Terminal Island (17 page)

Maybe it’s because of the water restrictions
, he thinks, but that doesn’t explain the petrified aura of the place, the sense that it is all a dry museum display—it might as well be marked DO NOT TOUCH. The cast-iron lawn furniture is bolted to the ground, immovable; stains on the seats from standing water make it look to Henry as if none of it has been used, or is ever meant to be.

Rot. Rot and solitude. The peeling façade of a shuttered carnival. As an adult Henry is alert to these negative aesthetics, knows when he is in their presence—they give him that bittersweet rush of childhood.

Usually he has to seek them out: Henry is a connoisseur of blighted landscapes and old cemeteries. It’s one of the things that attracted Ruby to him, and he to her—what she calls her “Morticia Addams streak.” The tattoos, the piercings, the whole Suicide Girl motif. Her favorite hobby is collecting grave-rubbings. In spite of all their differences, they recognized this gloomy niche in each other and were ineluctably drawn to it.

Yes…he recognizes this smell.

Going up a gravel path to the nearest building, Henry enters a breezeway formed by the upstairs deck, following it along a row of identical doors and windows. Everything is shut tight. He notices that there are no mailboxes or mail slots—of course not; in a place like this there must be a central pick-up point. So the address is useless.

Damn
. Henry is beginning to realize that, once again, he is not going to find what he came for. It boggles his mind. At this point it is almost becoming funny—the joke’s on him.

Trying not to be conspicuous, he peers into the windows as he passes, trying to find a chink in the closed curtains, any glimpse of furniture and life, but they are all drawn against the morning glare.
Now you can add Peeping Tom to the other charges
, he thinks, cupping his hands around his eyes and attempting to penetrate the dark edges of the drapes. Every window is the same.

It’s all so uniform, so impersonal—there is nothing to distinguish one condo from another. The stylistic conformity doesn’t seem to follow the usual incentives of commerce and class, and brings to mind the hive mentality of communist-bloc urban planning.

Haphazardly taping as he goes, Henry moves on, not certain what to make of all this, but more and more convinced that it’s nothing kosher. After the third identical building, Henry decides to take things a step further:

He knocks. Just at the next random door.

Of course there is no answer.

As he is contemplating what to do next, Henry hears a sound and freezes. It is the blat of a noisy engine coming up the road outside. It pauses at the entrance, sputtering. Then there is the unmistakable sound of the gate being opened.

Oh
shit…the dogs!

Henry looks around for someplace to hide. There is not a lot of choice: Everything is laid out in the open, the buildings interconnected and backed up against the steep hillside. There are no trees to climb, nothing that will shield him from a determined dog. The nearest thing to a refuge that he can immediately see is a concrete drainage culvert running downhill under the raised boardwalk, but that would only conceal him from human eyes, not canine noses.

Shaking his head at the stupid predicament, imagining what Ruby would think, Henry puts all his frustration into kicking in the nearest door. He broke down a lot of doors in Afghanistan, but never in civilian shoes—
Ow
. At the second kick, the bolt gives way with a splintering crunch and Henry ducks inside.

He steps off a cliff into total darkness.

Chapter Eighteen

WE’RE SHADY ISLE

I
t is a low cliff—two or three feet high—but Henry lands hard on his face. If the ground wasn’t soft earth he could have fractured his skull. As it is, he is just rattled. He crawls to his feet, spitting a gob of blood and dirt.

“
Fuck
,” he says, checking his jaw. His voice echoes as if in a barn; the whole building is hollow inside, gutted. There are no condos, no separate rooms at all, just one big empty box.
What is this? Remodeling?

Standing up, Henry closes the door to a crack and blearily peeks out. He can hear the jangling of the inner fence being unlocked and dragged open, and a gruff voice abusing the dogs. “Stay!” the voice says. “Stay, you whores!” The vehicle spurts through with a farting roar, and now Henry sees it coming down the driveway:

It is the same dirty-yellow quad ATV that he and Ruby saw at the Casino, and carrying the same two men. The one in the rear has a blue U.S. Postal Service mailbag slung across his back. They do not stop to scan the grounds, but move purposefully as if on an errand, following the service road downward to the lowest bank of condos. Henry loses sight of them. The dogs are nowhere to be seen—they must not have been released into the compound.

Thank you, dear lord
, Henry thinks—not only for himself, but because of his foresight in telling Ruby to return to the hotel.

The last thing he would have pegged those guys for is mailmen. At least they’re not security or cops—at the moment he seems to be in the clear. It’s almost disappointing: For a second Henry’s mind had raced through the various scenarios of being caught, and all of them at least allowed him to vent his frustration at being forced to trespass like this…and now almost break his neck. It’s not like he’s in here for fun! He’d like to walk right out and flag those men down, demanding answers.

But somehow it just doesn’t seem like a good idea to reveal himself to them. Maybe if they were more official-looking and not so much like crazy yahoos spoiling for a fight. Especially if something illegal is going on here, they could be dangerous. After all, isn’t that what he came here to find out?

Henry makes the snap decision to see where they went, to discreetly follow them. If they’re really mailmen, maybe they went to an administrative office where all this can be neatly resolved. He’d gladly pay for the busted door. In spite of everything, he still dearly hopes there is some reasonable explanation.

Venturing out of hiding and down the stairs, Henry listens carefully for the giveaway racket of that ATV. On the next-to-last landing, he catches sight of the vehicle. It is parked on the sun deck of the lowermost block of condos, which are set on a concrete ledge directly overhanging the beach. It is the base of this platform that Henry and Ruby had first seen from the shore road below.

Henry wavers, unsure of what to do. Much as he wishes he could just march down there, his military experience tells him to reconnoiter first, to not throw away his only advantage.
Oh, now you’re James Bond,
he thinks as he vaults the railing and ducks into the shaded space beneath the stairs.

Feeling like an idiot, he works his way down the steep culvert, hanging onto the wooden struts for support. It’s a little scary—the cement drainage chute dips almost vertical at times, and ends at a fifty-foot drop to the rocks. Quite a fall if he loses his grip.

Tourist killed in fall
. He can’t help but grin at the idiocy of it—Ruby would kill him if she knew—but at the same time it feels good to be
doing
something, to be working up a sweat outside of the gym. However nonsensical, this is more real than anything he’s done in years. Henry knows that he is having a life-moment of some kind, and allows himself to relish the feeling—it doesn’t come often enough these days.

Suddenly he hears a spritely electronic tune—his cell phone! Struggling to grab the phone out of his back pocket without losing his grip on the wooden beam, Henry fumbles the noisy device and watches it go pinwheeling down the culvert and over the drop. The tinny music ends with a very faint splash.

Great
. At the base of the stairs he peers out at the ATV, now eye-level with him and just a few dozen yards away. The engine is ticking as it cools. He can see down the length of the lowest tier of condos, his eyes following the ranks of doors and windows blankly facing the sea. The third door down is open, black as a missing tooth.

Henry boosts himself up onto the deck, not quite pulling off the fast, silent commando maneuver he had in mind—he was never that graceful, even when he was in shape. If someone glances out now they will see a middle-aged man straining like a walrus climbing out of a pool. But no one sees him, and in a second he is clear, heaving for breath behind the corner of the building.

There is a sound: the muffled bass thump of heavy metal music, resonating from the wall next to him. Henry presses his ear to it and the AC/DC song jumps out loud and clear: “Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap
.
”
The music has a hollow echo to it, as if being played in a cavern.

Deciding to risk it, Henry turns the corner and briskly walks toward the open doorway. If anyone should pop out, he will just be completely honest and straightforward, cut to the chase. It would probably be for the best at this point anyway to get it over with—Ruby was most likely the one trying to call him, perhaps to say she is back at the hotel, and he doesn’t want to worry her.

But as he nears the door, Henry has second thoughts. Slowing down, he pads to the edge of the doorframe and listens. The music is muffled, emanating from somewhere deep inside—a big open space, by the sound of it. He steals a peek: The room is dark compared to the brightness outside, but in a panel of sunlight Henry can see plywood flooring and exposed wall joists. The building is not an empty shell on a dirt foundation like the other, but it’s clearly not ready to be lived in. The two men are nowhere in sight.

Standing in the doorway, Henry’s eyes adjust to the gloom. He can now make out the entire apartment, front to back. A ladder is propped against the side wall, and there are beer cans and construction trash scattered around. In the far corner is a mattress piled with old sleeping bags.

What is still not clear to Henry is exactly where the men are, or where that music is coming from. He can see as far back as the unit goes, right through the joists of the unfinished bathroom and closet partitions. The whole place is empty; there seems to be nowhere left to hide.

Where the hell did they go?

Henry creeps inside, ready to bolt any second. He goes to the mattress and stoops down, scanning the collection of pornography lying around on the floor:
Leg Show
,
Hustler
,
Club
International
. There are crumpled Trojan wrappers underfoot.

Suddenly the music cuts off and there is a hooting laugh from somewhere high up, practically in his ear. Henry jumps in alarm, whipping around to see a man materializing at the top of the ladder, climbing in over the wall through the ceiling rafters. He is not looking at Henry or he would have seen him at once; he is busy talking to someone on the far side:

“—so I says to her, I says, ‘If you think you can get it done cheaper, you go right ahead,’ and she says, ‘Kevin, you drive a hard bargain,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I got your hard bargain right here!’”

From the opposite side of the wall, another man laughs, saying, “Dude, you
know
she wants it.”

“Hell yes. One of these days she’ll be getting it, too. Put that mouth of hers to good use.”

There is no way for Henry to cross back to the front door without being seen. The first man is already moving down the ladder and the second one coming over the top. All of Henry’s plans for confronting the men evaporate in a burst of instinctive action:

Without thinking, he dives down flat in the crevice between the mattress and the wall, huddling there behind rumpled sleeping bags as the men descend to the floor and go outside. There is the sound of the door being shut, and the
ka-chunk
of its lock. Still, Henry doesn’t budge until he hears the grunt of the ATV starting up, its receding snarl up the hill.

“Damn,” he says aloud, pushing back the smelly sleeping bag and sitting up in darkness. “What the
fuck
am I doing?”

There is dim light bleeding through the curtain, barely enough to see by. Henry goes to check the door, and with a feeling of unreality discovers that there is no inside latch—it requires a key to get out. This is funnier to him than it is frightening—there is no question of staying there until someone comes along to free him, but how many damn doors is he going to have to bust down today? The idea that it took three days to get in and now he can’t get out without literally
breaking
out—Ruby would be shaking her head at the well-deserved irony:
So much for chutzpah, bunnykins
.

Henry leaves the door for now and goes to the ladder. Wherever this leads, maybe there’s another way out, or perhaps a phone he can use to call the hotel desk and reassure Ruby. He climbs up and looks over the top of the plywood wall, grunting at the view as if jabbed in the solar-plexus with a big soft finger. So this is why the music sounded so strange.

Just like the other one, the rest of this building is hollow inside…but not quite empty. In fact, it’s as cluttered as a warehouse. He is looking down its whole length, two stories up and a hundred feet long. Light seeps in through the rows of draped windows, every door a fake front for a condominium that doesn’t exist. Henry knows for sure now: It’s all a façade, the whole complex; some kind of front for a scam of epic proportions.

The only real apartment is the one being built beneath him, assembled like a kit out of the prefabricated parts that are lying all around. Whole finished walls ready to be snapped together whenever and wherever needed, an instant showroom behind any of these sham doorways.

Along with the building supplies are troves of plastic-wrapped furniture and appliances, rolls of carpeting, all manner of decorative lawn and garden kitsch. Henry supposes that all this stuff goes on display when the brochures are being shot, or when visitors and prospective tenants are ushered through. Stage dressing. He has no doubt there are actors in this show as well, con-artists playing the part of happy residents.

There is a ladder on the opposite side of the wall, and with a sickly sense of wonder Henry climbs down to the floor of the cavernous space. It is like standing in any kind of factory or mill. Along the nearest wall are several large tables made from plywood sheets propped on sawhorses, and on these tables are plastic crates of mail in various stages of being sorted and filed. Aside from the enormous boom-box that Henry expected to see, there are also TVs and laptop computers and a host of electronic printing equipment. Metal folding chairs have been set up in front of the tables, and the floor is covered with bags of unsorted mail.