Blackout, page 30
He didn’t want to see whatever she was holding.
She shoved it toward him, and he squinted at it, then closed his eyes, searching his mind for some tiny corner where he might be safe. But all he could see was his daughter’s face, and all he could hear was Lee Boyle’s voice: All hope abandon ye who enter here.
45
Darcy shut her eyes and pressed her knuckles into her lids, seeing bright visual flashes, and thinking they had a name, phosphenes, something like that, and if she just concentrated on unusual words she’d be fine, she wouldn’t need to listen to what Lee was saying.
But his words filtered through anyhow. ‘The way I see it, they’ll love you. They’ll wait in long lines for you, babe. I imagine you in a wine-colored velvet skirt, not too short, and maybe a pricey lace blouse. No see-through crap. Something with class. And we’ll stay away from the streets, because it’s a snake-pit down there. It’s going to be hotels, good hotels. I don’t want you out there with the goddam riff-raff. You’re better than that.’
She peered at him through slatted fingers. His face was white and glistening. The gun lay in his lap. The leather bag with the dope sat on the console. Much of the dope was spilled. Money was strewn inside the car. Everything was chaos and displacement.
‘This is a fresh beginning. Gleaming spires in the distance. Lee is moving up in the world. Lee will have a kidskin Filofax and a state-of-the-fucking-art cellular phone and a car that has taste written all over it.’
She saw this future he was talking about. He couldn’t possibly be serious. But he was. He was animated and purposeful and his voice was resolute, and he was chopping the air in karate fashion with one hand to emphasize everything he was saying.
‘You think –? You’re crazy,’ she said.
‘I have been told that on more than one occasion, nightingale. Always by wrong-headed people lacking perception. People who cut me down, took pot-shots at me. The trees are thick with snipers. My head’s always in somebody’s cross-sights. Not this time, because Lee has had enough. You understand what I’m saying? Lee takes no more shit.’
She was traveling through another person’s nightmare, the strands of somebody else’s reality – or in Lee’s case no reality at all, but some kind of deformed relationship he had with the world.
Phosphorite.
Just keep the words coming, Darcy. Just fill your head with words.
He said, ‘I’m not saying it’s going to be easy at first. I realize that. You’ll probably hate yourself, you’ll definitely hate me, but we’ll get round that. The trick is, you don’t think about what you’re doing, you just numb yourself. After a while it comes naturally to you. It’s just a job you do.’
It comes naturally. Going to hotel rooms to fuck strangers. She pictured herself taking her clothes off, fat men pawing her, slobbering over her, screwing her, she thought of dirt under fingernails and sweat and bad breath.
‘And if any of the customers step out of line – hey, I’m there to see you’re protected. I’ll look after you all the way. And we won’t work it too hard, we’ll do it nice and easy.’
Yes, Lee. Whatever you say, Lee. She looked from the window and wondered about her father, where he was, why he wasn’t looking for her, why she didn’t hear the wail of sirens. She saw houses float past, and then abruptly there was darkness and the lit streets were left somewhere behind and the car was traveling through a black wormhole in the texture of space.
Phosphate.
But the words weren’t working. She couldn’t play this game any longer. She couldn’t hide from her predicament. She looked at the oil-black landscape on either side of the road, which was narrow and unmarked, and she realized where she was, and that the city was slipping away behind her, her father receding, the notion of safety diminishing.
‘You’re a natural,’ he was saying. ‘The way you walk. From the hips, you know what I mean? With a little pelvic thrust that says, Hey, guys, consider it a privilege just to breathe the same air as me. And that mouth of yours – people will think you stole it from an angel. We’ll need to color the hair, I figure. Red? No, I don’t think red. One of those offbeat colors – purple? A streak of gold? Not too much, though, because we don’t want you looking tacky. When you strut inside a room I want men going fucking wild with desire. I want them drooling because a goddess has condescended to visit.’
He was expelling his words like tiny torpedoes of air. She was looking into the darkness, thinking, thinking, fearful, seeing the headlights gleam on the blacktop. Humor him. Go along with him. Crossing him now was dangerous. Think. Nobody’s going to help you out of this. You’re on your own.
She said, ‘It all sounds terrific, Lee.’
‘It is terrific, no two ways about it,’ he said. ‘First time I saw you, I thought, She’s the one, she’s my girl,’ and he reached out to touch the back of her hand. ‘Or maybe it was when I heard your voice. What the hell. It doesn’t matter, does it?’
She couldn’t stand the feel of his skin. She was aware of blackness zooming past. Do something. But what? The only thing that came to mind was risky and dangerous, but she was beyond thinking of any consequences, all she wanted was to disrupt a sequence of events that in Boyle’s mind was inevitable. Becoming a whore. His.
Just do it.
She hesitated a moment and then thought, Go for it, now or never, and made a grab for the wheel, thinking she could make the car swerve, maybe crash it, derail everything somehow. But it was a hapless effort, doomed from the start because Boyle anticipated her. He was too quick, he struck her wrist with the hard edge of his hand, and she pulled her arm back to her side.
He braked, turned to her with a fierce look. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re trying to do? You could have killed us both, for Christ’s sake. Did you imagine you could somehow get away? Huh? Some crazy notion of freedom entered that little head of yours?’ He smiled suddenly. ‘Oh, you are precious, nightingale. Totally precious. Devious and sly. You’ve got the instincts of a whore. See, you’re halfway there already. Just don’t ever think about fucking with me again. Any time a similar stunt pops into your head, take my advice and strangle it at birth.’
He laughed in a discordant fashion, and turned off the blacktop at a place where the incline into the field was gradual and easy, and then he was driving through long stalks of grass that slowed the progress of the car, and straight ahead was a big tree made white by the glossy glare of the headlights.
‘Now the sightseeing,’ he said. ‘And after that we move move move, all hastening onward, and no more fucking games. One more off-the-wall prank and you’re a dead little girl and Daddy’s going to have to arrange a funeral. Think about that, nightingale.’
46
Samsa let the print slip out of his hand. It fell down the side of his seat and he didn’t reach to retrieve it, didn’t want to touch it.
‘They’ve been blackmailing you,’ Eve said. ‘Gold and Lee Boyle.’
‘Gold? I didn’t know Gold was involved.’ Gold and Boyle conspiring in the fissures of the city: Gold taking the furtive picture, Boyle exploiting it.
‘I can just about understand you picking up that girl. Just about. And I can see how your reputation would be compromised seriously after the accident. And maybe I’m being naïve and idealistic, but what really blows me out the water is the fact you didn’t tell the truth from the beginning, because in the long run it’s easier –’
‘Easier? When you’re faced with the dead body of a young girl you don’t always make the right choices, Eve. All that training you get to stay composed in the face of pressure, it’s nothing, it goes haywire. You create a lie and suddenly everything’s built around it, and you can’t see a way out because you can’t go back and undo it –’
‘By covering it up, you compounded it, for Christ’s sake. You got yourself tangled up in this whole diabolic mess, going through the motions of an investigation you knew was a total fiction. And now Darcy’s out there …’
He laid his cheek against the window of the car. What did he feel anyway? A release? Or a darker guilt? It didn’t matter now.
She said, ‘I thought seriously about never mentioning this to you and just choking it down and going on as if I’d never learned about it in the first place. But I can’t live like that, Greg. I’d see you every day. There would be this effort at pretense, and I wouldn’t know how to carry that off.’
‘You’ll go to Brodsky,’ he said.
‘That’s not up to me,’ she replied.
She had an expression he’d never seen before on her face – pinched and sorrowful, and her green eyes were a shade darker. There were right ways to do things, and wrong ways, and she knew the difference. And you, Samsa, in the most terrible overheated moment of your life, you forgot.
Eve said, ‘I’ll ask for a transfer if it comes down to that. I’ll make up some excuse: I need a change of scenery, I’m tired of homicide, whatever. But I won’t tell him what I know, Greg. It’s up to you to straighten it out.’
He looked at the street ahead. The city was dead space in which his daughter was lost. He half imagined she’d suddenly materialize in the darkness unharmed, she’d come strolling along the sidewalk, that Boyle’s phone call was just a cruel hoax.
‘I had you up on a pedestal,’ Eve said.
‘Where I didn’t belong.’
‘More naïvety, I guess. That was my mistake.’
‘We all make them,’ he said.
‘I thought … well, maybe we had the germ of something. Stupid me. Naïve me.’
‘And now it’s changed. What happened between us is just something hit by a fucking truck and bleeding at the side of the road. Is that how you see it?’
‘I should have left it alone,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have gone back to see Gold, I shouldn’t have looked inside his goddam darkroom. The timer on his developer was buzzing and I keep hearing it –’
‘You did what you had to,’ he said.
‘And what good has that done?’
‘You can sleep nights,’ he said.
‘I’m not so sure. How much has this cost you so far?’
He told her.
She said, ‘You gave him twenty-five thousand dollars. You stole State’s evidence and handed it over to him. And now he’s got your daughter. This guy has it in for you in a big way.’
I killed his girl, Samsa thought. He thinks I still owe him.
And the last installment of the debt is Darcy.
‘You forgot one simple truth,’ she said. ‘Blackmailers always come back, Greg. Always.’
‘I didn’t forget it,’ he said.
‘You hoped he’d just evaporate?’
‘I don’t know what I hoped. Maybe he’d just see the well was dry and take a hike. I don’t know.’
She drove for a few moments in silence. ‘Gold is terrified. He’ll testify against Boyle in the matter of extortion. He wants very badly to be law-abiding. Basically he doesn’t want to be a piece of gay white ass in a prison.’
Samsa wasn’t interested in what Gold would or wouldn’t do. ‘There’s only one thing on my mind right now. Everything else can keep.’ He looked at her, searched her face for some tiny glimmer of sympathy, but found none.
She said, ‘I keep wondering what you would have done if I hadn’t gone back to see Gold. Would you have kept up this masquerade? God, I want to believe you’d have come to your senses, because basically I always considered you a decent man, Greg. I’ll never really know now, will I?’
‘Then we’re in the same boat,’ he said. He touched her hand and she permitted the contact a moment before she drew away.
The car was beginning to rise up through narrow streets in the direction of Dolores Drive. He glanced back and saw the city spread out below in spidery interstices of light the color of jaundiced flesh.
Dolores Drive. It was a narrow blacktop that sliced through the badlands where everything in his life had gone wrong. He thought of the great dark unkempt mass of the Purchase property that lay on either side of Dolores.
And he wondered why Lee Boyle had taken Darcy into that vicinity.
Dear God.
If Boyle had taken Darcy anywhere close to the Purchase property, he could have only one reason for doing so.
Samsa could think of no other.
Boyle was redressing the balance of things as he perceived them. Squaring the accounts. The debt paid in full.
We’re even now, Samsa.
He leaned forward in his seat, staring ahead, seeing nothing, listening to his own roaring pulses. The field filled his head. Damp grass, a branch cracking and falling, wheels spinning, metal crunching against wood.
‘Pull over,’ he said.
‘Pull over? Why?’
‘Just do it, Eve.’
‘I don’t see the reason for –’
‘Pull over, I said. Here.’
‘Okay, Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘Whatever you say.’
She braked, looked at him in a puzzled way.
‘I’ll drive,’ he said. ‘Change places with me.’
She shrugged, stepped out of the car reluctantly and slammed the door.
He slid his body behind the wheel, saw Eve walk round the hood to the passenger side. He waited until she was reaching for the handle of the door and then slammed his foot on the gas and drove forward. In the rearview mirror he saw her standing in the middle of the street, a diminishing figure with one arm raised in a gesture – of what? Anger? Bewilderment?
It didn’t matter what she felt. He was the one who’d constructed this nightmare. He was the one who’d have to go into the depths of his own creation. Nobody else. It was beyond police business now, outside the law, it lay in that uncertain territory where no book of procedure dictated the rules.
He was alone.
47
The Ford stammered to a halt about fifty yards from the tree. Boyle cursed, turned the key, heard the engine hack. He twisted the key again, then again, nothing. Out of gas, okay, that wasn’t going to be a problem. He wouldn’t allow it to become one. It was a minor inconvenience. Don’t blow it up into something enormous.
‘What are you going to do now, Lee?’ she asked. She looked into his blue eyes by what scant moonlight there was, and they were cold, like icicles hammered all the way into his skull.
‘I’ll steal another goddam car,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole suburb over there filled with them,’ and he pointed into the distance, where dim streetlamps were visible way beyond the foliage. Then he swung round and kicked a front tire of the Ford in a petulant way and said, ‘The fucking fuel gauge is probably faulty.’
He stopped himself. Waste of energy kicking rubber. He’d forgotten why he’d driven down here in the first place, then it came back to him, and he gripped Darcy by the wrist and walked to the tree. ‘The guided tour,’ he said. ‘This is the spot where your daddy crashed his car. You can see the gouge.’
She found herself staring at the tree. She didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to listen to him.
‘Touch it. Try to picture Daddy smacking into this. Imagine a little girl dead.’
‘No –’
‘Just do what I fucking say, for Christ’s sake.’ He seized her hand and forced it against the trunk, and she didn’t have the strength to resist.
She encountered a jagged indentation with her fingertips. Something moved in the crevice – an ant, a spider. She drew back, alarmed. She watched Lee stick his fingers into the gash. Ants, scores of them, criss-crossed his hand. He imagined them working their way into his flesh, tunneling into his veins. He thought of himself as a building occupied by busy black tenants always making demands. He brushed them off.
He walked around the tree. A large branch lay some feet away. ‘This probably came off when he whacked into the trunk.’ He stared into the distance and had the strange feeling that just beyond the range of his vision a hooded figure lingered in the bushes, one crooked finger beckoning from the fold of a long sleeve, a voice saying, Step right this way, Lee. I’ll take you to a place nobody ever comes back from.
‘Your daddy dumped her like a piece of trash. Just walked off the scene. Free as a bird. You think I’m making this up?’
She shook her head. I don’t know what you’re making up and what you’re not, she thought. All I know is you scare me to death. All I know is I want to be a million miles away from you, a galaxy away.
He grabbed her arm again and pushed her forcefully back in the direction of the car. He began to rummage inside the car, gathering money together and stuffing it in his pockets, rescuing his dope, some of which lay spilled on the floor and the console. Working quickly. Gotta move. Get out of here. Time is an eagle.
She watched him move around in a frantic way. He raised to his nose a little pile of speed balanced on the back of one hand and sniffed deeply. How could he keep doing that stuff on and on?
He finished collecting his money and then –
– wowee, here it comes, the rush, the familiar big jolt. He had the feeling that his skeletal structure was changing, as if pins had been implanted to hold his bones together, knobs of steel, little screws. As if he’d undergone surgery, his skin peeled back, men in surgical masks screwing bolts into his exposed skeleton. His skull had been reassembled too, the cracks fused together with thin metallic stitches, but they weren’t holding, they were beginning to come undone, and with each pop there was a tiny hand-grenade burst. When he stood upright from his bending position, he heard the pins creaking inside him and his skull splitting open.
He shivered and rubbed his hands together briskly, thinking how even the bones of his fingers felt odd, like they were steel inserts under his skin. He licked his dry lips. Numb, tasted of stone. ‘Now it’s time for some grand theft auto. Then we’re history, kid. We are truly history.’
And he bent down, groped around in the dark below the exposed roots of the tree, then rose with something in his fist. He looked at the girl and said, ‘Can I trust you?’
She nodded her head slowly. She couldn’t see what he had in his hand. He concealed it, tucking it in his waistband, his shirt hanging over it.
