by Barry Graham
“Sorry,” she managed to say.
“I hate you, Ponto.” Then David was laughing just as hard.
When they finally got a grip on themselves, David said, “I wasn’t kidding, though. I mean, okay, it’s funny, I admit it. But that’s not normal life, you know? And I just don’t want to be the guy who looks for the worst people and the worst places and then goes there.”
“That makes sense, but what brought it on?”
“You had something to do with it. I’ve felt that way for a while, but getting with you just brought it home to me. Hanging out with you – that’s what I want to be doing, not chasing down Hell’s Angels or watching cartoon characters take it up the ass.”
“So, if you weren’t a reporter, what would you do?”
“See, that’s the problem. I’m damned if I know.”
David fell asleep before Laura. She lay there and looked at him, thinking about his strange innocence. She didn’t know how to name what she felt at that moment, because to name it would have been to make it less than it was.
When they woke it was light outside, but not for long. The morning turned dark, and the air suddenly felt wet. Then the rain came down like bullets from an automatic weapon, drilling the building with such force that it felt as though the windows might break. The smell of the wet city filled the apartment.
Laura laughed and sat up. “All right! Monsoon season!”
David kissed her ear. “You like the rain?”
“Who doesn’t like it? We only get it a couple times a year.”
She got up, threw on a loose, casual dress and then went out to the balcony. David put on his jeans and followed her. It was a covered balcony, so they had some shelter. She stood there laughing as she watched the rain eclipse everything. He stood behind her and put his arms around her, and she leaned back against him.
Frank stood outside in the street and let the rain soak him, until even his underwear and socks were heavy with water. He wished it could soak him all the way though, through his skin, through all of him. He stood there and watched it clean the city and feed the earth, watched it bow the non-native palm trees, watched as all the traffic slowed down to a walking pace. He knew the rain would last for hours, and he wanted to stay out in it for as long as it lasted, but he knew he couldn’t, knew he wasn’t that free, and so he splashed his way back to the halfway house.
Inside, a guy was sitting at a table with an unlit, handmade cigarette in his mouth, staring at his tattooed fingers. He looked up at Frank and didn’t say anything.
A wet dress and a wet pair of jeans lay on the floor of Laura’s bedroom, and the sound of the rain almost drowned out the noises made by Laura and David on the bed, Laura about to come for a long time, but never able to stop telling herself a story about something she wanted or something she didn’t want and not even knowing what it was.
Later, they took a long shower together after hanging David’s jeans up to dry, and later still they drove through the rain to a restaurant in Guadalupe and ate albondigas and drank iced water.
“You’re pretty underwhelmed by the storm, huh?” Laura said.
“I like it okay, but I can’t get all that excited about rain. Remember, I’m spoiled. Look at where I grew up.”
“I didn’t think it rained all that much in Texas. Isn’t it desert, like here?”
“Ever thought about becoming a geography teacher? The part I come from is subtropical, and Corpus is right on the ocean. Scary storms aplenty.”
“Sounds cool.”
“Tell that to the natives. Want to go there with me sometime?”
“You’ll never, ever hear me say no to anything involving a beach.”
“We can go down there whenever you like. I still got a lot of friends there.”
It was all so good, everything, and it made Frank sorry for everything that had ever happened, everything he had ever done. He thought about it all, especially the things nobody knew about. If these things had been known, he would never have gotten out. He’d have spent the same length of time locked up, and then his appeals would have run out and they’d have had a clemency hearing and then strapped him down and put a needle in him and filled him with poison while an audience watched him die. He knew all this, and he knew he deserved it, and he was sorry. They had hurt him so much, and yet that was only for what they knew about, what they could prove he’d done. When he thought about how they weren’t hurting him anymore, how they had let him try to live, and what he had taken away from other people, Frank was so grateful and so sorry.
Sitting in a Denny’s, drinking coffee and looking at the world, he wished that nothing bad would ever happen to anybody, that everybody would just be kind.
Two young guys in a booth near him were talking about time spent in jail. One of them was about to go back in, because he had been convicted of driving with a revoked license. “I got to get smart,” he told his friend. “I mean, I ain’t gonna quit driving – I can’t, I gotta get to work – but I gotta stop getting pulled over. Gotta stop breaking the damn speed limit all the time.”
“Yeah,” his friend said. “I gotta stop breaking jaws all the time.” And he laughed at his own wit, high on his own fumes, so impressed with what a hard case he was.
You stupid fucking kid, Frank thought. Why do you want to do that? Why do you want to hurt people? What does that get you? Can’t you just be nice to people? He looked at the guy and he saw all the misery he would cause, to other people and to himself, all the stupidity and cruelty, and then he couldn’t look at him anymore because it just hurt too much.
He got more coffee. Then he opened a pack of stationery he’d bought, and began writing a letter to Laura.
FOUR
Laura sat at a table in the Rhythm Room with Pat and some other people from Capital Habeas – three lawyers, an investigator and an administrator. It was an island of Ralph Lauren in an ocean of vintage and Levi’s. A local band was onstage. Laura had told her former colleagues that she’d acquired a boyfriend, but not who he was, so when Pat groaned and rolled his eyes she knew David had walked in.
Pat stood up as David reached their table.
“Hey,” David said. “How’s it going?”
“Look,” Pat said. “I don’t want to be rude, but take no for an answer. Nobody here is interested in talking to you.”
David pointed at Laura. “I think she might be.”
“Yeah,” Laura said. “I might be.” She stood up, kissed him, and motioned to the seat she’d saved for him.
As David sat down, it struck him that this might be the first time he’d ever seen lawyers shocked into silence. For a moment, they all just sat there and looked at each other while Laura laughed at them.
“I’m guessing you haven’t mentioned me yet,” David said to her.
“I thought I’d wait and let you share the ridicule.”
Lee Cetrine looked at David and said, “You’re dating her? Really?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Man...” Lee shook his head. “You know what she’s like? I mean, I worked with her, and I gotta tell you... She’s probably the most worthless human being I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.”
“I don’t know about that,” David said. “I don’t know that I’d go as far as to call Laura a human being.”
“I hear you,” Pat said. “Still, Lee has a point. Laura’s not even fit to be exhibited in a freak show.”
“Yeah, she is,” said Christine, the administrator.
“I guess this is going to be a long night,” Laura said. “I haven’t told David what retards I hang out with yet. I’m trying to let him find out slowly, so see if you can behave yourselves.”
Marky Moorhead was sitting in his backyard, drinking beer and listening to the radio, when they came for him. There was no warning, nothing to tell him they were arriving. It seemed to him that they were suddenly just there, in his yard with their guns on him, when all there had been a second ago was the hot moo
nlight and the smell of orange blossom.
The Capital Habeas crew got so wasted by mid-evening that David privately named them the Habeas Corpses. At first they had seemed awkward about talking in front of him, beyond banter, but as they drank more and David assured them that nothing they said was on the record, they seemed to relax. Laura noticed, though, that David became more reserved as the others opened up. She wondered if it was just that he was sober and they weren’t, or if something else was getting to him.
“You okay?” she asked him.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You seem kind of subdued.”
“I’m not a sub-dude, I’m an uber-dude. Just tired.”
“Want to go?”
“Soon, if that’s okay.”
“Yeah, it’s cool.”
“I take it you’re coming with me?”
“Yep.”
“You okay to drive?”
“Yeah, but I’ll be riding with you. I left my car at home. Pat picked me up and brought me here.”
“Cool.” David surveyed the others at the table. “Are those guys okay to drive?”
“Nope. But they never are, and they always do.”
When Laura announced that she and David were leaving, there were loud protests. “It’s not even midnight, and you’re running away with her already?” Lee growled at David.
“Lee...” said Laura. “If you could go home and have sex with me all night, would you be staying here till closing time?”
Marky didn’t know what to do. There were four of them, all with guns pointed at him, and none of them showed any sign of making a mistake, anything that would give him a chance. They spoke to each other in Spanish, and when he tried to speak to them it seemed that either they didn’t speak English or else they just weren’t interested in speaking to him.
He felt something, and he didn’t know if it was fear. It felt more like two opposite certainties; everything inside him told him he must do something, and everything that surrounded him told him there was nothing he could do.
“So... how did you like them?” Laura said as David started the car.
“I liked Pat.”
“Not the others?”
“They’re okay. I didn’t dislike them, but listening to them was really starting to piss me off.”
“How come?”
“Well, to hear them tell it, it sounds like the finest, most intelligent, most compassionate, most sensitive people in the state are all on death row.”
She laughed. “Come on.”
“I’m not kidding. Your buddies are exactly like the fucking conservatives they hate so much. Talk to a cop about a murder, and they’ll tell you it’s all the fault of the perp, the perp’s just scum and that’s why it happened, as simple as that.”
“I know. I used to talk like that when I was a cop. I never figured out if I actually believed it.”
“But tonight these guys were doing exactly the same thing. The only person who bears no responsibility for the murder is the guy who did it. It’s everybody else’s fault – the prosecutors are bastards, the judges, the murderer’s parents. And the way Lee was taking about the victims... Christ.”
“I’m glad you didn’t say any of that in front of them.”
“I nearly did. Look, you and I know damn well that what causes most murders is that the wrong person meets the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong fucking time. But, shit, everybody needs to take some responsibility.”
Laura thought about the executions she’d witnessed. She’d seen people die before, of cancer and A.I.D.S., but they were so sick that their deaths made sense and in some way were even a relief. Her clients weren’t sick. Healthy, robust-looking men tucked up on gurneys and covered by sheets to hide the catheters in their arms, the cosmetic nature of the procedure gave them the air of a person lying in bed on a Saturday morning, waiting for someone to bring him a cup of coffee. For reasons she could never explain even to herself, that was more horrible than the most bloody crime scene she had ever been to.
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
“Hell, I’m not making a judgment call,” David said. “I don’t think there’s anything I’ve ever heard of that’s so cruel or so stupid that I wouldn’t be capable of it myself.”
It’s called “bone tickling”, and Marky had heard of it. They take an ice-pick and use it to penetrate the skin, and then they scrape it along the bones, paying particular attention to the joints. Marky knew the name and the details, but he didn’t know what it meant until now. The name and the details couldn’t tell you what it meant. What it meant was bawling and yelling for your mommy to help you and to God and to Jesus and to anybody and saying please a hundred times to the men with the ice-picks and your skin tearing off because you pulled so hard on the ropes that held you down and you not even feeling it because the man was turning the pick around inside your elbow and that was all you could feel and your scream never seemed to stop and you wanted to faint and you wanted to die but you didn’t, not for a long time.
And then you saw the axe, and you saw them laughing and you knew they were going to start with what was left of your arms.
David and Laura had changed the subject and were now arguing about the difficulty of pissing in public.
Laura said she had to piss and couldn’t wait until they got to David’s place, which was a few minutes away. David said there was nowhere along the way that would make for a discreet stop.
“Guys have it so easy,” Laura said. “If it was you, you could just jump out and piss at the side of the car, and stop and zip up if anybody saw you.”
“Spoken like a true chick. Trust me, being male ain’t the promised land of urination. You’ve got to worry about getting it on your shoes or your pants. It takes concentration, even in a bathroom. You’d be surprised at the number of guys who prefer to sit down to piss.”
She looked at him. “Are you one of them?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “Maybe.”
“I never had a guy admit to that before. David, this has brought us closer.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“Sure, once we get to your place. If I don’t have an accident first.”
When David pulled into his driveway, Laura said, “Give me your keys.” He did, and she jumped out and sprinted for the house. David was sitting in the living room when she emerged from the bathroom.
“Feel better?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m surprised that happened. You didn’t seem to drink all that much.”
“I didn’t. It was the water I had just before we left.”
“Ah.”
“You know, arguing with you is pretty cool. You don’t make me mad.”
“Well, we’ve been through the death penalty and public urination. Anything else we can bicker about tonight, or should we go to bed?”
“Let’s go to bed.”
Before they finally slept, she said, “I probably won’t be here when you wake up.”
“Why not?”
“Since I start my job on Monday, I should spend tomorrow doing some stuff by myself. So I’m gonna head home as soon as I wake up.”
“Makes sense to me. But if you want to wake me in the morning and have your way with me before you leave, that’s fine too.”
“Yeah, right. It’d take an hour to wake you up.”
She did anyway.
FIVE
On Monday morning, David was sitting in his office, reading the A.P. wires online, when his cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number on the caller I.D., and he thought it might be Laura calling to tell him how her first day at the new job was going.
It wasn’t her. It was a Mesa homicide detective who’d been one of David’s sources for a while. The reason the phone number was unfamiliar was that he was calling from a public phone because he didn’t want his association with David appearing on any records, even private cell phone records.
“I though you’d want to k
now,” he said. “It looks like Mad Marky got what was coming to him. I guess the narcos don’t like the bikers competing with them, so they made an example of him.”
“Is he dead?”
“Sounds like it. I’m on my way to his house. That’s where he is.”
“Thanks. I’ll head over there now.”
“When you get there, you don’t know me any better than you should.”
“Of course. Thanks.”
“You owe me.”
“I know it. See you in a bit.”
David ran out of the building, stopping for ten seconds at his editor’s desk to tell him what he’d heard. He got on the freeway and drove as fast as he could without killing himself or someone else, watching for cops who might pull him over. When he got to Marky’s house, a few cops were in the front yard, and the yellow tape was in place.
“Is he dead?” David asked a uniformed cop.
“Yeah.” The cop’s voice shook. David had heard about what the Mexican drug traffickers – the narcotrafficantes – did to those who threatened them, and the sound of the cop’s voice and the look on the cop’s face made him want to walk away.
He stepped over the tape, ignoring the cops who told him not to, and walked up the driveway, where he saw the guy who had called him and who was obviously in charge of the scene.
“Hey, Detective –” David called to him.
He turned around and said, “How’re you doing? Regier, isn’t it?”
The cops who were about to grab David and cuff him backed off.
“What’s going on?” David said quietly.
“We’re just waiting for Crime Scene to get here.”
“Can I go in for a second? I won’t touch anything.”
“You don’t want to go in there.”
“Yeah, I do.”
The detective turned away from him.
“Thanks,” David said. “I’ll be quick.”
The hallway looked just like it had three days ago, but smelled different. The smell was a cross between that of a geriatric ward and that of a meat market. The living room was the same living room he had gotten drunk in while watching movies with Marky. He paused there for a few seconds, then went to the bedroom.