by Saul Black
It took her a few moments to lift her head. The snow had received her with shocking cold. She was winded. A pain in her ankles and forearms, but she didn’t think anything was broken. She was less than twenty feet from the parked Cherokee. Carla lay a few feet to her right, face down, not moving. The wind dropped. In the quiet (it was as if the weather had hushed itself for this) the sound of the chopper’s blades receding, dropping back into the ravine. Then what felt like a long complete silence – before an explosion and a swell of dull orange light as the chopper struck the western wall. She heard metal grinding and crashing as the aircraft dropped to the river. The wind, having stilled itself not to miss the spectacle, lifted again. Flying snow drove into Valerie’s face.
The Cherokee was between her and Leon.
He was trudging through the snow towards her.
She pushed herself to her feet and reached into her shoulder holster.
Just in time to see Leon raise the shotgun.
The impact knocked Valerie off her feet. She felt herself falling backwards before she felt the pain.
Then the pain.
The snow’s embrace a second time, with an odd little noise, a crunch-gasp, as if she’d knocked the wind out of the ground rather than vice versa. She remembered it from making snow-angels as a child. Wet jeans and your face looking up at the low sky.
Her left shoulder. Her lungs emptying. The exhalation slid away from her, a breath that had gone all the way to the bottom of a long, long slope. It was inconceivable that she would ever be able to drag it back up again. She would never breathe in again.
Leon stood over her. Snow clung to his hair. Snow swirled around him. The bandaged hand cradled the shotgun’s barrel. His face was wet, fraught, vivid.
‘You?’ he said. ‘You?’
Then he turned the weapon, raised it, brought it down.
She saw the rubber treads on the shotgun’s butt, a curious design to stamp and endorse the end of her life.
Then darkness took her.
Nell opened her eyes to the cabin’s now familiar floor, sweeping away from her. She was lying on her side. One of the oil lamps had been blown out by the wind. The door was open. It had stopped snowing, though the wind still tore through the ravine. The doorway framed her mother’s Jeep. Warmth flooded her. Joy. It was impossible. Her mother was here. But, propped against the Jeep’s flank, like Raggedy Ann dolls, were two women she’d never seen before. One of them, slumped lower than the other, bleeding into the snow. The man in the windbreaker was standing over them with – Nell thought her mind had gone wrong – shopping bags at his feet.
Valerie swam back through the folding weight of dark water to consciousness to see Leon reach into Carla’s shoulder holster, remove the sidearm and stuff it into the back of his jeans. Her own weapon was gone. Carla stirred. Her eyes opened. Her breathing was shallow. The two of them were slumped against the Cherokee. The wheel housing cut into Valerie’s back. A strange little thing to be aware of past the pain in her shattered shoulder. Beyond Leon she could see the open doorway of the cabin filled with yellowy flickering light. A girl’s body lying on the floor. Dead, presumably. The one that got away. Except didn’t, in the end. The snow had stopped falling. It comforted her, for no reason she could fathom. Maybe just because she could see. She could see the world before she said goodbye to it. That was something. Carla looked at her. Opened her mouth to speak, but her eyes closed again.
Leon was going through the shopping bags, lifting items out and setting them in the snow. A pineapple. A doll wearing a crown. A yo-yo. A xylophone. A bag of nails. He had a lemon in his bandaged hand.
‘You were in my house,’ he said, turning on Valerie. ‘You were in my fucking house.’
Carla opened her eyes again. ‘He was never the same,’ she said.
‘Shut the fuck up, cunt,’ Leon said.
Carla shook her head, as in mild refusal. She slurred a few quiet words, but Valerie couldn’t make them out. Other cops she knew carried a second gun. In a side holster. In a boot. She wasn’t one of them. When she’d driven to the farmhouse she’d forgotten to put on the bulletproof vest. It had been in the Taurus’s trunk. There had been no time. It hadn’t even occurred to her. And she wasn’t wearing one now. She was a terrible cop. She had a very clear image of herself lying in bed with Nick Blaskovitch, her head on his chest (summer sunlight making softly glowing ingots of the apartment’s window blinds) saying to him: I’m a terrible cop, you know. She had said this to him, once, long ago. He had remained silent for a long time. Their bodies had been warm and sleepy. They’d had so much sex merely summoning the energy to get out of bed seemed implausible. Then he’d said: Not only are you not a terrible cop, but you’ve got the prettiest ass in the Western world. Everyone hates you. Even me. Now look: what about breakfast? The memory was so clear and disinterested – her soul sorting out its hierarchy of things to pack before death – that she smiled. It wasn’t a bad thing to die, as long as you’d had a life full of life. And she had had that. It turned out all you needed to be OK with dying was knowing you’d lived.
Leon, manifestly, was not happy. His face was pouchy. He was a man being hurried against his will. He was a man being forced to compromise the quality of his work just to get the job off his desk. As she watched him, he turned and barked: ‘I’m doing it. For Christ’s sake I’m doing it!’ as if to a guardian angel only he could see. Scowling, he unbuttoned Carla’s pants, pulled them and her underwear down around her ankles, then straightened up to look at her. It hurt Valerie to see Carla’s tibia poking through the skin of her shin. Bone. We were skin and blood and nerves and bone. It was a knowledge so terrible that God concealed most of it from view.
‘Bit cold for that sort of thing, isn’t it?’ Valerie said. She’d lost all feeling in her left shoulder. A part of her was indulging vague doctorish speculations about how the damage to her clavicle and scapula might be painstakingly repaired. She pictured a surgeon, who would be an arrogant asshole in the consultation room but who, once he was in theatre, would devote every atom of his ego to fixing the thing that shouldn’t, by rights, be fixable. He would wear gold-rimmed spectacles and have Mahler playing in the background. You’d hate him, but you wouldn’t want anyone else on the case.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Leon said, pointing the fish knife at her. ‘Shut. The fuck. Up.’
He grabbed Carla’s blouse and tore it open. Seeing the prettily laced black bra, Valerie felt sad. It occurred to her that she’d thought of Carla as a sexless being.
Carla opened her eyes and tried to turn away. Leon slapped her. Yanked her back into a sitting position by her hair.
It was a great relief, Valerie discovered, to realise you were ready to die. It gave you liberty for all sorts of academic exercises. One of them was to make this as annoying as possible for Leon. She raced back through everything that had happened (while other parts of her speed-read her own life of densely packed childhood and anguished adolescence and fraught adult lust and professional approximation and love and love and love [and loss]) convinced, though she conceded again the academic nature of the exercise, that there was, even now, even now…
Who was never the same?
The rogue question distracted her for a moment.
Carla opened her eyes again. She was back, this time, properly. Just in time for the bad news. The worst news. The only news that mattered.
Leon, still holding the lemon in his right hand, got down on his knees and pressed the fish knife’s point against the bare flesh of Carla’s midriff. A bead of blood sprang up merrily and trickled down the blade. Carla lifted her hand as if it were the slowest, heaviest thing in the world. Leon swatted it away.
‘You dumb fuck,’ Valerie said.
Leon paused. The blade quivered. Went in a little deeper. Carla cried out.
‘Hey,’ Valerie said. ‘Leon. Yes, you. I’m talking to you, you dumb shit.’
He looked at her. He appeared sweetly surprised.
&n
bsp; ‘You fucked it up,’ Valerie said. ‘You know that, right? I mean, you do know that even now after all these years you still can’t get the simplest thing in the world right? Christ, you’re stupid.’ She laughed, holding her shoulder. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid. You think you’ve got this? You haven’t got this. Want me to spell it out for you? Want me to spell it out for you, genius?’
Leon withdrew the knife and got to his feet.
‘It’s the lemon after the kite. It’s the lemon after the kite. K is for Kite, L is for Lemon. Jesus Christ, how fucking slow are you? J, K, L. Jug, kite, lemon. Whereas what did you do? Come on, tell me: what did you do?’
Leon frowned, breathing through his nose. His hand was tight around the knife’s white handle.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ Valerie said. ‘I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised you’re embarrassed. You should be. You went jug, kite, monkey. J, K, M. Monkey. It’s an insult to monkeys, Einstein. And now you’re standing there like a fucking lemon, holding… what? A lemon! It’s priceless, Leon, priceless. Leon the lemon. Can you spell “incompetent”? Can you spell “fuck-up”?’
Leon took a pace to his left to stand directly in front of Valerie.
Behind him, she saw a figure crawling towards them from the cabin.
Angelo was at the end of his strength. His chest ached. L5 and S1 had, if anything, entered a new, intense relationship, a passionate affair to maximise his pain. His head was reduced to the thud of his broken jaw. Memory, liberated and lawless, now that its life work was done, told him that Muhammad Ali fought Ken Norton for two rounds with a broken jaw, getting hit in the head, repeatedly. This forced an amusing concession: he was not, at least, getting hit in the head at the moment, so how bad could it really be? He would crawl.
He pushed the axe ahead of him through the snow. He wanted to look back to see Nell one last time, but he was afraid the movement would paralyse him. The wind roiled and sang, as if delighted with all this human madness.
Nell had inched forward on her elbows and collapsed in the cabin’s open doorway. Everything seemed invaded and broken now, the stove’s warmth and the lamps’ soft light. The wind going through the place like a burglar, at complete liberty to handle whatever it wanted. It seemed a year ago that she had crossed the ravine. The days since her mother told her to run had been longer than all her life before. She felt ancient, as if the old lady she would one day have been were visiting her now, like a ghost from the lost future.
‘And that’s not all,’ Valerie said to Leon. ‘The girl in your basement? She’s alive. You couldn’t even get that right. I got into your shit-hole house and you thought I was dead. But look: here I am. You thought she was dead, didn’t you? She’s not. I saved her. She’s very much alive. She’s laughing right now at the mess you’ve made. Her and every cop in the country. Your picture’s all over the news. The dumbest killer in history. Your grandmother must be so proud. Your grandmother must be laughing her dead, fat ass off.’
Leon had gone very still. The wind had dropped again. Valerie was aware of Carla, sobbing, softly.
Leon raised the knife.
And screamed.
The sound silenced even Carla.
A long time seemed to pass. The snow-globe was at complete rest.
Leon dropped the knife. Very slowly reached behind himself and pulled out the axe Angelo had buried in the back of his thigh. He looked at it, puzzled, then turned.
The old man was lying on his side in the snow, eyes closed, wheezing.
Valerie got her legs under her. Her shoulder was dead and her hands were numb but her face was alive with seductive heat. Leon’s jacket had ridden up where he’d stuffed Carla’s Beretta in his jeans.
*
Nell saw Angelo collapse onto his side. The man in the windbreaker stood over him, both hands wrapped around the axe. The bandage had unravelled. It hung from his wrist like a sad party streamer. The wind had died completely, as if a switch controlling it had been turned off. The snow brought every sound close to her. She could hear Angelo struggling for breath. One of the women was on her feet, now.
Angelo drifted gently towards a soft-edged darkness, like an ocean at night. His body seemed a very far away thing, negligible, of no more consequence than the clothes he might have left on the beach before swimming out from a shore to which he knew he would never return. He thought of Sylvia saying: It made leaving bearable, knowing I’d had that kind of love in my life. Knowing I’d had the best thing. There was no one to see, but he was smiling.
Reaching for the Beretta, Valerie thought: I need two hands for this.
You don’t have two hands. So you do it with one.
She bent forward. Extended her arm.
Felt the cut-glass rainbow edging her vision.
Not now.
Oh God. Not now.
She jammed her teeth together. Force of will. Force of will.
Darkness encroached. The aperture starting to close. No time. No time.
Her hand shook. Her hand had an infinite number of ways to get it wrong.
One chance.
Pickpocket.
Very gently wrapped her fingers around the Beretta’s grip.
The aperture shuddered, narrowed a little more.
She yanked the weapon out of Leon’s jeans. Clicked the safety off.
‘Drop it, Leon,’ she said, holding the barrel to the back of his head. ‘Drop it now or you’re dead.’
The darkness shivered. The circle of light narrowed, expanded, narrowed. Kill him now. While you still can. Kill him. End it.
That’s not what you do. You arrest him. You take him in. Justice. Not execution. Murdering a murderer is still murder.
The camera eye opened, fractionally. Her jaws ached. The rainbows flickered. Flirted with giving up.
Cuffs. Call. Court. Lawyers. The law. The families. Words. Katrina Mulvaney, smiling by the double-trunked tree. The sprawling hopelessness of Leon’s history. And before that Jean Ghast’s history, the as yet unknown antecedents, an infinite regress, nesting dolls with no end. Causes.
Make this easy for me, Leon.
He did.
He raised the axe. And turned.
He got one word out. ‘Cunt.’
Then Valerie pulled the trigger.
NINETY-SEVEN
At the Sterling Regional Medical Center, Colorado, Valerie made a new friend. Morphine. The buckshot had gone through her deltoid, clipped the humerus, missed the subclavian artery. But there had still been a lot of damage to repair. She was still, in the surgeon’s words, a godawful mess. And he wouldn’t give her a straight answer about the nerves. Her arm was dressed and in a sling. She had no idea if she’d ever be able to use it again. She tried to imagine that: The Disabled Detective. Couldn’t. Got an image instead of herself at the apartment’s kitchen sink, failing to peel a potato.
She wasn’t supposed to be out of bed but she’d sweet-talked Carla’s colleague, Field Agent Dane Forester (who’d come with them in the ambulance, and who appeared not to be in on Carla’s hatred) into scoring a wheelchair and taking her to see Nell.
The girl was barely awake. Her foot was stirruped in a cast. She was mildly sedated, and would be kept that way until her grandmother arrived from Florida. She was expected imminently.
For a while Valerie just sat by her bed, enjoying the sight of her wrapped in the arms of high-tech care. The monitors, the IV, the crisp white linen. The little plastic ID bracelet around her wrist said Nell Louise Cooper. Her fingernails were filthy. Snow-reflected sunlight came in slats through the venetian blinds. The world was a wonderful place. Full of nightmares.
She was about to call Forester back in to wheel her away when Nell stirred and opened her eyes. It took a moment for her to focus. Valerie didn’t know how much they’d told her, but her face said she already knew. Your mother and brother are dead. Maybe she’d known ever since she ran.
‘Hey,’ Valerie said. ‘Remember me? How’s your ankle?’
&
nbsp; They were practically the first words she’d spoken to her. Back at the cabin, she’d managed to call in their location and tell Nell that she was a police officer before passing out. By the time the cavalry arrived Nell was the only person on the scene still actually conscious.
‘I can’t feel it,’ Nell said.
She was visibly exhausted. Childhood force-fed adult horror, adult loss. The look of absorbed suffering you saw in the eyes of starving children, as if they were compelled to stare at all the universe’s cruelty and meaninglessness while you spent your entire life distracting yourself from it with pleasures you took for granted and more than enough to eat. The eyes of starving children were an accusation – and the eyes of this little girl would always have something of that in them. In whatever new place she ended up (with her grandmother in Florida, for now), at whatever new school she joined, people would sense it, the something different in her, the something unnatural, the something wrong. Her life ahead would be a terrible accommodation. She would grow, she would live (assuming she didn’t break down or kill herself), but everything she did and everything she became would have its roots in what had happened to her.
‘I can’t feel my shoulder, either,’ Valerie said. The discrepancy between what life needed and what words could do. This girl would have been reared on stories with happy endings and miraculous justice. And denied the chance to grow out of the fantasy naturally. Valerie felt the moribund reflex, that there ought to be something you could do to stop it. But there wasn’t, not for her. All she could do was try to stop the ruiners before they did it again. It wasn’t enough. If she did it for the rest of her life it would never be enough.
The door opened. Forester entered with a woman in her early sixties. Meredith Trent, Valerie understood, Nell’s grandmother. She was a tall, handsome woman with well-cut dyed auburn hair that fell in two thick waves down to her shoulders. A long green woollen overcoat and black corduroys. She was clutching a soft, dark leather shoulder bag and her eyes were raw. At a glance Valerie could see the effort she’d put in to lock her shock and grief down. She’d lost her daughter and her grandson, but she was forcing herself to be strong for her granddaughter. Forcing herself. She would have spent the whole flight in tears, had been crying, Valerie knew, right until she got outside the door to Nell’s room a moment ago. All the trauma was there in her face, barely held back from unravelling her features. It was as if the air immediately around her trembled with what the composure was costing her. And the second she saw Nell lying in the hospital bed the tears came again, though she didn’t make a sound.