates, two social security cards, two driver’s licences issued by the State of Arizona. Two credit cards and a cheque-book from a bank in Yuma. The key to a house in the same city, address attached. You’ll see we’ve described you as married. I picked the names myself. Erika and Robert Bloom.’
/> ‘Wait,’ she said.
Kelloway said, ‘I can’t begin to build a case without you two and I want to be one hundred per cent goddam sure any witnesses of mine are in protective custody –’
‘Wait,’ she said again.
‘I want you both safe and sound while I work this business out. We have our own in-State witness protection program –’
‘I’m aware of that –’
‘It’s small-scale compared to the Federal one, but at least it’s secure, and I know where I can contact you when I need you. I can guarantee total safety, round-the-clock protection, a direct line to my office open all hours.’
Amanda looked at the birth certificates, the credit cards, the cheque-book. They appeared to vibrate in her vision. ‘You’re asking us to drop out of sight for God knows how long and assume new identities?’
‘Nobody’s gonna come looking for you. You don’t have to live with an ongoing paranoia. You’ll be safe in my care.’
Safe in my care. ‘Is this mandatory?’ she asked.
Kelloway shrugged and raised his eyebrows. ‘Let me tell you what’s gonna happen if you don’t accept: you’ll spend a whole lotta time looking over your shoulder. When the sun goes down, you’ll wonder what lies out there in the darkness. When the doorbell rings, you’ll jump. When somebody comes to fix your garbage disposal, you’ll be reaching for a Valium or a gun, whichever’s closer. And then there’s Rhees to consider. He needs rest, time to mend.’
He’d fingered her weak point. She stared at the wind-sock and watched it fill with air. She listened to the breeze as if she expected to hear a message of guidance rustle out of the trees nearby, reliable counsel voiced by the shaken leaves.
‘Maybe you don’t trust me,’ Kelloway said. ‘But you have to trust somebody somewhere along the line. Begin with me. Who was it that gave you Tom Gannon for protection? Who was it offered you that? And those other cops? I walked that extra mile for you.’
She looked at Rhees, whose drawn face seemed to recede from her. Trust somebody somewhere.
Rhees said, ‘Robert and Erika Bloom,’ as if he were checking the flavour of the names in his mouth and didn’t like how they tasted, but his voice was odd and lifeless.
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