‘Like fate?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think we make the best of our bad luck and the most of our good luck.’
Audie squeezed her tightly and she squeezed him back and he felt the movement of her hip beneath her skirt.
‘You seem sad today. What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘My brother Carl.’ Audie kissed her hair. ‘We used to come here when we were kids. I thought it would be nice to see it again, but now I can’t wait to leave.’
‘There is a saying in El Salvador that memories keep us warm,’ she said, stroking his cheek, ‘but I don’t think that applies to you.’
It was late afternoon before they got on the road again. Audie planned to stop on the outskirts of Houston. He would call his mother in the morning. He didn’t want to visit her until he was sure that Urban hadn’t sent someone ahead to wait for him.
‘I need to do a wee,’ said Miguel.
‘Can you hold on?’
‘What do I hold?’
Audie pulled off the road. ‘OK sport, we’re going to do it behind a tree.’
‘Like cowboys.’
‘Yep, just like cowboys.’
They walked through the trees in the damp air, over a layered mat of dead leaves and pine needles. Mosquitoes rose in clouds from their footsteps.
‘Do you want me to hold you?’
‘No.’
Miguel stood with his legs apart, pushing out his groin, watching the thin golden stream splash against a tree trunk.
‘This is how big boys do it,’ he said.
‘Yes it is,’ said Audie.
The boy began to say something, but Audie’s attention was elsewhere. From somewhere that seemed to be high in the air, he heard the sound of sirens.
‘Is that a fire-truck?’ asked the boy.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Audie, who had looked over his shoulder, but couldn’t see further than the bend in the road.
The sirens were getting closer. Audie couldn’t tell which direction at first. He looked at Belita, who waved from the passenger seat of the Pontiac. Then he turned his head and saw a truck, the twin headlights blazing. It took a moment to realise how fast it was travelling, too quickly to take the bend. It veered to the wrong side of the road and the near-side tyres dug into the soft shoulder. The driver overcorrected and the truck slewed to the left. Audie could picture the man at the wheel, wrestling to get control and then throwing up his arms in that strange way people do when they’re trying to ward off a collision. It was too late. The truck tilted on two wheels for a moment and then toppled over, sliding sideways along the two-lane.
One moment the Pontiac was beside the road and the next it was gone. Audie heard the crunch of metal and convulsions of sparks and a booming sound. Time slowed down. Time stood still. With extraordinary effort, he bent and lifted Miguel, cradling him under his bottom like a toddler. He ran back through the trees until he reached the edge of the road.
He could see the truck, but not the car. He set Miguel down on his feet and grabbed his forearm, his fingers digging into the scant flesh. ‘Stay right there. Put your hand on the tree. Don’t let it go.’
‘Where’s Mommy?’
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Where did Mommy go?’
‘Don’t move.’
Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!
Running. Stumbling. He climbed the rise, trying to comprehend what had just happened. His eyes had been deceived. He would reach the car and find that everything was OK.
There were sirens and swirling lights behind him. The truck was lying on its side, ripped open as if something had exploded inside. Audie tried to breathe but his breath would not come. He saw the upturned Pontiac thirty yards further along the road. It didn’t look like a Pontiac any more. It didn’t look like a car. The twisted mound of metal had two wheels still turning in the air.
Audie screamed a name. He tried to open the remnants of a door, which seemed to be welded shut by the force of the impact. Lying flat on the road, he bent his body and slithered through the shattered rear window, across the collapsed roof of the Pontiac. Fuel soaked the front of his shirt and glass cut into his hands and knees.
Amid the confusion of torn wiring and twisted seats, he saw an arm and a hand with blood running down the fingers. For a split second he thought there was no body.
Gripping the seat above him, he dragged himself forward, almost dislocating his shoulder. Then he saw her. Her body was wedged beneath the dashboard, concertinaed unnaturally. He reached out and touched her face. Her eyes opened. Alive. Frightened.
‘What happened?’
‘An accident.’
‘Miguel?’
‘He’s fine.’
Fumes stung Audie’s eyes and caught at the back of his throat, making him want to gag. He could hear the leaking fuel sizzling as it spilled onto hot metal.
‘Can you move your legs?’
She wiggled her toes.
‘What about your fingers?’
She moved her fingers. Her arm was broken. Glass had lacerated her cheek and forehead.
She tried to move, but her legs were pinned by the crushed dashboard. Audie heard gunshots. There were two men in the truck. They had managed to crawl from the window and drop to the ground.
One of them spun around and then collapsed, clutching at his neck, blood running through his fingers. The other was hit almost at the same time, a bullet smashing into his knee. The uniformed police officer had a gun gripped in both hands, angled upwards. He had a stiff military-style haircut and deeply tanned skin.
Audie was peering through the shattered windows of the Pontiac below the still spinning tyre. He noticed a second deputy about thirty yards away, on the far side of the truck. One of the wounded men tried to stand. He looked helplessly at Audie, his eyes jittering, a pistol dangling uselessly from his hand. The deputy fired. Two slugs found their mark, knocking the man backwards, decorating his shirt with scarlet flowers. The last shot spun him around and he simply sat down on top of his legs, as though his skeleton had vanished.
The officer still hadn’t seen Audie. His colleague yelled. The deputy holstered the gun and disappeared from view. Audie was about to call out, but something made him stop. He saw the two officers again. This time they were carrying sealed canvas sacks toward the open trunk of a police cruiser. They would make the journey again and again. One of the bags caught on a snagged spur of metal and ripped open, spilling banknotes that were caught by the breeze, skipping across the tarmac where they wrapped around weeds and were pinned against tree trunks.
There were more sirens.
Audie crawled back toward Belita, pulling himself along with his arms and elbows. Her head was twisted at an odd angle by the compressed roof. Audie reached for her hand. His fingers took hold of her wrist. He pulled and heard her grunt in pain.
Audie retreated and yelled to the deputies. One of them turned and walked toward him. There were ironed creases in his trousers. Black leather shoes. Audie looked up. The deputy’s pale cheeks were red with exertion. He lowered a sack of money to the ground.
‘We have to get her out,’ pleaded Audie.
The officer turned. ‘Hey, Valdez?’
‘What?’
‘We got a problem.’
Valdez joined him, crouching and resting his arms on his thighs, a revolver dangling from his right hand with the barrel slanted downward. ‘Where did he come from?’
His partner shrugged.
Valdez leaned closer, his breath sour and a tiny web of saliva stretching and breaking between his lips. He turned his head and saw Belita trapped in the wreckage. He scratched his chin.
Audie grabbed the deputy’s shirt, knotting the fabric in his fist.
‘Help her!’ he cried.
In the same instant the road shimmered and the air filled with a whooshing breath as a blue flame slid across the tarmac from the ruptured fuel tank of the truck. Belita’s eyes were frozen wide.
‘Fire!’ yelled Audie, repeating it over and over. He crawled back into the twisted debris, reaching for Belita, trying to pull her toward him. He screamed at the officers to help, but they stood and watched with their hands at their sides. Audie retreated and ran to the far side of the wreckage. Ripping off his shirt, he beat at the flames but his hands were suddenly on fire. He dropped the shirt but kept trying to pry the metal apart with his fingers. The heat forced him back. Valdez picked up his hat and put it on his head. The other deputy lifted the bags of cash.
Belita’s screams softened and died. Audie collapsed on his hands and knees, sobbing. Blood ran in strings down his blackened thumbs. He became aware of a deputy standing over him. Valdez dumped the spent brass and began to reload. He stood over Audie and pointed the gun at his forehead, his eyes clean of emotion, a man who knew that reason and logic had no place in an unreasonable world.
Audie turned his head and saw Miguel standing in the trees still wearing his cowboy hat and holding his bear. He tried to shrink inside his own skin, to squeeze all awareness and sensation from his mind, to become nothing but dust that would float away on the breeze and re-form later into his body and soul, allowing him to become whole again.
‘Don’t take this personally,’ the deputy said as he pulled the trigger.
Max remembers. Somewhere deep inside his head there are doors and windows opening. Papers blow off desks. Dust rises. Machines hum. Phones ring. Single frames are threaded together like film being spliced, rewound and replayed. Images of a woman in a floral dress, who smelled of vanilla and mangoes, who took him to a fairground where there were coloured lights. Fireworks.
Yet even as his mind opens, Max tries to close it down. He doesn’t want a different past. He wants the one he knows – the one he’s lived. Why are there no pictures of him as a newborn, he wonders. He had never really questioned it before but now he mentally studies the photo albums that Sandy keeps in a drawer of her dresser, turning the pages in his mind. There are no shots of him swaddled in a cotton blanket, or being nursed in a hospital bed.
His parents had never talked about his birth. Instead they used terms like ‘when you came along’ and ‘we waited a long time for you.’ They talked about having IVF. Miscarriages. He was loved. He was wanted.
This man is making up stories. He’s a killer! A liar! Yet there was something about how he told the story that Max knew was genuine. Audie spoke as if he had been there since the very beginning.
‘Are you all right?’ asks Audie.
Max doesn’t answer. Without a word, he goes to the bathroom and scoops water into his mouth, trying to take away the taste. He stares at his reflection in the mirror. He looks like his father. They have the same olive skin and brown eyes. Sandy is fairer, with blonde hair and freckles, but that doesn’t mean anything. They’re his parents. They raised him. They love him.
He closes the lid of the toilet and sits down, holding his head in his hands. Why did this man, this stranger, have to tell him? Why couldn’t he be left alone?
When he was young he wanted to be a cowboy. He had a silver gun that fired caps and a cowboy hat with a star on the hatband. He had a teddy bear with a purple bowtie. These things he knows to be true, yet he has become a different person in the past few hours.
He had been born in San Diego. He had travelled to Texas. He had seen his mother die.
56
Desiree walks across her office foyer, passing a woman who is about her age, well-dressed, pretty, busy. She is someone who probably has plans for the weekend. Perhaps she will see a movie with her boyfriend or have a drink with a girlfriend. Desiree has no such arrangements, which should depress her more than it does.
Somebody has taped a newspaper clipping on a whiteboard near the water cooler – a photograph taken outside Star City Inn. Desiree is visible, two feet shorter than the detective standing next to her, pointing at something on the second floor. The speech bubble says: ‘It’s de plane, boss! It’s de plane!’
Desiree doesn’t tear the cutting down. Let them have their fun. She’s not supposed to be in the office, but she knows that Senogles left an hour ago and she doubts anyone else cares whether she recuperates at home or at her desk.
Her phone is ringing.
‘Is that Special Agent Furness?’
‘Who’s calling?’
‘You probably don’t remember me. We talked at Three Rivers prison. You wanted to know about Audie Palmer.’
Desiree frowns and looks at the caller ID number. ‘I remember you, Mr Webster. Do you have some information about Audie?’
‘Yes, ma’am, I think I do.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No.’
‘What did you want to tell me?’
‘I think he might be innocent of that robbery they said he done.’
Desiree sighs internally. ‘And what has led you to this startling conclusion?’
‘That boy he kidnapped. I think he belonged to the woman who died in the robbery – the one they never identified.’
‘What?’
‘I think she had a kid with her. Don’t ask me why he wasn’t in the car when it got hit. Maybe he got thrown clear. He didn’t get found until a few days later.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I just talked to the man who found him.’
‘On the phone?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘He came to the prison?’
‘I’m not in prison any more.’
‘You had a life sentence!’
‘They let me go.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know their names. They said that if I found Audie Palmer, they’d get my sentence commuted, but I think they were lying to me. I think they’re going to kill Audie and they’re gonna kill me for talking to you.’
Desiree is still getting her head around the fact that Moss Webster isn’t in prison.
‘Wait! Wait! Go back!’
‘I’m gonna run out of spare change real soon,’ says Moss. ‘You gotta listen to me. The man I spoke to said a deputy told him to lie about where he found the boy. The police said it was miles away, but it was just near the shootings.’
‘Go back to the beginning – who let you out of prison?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you see these men?’
‘I had a hood over my head. They’re gonna say I escaped, ma’am, but I didn’t. They let me go.’
‘You got to come in, Moss. I can help you.’
Moss sounds on the verge of tears. ‘Audie is the one who needs help. He deserves it. I’m going back to prison regardless, if I live that long. I wish I’d never become friends with Audie. I wish I could help him now.’
There is a beeping sound on the line.
‘I’m outta change,’ says Moss. ‘Remember what I said about the boy.’
‘Moss? Give yourself up. Take down my cell phone.’ She yells the number but doesn’t know if he heard the last digits before they’re cut off and the line goes dead.
She contacts the switchboard and asks if the call can be traced. The operator comes back with a location: a payphone at a supermarket in Conroe. By then Desiree has managed to get Chief Warden Sparkes on the phone from Three Rivers prison.
‘Moss Webster was transferred out two days after Audie Palmer’s escape,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘They don’t always tell us why. Prisoners are moved around all the time. Could be operational or on compassionate grounds.’
‘Somebody must have approved this,’ says Desiree.
‘You’ll have to talk to Washington.’
An hour later – having made a dozen calls – Desiree is still on the phone. ‘This is horseshit!’ she yells, berating a junior staffer at the Bureau of Federal Prisons, who must regret having returned her call. ‘Why was Moss Webster transferred from a high-security Federal Prison to a holiday camp in Brazoria County?’
‘With all due respect,
Special Agent, the Darrington Unit is a prison farm, not a holiday camp.’
‘He is a convicted killer serving a life sentence.’
‘I can only tell you what I have in front of me.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Webster used a homemade knife to threaten and disarm a US marshal during a rest stop at a Dairy Queen in West Columbia. The marshal was unharmed in the escape. State police have been informed.’
‘Who authorised the transfer?’
‘I don’t have that information.’
‘Why wasn’t the FBI notified of his escape?’
‘It’s in the system.’
‘I want to see statements from the marshal and any other witnesses. I want to know why he was being transferred. I want to know who gave approval.’
‘I’ve made a note for the director. I’m sure he’ll look at it first thing Monday morning.’
Desiree can hear the sarcasm in the bureaucrat’s voice. She slams down the phone and considers hurling it across the room, but that’s something a man would do and she’s sick of men.
Instead she goes back over what Moss told her. Logging into her computer, she calls up information on missing children.
Do you have any idea, Mr Webster, how many children go missing every year in Texas?
She narrows the search to Dreyfus County in January 2004 and comes across a story in the Houston Chronicle:
BAREFOOT BOY FOUND WANDERING
A small boy dressed as a cowboy was found beside Burnt Creek Reservoir in Dreyfus County on Monday, showing signs of having spent all night in the wild, police say.
Aged between three and four, the child was discovered by Theo McAllister and his dog Buster on the eastern edge of the reservoir.
‘We were just walking along the track and Buster found this bundle of rags under a bush. I got closer and realized it was a little boy,’ Mr McAllister said. ‘He was a hungry little hero so I gave him some food. When I couldn’t find his mama, I called the police.’
The boy was taken to St Francis Hospital where doctors said he was dehydrated, cold and suffering scratches and bruises, indicating he had spent the night outdoors.
Deputy Ryan Valdez said: ‘The boy is clearly traumatized and hasn’t been able to talk to us yet. Our first priority is to find his mother and to provide whatever support she needs.’
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