Exposure

by James Lockhart Perry

  He reached the desk outside, just as the caller gave up. Shit, he hated that. Why did Lydia have to be so damn impatient? Oh well, it was time to get home anyway. Much as it surprised Sam, the conversation with Crossfield had actually raised his spirits. His body might be a worthless piece of decaying shit, but at least his brain still seemed to function. More or less. He turned out the lights and found the keys, just as the damn thing rang again. Come on Lydia, can't you tell I'm on my way home?

  "Spaulding," he spat into the receiver.

  "Sam?" the voice asked.

  The tone stopped him in his tracks. He had never heard a voice sound so brittle. Without thinking, he immediately switched into calm and imperturbable. "What's going on?"

  "Sam, this is Sheri. Rudy's girlfriend?"

  "I know who you are, Sheri. Just calm down and tell me what's going on."

  Chapter 26

  Sheri hung up the public phone and glanced around the dusty bus stop. The last person on earth she would have pictured herself calling was Sam Spaulding. And if she hadn't recognized his voice, she never would have believed it was him. He had actually sounded like a human being. In parts anyway.

  She had called expecting Lydia of course. But the mere sound of a familiar voice sent her into a jumbled torrent of revelations:

  Her getting away from the hijackers.

  Rudy drowning, then not drowning—no way that could have happened.

  Then searching for him.

  Stealing Sam's boat—she was so sorry.

  The storm, and Rudy not drowning again.

  Then still working backward, Rudy killing a big black drug dealer and panicking and—

  Finally, Sam got her attention by snapping at her to shut up and listen. "Let me ask the questions," he said, but instead he started telling her things like, "First of all, he didn't kill anyone—"

  "But how do you—"

  "Never mind that now. The guy's name is Gus Smullen, and he's pretty mad, I guess, but not dead."

  "Thank God, but—"

  "Second of all, forget about the boat. It was Rudy's anyway—"

  "But—"

  "Why do you think I never changed the title? Mischa told me he wanted his nephew to get it. I just never got around to doing anything about it."

  The confession fell between them like a bomb. Sheri instantly thinking in terms of hating the self-centered old bastard who hadn't given a damn about anyone his entire life. "Did you know what that boat meant to him?" she asked, aghast.

  "Did you? Last time I saw you—"

  "Sonofabitch!"

  "Okay! You're right!" Sam out-bellowing her again. "But it isn't going to help anyone right now! You need to stay focused!"

  So Sheri calmed herself yet again and let her mind go dull so Sam could question her. Where had she searched? Had she tried the hospitals? The police? The Coast Guard? Where was the boat now? Sam wasn't getting anything Sheri told him. The questions he asked were all questions that belonged in the legitimate world. Finally, Sheri took a deep breath and gave him the rest of it.

  "I sank it." she started.

  "You sank it? What does that mean?"

  "I sank it because I shot the three hijackers."

  "Yeah right. A little girl killer like you." Sheri said nothing to that. She waited for Sam to re-orient his thinking. "Oh Jesus."

  "Yeah, it's bad."

  "But how did you shoot them? Where did you get the gun?"

  "On Mischa and Donny's boat?"

  That shut him up. Sheri jumped in with, "I have to find him, Sam. I'm not going anywhere until I do. I don't care what it—"

  "Where are you?"

  "In Mexico, south of Ensenada."

  "Jesus! And you have no money or papers?"

  "I've got money—"

  "But without papers, you can't get any help."

  Sheri glanced down the dusty road to the only café in the village and the Jeep sitting outside with the two surfboards strapped on top. Help was a relative term. No, she couldn't go to the authorities. She had nearly died of a heart attack yesterday, when the truck she was riding in stopped at a military roadblock. But then she realized that the soldiers had zero interest in a cute little sunburned Dutch-looking girl on vacation. That time, anyway.

  Sam was talking on the other end of the phone, something about Sheri getting to Ensenada and calling him back from there. And not mentioning it to Lydia, of course—she was already worried sick enough about her missing orphans. He would come up with something in the meantime. But the more Sheri thought about it, the less she saw the old photographer doing anything for anyone. He could barely walk the last time she saw him, and there was nothing she knew about him to suggest an excess of empathy.

  "I still can't believe you didn't find him and tell him about the boat," she broke in and said. Her initial gush at the sound of a familiar voice had petered out now to the crushing realization that she and Rudy were entirely on their own. No one gave a damn about them, and even if they did, there was nothing anyone could do to lever them out of this nightmare. "You should have seen him on it. He was a prince."

  "Stop talking in the past tense. I'm sure he's out there somewhere."

  "Yeah."

  "Just tell me exactly where you last saw—" Sam started. But then the phone ran out of coins.

  Sheri hung up and took in the empty midday street. Behind her, an Indian woman and her modern daughter stood in the swirling dust, patiently waiting for the bus. Astride the road, an earthmover sat abandoned in the middle of smoothing out a pitted stretch of the hard-packed clay and shell surface. Sheri's dry mouth and cracked lips reminded her that she needed to stock up on water before she set out with her new helpers for the ocean.

  In two days, Sheri was already on her second crop of so-called helpers. The first was a couple who had picked her up on the Transpeninsular on their way back north, after a week off-roading in the mountains along the Baja spine. She had ridden for an hour in the back of their mud-caked truck, uselessly peering out at the coast through their favorite pair of binoculars. She had asked them to drop her off here, then surprised them by offering two thousand dollars for the binoculars, one of their backpacks, and a water bottle. Not half the surprise they got, when she unraveled the bound-up survival suit and transferred wads of money and a handgun to the pack.

  Sheri figured Rudy must have come ashore somewhere along this stretch of coastline, two or three hours by boat north from where she sank the yacht. As far as she could tell anyway. She had hung around this village for a day, wandering out to the shore, knocking on doors, and asking in unintelligible gibberish if anyone had heard about a half-dead gringo hombre washing up on the coast. At least, that was what she thought she asked. Not a word of English passed the lips of a villager, and there was a limit to how far she could afford to enlighten them anyway.

  Sheri needed wheels to get herself down the rough trails and out along the rocky coastline. But the time was running away from her, two days' worth already. So when the two young surfer dudes showed up this morning in their four-wheel-drive Jeep with the surfboards on top, she was desperate. She hesitated at offering them money, at least until she had a better handle on who they were—the last thing she needed was to be robbed and stranded down here with no resources at all. But in an effort to get their attention, to talk the adolescents into joining her on this disguised misadventure along the coast, she might have implied an offer of something else. Okay, she hadn't explicitly promised a night of wild sex—thank God for that—but she had let it hang out there in the realm of their adolescent imaginations. Which meant that she had better get them started, before she ran out of wriggle room.

  By the café entrance, Sheri gazed out down the sloping dusty road to the highway and, beyond it, to the Pacific Ocean. Overhead, the clouds scudded across the deep blue, late morning sky. She could use a shot of Beethoven now to remind Rudy's ocean God that she was down here muddling around helplessly. She and Rudy. She had read in a fairy tale once
that, sooner or later, the sea gave up everything. All she wanted right now was a sign. One tiny little marker to even hint that her man was still alive, and she would scour this fucking country, if it took the rest of her miserable life.

  Speaking of fucking, the door opened behind her, and the two excited young virgins exited from the café. Money, sex, or a gun. The one persuader Sheri knew for certain she would never use was the gun—she had already overworked that guilt-ridden conversation with her new, murderous self. And the more she thought about it, these two boys didn't strike her as money-hungry—too rich, soft, and pampered in Daddy's bright red Jeep. As a child, Sheri had watched her mother Marta trade sex for lodging, so it wasn't as if she had no experience in the matter—and the slightest sign of Rudy would count for far more than a night in a hippy's warm bed. Still...

  Oh well, Sheri thought, she would work all that out when she got to it. She was getting used to finding out all kinds of new things about herself.

  Chapter 27

  Lydia was losing patience. Sam the invalid was one thing, and she had put up with Sam the Clam for years, but the two didn't mix. She was no airy-headed fool—she had expected some sort of backsliding into his old ways as he started to recover, but ever since yesterday and his weak shuffle home from the studio, he had hardly put two civil words together. He wasn't that far recovered, that he could expect her to wait on him and take his crap too.

  And just this morning, the fragility of Lydia's own state of mind had come crowding in, when she finally went to see Mac right before opening time. When she walked into Malloy's, he showed her his most beautiful mustachioed smile to let her know that she was off the hook for ignoring him. She sat down at the bar, and they talked over the soda water he poured her without asking. But she couldn't remember a word they said, because sitting there, she realized it wasn't Mac's friendship or good looks that had lured her to the bar. It was the bottles up on the wall behind him. She wanted a drink, and she didn't want any shit about it. She wanted a drink so bad, it was killing her.

  Mac launched into a story to do with his yard and all the misery of dealing with the Mexican day laborers he hired. Ordinarily, Lydia made the best of audiences, polite and attentive like any other southern girl with a touch of Louisville in her, but halfway through this one, she completely lost the thread. She could taste the whiskey on her lips and feel the fog of alcohol settling into her mind to cope with her tribulations. Just one little drink, not a whole bottle. Just one tiny shot glass. But when she glanced up, she found Mac staring at her, all stone-faced, her soda water in his hand.

  "Get out," he said.

  "Why? What's the matter?" She reached for the glass, but he held it out of reach.

  "I love you, Lydia, always have, always will. But get the fuck out of my bar before I throw you out. And don't ever come back."

  "But—"

  "I thought you were in AA."

  "I am in AA! What's your problem?"

  "You think you're the first falling down drunk I've seen? Get the fuck out of here, don't come back, and don't wander in down at Murphy's either. Go home and pretend you're a human being."

  "Fuck you, Mac!" she shouted. "Fuck you and everybody!"

  "Doesn't matter," he said and turned his back, leaving her to slink out the door, gasping and humiliated like some weak, pathetic scum. No one deserved to treat another human being like that. No wonder she immediately made for Murphy's, Malloy's rival down the street. She would show her ex-friend. She would show her ex-brother, ex-mother, and her soon-to-be-dead-anyway husband just how much...

  But outside Murphy's, quivering there in the hot, muggy sunlight, Lydia finally came to her senses. Stood there, blinking back the glare and wrapping her arms about her shivering body and waiting for the waves of nausea to subside. Maybe she really did need the AA. She hadn't shown up for the meetings since Sheri disappeared. Some excuse that was. Maybe, in spite of all her pretentions to not really belonging there, to not getting the point, she really did get something out of the program. From the day she signed up, she had completely blown off her so-called sponsor. Maybe it was time to start the whole thing over.

  But Lydia still didn't feel good about it. And she was still irritated at Mac and his kind and their ruthless, self-righteous airs. By the time she got home and started making some pathetic excuse for a dinner, the Louisville southern belle in her was ready to rip the colostomy bag off her selfish old bastard of a husband and spill it all over his ugly chemo head. So when Sam straight-faced, out of God-knows-where, suggested a vacation, she couldn't help it. She exploded.

  "Vacation! What, and bring the hospital along with us? You want to sit on a beach, while I spoon broth into your mouth and ferry your shit bags back and forth to the bathroom? Right now, the only vacation I want is away from you!"

  Sam stared at her, nonplused. Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, as if a wave had crashed over him and fizzled away, he said, "Sheri called."

  That brought her up short. She thought a brief instant. "When? Yesterday?"

  And that in turn stopped him. "How the hell did you know that?"

  "I figured something must have happened to put you in this shitty mood you've been in." And it was true. He had been driving her nuts since his inexplicable visit to the studio.

  "All right," he conceded. "I just didn't want to do what she asked, and figured you'd make me."

  "Make you what?"

  "They're down on the Baja south of Ensenada. They want us to come down and join them for a vacation."

  Lydia wasn't a complete fool. Something about her husband's gruesome imitation of unenthusiastic good cheer raised every suspicious hackle on her skin. She realized she was standing between the kitchen and living room with a colander full of spaghetti in her hand. The murky white water had dripped all over her newly polished floor. And the normally observant Sam hadn't even mentioned it, not even a malevolent smirk.

  "Damn it Sam, what the hell is going on?"

  Sam sighed his phoniest about-to-confess-all sincere. "I've got some feelers out on the Smullen brothers, and I think it wouldn't hurt us to get away for a few days. You said yourself you're getting antsy."

  "What about the Smullens?"

  "Nothing. At least nothing hard, but it looks like they're into drugs and prostitution. Maybe kiddy porn and worse."

  Lydia tried to wrap her recollection of the smooth, self-possessed giant around that one, but it didn't fit. "Kiddy porn? That's disgusting!"

  "No shit. Maybe even snuff films."

  "What?"

  Suddenly the spaghetti in her hand made her want to gag. She threw it into the sink and held on. She knew it was the dearth of alcohol sucking at every cell of her body and driving her overreaction, but couldn't help it. She heard Sam climb off the living room sofa and come after her.

  "Hey, take it easy—"

  "Take it easy! Are you out of your mind? I talked to them. I stood ten inches away from that man!" And what was worse, found him horrifyingly attractive.

  "What's got into you today?" Sam asked and wrapped his arms around her. "They aren't after you, and we aren't even sure they're after Rudy. Maybe the guy just wants us to shoot his portrait."

  Lydia was perfectly ready to run off to Mexico, if it meant avoiding the liquid vortex she had circled all day, that still drove her in thick, mindless circles. "Good grief, Sam. I'm not that stupid."

  "Nobody said you were. So what do you think?"

  "About what?"

  "About a little drive down the Baja?"

  Lydia shrugged him off and turned away to prevent him from reading the alcoholic famine in her eyes. She took a deep breath and waited for the internal shudders to pass. She still wasn't buying any of the motley stew he was selling. "I don't know. I have to think about it. What else did Sheri say? And why the hell didn't they tell me they were leaving?"

  "They've been out of touch on the boat."

  "The boat? What boat? Your boat?"

  "Mischa's boat
."

  "What the—"

  "I'm sorry!" Sam stopped her. "Really! I know I should have mentioned the phone call to you, but look at me! It must be the chemo. My memory. I don't know—"

  "Stop talking to me like I'm an idiot. You've known where they were since yesterday?"

  Sam said nothing. Lydia broke away from him and stalked into the living room. She found her purse and crossed to the sliding glass doors onto the deck. Her second cigarette of the day appeared in her hand. She had cut back drastically and hadn't smoked inside the apartment since the surgery. Right now, she felt like inhaling the whole pack. She opened the doors and lit up out on the deck.

  Did Sam really think she was that stupid? None of it sounded remotely lifelike. "I liked you better when your lies were more organized," she said over her shoulder. It was true. She knew a make-it-up-as-you-go-along charade when she heard one.

  Sam crossed the living room to the door behind her. "What did you say?"

  "I said I can't wait to go on your mini-vacation. You're right, I need a break. Let's start tonight, right this minute."

  "Actually, that's what I had in mind, only maybe tomorrow morning. Apparently, they're down there running out of cash. And you know how clueless they are."

  "Sure," Lydia said, although she wondered why he threw in that morsel of unsubtle cheese. Neither of the kids struck her as innocent children, and she was pretty sure Sam wouldn't give a damn about them if they were. There she went again, using the kid word, even though right now, she was too wound up and pissed off to mean it.

  "Nice night," Sam said behind her. She glanced out at the ocean and found nothing to agree with him on. The sun was easing down to the layer of atmosphere where the smog from the city caught the rays and spread a liquid golden orange haze over the sea. But with all that foul air, the hospitals would be passing out inhalers by the dozen. Lydia focused on a tiny yacht out on the water to distract herself, but then a delivery van pulled up out on the street and blocked her view.