The Exiled (22 page)

R
aney arrived at the Albuquerque National Cemetery at 11:00 p.m. on August 2. He wore a navy-blue jumpsuit and a matching baseball cap. The night watchman took his badge, held it under a flashlight.

“Care to tell me what you're looking for?” he asked.

“I work gangs. A baby banger in the Mexican Mafia says he hid a gun in the bushes near one of the mausoleums.”

“Didn't happen to say which mausoleum?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you're in for a long night.”

“I guess I am.”

“I was on the job,” the watchman said. “Second Precinct, Robbery Division. Thirty years. What you're saying doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if you ask me.”

“Which part?”

“Sending a single detective in the middle of the night to canvass an area this long and wide.”

“I'm on my own time. No wife waiting at home. Nothing on TV.”

“Can I ask why you're dressed like a janitor?”

“I'm undercover in the Courtside projects.”

“Now, that holds water. You're the wrong color for that part of town, but no one looks twice at a maintenance man.”

“That's the idea.”

“Let me see your badge one more time.”

Raney handed it back. “This seems like a good gig,” he said. “Quiet. Not much hassle.”

“There are worse,” the watchman said. “I'll let you pass even though your story smells like bullshit. You didn't come here alone at this hour to look for any gun. I'm going to assume you've got your reasons and leave it at that. Just watch yourself. It's pitch-dark in there, and we got no shortage of snakes and such.”

“Thank you,” Raney said. “I'll keep an eye out.”

The cemetery spanned three hundred heavily manicured acres, including an exotic rose garden and an arboretum imported from Japan—quiet settings where ashes could be scattered and plaques installed. Raney had downloaded a map, memorized the layout, highlighted Jonathan Grant's headstone in red marker. Still, the night watchman was right: the overhang from the trees cut the moonlight; he had trouble holding his bearings in the dark. He worked his way forward using a compass and a high-voltage flashlight. With each step he felt, or imagined he felt, small insects biting his ankles. He tripped over a memorial stone, scraped his cheek on a low-hanging branch. He kept heading north. He heard a low-pitched scream, reached for his gun before he realized the sound belonged to an owl.

Jonathan was buried at the rear of the cemetery, near the center of a row of tombstones bookended by Civil War mausoleums. Raney went stone by stone until he found Jonathan's plot. The epitaph read:

Oscar Grant was now the bogeyman of the urban desert, his face branded into the imagination of every citizen in the Albuquerque–Santa Fe corridor. State and federal authorities were offering substantial rewards for information leading to his capture. Street gangs were hunting him both for the bounty and because of what he'd done to their sales. If Oscar was planning to honor his son's birth, he'd likely do it at an hour when the city was asleep; if he was brazen enough to come by daylight, then Raney was prepared to wait. Of course, it was possible that he wouldn't show at all, that he'd fled the state and country: a loner with fake documents who might be standing anywhere on the globe. If that was the case, then the marshals would be searching until Grant died of natural causes.

Raney switched off the flashlight, lay on his stomach in the narrow space between the bushes and a wall of the mausoleum on the western side of the cemetery. If Oscar spotted him, he'd see a groundskeeper sleeping one off.

Hours passed. Raney kept his eyes fixed on Jonathan's tombstone even as his mind began to drift. He saw Clara looking out a window in some distant city, the early morning sun highlighting her hair; he saw Bay dressed in waders, wrestling a salmon out of an Alaskan river. Nobody, Raney thought, lives just one life anymore. A Boston prostitute somehow comes to own a crafts store in southern New Mexico; a one-time Navy SEAL finds himself in the role of single dad, then fugitive. Some people, like Clara, volunteered for their second or third lives; most just fell into them. It was the burden or blessing of an increased life span.

The sky began to lighten, turn colors. Raney sipped from a small Thermos of coffee, felt like a child under the covers, fighting sleep, playing make-believe. He pretended he was a nature photographer waiting to snap a picture of some rare bird, a World War II sniper lying in wait for the Desert Fox, Billy the Kid watching a posse ride past. His legs started to cramp. The arm he'd been lying on went numb, began to tingle. He found himself doubting Oscar would come, laughed out loud at the image of a forty-two-year-old man hiding in the bushes of a cemetery, telling himself stories while he waited for a bad guy who was sleeping comfortably in a motel several thousand miles away, maybe in Buenos Aires. Maybe, as a final irony, Oscar decided to live out Mavis's dream. Maybe, Raney thought, I should book a flight to Argentina.

The cemetery would open to the public soon. Raney would have to come out of hiding, pretend to be trimming hedges or polishing marble. The need to urinate became overwhelming. He stood, shook out his legs, walked around to the back of the mausoleum. He wondered why the zipper running down the front of his jumpsuit didn't extend to the crotch. He was forced to take his arms out of the sleeves, push the suit to his ankles, lean awkwardly forward—an absurd creature, pissing among the dead. He wondered if this stakeout was anything more than Detective Wes Raney clinging to what would likely be the last substantial case of his career.

He worked the zipper back up to his neck, started toward his post, stopped cold when he turned the corner. Oscar was there, kneeling at his son's grave. He wore a shoulder-length black wig, held a bouquet of yellow tulips in one hand and a small American flag in the other. Raney crouched down, watched him screw the flag into the earth, rest the flowers against the stone. Oscar's lips were moving, but not in prayer. He was singing, whispering “Happy Birthday” to his son.

Raney lifted his gun, crept forward. He was a few yards shy when Oscar, still kneeling, turned to face him.

“Hands on top of your head,” Raney said. “Now.”

Oscar reached up, pulled off his wig. Bits of glue stuck to his scalp, glistened.

“I'm not armed,” he said.

“Hands,” Raney said.

“You're too late.”

“Put your goddamn hands on your head.”

Raney was on top of him now. Oscar held out his left arm, rolled up his sleeve. His veins were yellow and swollen. He sucked at the air in short, harsh breaths.

“I've already surrendered,” he said. “Just not to you, Detective.”

“Son of a bitch,” Raney said.

He held his gun level, walked a half circle around Oscar, pushed him to the ground and planted a foot in the small of his back. He dug his phone out of his pocket, dialed nine-one-one.

“This is Detective Wes Raney, county Homicide. I'm at the Albuquerque National Cemetery. There's a man overdosing. It's Oscar Grant. I need an ambulance and additional units.”

He hung up before she could ask questions.

“You're too late,” Oscar repeated. “You've been too late from the beginning.”

“No talking,” Raney said. “Just lie still. They'll be here soon.”

Oscar began wheezing, grabbing at his throat. The spasms were intermittent, then continuous. Raney dropped to his knees, flipped Oscar onto his back. Oscar's torso was bucking, his arms and legs thrashing. Raney slipped a hand under his head, pressed down on his chest. Oscar vomited into the air. Blood ran from his nose and ears.

Raney heard a brigade of sirens. Oscar calmed, quieted, and went still.

H
e drove without rest, had emptied Dunham's lockbox by the time he reached the New Mexico border. For days, he lay naked on the cabin's bathroom floor, drying his skin with a towel, rising now and again to eat peaches from pull-top cans, fighting the urge to slit his wrists with the metal edges. When he drifted off, his dreams jolted him awake: pseudomythical creatures chasing him through a stainless steel maze; a lifeless, gray mass falling from Sophia's womb. Later, after he'd graduated to the loft, he would wake to find evidence of his own sleepwalking: a puddle of urine at the center of the kitchen floor; the TV tuned to static; the doors and windows open throughout the cabin.

He stopped sleeping altogether, stayed up waiting for Meno's associates to light the place on fire and murder him as he ran out the door. He searched the cabin, found a dusty .22 rifle and a box of shells in the foyer closet. He would lie for hours on his belly in the loft, rifle cocked, listening. Now and then he'd creep down the stairs, peer through each window in turn.

When he did sleep again, it was for a very long while. Afterward, he took his first shower at the cabin, used dish soap for shampoo. His hair was long and matted. His clothes hung from his body like drapery. He had no razor to shave with.

He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, tried to calculate how much time had passed. Sophia would have given birth by now. He saw Ferguson standing over her hospital bed, cradling the baby, promising, in Raney's absence, to be more than a grandfather.

In time, Raney left the cabin, walked barefoot to the creek, sunk his toes in the water. The physical pain was gone. Now there was only hunger and a dull withdrawal he knew he could manage.

On the strength of Ferguson's recommendation, and after a battery of interviews and field tests, the county hired him straight into Homicide. There was a two-month probation period during which he worked a suicide and a shooting in a bar full of witnesses anxious to cooperate. The job was his for as long as he wanted it.

He drove a hundred miles to the nearest library, searched the archives until he found a detailed account of the Mora-Malone fight. Mora was ahead on points when he knocked Malone out in the eleventh. He was now the mandatory challenger for the middleweight belt.
The Ring
magazine ranked him fifth in the division. Raney tried to imagine what might have been his own pro career, but he couldn't sustain the effort: he'd never seen himself as anything other than a cop.

He wrote to Sophia, received no reply. He wrote to her again and again. The letters came back marked
RETURN TO SENDER
. He kept them in a bundle on the shelf above his Polaroids.

He'd been at the cabin two years when he decided to call her. He had something to offer their daughter now: a window into another landscape, another way of living. The desert would seem exotic to a child from the city. He wouldn't be asking for custody, or even partial custody, but rather a visit in the summer, maybe another in the spring. He would take her with him on his hikes, introduce her to a hundred kinds of wildflowers, teach her to track deer, buy her a camera of her own. Ella the environmentalist, the scientist. Maybe all Raney wanted was to see the desert fresh again through his child's eyes.

He prepared for the call as though he'd be meeting Sophia face-to-face. He bought Ella a picture-book tour of the New Mexico desert featuring a chapter on cacti of every shape and size followed by a two-page spread of a coyote howling at the moon. He bought her a stuffed roadrunner that made sounds when you squeezed its stomach. He set her presents on the couch beside a manila envelope filled with the cash equivalent of all the checks Sophia had rejected. He reminded himself that his aim was not to win Sophia back or to reclaim his old life: he wanted to know his daughter; he wanted his daughter to know him.

Sophia's number remained unlisted. Raney called her office. The receptionist said she had been promoted, moved to a more potent branch of the same department. She transferred his call. This time a man answered:

“Special Services, Sophia Ferguson's office.”

“I'd like to speak to Ms. Ferguson,” Raney said.

“She's busy at the moment. Can I take a message?”

“I'm calling about her daughter, Ella.”

“Please hold,” the man said. “I'll see if she can step out of her meeting.”

The line filled with Muzak. Now and again an automated voice affirmed that his call was important to the office of Special Services for Children. Was Sophia really in a meeting, or was this a routine meant to weed out unmotivated callers? The longer he waited, the more motivated Raney became.

“Special Services, this is Sophia Ferguson speaking. How may I help you?”

“It's Wes,” he said. “Please don't hang up.”

She was quiet for a while. Then:

“You shouldn't be calling me here.”

“I know. Your home number isn't listed.”

“You shouldn't be calling me at all.”

“That used to be true,” he said. “Things have changed. I've changed.”

“Nothing has changed for me,” she said. “Who you were at the end erased everything that came before.”

“I'm clean. I have been since the day I got here.”

“Should I applaud? Let me say this in the clearest possible terms: I won't have you anywhere near my daughter. Ever. Under any circumstances.”

He heard traces of her father. Ferguson, alone to spin any tale he wanted, had cast himself as savior. For two years now he'd whispered in her ear about the man she'd almost married, the life he'd spared her. Raney had become a testament to her father's good counsel.

“The person you're talking about doesn't exist, Sophia. Not anymore.”

“You mean the addict who knocked me on my ass when I was six months pregnant? It's not him I'm worried about.”

“Who, then?”

“My father told me where the blood came from that night. The blood on your badge.”

“What did he tell you?”

“You know what he told me.”

“And you believe him?”

“If it's a clean shooting, you stand by the body. You call it in. Isn't that what you're all taught? But you left. You showed up at my place wearing another man's clothes. And then you ran.”

“Your father said I ran?”

“He told me you went to him the next morning. He said you were lost, hysterical. You begged him to help you.”

“That's not right. That isn't what happened.”

“Of course it is. You're living in his cabin, aren't you? You're living a life he handed you. I asked him why. He said he didn't want his granddaughter to grow up a murderer's child. He wanted to spare her that stigma. I wish he'd stayed out of it.”

Raney got up from the table, stood at the back door facing the creek.

“Sophia,” he said, “everything I told you that night was true. I'm saying this now with a clear head.”

“You mean my father had Stone killed? He manipulated you into killing the people who could hurt him? That's all been disproved a hundred times over. You're clinging to a delusion because you can't face what you did. You're a coward on top of everything else.”

“Listen to me, Sophia. All I want is a chance. See me. See me in person and then judge. I'll get on the next plane. You always believed in second chances.”

“You've had yours. You're living it now. You should be calling my father to thank him.”

“Sophia, he's not who you think he is. He's dangerous. He…”

“I don't want to hear it, Wes. Anyway, there's someone else now.”

“Someone else?”

“Someone Ella knows as her father. And it's going to stay that way. He's good to her. He loves her.”

She was lying, spinning a story to keep him in the desert. He could tell by the change in pitch, the slight quickening of her breath.

“Who is he?”

“I'm not going to answer that.”

“Did your father pick him out for you?”

“He works with me in Special Services. I've known him for a long time. Since long before you left.”

“What's his name?”

“Stop it, Wes. He's real. And he's a big part of Ella's life.”

He'd pressed as hard as he could. There was no point in continuing.

“At least let me send her something,” he said. “You wouldn't have to tell her it's from me.”

“I'd rather you didn't.”

“But if I did?”

“Send it to me here at work.”

“Thank you,” Raney said.

She hung up.

He drove to the post office, bought a box large enough to fit a picture book and a stuffed animal. He felt his first real craving in a long while—a desire for the world to go dull. He called his county supervisor.

“My vacation plans fell through,” he said. “Put me on a case. Any case at all.”