Life or Death

by Michael Robotham

  About the Author

  Michael Robotham started his career as a journalist but then became a ghostwriter, writing many bestselling autobiographies in collaboration with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, adventurers and showbusiness personalities. His thrillers have been translated into twenty-two languages and he has twice won Australia’s Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel. He was shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger in 2007 and 2008 and was also shortlisted for the inaugural ITV3 Thriller Awards.

  Also by Michael Robotham

  The Suspect

  The Drowning Man (aka Lost)

  The Night Ferry

  Shatter

  Bombproof

  Bleed for Me

  The Wreckage

  Say You’re Sorry

  Watching You

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  ISBN: 9781405530682

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Bookwrite Pty 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Sphere

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Robotham

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Epilogue

  For Isabella

  Acknowledgements

  As always there are people to thank: editors, agents and publishers. Some are repeat offenders, such as Mark Lucas, Ursula Mackenzie, Georg Reuchlein, David Shelley, Josh Kendall, Lucy Malagoni, Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough and Richard Pine.

  Others are new additions to the ranks, in particular Mark Pryor, a District Attorney and crime writer, born in Liverpool and working in Texas, whose advice on legal matters was invaluable.

  Anyone who writes about Texas is aware of the giants who have gone before and I am grateful to William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, James Lee Burke, Ben Fountain and Phillip Meyer – along with the actors who narrated their prose in audio form. Their works helped me immerse myself in Texas and hopefully capture the rhythm of the language.

  Finally I wish to thank my three daughters, who are growing up but mercifully not away from me. This book is dedicated to Bella, the youngest, who often feels left out but I promised I would save the best for her.

  Their mother, my wife, also insists on being thanked, even though I’m running out of words to describe the woman who has been with me for thirty years. She knows I love her, but will tell her anyway. ‘I love you.’

  Life can be magnificent and overwhelming – That is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.

  ALBERT CAMUS

  To be, or not to be: that is the question.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  1

  Audie Palmer had never learned how to swim. As a boy when he went fishing with his father on Lake Conroe he was told that being a strong swimmer was dangerous because it gave a person a false sense of security. Most folks drowned because they struck out for shore thinking they could save themselves, while those who survived were found clinging to the wreckage.

  ‘So that’s what you do,’ his daddy said, ‘you hang on like a limpet.’

  ‘What’s a limpet?’ Audie asked.

  His daddy pondered this. ‘OK, so you hang on like a one-armed man clinging to a cliff while he’s being tickled.’

  ‘I’m ticklish.’

  ‘I know.’

  And his daddy tickled him until the whole boat rocked from side to side and any fish in the vicinity swam into dark holes and Audie spotted his pants with pee.

  This became a running joke between the two of them – not the pee, but the examples of holding on.

  ‘You got to hold on like a giant squid hugging a sperm whale,’ Audie might say. ‘You got to hold on like a frightened kitten on a sweater,’ his daddy replied. ‘You got to hold on like a baby being breastfed by Marilyn Monroe.’

  And so it went on …

  Standing in the middle of a dirt road some time after midnight, Audie recalls these fishing trips with fondness and thinks how much he misses his daddy. The moon is blooming overhead, pregnant and white, creating a silver path on the surface of the lake. He can’t see the far side, but he knows there must be one. His future lies on the distant shore, just as death stalks him on this one.

  Headlights swing around a bend, accelerating toward him. Audie plunges down a ravine, turning his face to the ground so it won’t reflect the light. The truck hurtles past, kicking up a cloud of dust that balloons and settles around him until he can feel it on his teeth. Getting to his hands and knees, Audie crawls through the tangle of brambles, dragging the plastic gallon containers behind him. At any moment he expects to hear someone shouting and the telltale click of a bullet sliding into a chamber.

  Emerging at the edge of the lake, he scoops mud in his hands and smears it over his face and arms. The bottles knock emptily against his knees. He has tied eight of them together, lashing them with scraps of rope and strips of torn bed sheet.

  He takes off his shoes, laces them together and hangs them over his neck. Then he knots the calico laundry bag around his waist. There are cuts on his hands from the razor wire, but they’re not bleeding badly. He tears his shirt into bandages and wraps them around his palms, tightening the knots with his teeth.

&n
bsp; More vehicles pass on the road above him. Headlights. Voices. Soon they’ll bring the dogs. Wading into deeper water, Audie wraps his arm around the bottles, hugging them to his chest. He begins to kick, trying not to create too big a splash until he gets further from shore.

  Using the stars to navigate, he tries to swim in a straight line. Choke Canyon Reservoir is about three and a half miles across at this point. There’s an island roughly halfway, or maybe less, if he survives that long.

  As the minutes and hours pass, he loses track of time. Twice he flips over and feels himself drowning until he hugs the containers tighter to his chest and rolls back above the surface. A couple of the bottles drift away. One springs a leak. The bandages on his hands have long ago washed loose.

  His mind wanders, drifting from memory to memory – places and people, some he liked, others he feared. He thinks of his childhood, playing ball with his brother. Sharing a Slurpee with a girl called Phoebe Carter who let him put his hand in her whiter-than-white panties in the back row of the cinema when he was fourteen. They were watching Jurassic Park and a T. rex had just eaten a blood-sucking lawyer who was trying to hide in a port-a-potty.

  Audie doesn’t remember much else about the film, but Phoebe Carter lives on in his memory. Her father was a boss at the battery-recycling plant and drove around West Dallas in a Mercedes when everyone else had beat-to-shit cars with more rust than paint. Mr Carter didn’t like his daughter hanging out with boys like Audie, but Phoebe wouldn’t be told. Where is she now? Married. Pregnant. Happy. Divorced. Working two jobs. Dyeing her hair. Turned to flab. Watching Oprah.

  Another shard of memory – he can see his mama standing at the kitchen sink singing ‘Skip to My Lou’ while she washed the dishes. She used to make up her own verses about flies in the buttermilk and kittens in the wool. His father would come in from the garage and use the same soapy water to wash the dirt and grease from his hands.

  George Palmer, dead now, was a bear-like man with hands the size of baseball mitts and freckles across his nose like a cloud of black flies had swarmed into his face and got stuck there. Handsome. Doomed. Men in Audie’s family had always died young – mostly in mining or rig accidents. Cave-ins. Methane-gas explosions. Industrial accidents. His paternal grandfather had his skull crushed by a twelve-foot piece of drilling pipe that was thrown two hundred feet by a blast. His uncle Thomas was buried with eighteen men. They didn’t bother trying to bring the bodies out.

  Audie’s father had bucked the trend by living to fifty-five. He saved enough money on the rigs to buy a garage with two gas pumps, a workshop and a hydraulic lift. He worked six days a week for twenty years and put three kids through school, or would have done if Carl had bothered trying.

  George had the deepest, softest voice of any man Audie had ever met – like gravel turning in a barrel of honey – but he had less and less to say as the years rolled by and his whiskers grew white and cancer ate away at his organs. Audie wasn’t there for the funeral. He wasn’t there for the disease. Sometimes he wondered if a broken heart had been the reason, rather than a lifetime of cigarettes.

  Audie rolls beneath the surface again. The water is warm and bitter and comes in everywhere, in his mouth and throat and ears. He wants to fight for air, but exhaustion drags him under. Legs burning, arms aching, he’s not going to make it across. This is where it ends. Opening his eyes, he sees an angel dressed in white robes that billow and ripple around her as though she’s flying rather than swimming. She spreads her arms to embrace him, naked beneath the translucent cloth. He can smell her perfume and feel the heat of her body pressed against his chest. Her eyes half open, her lips parted, waiting for a kiss.

  Then she slaps him hard across the face and says, ‘Swim, you bastard!’

  Thrashing to the surface, gasping for breath, he clutches at the plastic containers before they float away. His chest heaves and water spurts from his mouth and nose. Coughing. Blinking. Focusing. He can see a reflection of the stars on the water and the tips of dead trees silhouetted against the moon. So he kicks again, moving forward, imagining the ghostly shape below him in the water, following him like a sunken moon.

  And at some point, hours later, his feet touch rocks and he drags himself ashore, collapsing on a narrow sand beach, kicking the bottles away. The night air has a dense feral odour, still radiating heat from the day. Mist hangs on the water in wisps that could be the ghosts of drowned fishermen.

  He lies on his back and looks at the moon disappearing behind the clouds that seem to be floating in deep space. Closing his eyes, he feels the weight of the angel as she straddles his thighs. She leans forward, her breath on his cheek, her lips close to his ear, whispering, ‘Remember your promise.’

  2

  The sirens are sounding. Moss tries to go back to his dream but heavy boots are ringing on the metal stairs; fists grip the iron railings and dust shivers on the treads. It’s too early. Morning count isn’t normally until eight. Why the siren? The cell door opens, sliding sideways with a dull metallic clang.

  Moss opens his eyes and groans. He’d been dreaming about his wife Crystal and his boxer shorts are tented with his morning glory. I still got it, he thinks, knowing what Crystal would say: ‘You gonna use that thing or spend all day looking at it?’

  Prisoners are ordered from their cells, scratching at navels, cupping testicles and wiping grit from their eyes. Some emerge willingly while others have to be encouraged with a swinging bat. There are cells on three levels enclosing a rectangular yard with safety nets to stop people from attempting suicide or being thrown off the walkways. The ceiling has a tangle of pipes that gurgle and knock as though something sinister lives inside them.

  Moss hauls himself up and out. Barefoot. He stands on the landing with his face to the wall. Grunts. Farts. He’s a big man, softening in the middle, but solid across the shoulders due to the push-ups and chin-ups he does a dozen times a day. His skin is a milk-chocolate brown and his eyes seem too big for his face, making him look younger than his forty-eight years.

  Moss glances to his left. Junebug is leaning his head on the wall, trying to sleep standing up. His tattoos leap and snarl on his forearms and chest. The former meth addict has a narrow face and a moustache trimmed into wide wings that stretch halfway across his cheeks.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  Junebug opens his eyes. ‘Sounds like an escape.’

  Moss looks in the other direction. Along the length of the landing, he sees dozens of prisoners standing outside their cells. Everyone is out now. Not everyone. Moss leans to his right, trying to peer inside the next cell. The guards are coming.

  ‘Hey, Audie, get up, man,’ he mutters.

  Silence.

  From the upper level he hears a voice ring out. Someone arguing. A scuffle develops until the Ninja Turtles storm up the stairway and dish out a beating.

  Moss steps closer to Audie’s cell. ‘Wake up, man.’

  Nothing.

  He turns to Junebug. Their eyes meet, silently asking the question.

  Moss takes two steps to the right, aware that the guards could be watching. He peers into the darkness of Audie’s cell and can make out the rack bolted to the wall. The basin. The toilet. No warm body or cold one.

  A guard yells from above. ‘All present and accounted for.’

  A second voice comes from below. ‘All present and accounted for.’

  The hats and bats are coming. Inmates flatten their bodies against the walls.

  ‘Up here!’ yells a guard.

  Boots follow.

  Two of the uniforms are searching Audie’s cell as though there’s somewhere he could possibly be hiding – under a pillow, or behind the deodorant. Moss risks turning his head and sees Deputy Warden Grayson reach the top of the stairs, sweating from the climb. Fatter than Albert, his belly hangs over his polished leather belt and more rolls of skin are trying to smother his collar.

  Grayson gets to Audie’s cell. He looks inside and takes a br
eath, making a sucking sound with his lips. Unhooking his baton, he slaps it into his palm and turns to Moss.

  ‘Where’s Palmer?’

  ‘I don’t know, suh.’

  The baton swings into the back of Moss’s knees, dropping him like a felled tree. Grayson is standing over him.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  Moss hesitates, trying to remember. The end of the baton is driven into his right side, just below his ribs. The world flushes up and down in his eyes.

  ‘Chow time,’ he gasps.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A shimmer seems to rise off Grayson’s face. ‘Lock the place down. I want him found.’

  ‘What about breakfast?’ an officer asks.

  ‘They can wait.’

  Moss is dragged into his cell. The doors close. For the next two hours he lies on his rack, listening to the prison buildings quiver and groan. Now they’re in the workshop. Before that it was the laundry and the library.

  From the next cell, he hears Junebug tapping on the wall. ‘Hey, Moss!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You think he got out?’

  Moss doesn’t answer.

  ‘Why would he do something like that on his last night?’

  Still Moss remains silent.

  ‘I always said that sonbitch was crazy.’

  The guards are coming again. Junebug goes back to his rack. Moss listens, feeling his sphincter opening and closing. The boots stop moving outside his cell.

  ‘On your feet! Against the back wall! Spread ’em!’

  Three men enter. Moss has his wrists cuffed and looped through a chain that is wrapped around his waist, while another tethers his ankles. He can only shuffle. His trousers are undone and he doesn’t have time to do up the buttons. He has to hold them up with one hand. Prisoners are whooping in their cells and hollering messages. Moss walks through shafts of sunlight and catches a glimpse of police cars outside the main gates where stars of light reflect from their polished surfaces.

  When he reaches the administration wing, he’s told to take a seat. Guards on either side say nothing. Moss can see their profiles, the peaked caps, sunglasses and tan shirts with dark-brown epaulettes. He can also hear voices inside the adjacent meeting room. Occasionally one utterance rises above the others. Accusations are being made. Blame apportioned.