Raymond leaned his elbows on the glove box. "I just need the money so bad."
"You got a family?"
"A wife. We're about to go under."
"We'll get paid. This is no time to be broke."
Raymond sat back and took a long breath. "What about you? You got a family?"
"Yeah. I got someone."
"She's lucky."
"And jealous," Bill grinned. "So don't start crying on me. Those types can smell the tears, you know."
They flew down the barren freeway. The meaning of the violence at the apartments eluded Raymond, as half-glimpsed as the dim cars left along the sides of the roads. And who decided to walk away from their cars mid-freeway? Had their drivers left them in the midst of a jam to be hauled off the road by the city? Where had all the passengers gone—the sunset? Had some of them died, coughing and puking, blood dribbling from their tear ducts, behind the wheel? There was no longer any sense that Raymond could see.
But sense was what you made it. That was the lesson of life, repeated in every tragedy, every windfall, every mystery of a long-lost city or a whale washed on the beach. He would get his money. If Mia was the only thing that mattered, the only plan that made sense was to go home to her and stay with her until things got better.
On the PCH, he could smell the sea blowing in through the empty window. Bill snaked up the steep cliffside to Murckle's estate. From inside the control room, Craig rolled open the gate, then met them at the door. One look at Bill and he cocked his big stubbly head.
"What happened out there?"
Bill glanced upstairs. "Where's Murckle?"
"Out. With Hu."
"Establishing an alibi." Bill bared his teeth. "Murckle's slinging."
Craig snorted. "He's a fucking Hollywood hack."
"You think that makes him less likely to be in the shit?"
Craig leaned forward, brow beetling, and sniffed Bill's shirt. "You fired a gun."
"Damn right. I'd be dead if I hadn't." In quick, specific strokes, he relayed the relevant details, starting from Raymond's trip to the Torrance parking lot, where he discovered he was couriering drugs, to their eastside delivery-turned-battle. Craig paced the room, face red as raw steak. By the end, his hands dangled by his side, still as a dog that's heard a distant bark, his back turned, ears burning, a vein squiggling on his neck.
"Still got your piece?" he said softly.
Bill nodded. "Going to need to ditch it, though. Murder weapon."
"You." Craig jammed a thick finger at Raymond. "Get up to the control room."
Raymond glanced at Bill. "What's going on?"
"Shut it off. All of it. Cameras, alarms. I want this house as dumb as a dropped baby."
"I'm about to be involved in a crime. How about you at least let me know what it is?"
Craig stepped so close Raymond could smell the musk of his skin. "Heavy burglary and vandalism, all right? Now get your fucking ass upstairs."
Raymond jogged up the cushily carpeted stairs and installed himself in the sterility of the control room. Things were happening too fast again. As fast as the looting at the grocery store, the shootout at the apartments. His fingers pounded the keyboard, shutting down cameras. The screens winked off one by one. He unplugged what he could, then wiped the keys down with the hem of his shirt and ran to the landing. In the foyer, Bill tapped his palm while Craig shook his head, skin bulging on the back of his neck.
"Cameras are down," Raymond said. "Still don't know how to shut off the alarm."
"It's okay," Bill waved. "We'll be out before they're back."
Craig strode straight for the paintings, shoes thumping tile. He yanked the frames from the walls, spraying paint and plaster, tiny nails clicking off into corners, and leaned the pieces beside the front doors. Bill hefted a bronze statue of a stylized penguin and set it in the foyer with a tile-chipping clunk. He raised his black brows at Raymond at the top of the stairs.
"Come on, kid. Steal till you can't steal no more."
On moving to the house in Redondo, Raymond had imagined he'd be able to build a fat financial cushion selling off his mom's old things. After a few weeks of cleaning, sorting, and combing the internet, he sold a box of long-limbed, creepy-eyed boudoir dolls for $100. Drunk with Mia, he'd rifled the silverware drawers, peering at the backs of his grandmother's Depression-era spoons and forks for the names of their manufacturers, grinning like a fool when he found the silver alone was worth thousands, that a set of the right sterling could hold them afloat for a good six months. The next morning, he called an antiques dealer. Scheduled a visit later in the week. Inside their living room, the dealer pursed his lips, mustache fluffing, and told him it was nothing but plate.
In the house of Kevin Murckle, Hollywood producer, drug-runner, Raymond went straight for the kitchen.
The silverware disappeared into his double-layered trash bags with an avalanche of screeching metal. He twisted the bags' necks, tied them off, walked them up front. Craig and Bill lifted the flatscreen from the wall, sweat beading their brows, and deposited it by the door. Raymond bounced upstairs, heart racing, and opened Murckle's bedroom door.
He could hear the breakers curling in the dark, their breath-like advance and retreat on the rocks below the cliff. He clicked on the light. The bed was a round red lozenge, maroon silk sheets puddled at its foot. Bamboo shades covered the windows, flanked by vents that let in the smell of salt and seaweed. In the teak dresser, Raymond found gold watches that weighed as much as his foot. Small gem ear studs. Rings of a strange deep silver. He stepped back, pockets sagging. Was it okay for him to take this just because Murckle was an asshole? Amendment: an asshole who owed him money. And had put his freedom and life at risk without informing him of those risks. Too, some unknown quantity of the man's money was earned through drug sales. Like Raymond's dad had said, when you try to take advantage of someone, you open yourself up to be taken advantage of.
He rubbed three of the five rings off on his shirt, returned them to the drawer. Replaced all but one of the watches. His pockets felt lighter.
A man shouted from downstairs.
Craig and Bill held guns on Murckle and Hu. Around them, the foyer and front room were piled with paintings, electronics, statues, upturned cushions, toppled chairs, bunched rugs, strewn papers.
"I'll tell you what's going on here." Craig's voice echoed through the vaults, the fine glass of the chandelier. "You hired us on to watch the place, then used us to deliver coke."
Murckle laughed. "That's anything new to you two?"
Craig muscled his pistol into Murckle's face. "How about a new hole through the back of your head?"
"No, I don't think so. My stylist is out of town."
"I only want to hear two more things out of you: where's your money, and where's your stuff."
Murckle laughed again and rolled his eyes. "If I had money, you think I would hire you three?"
Hu watched, stony as the cliffs below, while Craig leveled the pistol at the assistant's face. "Give it up or he gives up the ghost."
"Go ahead," Murckle shrugged. "Would you be kind enough to shoot him in the chest instead? I always thought I'd have him stuffed."
Raymond started down the steps. "Craig—"
Craig clicked back the hammer. "Give it up, you inscrutable fuck."
Hu flinched, lips pulled back in a silent snarl. "There is a safe beneath the third stone of the path in the back yard."
"You son of a bitch," Murckle said through a disbelieving grin.
Bill pointed the gun at the ceiling. "What's the combo?"
"36-24-36," Hu said.
"I'm taking anything they steal out of your pay," Murckle said.
Craig swiveled the gun to Murckle's face, his triceps swelling like an incoming wave. "You think you can take and take and take and the money will keep you safe. You know what the best part of this is? Everyone's too busy dying to give a fuck."
Murckle's jowls sagged like a shirt in need of a
wash. The crash of the gun pounded from the high, bare walls. Murckle's head snapped back, exit-blood fanning the white carpet, a limp stream gushing from the hole in front. His legs folded beneath him with a wet pop. Raymond tried to step backwards, caught his heels on the stairs, and thumped to his ass. Hu shuddered away, blinking and licking his lips. On the floor, Murckle's left hand wiggled like a shoelace being drawn across a carpet.
Hu let out a long, shaky breath. Craig turned and shot him three times in the chest.
Bill threw up his hands. "Craig!"
"What? He was Murckle's right hand here. Guilt by association."
Bill shook his head at the floor and put away his gun. "What if he was lying about the safe combo?"
"Oh. Shit." Craig wiped his nose, jerked his chin at the piles of paintings and TVs and laptops. "Well, we'll still have all that."
Bill considered the paintings. "Least it's abstract. They won't even notice the blood."
The step creaked under Raymond's descent. Craig's shiny scalp swiveled. "Where you going?"
"Home." Raymond's chest felt filled with motes of painless light. "To my wife."
Craig shook his head. "See, the problem is I can't let you do that."
"It's all right." Raymond took another step. Craig raised his pistol.
"What the hell you doing?" Bill said. "You think he was in on it, too? He's the one who tipped me off."
"I know he's fine on that. I also know he witnessed us kill three men tonight."
Raymond gave his head a tight shake. "I'm not judging."
"That's comforting, but you know who will? The judge you're put in front of."
Bill lifted his hands to his waist, palms down. "Craig."
Craig's eyes flickered and his jaw hardened. "I'm keeping us safe, Bill. It's all right."
"You shoot that boy, I will leave you. This is no joke."
Craig's mouth drooped open, slow as a sunset. "You kidding me?"
"I just explicitly said it wasn't a joke. Do you ever listen to me?"
His jawbone bulged the thick skin beneath his ear. "You're willing to put us at risk over this guy?"
"Murckle could have landed me in jail," Raymond said. "He almost got us killed tonight. You think I care if he's dead?"
Bill smiled with half his mouth. "I wouldn't say there's any 'if' about it."
Craig craned back his neck, teeth bared, and stuffed his gun in the back of his pants. He closed on Raymond. His stubble looked like it could scour pans. "Your word. Give it to me."
"It's yours."
"Come on, kid, convince me. Tell me you won't tell a soul. Not your wife. Not Jesus Himself if he took you out for a beer at Dodger Stadium."
Raymond raised his right hand. "No one."
Craig drew back, giving Bill a look. "This lands us in jail, I'm finding me a nice Aryan boy."
"Thanks," Raymond blurted. He stepped over Hu's silent body, smelling copper and feces. "I'm going home. Good luck."
Bill waved. Craig stared at nothing. Raymond opened the front door. Fog wisped from the ocean, slicking the rails along the porch steps. On the way to his car, Raymond had to fight to keep from running. He drove downhill at a crawl, lights blooming the fog, imagining his brakes would fail at every stop. He parked at the esplanade and took the ramp to the beach where he watched the breakers until his shoulders quit shaking.
"Where have you been?" Mia said when he stepped through the door. She grinned from the recliner, lit only by the pale blue light of the television. "It's past midnight."
"The boss kept me late."
"Hunting the undead? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"No," he said. "But I may have seen a few get made."
She grinned again, mistaking it for a joke. As he stood silent, she covered her elbows with her palms. "What are you talking about?"
"We just needed money so bad."
"What happened?"
He closed his eyes. "I don't want to tell you. But if I don't, that will it easier for me to make the same mistakes again."
He gave her the broad strokes—the inadvertent drug-dealing, their plan to extricate themselves, the chaos in LA and then in the mansion in Palos Verdes. Confessing felt like a breeze through his body, like the events he described had happened to someone else.
After he finished, Mia stared at her hands for several seconds. "But you didn't kill anyone?"
He shook his head hard enough to dislodge a tooth. "No. Of course not. I was just there."
"That's crazy. That's crazy, Raymond."
"Should I have done something to stop them?"
"What could you have done?"
"Gone to the police. Or quit going in to Murckle's before it got that crazy. We could have picked up and driven to Albuquerque. I could have done a million things different."
She sniffled, steepling her fingers over the soft point of her nose. "It's different when you're living it, isn't it? I think it's a lot easier to know what you should have done after it's happened."
"Yeah," he said: but wasn't that just another excuse? He felt better, though, like he always did when he spoke up, when he confronted feelings and doubts; he always felt stronger, capable of grappling any problem; if nothing else, of resolving to do better next time. And Mia, she still loved him. She stared at the TV a minute before unpausing it. A cartoon kid made a fart joke.
She glanced at Raymond. "You know what I read today about how it got its name? The Panhandler?"
"What's that?"
"It nickel-and-dimes you. Drop by drop—your blood, I mean. Once it's weakened you far enough..." She spread her hands in front of her in a gushing motion.
He told her he needed to go to bed, but he thought maybe that was how you lost yourself, too: bit by bit, by nickels and dimes, until one day you look inside and there's nothing left at all. But money, you could always earn more. If you lost what was inside, could you save it back up?
* * *
Like his long night at Murckle's, the end of the world came too fast to know what to do.
The city burned. Raymond and Mia stayed indoors, curtains drawn, and followed the news on their laptops. When that grew exhausting they watched horror movies over the Xbox with the lights turned off and the sound low enough to hear footsteps in the driveway. When they went to bed Raymond placed the revolver in the dresser and locked the bedroom door. Sirens dopplered down the PCH night and day.
Ambulances and cop cars came to their formerly quiet street as well, double parking in front of Cape Cod manors and haciendoid mansions while the paramedics gathered up the bodies and piled them in back.
Raymond's email overflowed with mass-mailed funeral notices, with scared and sentimental goodbyes from friends he hadn't seen since high school, with strange, fevered queries from total strangers. At first he read each one; later, he skimmed; later yet, he deleted them unread. Mia's parents pleaded for them to come back to Washington, but nonessential flights had been grounded to try to limit the spread of the disease. Trying to drive the thousand-plus miles struck Raymond as beyond suicidal.
Anyway, it looked like there might be hope. The power stayed on. The water stayed on. The garbage collectors missed their pickup, which Raymond was glad for; he pulled the empty juice and soda bottles from the recycling and filled them with water and stored them in the basement. He and Mia began rationing food, shifting most of their meat to the freezer and eating crumbled bacon over rice they fried in the bacon grease. On the news, reports of cures shriveled away, replaced by increasingly vague international death counts presented with little commentary and by federal advice to stay indoors, minimize contact with the infected, and to report household deaths immediately.
"I don't think it's going to get better," Mia said softly during the end credits of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.
"I don't know, I'd say the credits are a big step up from the rest of the movie."
"Not that." She sat in the recliner with her knees to her chest, eyes bright in the T
V-washed darkness, staring at the wall as if a cryptic threat were written on the dirty pink paint they'd never gotten around to redoing. "The world."
"Oh. That." He leaned forward, shoulders hunched, room tilting. "Just the world we know, right? Not the Earth itself."
She drummed her bare feet against the floor. "Yep. Still there."
"And so are we."
Mia smiled through the shadows. "Don't say that's all that matters."
"Isn't it?"
"Will life be worth living without ice cream?"
"Who says it's the end of ice cream? We'll still have cows. We'll still have snow." He stood, crossed to his laptop. "Guess we'd better start downloading survival guides before the internet disappears, huh?"
"See if there's anything about how to sew tires into coats."
He smiled. The days passed same and strange; locked in the house, he could almost pretend he was in the midst of a long weekend, happily isolated, with and wanting no one but his wife.
The moment they made plans, that illusion was shattered. They decided they would wait for the Panhandler to die down, only leaving the house to forage when they were down to a few days' food. They'd take the car, grab canned food, water, pasta, rice, and anything else that could be cooked simply over a fire or in boiling water. Longer-term, they'd find out whether any of their neighbors were still alive and in residence. Try to find walkie-talkies, as many batteries as they could carry, establish some sort of neighborhood watch. Keep the radio tuned to emergency channels. Put together a couple survival packs and be ready to move in minutes if things got worse.
The sirens thinned day by day. Within a week, they stopped altogether.
Raymond woke one night to the beeping keen of the smoke detector. He burst from bed and grabbed the revolver; but it was useless against the smoke and fire beyond the door.
10
Walt knifed feet-first into the water. An icy fist closed over his head. The cold of the water crushed him, clamping his muscles; he gasped, plastering his palm across his mouth and nose. He thrashed his feet but couldn't tell which way was up. His head throbbed. He burst from the water just before his lungs began to sear.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 9