When the Killing's Done (34 page)

Immediately she feels better. She flushes twice, watching the water swirl in the bowl, but the smell lingers even as the outer door wheezes open and footsteps approach in a sharp high-heeled tattoo. Her first thought is of Annabelle, but that can’t be because she watched her go down the steps in animated conversation with Frazier ten minutes ago. At least. The heels tap closer and she freezes while the handle of the stall briefly rattles and whoever it is pulls back the door of the adjoining stall and settles in with a sigh, followed by a fierce hissing rush of urine. Then she’s out of the stall and at the sink, cupping her hands for a sip of water to rinse her mouth, wishing she had a toothbrush—or breath mints; she makes a note to stop in the place downstairs to pick some up—and though she’d like to take a minute with her lipstick and hair, she doesn’t dare because the occupant of the other stall is noisily unraveling toilet paper and she doesn’t want to be seen. Not now. Not after being sick. So she’s out the door and down the stairs, thinking to freshen up in the restroom at the office, thinking she’ll get herself a Coke and maybe a package of crackers to settle her stomach. And the breath mints, definitely the breath mints.

Just below the restaurant, on the promenade that wraps around the marina, there’s a shop that caters to tourists and carries the usual cornucopia of things, from Dramamine, sunblock and cheap straw hats for the whale-watching crowd, to postcards, T-shirts and bobble-head dolls for the landlubbers, to the soft drinks, hot coffee, prepackaged sandwiches, crackers and cheese in the shrink-wrapped single-serving portion, breath mints, candy and tabloid magazines everybody needs all the time. She’s about to duck in the door—a drift of metallic balloons in a stand there, artificial poppies sprouting from a styrene ball in a papery blaze of red, T-shirts clothespinned to a wire like wash—when she catches herself. There’s a young woman, a girl, seated at one of the white plastic tables out front, her back to Alma, and her hair—dyed a uniform copper red—trailing down her back in a spill of trained curls. But isn’t it Alicia? Alicia doing what, taking her lunch break? She checks her watch. At ten-thirty in the morning?

Before she can think what to do—Is it Alicia? Is she really prepared to question her, discipline her, wonder why she’s not at her desk in the absence of her boss, opening the mail, answering the phone, for God’s sake?—the light shifts as if someone’s put a hand over the shutter of a lens and a man comes backing out the door, a cardboard tray with two cups of coffee and a package of powdered doughnuts held out gingerly before him. But she knows him, doesn’t she? The earring, the goatee, the incongruous shock of the blue eyes in a Latino’s face, or part Latino, Chicano, mestizo, whatever you call it, and who—?

And it comes clear. Because he recognizes her in that instant and in that instant she knows him, knows him in a flash of recollection, even as Alicia turns her head to look over her shoulder to see what’s keeping him. Alicia, her features gone slack and her eyes retreating. Alicia, shrinking. Alicia revealed. But he—Wilson, that’s his name,
Wilson
— he’s unfazed. He saunters up to the table, sets the tray down, and looks back to where Alma stands arrested at the door to the shop in which her Coca-Cola Regular, cheese and cracker combination and breath mints await. Then, so casually he might have been posing for a snapshot, he flashes her a smile—a beautiful, full-lipped, effervescent smile, as if they’re the best friends in the world—and slowly pulls up the chair beside Alicia, puts an arm around her shoulders, and draws her to him.

Prisoners’ Harbor

H
e’s at home, glancing up from the morning paper in what he likes to call the sunroom to look out the window on the crew he’s hired to lay sod over the desiccated remnant of the lawn. The whole operation has him conflicted—lawns are bad news for the environment, yes, but he’s got to keep up property values, or his property’s value anyway, and he did turn down two contractors who wanted to go the herbicide route in favor of this crew, amigos of Wilson, who dug everything up and then laid down plastic sheeting to stifle the weeds—but the bottom line is that the old lawn, the one he inherited when he bought the place back in 1993, was looking pretty ratty. Now, with the sod—and they’ve already rolled out two long dense sections of it, like carpet—he’ll have a deep blue-green Kentucky-perfect lawn right out of one of those glossy magazines, and he won’t have to wait for it to grow in either. And it’s not a question of vanity or keeping up with the neighbors or anything like that—it’s about protecting your investment, because this house is the best investment he’s ever made, a Spanish mission-style beauty situated on a hill, two stories high with carved wooden beams in the main rooms and intricate wrought-iron grillwork everywhere you look, nearly five thousand square feet of living space set on an acre and a half, and now, twelve years after he bought it, worth four times what he paid. He couldn’t have done any better investing in a gold mine.

The sunroom is on the second floor, facing south, and he can look out beyond the humped backs of the Mexican laborers—three of them, two bareheaded, one in an off-white baseball cap with
El Jefe
looped across the crown in what looks to be black Magic Marker—to the stucco wall in front and over the roof of the house across the street and out to the ocean, five blocks distant. Today—it’s the end of October, the air clear and sharp—he can see all the way out to Santa Cruz Island, the channel spread out beneath him like a placid little pond and the oil rigs like stepping-stones lined up along the shore. Of course, this time of year the winds can come up and make things hazardous out there in a heartbeat, everybody knows that, and if Anise doesn’t show up soon he’s going to have to call and remind her of that fact. But the forecast is for light to moderate winds and he’s trying to reform his behavior, trying not to be so controlling, so quick to explode—she’ll get here when she gets here, he’s thinking, lifting a spoon of granola to his mouth and watching the faintest little rumor of a breeze finger the leaves of the trees along the road.

Her mother’s in town—Rita, flown in all the way from Port Townsend, Washington—and while he doesn’t care much about that one way or the other, Anise does, Anise certainly does, and when they arrive, if they arrive, if they can ever get their shit together and understand that winds rule the channel and sunset comes early this time of year, he will drive them down to the marina in his Beemer, hop aboard the
Paladin
and take them out to the island for the day. For pleasure. For a day off from walking the picket line outside the Park Service offices and for the not incidental purpose of testing the limits of the Park Service’s authority: the island is officially closed to all comers because they want to do their killing in private.

But just the thought of it is enough to set him off. Down goes the spoon, the bowl, the newspaper, milk sloshing, the wicker table trembling under the violence of it, and he’s on his feet and across the saltillo floor, pacing now, because he just can’t sit, can’t eat, can’t read. The dogs, conscious of trouble, get up from their beds in the corner and come to him, tails thwapping at their bony haunches, but he takes no comfort in them. It’s as if deep inside him a hammer has dropped, the rush of hate and rage and frustration shooting from his gut right on up to the top of his head to inflame the roots of his hair till they ache, actually ache. Every lawsuit he’s brought has been thrown out of court because the judges work for the system and the system is the National Park Service. And now they’re closing the island in their typical imperious way, no matter what the will of the people says, no matter how many petitions come across their desks or how many protestors stand out there chanting, because they’re confident no one’s going to cross that channel when the water gets rough. With the Civil Rights Movement you could get on a bus and drive down to Mississippi, with Vietnam you could bring people to Washington in cars, buses, trains and jet planes. But not here. And don’t they know it. The sons of bitches.

Just then—the workers out there unrolling the sod, the wind stirring the trees and his mind going up in flames—he sees Anise’s car at the gate and Anise’s pretty white bare arm reaching out to punch in the code that will roll it back on its wheels so she can enter, with her mother, and the day can begin.

It can’t be more than fifty degrees out on the water, the wind chill dropping the temperature a whole lot lower than that, but Anise’s mother insists on sitting out on the deck the whole way across. He tried to tell her it was going to be chilly before they’d even climbed out of the car, but she dismissed him. “You think I don’t know these islands?” she said, her eyebrows lifting till they floated on the furrows that ran up into her hairline. Her face was a template of Anise’s, uncanny, exact in every detail, as if her daughter had been cloned instead of generated in the usual way—the same broad forehead, the round face and strong chin, eyes that jumped out at you from ten feet away, the perfect shells of her ears and the sexy slight eversion of the upper lip, the whole of it framed by a whipping hurricane of dirty-blond hair that was going to gray in long electric streaks. She was tall, square-shouldered, leaner than Anise, but built, still built, though she must have been in her mid-fifties. At least. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, a short-sleeved blouse and a bandanna at her throat. The blistered leather jacket, fleece-lined, her concession to the weather, was knotted round her waist. She wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry.

When she’d put her rhetorical question to him, she wrapped an arm round Anise and said, “Now that Bax is dead and probably Francisco too, I don’t think there’s anybody alive knows them—or at least the one we’re heading for—better.” She broke into a smile and turned her face to Anise’s as if she were going to kiss her—and she did, on the tip of her nose, a quick compression and release of the lips that made him uneasy in a way he couldn’t quite pin down. “Right, honey?”

But that’s all right. Everything’s all right. The water’s a cloud and he’s floating on it now, living in the moment, getting away, and he feels his mood lightening by the minute. There’s not much chop. The sun’s unencumbered by even the hint of a cloud or the slightest tatter of fog. The dolphins come gamboling. The engine never misses a beat. And if he hammers it all the way out it’s because he’s eager to get there if only to reconnoiter, but he’s hoping—they’re all hoping—to be able to land at Scorpion, or if not Scorpion, then Smugglers’, so Rita can see for the first time in all these years what’s left of the place. So she can reminisce, spin stories, talk about sheep and ravens and the way it was sitting round a bonfire on summer nights strumming a guitar and blending her voice with her rangy tall pubescent daughter’s while the moon rose up full-bellied out of the channel and all the dwarf foxes and skunks pinned back their ears and howled. Or barked. Or whatever it was they were capable of. For the most part, Anise stays out on deck with her mother, the two of them chattering away, Rita’s mood so airy she might have swallowed his entire bottle of Xanax, and he doesn’t mind. It’s his pleasure—his privilege—to escort her and if that involves hearing the old stories over and over, that’s fine with him. If it makes Rita happy—and here he steals a look over his shoulder to see the two of them seated in deck chairs, their heads together and the wind at their hair—it makes Anise happy. And what makes Anise happy absorbs him totally. Or so he tells himself as he pushes the throttle forward and the cove at Scorpion heaves into sight.

He knows better than to anchor before he can sweep his binoculars over the pier and the beach and the beaten dirt trail that curves around behind the rock face on the right, because that’s where the house is and that’s where the rangers will be, if the rangers are here at all. Rita, windblown, flushed, is leaning way out over the rail as the boat swings round in the chop. She’s got her own binoculars, a little 8 × 22 birdwatchers’ pair she pulled out of her purse. “There,” she cries, her voice pitched high with excitement, “isn’t that the Jeep? Bax’s Jeep?”

And now Anise is in on the act, a hand shielding her eyes till her mother passes her the binoculars. She takes a moment to focus, steadying herself over the flexion of her legs. “I don’t know,” she says, “is that a patch of yellow or just my imagination?”

From where he sits at the bridge he can see nothing but a rusting heap of old ranch equipment the Park Service dragged down away from the house and left there in the tall weeds above tide line. They’d probably meant to haul it all away, wipe the place clean, but then they would have had to bring a crane out to lift the wreckage onto a barge and transport it back to the coast, so some Park Service genius decided they ought to just leave it there as a curiosity, a historical artifact, a reminder of the times when people like Anise’s mother were out here running sheep. Maybe he can make out something in the pile that might once have been a Jeep, but he’d have to use his imagination to force the lines to coalesce and he’s too busy jumping the binoculars from one point to another, looking for authority figures, for hunters, guns, hounds, helicopters, to pay it more than passing attention.

So he decides to drop anchor and lower the dinghy. What are they going to do—shoot him? He sees nobody, nothing, not a flicker of movement but for the shorebirds doing their thing in quick-footed runnels of color. The outboard fires up right away, a long smooth swell rocking beneath them, and in the next moment they’re planing toward the pier, Anise and her mother riveted ahead, their faces tight with anticipation, and for a moment he sees them both as children, Girl Scouts maybe, and here’s their field trip, their wienie roast and the return of the native all rolled in one. Of course, there’s a sign there, posted on the face of the pier, right where the tourist boat bumps up against the crossbeams to offload, and it tells them what they already know: ISLAND CLOSED TO ALL ACTIVITIES/NO LANDING UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. BY AUTHORITY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.