The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (61 page)

Her hair fell down and brushed his lips, and there were the apples—the smell was coming from her hair. He wound his fingers through to her scalp and pulled. His knuckles brushed the hoops in her ear, all that cold metal going through her skin. She tugged at his shirt and he threw it off and she ran her teeth along his shoulder. And then they got hold of each other's belts and tried to unlatch them in the dark. She got his done first and threw it to the ground, then pushed his fumbling fingers away, stood up next to the bed, slid her jeans down her long legs and stepped out of them, her bare skin shining in the clock light.

Hawley caught her around the hips and buried his face in her neck, and together they fell onto the carpet. He pushed her knees open, and she made a sound like it was hurting her. Hawley tried to see her face, but she only wrapped herself tighter around him, and their bodies spun and he cracked his head on the bed frame. And that's when he heard the gunshots. Two quick pops in a row and then silence.

The girl was still panting and shaking beneath him. Hawley covered her mouth with his hand. They waited like that in the dark on the floor of the motel room. And then there was another blast, and the baby woke up and started crying.

Hawley scrambled to the table and pulled open the drawer and took out the Beretta. He went to the window and peeked through the curtains. He couldn't see anything but the two cars. He turned back, and Amy was still lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

“Shut him up,” Hawley said.

The girl climbed onto the bed. She pulled the baby to her chest and started rocking. Hawley found his jeans in the dark and hurried over to the closet. He grabbed some clips and his father's rifle and went back to the window. The baby was still crying. Every scream screwed Hawley's nerves tighter. The girl was standing now, searching through her bag. She found a bottle, but her hands were shaking and she dropped it twice, and then she got back on the bed and stuffed the nipple into the baby's mouth and the baby was quiet.

Hawley took a deep breath. He told the girl to keep the light off. Then he told her to take the baby and go into the bathroom and lock the door. She cleared her throat a few times as if she was going to say something, but she didn't. He listened to her gather the kid and her clothes and then he heard the door to the bathroom click. His eyes never left the parking lot. He could still sense the clock behind him, the stagnant numbers like heat, illuminating the side of his face in the gloom.

A few minutes later the brown van, the one from Kansas, eased around the side of the building. It circled the lot and slowed by Hawley's car, then stopped right before it came to Amy's. A man got out of the driver's side, holding a handgun. It was the man with the freckles. He was wearing the red bowling shirt the Navajo'd had on earlier. His arms were bare and his prison tattoos wound past his elbows. He checked the license on Hawley's truck and peered in the windows of Amy's hatchback. Then he looked up at the line of rooms.

They'd both seen him—Hawley and the girl. If he'd only stolen some money, Hawley figured he'd get in his car and leave. But if he'd killed the Navajos, he'd probably come after them. The man went back to the van. He took out a box of bullets, opened the chamber on his revolver, and reloaded. Then he wiped his hands on the red bowling shirt, picked up the gun where he'd set it on the driver's seat, flipped the safety, and started up the stairs.

Amy's hatchback and Hawley's truck were both parked in spots marked with their room numbers. Hawley waited to see which door would get tried first. The freckled man reached the landing, then made his way along the row of doors. He took out a set of master keys, fit one into the lock of Amy's room, and slipped inside. As soon as he did, Hawley stepped out onto the landing. He leveled the rifle, and immediately the wind swept up and started pushing against the barrel.

Hawley knew how to read his surroundings, to compensate for drag while lining his sights. When the leaves changed direction, the wind was seven miles per hour. If branches began to bend, it was closer to nine. But there were no trees here to tell how fast the storm was blowing, not even a plastic bag caught in a fence—only the sand that had crossed the open desert and was now circling the motel, pelting the windows with dust.

Start with your feet
, his mother had told him.
Your heels are already on the ground. Build from there when you lose your way
. Hawley eased his weight back. He shook the tension from his calves and loosened his knees. He turned at the waist. He braced his elbow against his ribs and felt the gun steady. Then he pressed his cheek gently to the stock of the barrel and dragged it down behind the rear sight.

Hawley took in a full breath. He let half of it out.

The man with the freckles stepped from Amy's room, not even careful. Hawley could have shot him in the head, but he went for the shoulder. The man cried out and staggered, then lurched for the stairs, but before he made it halfway down, he turned and fired off all the rounds he'd been holding. Hawley stepped back too slowly and felt a burn through his right side, and suddenly his arm couldn't support the rifle anymore. It was falling and it fell and he watched it fall and then he was scrambling for the Beretta. He staggered over to the balustrade with the handgun. There was blood—it was streaming out over the walkway, and Hawley's head was spinning. He grabbed the railing and watched the man struggling into the van below, the red shirt billowing sideways like a cape in the wind. Thirty miles an hour, Hawley decided. Then he raised the gun and took the shot.

Hawley's legs went weak and he slumped to the ground. He was having trouble breathing—it was as if there was a sponge at the back of his throat. He crawled across the landing on his knees. The concrete was cold and hard and unforgiving. He called Amy's name and pushed open the door. When she came out of the bathroom, she was fully dressed, like when he first met her, her hair pulled back tight in a bun once more and the baby in the sling and zipped up in her jacket.

“We got to leave,” he managed. But he couldn't get up from the floor.

Amy grabbed towels from the bathroom and wet them and pressed them to his side. Then she took some diapers and opened them and put them under the towels, taping the plastic tabs to his skin. Hawley told her to get the bag with the guns and to fetch the rifle he'd dropped, and then he told her to open the toilet tank and get the jar of licorice out and put it in the bag, too. She did all he asked, and when she came back and kneeled beside him, her face held that same strange look from earlier, when he'd told her that her name was pretty.

He barely remembered coming down the stairs. Amy threw some towels across the rear seat, then maneuvered him into the back of her car. She put the bag in the trunk. She opened the other door and took the baby out of the sling and strapped him in next to Hawley. The van was still running, the windshield sprayed with blood, the man with the freckles half in, half out of the driver's seat.

Amy got into the front of the hatchback and slammed the door. She gripped the steering wheel and kept her eyes on the rearview mirror. “Do you think the manager's dead?”

“We should check,” said Hawley.

They drove around to the front of the building. Amy got out, and this time the office door was unlocked. Hawley and the baby stayed in the car, the kid watching the spot his mother had disappeared into, kicking his tiny feet and drooling. Hawley pressed the diapers against his ribs and drifted in and out. When Amy came back, she froze for a moment, holding on to the handle of the car, looking like she was going to be sick, and Hawley knew he'd been right and the other men were dead, and he wished he'd listened to his guts when he checked in and saw those freckles. He could have been miles away by now or even drinking beers with McGee and not dying in the back seat of some girl's car.

Amy fumbled with her seat belt. She put the car in reverse, backed out of the parking spot, then pulled onto the highway. “There's a doctor on the reservation,” she said, “about ten miles down.”

The seat cushion beneath Hawley was wet with blood. There was blood on the seat belt, blood on the floor. “He'll report it.”

“Not if you pay him,” Amy said.

And that's when Hawley knew she'd opened the jar.

He tried to say something about this, but it came out slurred. He focused on the little boy strapped in the carrier next to him and tried to stay awake. The elephant pajamas had blood on them, and the baby was staring at the back of Amy's head and his arms were grabbing for his mother as if she was the only thing that mattered in the world.

The sun seemed to be coming up, the sky a multitude of pinks and oranges, and Hawley wondered again what time it was. The bullet was turning now, spinning its hardness into a dark place and taking him with it. He touched the diapers taped along the side of his stomach. They smelled of talcum powder and were heavy and warm and felt alive in his hands, just like the baby's diaper had when he'd carried it into the bathroom and put it in the trash.

“We're nearly there,” Amy said. Then she said, “I'll go back and get your car for you.”

Hawley hoped she would. He hoped that when he woke up and stumbled out of the doctor's house into the blazing desert heat, she'd be there with the baby and the money and it wouldn't just be his truck covered with dust on the side of the road, the keys in the ignition. That he wouldn't have to check the trunk for the guns, and that there'd be at least a grand left for him in the licorice jar. She owed him that, at least, he thought. She owed him something.

Hawley pressed his face against the back window. He eyed the side mirror, the highway as it stretched behind them. A black line reflecting through the desert morning. A single, lonely path. Then the car went over a bump, and there was a flash of fur and feathers. Roadkill—something already dead. A rabbit and an eagle, he thought. A coyote and a vulture. In the seat beside him the baby moaned and whimpered. His tiny mouth opened. He began to cry.

“He's hungry again,” said Amy, but they couldn't stop, so she started singing. “Twinkle, Twinkle” and “Hush-a-bye, Baby.” Hawley closed his eyes and listened. Her voice was off-key, but she was trying.

“You're a good mother,” Hawley said, or at least he thought he did, and then the bullet pulled him the rest of the way into the dark.

MAURINE DALLAS WATKINS

FROM
Strand Magazine

 

Yes, mr. hedges, I'm deaf but I can read your lips and understand perfectly: anything I say may be used against me, and I'm making this statement voluntary and of my own free will. And I'll write down exactly what happened last night, and how. But I wish you wouldn't read over my shoulder like that—I'll hand you each page when I'm done
.

Miss Thyrza took me to raise when I was thirteen.

“I don't want a boy that's too bright,” she said. “None of these young smart alecks for mine. In fact, I'd rather have him more on the dumb side.”

“We've got one here that's all on the dumb side,” said the matron. “Ha, ha.” She was always a great one for jokes that way. “Fetch Ernie, girls.”

I was less than a rod away, reading every word they said, but I waited for the girls to fetch me, for if Mrs. Simpson had ever learned I could read lips like that, it would have been much harder for me to find out her plans and pass them on to the boys.

Miss Thyrza and me eyed each other, and I wasn't any more pleased than she was. That was seven years ago and she was in her middle thirties, but she looked to me like an old woman: partly her blue-gobbler nose and long yellow neck with its folds of fat going round and round, and partly that “ancestral” look, as I learned later when I studied her family photograph album on Sunday afternoons. People who resemble their folks too close always look old before their time, as if they've inherited their age along with the features.

“Of course, if you want a boy for company, Ernie can't gab none,” said the matron brightly, laying an affectionate arm around my shoulders and giving me a pinch that meant I should close my mouth. It's a bad habit I have, letting my mouth hang open.

“Not for company,” Miss Thyrza answered shortly. “But with Pa's death it leaves just me and the hired hand, Amos McGill. And you know how tongues wag—a woman alone that way and a man.”

Then she turned and her black eyes burned me through. “Humph, is he healthy? Is he strong? Has he had all the children's diseases? For I can't spend my time nursing boys through the measles—I've got a hundred and sixty acres to tend!” And she ran her fingers over my teeth—just like I was a horse—to be sure there'd be no dental work till she'd had me a few years.

“How's his appetite? Will he eat me out of house and home? Can he work? Is he willing? Milk? Look after chickens? Hogs? Chop wood? Any bad habits? Does he lie? Steal? Smoke? Chew? No goings-on like that, mind you.” She paused for breath, then finished: “And what schooling has he had? I aim to board a teacher this winter, and he can pick up some there if he's eager.”

The matron wrote on the slate, which I wore around my neck: “Ernie, wouldn't you like to go with this nice, kind lady and have a nice, good home?”

And I wrote back, “Yes, ma'am.”

But Miss Thyrza wasn't one to leap before looking, so she said she'd take me on trial from Friday till Monday.

When I explained to the boys how it was, they all went without apples for dinner and gave me half their biscuits that night to put in with my bundle of clothes, so that I could eat them between meals and be sort of delicate at the table. For our experience at the Home had taught us, unless you were a little girl with golden hair and blue eyes, the best way to make a good impression when tried out was to go easy on the victuals, do chores without being told, and keep from underfoot.