Time to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  Mason drove along and around four of the streets at the end of Hill Avenue without locating a school bus drop, then retraced his route down the road that ran parallel behind Slater’s house, separated from its rear neighbour by a high, unbroken hedge. He located the school pick-up on the street that formed a T-junction at the bottom. Fifty yards further along that street was a small neighbourhood shopping precinct with a shaded car park behind. He checked it out to decide upon the most concealed spot for later, and bought a Newsweek magazine at the convenient 7-Eleven.

  Mason spent a further hour thoroughly reconnoitring the entire area around Slater’s house until he was satisfied he knew every approach and exit street before driving back towards the town and stopping at a tavern he’d isolated on his way out. With the coffee shop mistake still in the forefront of his mind Mason chose what he considered the most unobtrusive booth. He took his time with a beer studying the menu and drank another with his scrod. Fish had been a rarity in the penitentiary and a preference since he’d been released.

  Mason wasn’t sure what time schools let out so he was back in his already chosen and fortunately near empty parking spot behind the shopping precinct by three p.m. He remained hidden beneath a tree clump and behind his magazine, alert for each and every movement on the outside street, reacting immediately when the easily identified yellow school bus finally passed. Mason was already on the cross street before the children were disgorged, in no hurry to close the gap between himself and the kids when he saw there were a few waiting mothers.

  Mason pulled himself into the cover of one of the street-edged trees that never seemed to lose their leaves, straining intently to recognize Ann, trying to adjust his recollection of his former wife who had cheated and then abandoned him so many years ago, striving to imagine how she would have changed, how she might have physically altered, under cosmetic surgery even, hairstyle and colouring almost inevitably different. Mason scrutinized every waiting mother before determining that Ann was not among them.

  By that time the children whose mothers were not there had moved off, either in groups or individually, in every direction. Mason was only interested in those moving in the direction of Hill Avenue SE. A group of five backpacked kids – two girls and three boys, one of the boys much taller than the rest – was headed in this direction, followed by three individual stragglers. At the junction with Hill Avenue they all paused, as Mason briefly did in the shadow of another convenient tree, for the customary pushing and shoving farewell of children in their eighth or ninth grade. Mason’s hesitation was only momentary. They were still jostling when he emerged in his recovered Yaris, letting traffic he could have beaten pass in front of him while he waited for the group to break up. Only when they did, three boys and one girl turning into Hill Avenue, did Mason consider moving and then, frustratingly, not for at least five minutes because of a sudden build-up of vehicles that didn’t stop to let him out. By the time he finally emerged, all the children had dispersed and none were in sight when he turned into the empty avenue on which Slater, Ann and their offspring lived. Mason felt fresh frustration until, still about three hundred yards from the marked house, the unusually tall boy he’d already identified emerged palming a basketball rapidly against the ground, his other arm arced against imaginary opponents, ducking and weaving to the hoop to do basket loops and drops.

  This wasn’t the only thing Mason saw. At the bottom of Slater’s drive, parked to allow the boy room for his practice, was a pale green Ford Focus. Once again without showing any obvious interest, like moving his head to look pointedly at the house or the car, Mason registered the licence plate number as he passed, without slowing, easily able from his previous assimilation of the area to pick up the route back to Washington without again needing to go back along Hill Avenue SE.

  Apart from the coffee shop incident, the danger of which he was already minimizing, Mason decided it had been an extremely productive and worthwhile day. He wondered what the name was of the gangling boy who was going to be the first to die.

  It was another letter, to his office not their Hill Avenue home, and in no way as unsettling as the warning of Mason’s release had been, but Slater knew at once the effect it would have upon Ann and tried to forestall it. He miscalculated the time difference with San Jose and had to wait a further hour before there was anyone to talk to at the corporate headquarters of the kitchen furnishing franchise who had accepted his quote for the mall development. He had a carefully rehearsed argument that they could surely discuss and refine everything by telephone, fax and FedEx, but this was interrupted by their argument that the point of the invitation for a personal meeting with their development division was not primarily concerned with the Frederick contract, which they’d already agreed, but to discuss further commissions in other, predominantly southern, states. Slater promised to call them back the following day.

  Once again Slater waited until they’d eaten and David had gone to bed before disclosing the approach to Ann. She listened, head bent, until he finished before saying, ‘You couldn’t get to San Jose and back in one day. It would take three, at least.’

  ‘I might be able to manage it in two,’ he said.

  ‘Three,’ she insisted. ‘Maybe even four.’

  ‘There’s no danger; he can’t …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I really could do it in three days, at the outside. I’ve checked the flights, worked it out.’

  ‘Why can’t you do it by fax? Emailing attachments?’

  ‘I’ve already told you, my darling. It isn’t this contract. They want to talk about different expansions, in a lot of other states. This could be a breakthrough.’

  ‘I didn’t think we wanted a breakthrough, to get any bigger than we are already? We make enough, between the business and the gallery. You could be recognized if you got any bigger.’

  Slater shook his head. ‘No one’s going to recognize me, after all this time. That’s all over. I can’t turn it down; it could guarantee things for a long time. Set us up comfortably.’

  ‘We’re already set up comfortably enough. You could turn it down if you wanted to.’

  ‘I don’t want to turn it down!’ The words blurted out, too quickly – too unthinkingly loud – for Slater to bite them back.

  Ann remained with her head lowered, refusing to meet his look.

  Slater said, ‘If I don’t go – for just three days – Jack Mason will have beaten us. We got over our problems in the beginning and you came to believe, do believe now, that we wouldn’t be hurt by Moscow. We built a good life – a perfect life – but made silly mistakes when we learned Mason was being released. He can’t remain forever between us, eroding us until we break up, which is what you told me could have happened if we’d let it, just a few weeks ago. But we didn’t let it happen then and won’t let it happen now. He’s out of our lives forever. Couldn’t find us even if he wanted to. You hear what I’m saying? Accept what I’m saying?’

  Ann remained silent, not looking at him, for a long time. Then she said, ‘Three days?’

  ‘Just three days,’ promised Slater.

  Eleven

  She had to be strong, Ann decided. Just as she’d decided so long ago that she had to be. Not just strong. Deceptively, overly strong, so that David didn’t detect her inner, churning weakness; Daniel, either, when he called from San Jose, which he’d promised to do as often as he could, either here at the house or at the gallery during the day. It wasn’t weakness, Ann argued with herself. She knew what no one else did: knew how relentless and cruel and violent – close to madness – Jack could be; had been, to her, a virtual torturer who got something like sexual pleasure he never gained in his near-rape lovemaking but instead from the beatings. She felt physically sick now at remembering his often repeated threat, his favourite: You ever do anything to screw me, fight me back, you know what I’ll do? I’ll take your face right off, make you uglier than you already are. Think what that would be like, being someone with no
face. There’d been slave-like humiliations, as well. The humiliation of parading his mistresses and whores during their overseas postings in Eastern Europe – even bringing some of them to their house and making her cook and serve table to them and then dismissing her to the guest room while he slept with the other woman in their bed. She found it difficult now to believe she’d endured everything to keep intact a marriage in which Jack had been so totally disinterested, apart from the torture he could inflict. She hadn’t really found escape in the bottle; no matter how drunk – drunk even to the point of unconsciousness – she’d got there’d always been a whimpering voice in her mind asking why she didn’t give up. It was Jack’s voice who answered that, in his bellowing, kicking, beating voice telling her that he’d kill her if she talked to a divorce lawyer or a marriage counsellor, and perhaps because he’d beaten her for so long and told her that so often – brainwashed her so completely – she still believed those words now, this night and every night since he’d been arrested and as she would every night still to come until … until she didn’t know when.

  Something else that Ann knew was that she wasn’t brave. Over the years, with Daniel, she’d rationalized that, believing in his love and care and encouragement had made her stronger – strong enough to start up her own art gallery – than she had been, but deep down she feared that she would never, ever, be confrontationally brave. If she’d been brave she wouldn’t have become a slave to Jack as she had. She’d have fought back, just walked away into the unknown rather than endure what she had gone through with Jack Mason after he’d declared he couldn’t stand her any longer with her constant cringing, clutching humility. But she really had been the orphan David believed her to be, an abandoned-at-birth illegitimate who’d only ever known orphanages and institutions and any home, even the home with Jack, was better than the total, frightening unknown.

  She wished Daniel would call, as he’d promised, immediately annoyed at the thought because from the schedule he’d carefully written out, complete with telephone numbers and addresses and hotel reservations, she knew his plane wasn’t due to land in New Mexico for another two hours. She guessed it would be at least two hours – maybe three – beyond that before he would have booked into the Marriott and made his business calls and was finally able to ring her. She had to be careful nothing showed in her voice: certainly not the gin. She stirred the ice in the drink, which would be weakened when it melted. Only this one. She could easily handle just one. Destroy the lime in the disposal and have the glass washed and put away long before David got home. And she wouldn’t again leave Jean by herself in the gallery all afternoon, as she had today, knowing that Daniel couldn’t call when he was travelling. Just this one afternoon and just this one drink. Or maybe just one more.

  Daniel was right, as he was always right. Jack would never find them: that’s what the protection programme was for, to give them the new life they had and make sure no one would or could ever find them. Unlike Jack, Daniel had never cheated her, in any way. That very first night he’d told her who he really was – ‘Because I love you and always want to be with you I am trusting you with my life by what I am going to tell you’ – a Russian spy supervising her traitor husband, and he’d warned that the KGB would try to find and kill him for defecting. Which they hadn’t been able to do. If the then biggest, most omnipotent and vengeful spy organization in existence hadn’t found them, what chance did one solitary man have, no longer even with the resources of the CIA? For all his beating and punching, Jack was a soft man, a find-the-easy-way-out-of-trouble man, not able to look after himself, survive under any pressure, like Daniel. Prison would have been hell for him, the sort of unbearable hell in which she’d existed as his slave wife. Prison would have broken him, crushed out of him any thought of revenge. Ann hadn’t thought of it like that before and was angry that she’d let her fear be amorphous, without properly reasoning it through. But now she had and everything made complete, logical sense, and a rarely experienced self-confidence, not something imbued by Daniel, surged through her. And it was from complete, sensible reasoning, not the gin.

  She had just one more, enjoying it as a celebration, raising her glass in an imaginary toast, proud of herself for stopping then. She destroyed the lime wedge and washed and polished the tumbler before putting it away. She spent a further hour going through the schedule for the forthcoming provincial exhibition she hadn’t anticipated being asked to stage of a visiting French artist who had achieved some recognition from a prestigious gallery in Manhattan. She decided to retain until its start the display advertisement she had already run for a week in the Frederick News-Post, stoking her wavering confidence by making a decision without discussing it with Daniel first. She had her call transferred from the advertising department to the news desk, who assured her they intended covering her show with a photographer as well as their art critic. There was a possibility they might also run a feature, showing a selection of the paintings, in their weekend supplement. And finally she cleaned her teeth for the second time and rinsed her mouth with a breath freshener.

  Ann had everything already out of the refrigerator when David arrived home from school. She said, ‘You’re the man of the house looking after me while Dad’s away and I thought the man of the house could barbecue some burgers and hot dogs.’

  ‘You look happy,’ said the boy.

  ‘I am,’ agreed Ann.

  ‘So am I, very happy indeed,’ said David.

  Ann let him make a game of it, feigning irritation when David wouldn’t tell her what his news was, all the while enjoying, and comparing, his laughing excitement against the sullenness of a few weeks ago, glad that had gone just as her newly rationalized fear had gone. The boy strung it out until after they’d eaten, working hard to appear cool and unimpressed when he finally announced, ‘Met a guy at school today.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Ann, playing cool in return, her back to him as she stacked the dishwasher.

  ‘Someone from the university.’

  ‘University?’

  ‘The University of Maryland.’

  Ann turned to her son, feeling the first stir of uncertainty despite that afternoon’s resolution. ‘Someone from the University of Maryland came to school today?’

  ‘To see me.’

  Ann was confident the principal wouldn’t have allowed someone he didn’t know come into the school and talk to David, certainly not after the recent upheaval. But there should have been some communication in advance. ‘What about?’

  The boy couldn’t retain the coolness. It came out in a blurted torrent of initially unconnected words. There was a name – Jeb Stout – a black guy, played major league, snapped Achilles, became a scout, had got a recommendation, seen him play, had been impressed …

  ‘Woa, woa,’ stopped Ann, raising her hands, palm outwards against the rush. ‘Someone called Jeb Stout, who used to play major league until he got injured, came to school today to talk to you about basketball?’

  ‘That’s what I just said,’ insisted the boy. ‘He said he’d watched me play. That I could be good, very good. That I could get a sports scholarship, even …’

  ‘To the University of Maryland?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’ At last David hurried to his backpack and offered Ann an envelope.

  There were two letters, one from Victor Spalding introducing the second, which bore a university letterhead, signed by Jeb Stout and asking for a meeting with David’s parents to discuss their son’s sports prowess.

  Ann reached out, hugged him and said, ‘Wow! We could have a famous son!’ Through whom she and Daniel could be recognized and identified, she immediately thought. Spalding should very definitely have asked their permission before letting David meet the scout.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked David, eagerly.

  ‘I think we’ve got an awful lot to talk about and consider,’ said Ann. ‘You haven’t even got through high school yet.’

  David’s face crumpled. �
�You mean I can’t!’

  ‘I don’t mean that at all. I mean Dad and I have got to talk about it, with you. Then we’ve got to talk to the principal and Jeb Stout …’ Ann offered David the university letter. ‘And after all that we’ve got to decide what would be the best for you. That’s the only thing that really interests your dad and me – what’s best, the very best, for you.’

  ‘But you’re not saying no?’

  ‘You heard what I’m saying. I’m very proud of you and I know Dad is going to be, when we tell him later. And I guess Mr Spalding and a lot of people at school are proud of you, too.’

  ‘I want to be a major league basketball player,’ declared the boy.

  Slater didn’t call until after ten, Eastern time and Ann let their son take the phone in another eruption of disconnected words that took as much time as before to link together. Throughout the to and fro Ann sat studying the child she’d never thought capable of conceiving, after the gynaecologist’s prognosis following the miscarriage caused by Mason’s beating, feeling the pride and love and satisfaction and other emotions she couldn’t identify move through her.

  When she finally regained the phone Slater said, ‘What about this then?’

  Conscious of David’s attention Ann said, ‘Isn’t it exciting!’

  ‘Unbelievable! You OK?’

  ‘Fine. Why’d you ask?’

  ‘I phoned the gallery from the plane, just before I landed. Jean said you’d taken the afternoon off.’

  So little had they travelled by air that Ann had forgotten about in-flight telephone facilities. ‘It was quiet and I wanted to concentrate upon the exhibition,’ said Ann, easily recovering. ‘I’ve decided to extend the advertising until the opening. The News-Post are going to cover it. Maybe do something in their weekend edition as well.’