I gave it some gas when I hit the highway. A pair of taillights a few hundred yards up, weaving over the center divider. There were headlights coming on quickly, and he overcompensated, veering onto the shoulder, spewing dust before dropping out of sight. Pulling up moments later, I saw he’d plowed into a dirt channel at the side of the road. Horn blaring, steam billowing from the front where it crumpled into the dirt. The airbag had blown, a large dark circle visible on it. More blood ran down the seat onto the doorjamb. Touching what I thought was the wound on my forearm, I found that it was only tomato sauce.
Blood trailed into the brush, the drops glistening at my feet. Eventually, I lost them in the darkness. I wondered how far he could have gotten with the amount of blood he’d lost, but I kept going anyway, gun waving in my hand, the only sound the scratch of my feet in the dirt and the breath wheezing in and out of my lungs. The soil started getting more sandy, like the dunes further south where the recreational vehicles tore up the desert. I stopped and looked around. The unfiltered moonlight gave everything a ghostly cast that was otherworldly and gaunt. Hardy desert brush dotted my vision like febrile hallucinations. The highway noise had faded a while ago; I’d gone much farther than I planned.
It was time to go back. He’d probably already collapsed somewhere, and the cops would find him tomorrow morning. I went down into a shallow wash, where the going was easier, and started following it back toward the road. Suddenly, a quick rush of footsteps from the top of the embankment. A shadow darkened the starry sky as he hurtled downward and landed on me with a bone-jarring thud. He rolled off with a painful grunt, reaching for the gun that had flown out of my hand. I grabbed his ankle, pulled myself toward him and turned him over, throwing sand into his eyes. The next handful I ground into his nose and mouth, forgetting completely about the gun. The intimacy of this violent physical contact was exhilarating. He gagged and spat, head shaking from side to side, and the silver moonlight turned to red as I stuffed fistful after fistful of sand into his open mouth and nostrils.
Then I stopped. Cleared all the dirt away, caked with spittle and mucous. Stood up with the gun and listened to him gasping for air. He turned his head sideways and retched mud onto the ground.
“Hey,” I said, kicking his leg. He didn’t even open his eyes. I leaned over and squeezed his shoulder, hard. His scream pierced the warm night, and he sprang up halfway before easing back down.
“Tell me everything,” I said, cocking the gun.
“You won’t do it,” he finally said. His hand went to his bloody shoulder. It still hadn’t stopped.
“Maybe not. Maybe I’ll just stand here and watch you bleed.”
He looked at his hand, put it back on the wound. “It was your wife’s son.”
I almost dropped the gun. “What?”
“I set up the adoption. She used the money to get clean, start over.”
The night pitched around me, like the deck of a ship. Dizzy, I staggered back a step before it all snapped into place. “Clayton?”
“I work for him,” he said, nodding tiredly. “I used to be Deirdre’s dealer way back when.”
I squatted next to him. The moon was an unblinking eye high above. “Why did you kill the boy?”
He shook his head. “It was an accident. Wasn’t even my gun.”
“So what happened?”
“Come on, I’m bleeding to death here, man.”
“You better hurry then.”
He grimaced in pain, readjusted his hand over the bullet hole. “Clayton sent me out here to stop John from meeting his real mother. If the illegal adoption got out the election would be over. So I flew out, waited for him to show up—”
“You couldn’t stop him before that?”
“We didn’t know where he was, only that he was driving here with a friend. No credit card records of a flight or hotels. Maybe he did that on purpose so there’d be no trace of the trip. Maybe he just didn’t have the money. His friend had a car, so…”
“How did he find Deirdre?”
“One of John’s cousins spilled the beans about him being adopted. Bound to come out sooner or later. This cousin called Clayton after John left and apologized. It was the first we’d heard of it. Then we found Clayton’s files had been gone through. John broke into them and found his original birth certificate with your wife’s name on it.”
“That information was from years ago. Where would—”
“Probably spent forty bucks on an Internet search, just like we did. Can find almost anybody nowadays.”
I wondered why John hadn’t called Deirdre first. Probably afraid she wouldn’t want to meet him. Harder to shut the door face to face.
“What about the illegal adoption? Why not just go through an agency?”
“Clayton and his wife got tired of waiting. It could take years for a white baby. Plus, they’d been burned a couple times by women who changed their minds after giving birth. When I heard Deirdre was pregnant I thought we could make something work. Everything would have been fine if Clayton had shredded that birth certificate like I told him to.”
“Why would he keep it?”
“I don’t know, man. Because he’s an arrogant bastard who thinks he’s smarter than everyone. You’ll have to ask him.”
“Get back to that night.”
“I tried to convince John not to go through with it. There was a lot he didn’t know. Come back to New York and have it out with his dad, but don’t do something rash now. I was trying to push him back to the car. His friend comes up and says to leave him alone. I tell him to mind his own business. He goes to the car and comes back with a piece. Little .22 popgun, probably shoots tin cans with it or some shit. Has the balls to point it at me. Sideways, like those gansta idiots in the movies—”
“Spare me the commentary, all right? Why didn’t you just walk away?”
“Some punk threatens me with a gun, my first inclination is to teach him a little respect. Called me a goddamn Mick too.” He lifted his bloody hand, checked his shoulder. Bleeding seemed to have slowed. “Anyway, we fight over it, John gets into the act and the gun goes off.” He shook his head. “Twenty-two up top is bad. Bullet pinballs around in there because it ain’t powerful enough to go straight through. I checked John’s pulse, shook him a few times, but I knew he was dead. His friend took off like the punk he was.”
“And you took everything from John so he wouldn’t be identified. Including his motel key.”
“I was trying to buy some time till we could figure out what to do. I looked around, expecting somebody to start yelling, but no one did. And that kid didn’t report anything either. Probably because it was his gun.”
“But you were looking for him anyway.”
“Couldn’t risk him going to the cops. Kept on thinking he would, that he’d be on the news any minute, but it never happened.”
“Why’d you wait almost two days to go to the Blue Bird?”
“That key didn’t have the name of the place on it, just the room number.” I nodded, remembering what I’d observed in the motel lobby. “But it was an actual key, not one of those credit card deals, so I knew it wasn’t one of the chains. Kid probably high-tailed it already, but I had to make sure. I drove all over the place, checking out every two-bit dump I could find. Couldn’t call ahead because I didn’t want some nosy manager involved. So it took some time.”
“And you were busy doing other things,” I said. “Like getting those weapons you couldn’t bring on the plane with you.”
The man nodded, looking up at me.
“And scoring the dope you put into my wife.”
He closed his eyes, like he was expecting a blow. Or a bullet. Somehow I restrained myself. My thoughts were racing, crashing into each other. Deirdre couldn’t have known the boy was her son. But if he was identified—from New York, and the right age—it was only a matter of time.
“Deirdre was your idea. You knew about her past. That you could get away with it.”
I didn’t get an answer. The shot was impossibly loud, echoing among the foothills. The bullet flung sand into his face. He flinched, then looked back up at me, eyes shining with the moon’s cold light. Somewhere a coyote howled, its cry plaintive and lonely in the hot night.
“I didn’t want to.”
“So why did you?”
“Clayton’s backers…,” he started, shaking his head.
I put the gun to his head. “They’re not here. I am.”
“They’d spent a lot of money under the table on the campaign. We didn’t have much of a choice. We didn’t do things their way, they’d expose the black market adoption themselves. And make things bad with John’s death.”
“Who are they?”
“They’re connected. I make it a point not to know exactly. I did my own bullshit stuff back in the day, but not on the same level as these guys. They’re into a lot of things, have some powerful people in their back pockets.” An ironic chuckle. “Thought I could go legit when Clayton hired me. But he had a few longtime acquaintances, you know? People that did favors for him early on, and expected to be repaid. With interest, so to speak.”
“Really not interested in your problems, pal. How’d they know I was in New York?”
“We knew you had no idea who John was because it would’ve been all over the news. I was supposed to keep an eye on you, make sure you didn’t find out what really happened. Thought I’d blown it when you disappeared after your wife…” He looked up at me uncertainly. “After your wife…”
I kicked him in the teeth and his head snapped back.
“That help?” I asked.
He spat out some blood, but no teeth, and tried to take it like a man. Continued.
“But then out of the blue, you come back home that night. I followed you to the airport. When you got on a flight for New York the next morning, I made a phone call. They were with you the moment you landed.” More blood and spit, a dark silver dollar in the sand. “You got lucky with that story about Turret. Gave them a way to tie it up neatly. Otherwise you wouldn’t have made it back here in one piece.”
“What, some sort of fatal reckoning? Like we did each other in?”
“That was the idea.”
His skin was shiny with sweat, and he shivered briefly. “I’m not doing so good here, man. You gonna leave me?”
“Take your belt off.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
He got up to a kneeling position. Undid the buckle with one hand, then pulled it through the loops. Looked up at me expectantly when he was done.
“Stand up.” He did, stepping back drunkenly before steadying himself. “Put it back on, loosely. Don’t use the loops.” I watched him do it. “Slide the buckle around to the back.”
When he’d done that, I stuck the gun in my pants and pulled his arms behind him, none too gently. “Fuck!” he said through clenched teeth, as I put his hands together under the belt and tightened as hard as I could. “You got the gun, man.”
“Where’s yours?”
He shook his head. “In the fuckin’ car.”
I pushed him forward. “Start walking.”
We didn’t speak on the way back. All of it was hitting me at once. How mentioning Turret had actually saved my life. Then Deirdre, and the way I’d shut her down the other day after the police interrogation. Maybe she wouldn’t be dead if that conversation had run its course. Maybe she would have found the courage to finally tell me about having a baby all those years ago. There was no escaping my own culpability. I was drowning in regret, following Deirdre’s killer through the sand that had once been at the bottom of an ancient lake. The gravel crunched under our feet, and I thought of the tiny fishbones being ground into dust on the shoreline of the Salton Sea.
Up ahead, the stars twinkled above the highway and the lake I couldn’t see, and the lights of the towns next to it glowed faintly in the eastern sky. I wondered how long those marks of civilization—streetlamps and store signs and house lights—would continue to shine, as the allure of the sea that had once supported them steadily diminished. Then the white light became pulsing flashes of blue and red, and I knew the police had found our cars.
WHITE WATER
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Friday afternoon, four days after it ended, I woke up in a blazing shaft of sunlight. The bedroom window was open and the heat of the silent desert invaded the room. I turned over, groggy with too much sleep and unsure of how I would make it through another day. The last few had been a haze of loneliness and depression.
I got out of bed, stumbled to the shower and turned the water on all the way cold. The phone rang in the bedroom just before I stepped under the spray. For some reason I decided to answer this time, not bothering to turn the water off.
“Is this … is this Tim Ryder?” the caller asked.
Soft, hesitant. I knew exactly who it was. “You’re John’s friend.”
For a moment I thought he’d hang up. “I just … I don’t know why I called. I guess I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Everything that happened. Your wife.” His breath hitched in his throat. “I’m the one that started it all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I convinced John to come out here. Never knew my own parents, so I know what it’s like, wondering. John wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell why he wanted to drive. So he’d have plenty of time to change his mind. But he didn’t. And then, that night…”
I sat down on the edge of the bed, listened.
“I shoulda left the gun in the car. But that guy, Anderson, wouldn’t leave John alone.”
“You knew him?”
“I’d seen him before, around John’s parents’ place. John told me his dad would be pissed if he knew what he was doing. So it didn’t really surprise me to see Anderson there. I just wanted to get rid of him. Didn’t think he’d grab the gun.”
“Was it yours?”
“I found it in an alley behind where I used to live. I just … liked it. Always kinda kept it nearby. I guess that’s why I brought it. Kept the stupid thing under the seat. John didn’t even know I had it.”
A long pause. I waited.
“I panicked when the gun went off. Just … lost it. Anderson was shaking him, but I knew it was no use.”
“Why didn’t you report it? Call an ambulance or something?”
“I know. I know. I wasn’t thinking straight, afraid I’d go down for it. But I stuck around anyway, trying to make it right somehow. Then your wife—”
“You were in my house that morning,” I said, seeing him speed away in that car as I’d run home. “You knew she was dead before I did.”
“I finally decided to tell her it was her son, if she didn’t know already, and whatever happened after that, I could live with. But they got to her before I did.” He stifled a sob, took a deep breath.
“Where are you calling from?”
“I was there the other day. At the funeral.”
“You were? At the cemetery? I didn’t—”
“Those cops scared me off. But I guess it was too late by then anyway.” Another sob.
I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, that it had really begun years earlier. But he probably wouldn’t believe me. I remembered what Branson told me about his wife’s miscarriage, how she’d blamed herself. Guilt could be a tough thing to shake.
“They got everybody,” I said. “Even the doctor that signed the fake birth certificate.” It occurred to me that Deirdre would probably be in some trouble if she were alive. But I knew she’d done what she thought was best at the time.
“They’re probably looking for me.”
“Turn yourself in.”
Silence. I tried again. “Just tell them what happened. If you don’t, this will be hanging over your head for the rest of your life. Believe me, you don’t want that.”
No response.
“It’s up to
you,” I said, then thought of something. “Do you smoke?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Never mind. You take care. And think about what I said.”
I hung up the phone and got into the shower. The shocking blast of freezing water at first felt burning hot, literally taking my breath away. The world disappeared for a second, then returned brighter than before.
Later, I made some breakfast. Washed the dishes and put them back in the cabinet when I was done. Stepped outside into a blanket of clear sunshine. Everything I looked at seemed new, as if a lens in front of my eyes had been cleaned and focused. The San Jacintos stood out sharply against the porcelain sky, and the flowers in my neighbor’s yard suffused the air with color and scent.
I got in the car and drove west toward Beaumont, where Deirdre was buried. The freeway kept to the northern edge of the pass, hugging the sides of the San Bernardino foothills as it rose from the valley floor.
It reached its highest point at the Whitewater turnoff and there, without thinking, I exited the freeway and pulled up to the stop sign overlooking the interstate. If I turned right, the two-laned road would take me past a concrete company, then into the San Gorgonio wilderness. Eventually it would end at the Whitewater Dam, where I’d fished as a kid. On the other side, the road descended to the desert floor, traversed the sandy bottom of the pass and crossed over the Southern Pacific tracks before meeting Highway 111 into Palm Springs.
I made the left, parked at the side of the road a few hundred feet below the highway, and got out. A hot, dusty wind whistled through the pass and gave motion to the massive wind farm windmills rotating silently in the heat. One hadn’t started up. Its three blades were frozen in place, conjuring a ’60s peace symbol from the memories of my past.
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