The Exiled (5 page)

“His eyes were burning red.”

“Do me a favor,” Dunham said. “Take a couple of steps back.”

“What?”

Dunham tossed his bat, pulled out his gun. The woman went limp. Dunham shook her.

“Now, darling,” he said. “There's some good news. You're gonna live to see your next fix. But I want you to watch this very carefully, and then I want you to tell all your friends from the neighborhood what happened here tonight. You understand?”

She nodded, spit dangling from her lips.

Dunham shot the man twice in the face.

“You think you can remember that, angel?”

He let her drop, knocked her backward with his heel, belly-laughed as she crawled through the doorway and down the steps.

They pulled into a dark and empty aisle at the end of a Turnpike rest stop. Dunham beat his fists against the steering wheel, unleashed a victory howl.

“Goddamn, that feels good,” he said. “I mean, tell me your blood's not pumping. Tell me you aren't more alive now than you were when you woke up this morning. Where do you go after something like that? What do you do? Fuck a stripper? Lift some weights? It's like one minute you're swimming with sharks and the next you're in a coma. So how do you hold on to that feeling? You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me something—do you sleep?”

“Everyone sleeps.”

“Okay, but I mean, do you just lie down and shut off? Head hits the pillow and that's it?”

“Most nights.”

“You're lucky. Not me. I'm afraid if I fall asleep I won't wake back up. It's a thing. There's a name for it. I've had it since I was a kid. Since before I can remember. So I take pills. And then those pills stop working, so I have to find different pills. It's like a game. Sometimes I mix the pills with booze. But sometimes I don't want to sleep. There's a feeling I want to keep. I want to stay up with it all night long. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“So let's keep this feeling.”

He pulled a small, clear Baggie of white powder from his jacket pocket.

“Peruvian shit. The stuff out of Mexico will make your brain fizzle.”

He dug his wallet from his jeans, spread an assortment of licenses and credit cards on the dashboard.

“Try some,” he said. “You look tired. I need you to keep up. You did good tonight. We're going to be great friends.”

They met at District Attorney Stone's apartment on West 96th Street, far from any courthouse or precinct station. Stone ordered lunch from a Thai place, gave Raney the tour while they waited for the food to arrive. A long and lean two-bedroom, an art collection in its early stages—small modernist canvases that reminded Raney of Dunham's bathroom. Stone's home office was decorated in laminated news articles chronicling his successes, everything from maximum sentences for street-level dealers to a 120-year bit for a serial killer preying on Columbia undergrads. The
Times
described him as “a man whose small stature belies his ferocity.” He was known for apoplectic cross-examinations, for crowding the witness stand while spewing out harangues. Op-ed after op-ed called him heroic; one called him a legend at forty. Still, he hadn't touched anything the size of Meno's organization. Raney saw himself in the middle of a pitched battle between two giants who would only meet face-to-face once Stone had already won.

Raney told him everything over a heaping plate of noodles—from the weed outside the club to the killing in the crack house to the coke in the car. Stone rolled his cloth napkin between his fists as though it were a snowball.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

“I had a man murdered at my feet, and I've broken just about every law I'm sworn to uphold.”

“Apart from that.”

“Hungover.”

“Sometimes justice has to work backwards.”

Raney sniggered.

“Listen to me,” Stone said. “Everything you did was to protect yourself and your cover. There's a bigger picture here.”

“Bigger than homicide?”

“Bigger than a single homicide, yes.”

“Okay, but why not arrest Dunham now? Threaten him with life twice over. Get him to turn witness. There's bad blood between him and Meno.”

“Because we don't know enough yet.”

“Meno ordered the job.”

“You can't be sure. You said so yourself: Dunham wouldn't give a name.”

“He killed a man,” Raney said.

“A man you beat unconscious. How do you think that will play in court?”

“He came at me with a knife.”

“You came at him with a baseball bat and a gun.”

“Yeah, but I'm the good guy.”

“The man was still defending himself.”

“So what's the endgame here? Why am I doing this?”

“We want to dismantle Meno's organization. Top to bottom. We want to cripple it so severely that no one rises up to take his place. This isn't about putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

“A dead junkie is a bullet wound?”

“For now. We're building a case. He'll be a part of that case. He'll get his day in court.”

“And in the meantime I keep playing accessory?”

“If things continue at this pace, it won't be long. I promise you.”

He rented a room in Fort Hamilton, just across the bridge from Dunham's club. He told Sophia it was for her protection. He repeated the DA's words:
It won't be long
. Sophia looked at him as though she knew better, as though she saw the end in the beginning.

R
aney pulled the curtain back, watched the contrails of an airplane fade into a sky that was just starting to brighten. It would be an hour before the diner opened. He splashed water on his face, then noticed for the first time that the bathroom, with its claw-foot tub and double sink, was at least as big as the room he'd slept in. The lore about the place being a brothel for pioneer soldier boys seemed more likely: they'd simplified the conversion by making every other room a bath. The building suffered as much from lack of imagination as from neglect.

He dressed, walked past the empty reception desk and out to his car. There was something his father used to say, something he'd forgotten for a long while and then remembered:
Find what makes you glad you're alive and do it before the world's in your face. A day is no good unless you get out in front of it.
Back in New York, that meant rounds on the heavy bag and a circuit in the weight room. Then mornings became the dead time in which he slept off one fix in order to make way for the next. Now he spent the early hours of the day walking the trails behind his cabin, climbing a thousand feet before reversing direction. When he first arrived in New Mexico, he brought a gun with him every time he stepped outside. Now he brought a camera. City life had been an accident of birth, one he'd corrected with a brutality that he could only put behind him by thinking of his life as part 1 and part 2.

There was national land on the other side of the reservation. He parked at the first trailhead he came to, zipped up his nylon jacket and strapped his camera around his neck. He set his stopwatch for thirty minutes, hiked up into a juniper-piñon savanna, pausing to photograph whatever might not be there if he followed the trail a second time: a Steller's jay pecking at juniper berries, a tuft of fur where a small animal had brushed against a prickly pear. When the stopwatch sounded, he sat for a moment, breathing in the altitude—a thin air he found invigorating though it made most people nod off.

On the drive back he thought again of Luisa Gonzalez. No one would come forward to claim her body. She'd be buried by the county in an unmarked grave. If anyone cared enough, they'd hold a service for her and her brother back in Mexico. Her uncle would call her loyal, disciplined. The priest would recommend her soul to heaven. The people who'd raised her to be murdered in that bunker would glorify her death, make her a martyr to local children. Raney saw himself standing among them, saw his guilt reflected in theirs. He'd brought a child into a world split between people who cause pain and people who endure it, and then he'd left. He offered her nothing—no guidance, no love. What place, he wondered, did she see for herself now?

He sat in a corner booth with a cup of black coffee, poring over the Gonzalez file. He imagined sharing the contents with Mavis, setting the twins' mug shots on the kitchen table, asking if she knew whose kin it was that died in a bunker on her property. With nothing else to go on, he'd cast Uncle Gonzalez in the role of bad cop.
His blood died down there,
Raney would say.
His sister's children. He may not know where they are now, but he damn well knows where they were headed last time he saw them.
When vengeance came, he'd tell Mavis, it wouldn't be swift. He'd prompt her imagination with true-crime descriptions of tire fires, of people buried to their necks and left to burn or bait scorpions in the Mexican desert. Gonzalez had an army at his disposal. And what did Raney have? The protection of the state and federal governments, if she chose to cooperate.

He continued rehearsing over an egg-white omelet, scripting and rescripting Mavis's reaction. She wasn't Dunham, wasn't Meno, but she wasn't one to flinch, either. Her performance yesterday afternoon may not have been nuanced, but it didn't have to be: for the time being all she needed was conviction. She needed to stick with the same lie she'd been telling for forty years no matter how transparent it now seemed. Jack didn't build a shed with a false floor to escape the apocalypse; he built it because he thought they might have to hide, wait someone out. Jack and Mavis had been on the run.

“Good morning, Detective Raney,” Clara said.

Her eye shadow clashed with her skin tone; the straps of her tank top hung at odd angles. She stood behind the coffee bar, looking like a bleary version of the woman he'd met a little more than twelve hours ago. Daniel sat on the floor a few feet away, filling in a coloring book, crayons scattered around him. He lifted his head briefly, then let it drop: invisible as well as silent. But listening, Raney thought.

“Are you holding up okay?” he asked.

“I spent last night with Mavis, at the ranch.”

“How was she?”

“Inconsolable. Not for Jack or for herself, but for the girl. For what Jack had done to the girl. She kept repeating, ‘It should have been me.' Over and over again. Sobbing. I didn't know what to do. I kept wondering if I should call a doctor, but then I thought that was just an excuse to leave the room.”

“All you could do was be there.”

“It didn't feel like much.”

“It never does.”

“What can I get you, Detective?”

“An Americano. Large, with a little bit of cream, please.”

“You wouldn't happen to be buying for a certain deputy?”

“This
is
a small town,” Raney said.

“These things are going to ruin his stomach.”

Raney watched her tamp down the espresso, line up the shot glasses. She moved quickly, her fingers graceful. Raney knelt beside Daniel, in part to keep himself from staring. The coloring book was desert-themed. Daniel was rendering a saguaro in purple, no trace of color beyond the thick black lines. Again, as if by instinct, the boy's fingers reached for Raney's badge. Raney unhooked it, handed it over. Daniel weighed it in his palm, then set it on the page below the cactus and began tracing its outline in silver.

“You know, a paper shield is just as good as the real thing,” Raney said.

Daniel tapped his forehead with one finger:
I'm not stupid
.

“Who knows?” Raney said. “Maybe you'll be Detective Remler one day.”

He clipped his badge back in place, stood. Daniel grabbed his pants leg.

“Hey, there, kiddo,” Clara said. “The grown-up detective has bad guys to catch.”

Daniel turned back to the outline of Raney's shield, began filling it in with gold crayon. Raney pulled out his wallet.

“Tell Junior it's on the house,” Clara said.

Raney lifted the cup.

“Thanks again,” he said. “I'll be in touch.”

He felt her watching him go.
It should have been me,
Mavis said. Why did Clara choose to share that detail? Was she advocating for or against her friend?

Outside, his phone rang.

“We found the Mexies' truck,” Bay said.

“Yeah?”

“Or at least
a
truck.”

“Where?”

“Burned to shit in a ditch, a mile or so up Canyon Road. One of the plates is intact, but it's a fake. From this side of the border.”

“How far is Canyon Road from the Wilkins ranch?”

“A healthy pair of legs could walk it in an hour.”

“And probably did,” Raney said. “Or else arranged a ride back.”

“I know it,” Bay said.

“Anything else?”

“I have a preliminary autopsy report. They said to stress the preliminary part.”

“What did they find?”

“All three had empty stomachs. They were badly dehydrated, most likely delusional by the end. No mystery as to the cause of death, but the morgue-like conditions make it impossible to pinpoint a time. No more than ten days, no less than seven.”

Raney looked over his shoulder, lowered his voice.

“Was the girl raped?”

“No, sir. Believe it or not, she died a virgin.”

“I guess she was as good a Catholic as she could be under the circumstances.”

Since he'd left New York, Raney's professional life consisted largely of cases that solved themselves: meth lab explosions, domestics so routine he couldn't remember which spouse went with which murderer. The past eighteen years were not the future he'd once imagined. He'd been exiled from the lives and the work he valued most, though
exile
wasn't the right word: he'd long since stopped pretending he had no choice. With time, he'd adapted to his new home, found some meaning in his job and more outside of it, but still he felt, a little less keenly as the years passed, shrouded in defeat. This morning, he allowed himself to imagine the shroud lifting, if only for as long as it took to solve this case.

A trucker flashed his brights, the universal signal that a cop sat lurking around the bend. Raney pulled up behind Junior's squad car, skimmed the bumper stickers advocating sobriety and offering rewards for solid information. The car appeared empty, or else Junior had fallen so deeply asleep as to have slumped all the way forward.

“Rise and shine,” Raney called.

He came up on the driver's side of the squad car, coffee in hand. Flies darted in and out of the open window. Junior's forehead pressed against the top of the steering wheel, his arms hanging limp, his gun in his holster. Blood spatter on the windshield, the dash. Blood soaking the floor around his feet. Raney tossed the cup, took the deputy by his shoulders and tugged him slowly back, revealing the same deep and sideways cut he'd seen twice before. Raney pulled his gun from its holster, ran across the two-lane county road, through a clutch of pampas grass and onto the Wilkins property. The front door stood wide open. There was a thick trail of blood beginning at the steps and leading across the gravel to the driveway exit. A second trail led in the opposite direction. Raney scanned the house windows, the garage windows, the sedge and scrub. He raised his gun in both hands, started forward.

There had been a hard-fought battle in the living room—glass coffee table shattered, love seat overturned, portions of the far wall caved in, blood marking every surface. In the kitchen he found Mavis lying faceup on the floor, a gash across her throat, one arm reaching, as though someone had posed her in imitation of her husband. Her blood pooled on the slate tiles, spilled across the floor.

He cleared the house room by room, found it undisturbed past the kitchen: no bloody shoe prints, no closets rifled through, nothing different from the day before save two large suitcases lying open on Mavis's bed. One was crammed with women's clothing. The other was empty.

Raney holstered his gun, waited for his breathing to slow, then called Bay.

He had time before the sheriff and his team arrived. He stood out front on the stone steps, eyeballing the blood trails. The shorter trail ended a few yards shy of the road, where the assailant must have climbed into a vehicle and driven off, or been driven off. The second trail exited the driveway and continued beyond Raney's line of vision. He followed it onto the road, where the blood thinned, became more sporadic, most likely stayed by a makeshift tourniquet. It kept on around a bend, stopped abruptly in a bed of sorghum grass. Raney looked back: Junior's squad car was hidden behind a stand of Douglas fir. There were tire tracks in the grass, solid imprints that might be used for comparison. Whoever drove this car came up on the Wilkins ranch, saw Junior, kept going, and stopped here. Sometime in the dead of night, when this part of the county was pitch-black and there would be no witnesses to begin with. And then? He snuck up on Junior and slit his throat.

Raney crossed the road, slipped through a parting in the scrub, serpentined his way through a maze of juniper until he was standing a few quick strides from Junior's car. Junior would have been dozing with the window open. He never saw it coming. Raney doubled back, searching the dirt for prints that weren't his own, looking for any scrap of fabric clinging to a branch or thistle. The earth here was hard and compact, but he found, in three separate places, boot prints marked by a heavy heel and faint toe.

He walked back up to the house, heard sirens bearing down.