Each breath was like ice water falling on hot coals in her throat, cold Michigan air turning to steam. But Diane Harbaugh didn’t stop or slow down. She craved the pain. It was the entire point.
The burn toughens you, Hardball, she told herself.
She grimaced out a grin, remembering the nickname. She’d been Diane Hardball as far back as middle school. The track coach called her that. So did the crosstown rivals in high school. The debate team. Even her cohort 1Ls at UCLA Law. She liked it.
Run, Hardball. Run.
She pushed on through the grimy snow in the bottoms and frozen marshes. By spring the flies and mosquitoes would hatch in the millions from these Upper Peninsula bogs, but now the ice crunched under the pressure of her snowshoes like a saltine. Someone else might have pictured the crust as some sweet confection, a frosting or a sugar cookie, but to Harbaugh it was salt, a savory, she didn’t go for desserts, not really, not even chocolate, why did men assume women loved chocolate so damn much, we don’t, not all of us, not the strong ones. We like to feel the flume of our lungs too. We like to run up against something. We like good cold air, a good hurt, the tang of salt.
She’d been using herself up like this the whole time at the cabin. It was just her and Bronwyn, a true vacation, days of nothing on the schedule. She burst with every step, she couldn’t get enough exercise, enough life. The sweat that soaked her thermals. The pride in the pushing through. The pain that made you recede within, and then you almost didn’t notice the world out there until—
This tingling in her spine. A creepy inkling of being observed. Her legs wobbled at this new distraction. And for the first time in an hour, she slowed and clunked to a stop. She couldn’t hear over her breathing or her heartbeat. Her vision wavered as she scanned the tree line.
Why would someone be out here in this country? Who’d she expect to step out of these woods? Some dude out on parole? Someone she mandatory-minimumed years ago?
Dufresne. This time it was Dufresne. Not the close-cropped GS-14 in charge of Southwest Task Force of the Los Angeles Division, but the bearded longhair he was before. The Dufresne who used to emerge from the shadows outside her Sacramento apartment, who’d come at all hours, whenever he needed a Sacramento County DA willing to file an indictment that the feds wouldn’t touch. He’d tap on his horn as she passed. Hey, Hardball. When she finally got into Quantico and learned to put her head on a swivel, she always saw him on the bad-guy paper targets. That Dufresne.
Not that he was a bad guy. Dufresne was a very good guy. Her mentor. She adored him. She just expected him. Even there, somewhere in the woods.
She looked at her watch. Three hours she’d been out. Her legs shook, cold or exhaustion, she couldn’t tell and didn’t care. Spirit strong, flesh weak. This is the Upper Peninsula, after all. A white wilderness every which way, the odd contrail against the blue. She eyed the timber one more time. The steady thud of her heartbeat emptied out her ears, and she could hear the faint roar of a distant snowmobile.
Run, Hardball.
She couldn’t help but smile when she spotted the smoke. Bronwyn had to be Welsh for pyro. She’d have laughed if she had the breath to spare. Christ, the man loved building a fire, balling newspaper and fashioning lattices of kindling and sticks. He’d wanted to saw the rounds with the chain saw himself, but she paid the Harrisons every winter to keep them stocked up, so he’d settled for splitting and stacking. She invited Bronwyn to run with her, but he passed, needing an objective, a task, a place to run to. He had a vanity about classic, useful manliness. And she liked it. This morning in the blankets she watched him sling on his Carhartt jacket and grab the axe from against the wall. He let it lay on his shoulder just so. The sight of him standing there sent a chain drive of desire wheeling inside of her, and she ordered him back into bed.
And then, after it was over, the same crank turned and sent her off snowshoeing, out the door before she had her coat zipped up. There was little to do out here but be an animal. She and Bronwyn weren’t dumb together, just physical. No pretending otherwise. And maybe that was the state of the relationship now three, no, four months into . . . whatever this was. A few three-glasses-of-pinot dates, a Bay Area weekend, a Santa Barbara weekend, a brief campaign through Yosemite that left her more sore than she wanted to admit. And now the UP. Good sex. Very good, like, exceptional. High standards in that regard, the both of them. She and Bron were in a conjoined period of life-lust or something. That’s how she’d put it, if anyone asked.
The chopping woodsman and the running snowrunner.
Perfect.
Well, almost perfect. At the edges, a niggling sense that he was getting a bit earnest by the fire in the warm blanket with wine. Inhaling her hair, sighing. She could feel him trying to commune with her from time to time. Dropping inmost sentiments, gauging her reaction. His hopes to live close to nature the rest of his life. A professed admiration for scrimshaw. She had to cover up her sudden laugh with a cough at that one. Scrimshaw?
She shouldn’t be so hard on him, though. He was sweet, he was. And sexy. Just a bit corny.
Seeing the smoke from the fire he’d so carefully constructed, she suddenly realized something that stopped her cold: this setting, the weather, their easy companionship, would to a guy like him be perfectly romantic. He might propose. And she might say yes.
You would.
I might.
You fucking would say yes, you sap. Figure out the work stuff and the living arrangements, but say yes because maybe corny-becomes-cute, and good is just good enough, your mother’s given up asking if you even want children, and Dufresne has been dropping hints that you gotta have a support structure, see, all these DEA people, they need their families. . . .
She pulled off her hat and let the steam rise off her head. Like the idea of marriage was smoking inside her skull. She trudged toward the cabin, a little lodge she’d inherited from her childless aunt and uncle. She clocked Bronwyn’s footsteps all over the place, circling the house, trodden places at the windows, as if he had been measuring them. She’d mentioned a draft earlier. Looked like he’d tried to find it, the dear. She tugged her hat back over her chilled forehead and began to catalog. There would need to be repairs, new appliances, new windows, the tankless water heater Bronwyn said would suit the place—
Oh god, she’d thought, you’re nesting.
She struggled with the shoes and poles, lost her balance, threw snow around every which way. Slow it down. Breathe. She pulled off her glove with her teeth and then the other one on the porch and undid the snowshoes. Two minutes before, she was bailing on the idea of settling for Bronwyn. Someone named Bronwyn. Scrimshaw. But now. Now it’s almost inevitable. Waking every day to Bronwyn. Bron. Bronny.
Stock simmered in a pot on the stove. She went over without even taking off her coat and ducked her head into the pot and breathed deep.
“My god,” she said, sensing him ease up behind her. “This smells professional.”
He grunted and nudged her aside with his hip so he could put his handfuls of leek into the pot. Scrape of the knife’s dull side against the cutting board. The stove’s blue flame tossed against that draft.
“Entry-level, babe,” he said. “Sear some bones, add a little water and fat, toss in some spices, whatever vegetables you got. I wanna cook like this every day.”
That, right there. I wanna cook like this every day.
Every day with you.
He smiled at her, his white corn-cob teeth. She moved close to him, wished she’d taken off her jacket and bib already so she could better feel his body against hers.
“I’ll take this every day,” she said, clenching his ribs.
“Is that why you keep me around?” he asked into her neck.
“And to fix drafty windows.” Harbaugh took him by the elbows and wrapped his arms around her. He pulled her tight. The knife still in his fist. She could feel the handle on the small of her back. She pressed herself against him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll get on it.”
She put her lips against his cheek. She breathed against his skin and bit him.
“Take me out of these clothes.”
She’d imagined him cutting her out of them, and when he set the knife down, she kind of wished he had. But he held her jaw with one hand and with the other quickly pulled off enough clothes to get at what needed to be gotten. She said things to him as he did this, but his body was the only answer he gave, a silence that thrilled her. She did the talking. She asked him to mark her skin, and he did. She asked him to lift her up, and he did. She told him to pull her hair. She ordered him to grab and take and weigh her down. She told him not to stop.
She ate in bed, practically guzzling the soup. She licked the bowl to get the last of it. Then she finally rose, donned her pajama pants and a sweater, and tied up her hair. Bronwyn had stirred up the fire (of course), and through the smoked glass the logs pulsed. She poked around in the kitchen for cinnamon to make mulled wine. The room was blue with evening, the cool of snow and diminishing light. So warm within, so cold without.
Bronwyn was saying something from the bedroom, she couldn’t hear what. She didn’t care what. Totally mean of her, and she knew it. But at times the man couldn’t harbor an unexpressed notion. His plans for cabin renovations, kinds of dormers and shingles. When she left the room, he’d been on about kinds of joists, mortises, and tenons—
All at once, a flush of mild dread washed over her.
She couldn’t say why, or where it came from.
The colors in the house hued dark, the air itself seemed bruised. She inhaled deliberately as though aiming a gun, absorbing the air like Dufresne had taught her, breathing in the warmth of the wine in the pot.
This was the same ill-at-ease she’d felt when she was running outside in the empty. She realized all at once that the footsteps in the snow under the windows weren’t Bronwyn’s—
As if on cue, a man walked through the front door.
She turned off the burner. She didn’t say anything to him, this man who’d stepped his way brazenly inside. In fact, she actually moved toward him, because now she did recognize him and saw something lost and hurt in his face.
“Oscar,” she said.
His eyes popped at his name. When she saw the pistol in his hand, she came to a neat halt.
His head tilted to the side. As if weighted down by what was happening now. Cold air slipped through the open door.
“Oscar,” she said again.
He was tall, over six feet, and his face was drawn and wooden, as if its contours had been formed by years of running water. His peacoat could not be warm enough in this weather, his jeans were soaked through and snow-covered, he had to be freezing. He looked like a deer, liable to spring at any moment.
Harbaugh raised her hands, slowly, very slowly. She made sure he saw they were empty.
“Are you okay, Oscar?”
She knew he’d brought trouble, was himself trouble standing shivering in her cabin, but he was endangered too, this was plain.
“Do you want to sit? I can call—”
“Don’t call nobody,” he said softly. He made a gesture with the pistol. Not pointing it. More like reminding her of it. She nodded.
A thought came to her—It’s okay to feel what you feel—and there was a comfort to it. Just like Dufresne told her before her first raid. She felt the fear, and felt okay about being scared, and she remembered again to breathe, and breathing reminded her to look the man in the eyes, so she looked.
Make how you feel your first observation. Pay attention to everything. What’s possible and what is coming, both will reveal themselves.
His eyes, so jumpy and anxious.
“I’m gonna set my hands on the counter,” she said, thinking, Announce yourself.
Oscar didn’t speak.
Harbaugh put her hands palm down on the kitchen countertop.
“Just don’t come near me,” he said. His voice was soft and scuffed. Like he had a cold.
“I won’t. And I won’t do anything without telling you, okay? I promise.”
He seemed scared. Almost like her. She observed his fear and her own fear like objects you could hold in your hand. She looked for what was next. Like Dufresne said to. Don’t try and do everything at once. You want that gun, but you won’t get it in one move. Look for the adjacent possible. The next step you can take in the direction of getting that gun.
There was only one adjacent possible: Listen. Listen to him.
Oscar shut the door with his foot. He said nothing.
Get him to talk. That’s your move.
“Thank you,” she said, willing kindness into her eyes. “You must be freezing.”
He nodded. He agreed, and, agreeing, began talking, almost comfortably.
“My family went all over Arizona, Texas, Califas, Idaho. Picking the fields.”
“Yes, I remember. You told me before.”
“I’m telling you again.” He was confused, his eyes shunting about. “What the fuck was I saying?” He turned his face upward, as if trying to steer his thoughts back on track.
Just listen, damnit.
“Some of those towns were pretty goddamn cold. At night especially. We’d sleep in the car all together. I remember you could put your breath on the window. Didn’t want to get up in the mornings. Not ever. But it was never cold like this.”
“Your whole childhood, right? The migrant work?” she asked.
He shook his head, dismissing the question.
“We had a trailer back then, before we moved to Pedro, a . . . I can’t remember the name. Old, chrome. It’s called a wind something something.”
“An Airstream?”
“No.”
She resisted the urge to disagree with him. Listen.
“It was . . .” He touched his temple once, twice, three times. “Something. I wanted to say something about it, but I can’t remember the pinche name.”
He looked up again. She wondered what he was on. Her stomach clenched, and a sudden urge to move tickled through her. She gritted her teeth, resisting what her body wanted. She wanted to run. But that was not the next step. She couldn’t get to the adjacent possible on foot. She swallowed, breathed. Examined the urge to run.
Fear?
No, not fear. Revulsion.
The sight of him here, of all places. Thin and dark. He looked sick, broken, cracked.
“Oscar,” she said, using his name to make herself stay put.
And he said “Diane” back to her. A warmth in his eyes. Like everything might be all right—
A loud bang startled them like a shot. The light was changing, and Bronwyn was saying from the living room that they should move the lamp, he keeps knocking the damn thing over when he leaves the bathroom.
Bronwyn just slowed at the puzzling presence of Oscar before stopping completely at the sight of the gun. Then he went rigid. Edged against the wall, flush, in a valence of fear. The lamp he’d kicked over slowly rolled along the floor, light spoking through the shade.
Oscar had turned in the direction of the noise, and now he made some kind of strange involuntary sound, a slipped groan. She couldn’t see his face, his back to her now.
A step in the wrong direction. Get him back.
“That’s only Bron,” she said. “Can you look at me again, Oscar? He will stay there, won’t you, Bronwyn?”
Bronwyn didn’t move, but she yearned for him to say he’d stay put.
Tell him you’re cool, Bron.
He just looked at her.
Fucking say it.
His lips parted, but nothing came out.
“He’s gonna stay right there. You don’t have to worry about him, Oscar,” she repeated.
Oscar turned back to her. “Bet that,” he said. He didn’t look confused anymore. He’d found a focus, something to be pissed about.
“This is Oscar, Bronwyn,” Harbaugh said, pleasant but flat.
Bronwyn’s gaze bore down to the floor, into it.
“We—”
“We what, Diane?” Oscar barked, working the nape of his neck with his free hand.
Shit. She’d seen him like this before. Inconsolable. At odds with himself.
“We who? You and me?” he asked. “You and him? You and all your DEA? Who the fuck you talking about?”
“I’m telling Bronwyn how I know you,” she said quickly, no time to think how it would land.
“Brawn-win,” he said, trying out the name. “You want to tell Brawn-win. Well, that’s easy, man.” He spoke over his shoulder, looking at her. “Diane knows me from when she ruined my life.”
She’d felt it even before she saw him, in the ghostly dread that had preceded him. She’d known somehow, the light telling, the feeling in her chest. He’d come for her. He’d come for revenge.
Three years ago. Oscar is picked up on an anonymous tip. Sitting in a Cadillac in Koreatown, waiting on his side piece getting her nails done. Rollers roll up and snatch his ass. It’s quick, he’s not sure he even locked the ’lac.
He’s soft-spoken, quiet, but asks for his lawyer right off. He’s a gentleman, as polite as can be to Harbaugh when she walks into Interrogation. Ma’am, no thank you, yes please, all that shit.
She’s all business right back at him, short and snappy at first, white-lady voice, but then she gets a little spark going at him with her eyes. The idea isn’t to flirt per se, but to dangle an opportunity. Could be anything. A roll of hundreds on the floor, a cold Coke set in front of him. It doesn’t matter what it is, the idea is to give him the sense of a choice, a chance. Give him adjacent possibles.
So he can feel the loss. So she has something to take.
Her partner, Russell Childs, hangs back, just dropping in twice to say they are trying to reach Oscar’s lawyer. By now, she and Childs have their routine. He leaves her be, and she sits with the guy until it’s comfortable, until the tension isn’t legal in nature.
This is stupid for me to say, Oscar, but I’m going to do it anyway. You’re like a famous person to me.
Fuck outta here.
I’m for real, Oscar. You’re a big deal.
She pulls a notebook out of her bag, places it on the table. His notebook. His face drops for just a second, though he recovers quickly. She starts idly flipping through the notebook.
I know you’re not going to admit it, but this—this is a payout ledger. Well, more than a payout ledger. It’s got all those trucks you’re not personally affiliated with, and the DL numbers of your drivers. And your routes that change randomly. It’s all very tight. But that’s not what impressed me.
She turns the book around and points to an item. He flinches, just so, but he flinches.
Forty thousand dollars to a store in the garment district.
Not mine.
Okay, sure. I’m gonna keep going, though. So we got a subpoena for every joint in the garment district, right? All these purchase orders for Under Armour and Levi’s and Nikes for retail outfits in Baja, paid for in cash, in Los Angeles. By you, Oscar. Financial forensics worked forever to figure out how you got the money back to Mexico. But the mistake we made was following the money! They should’ve been following the T-shirts and shoes. Because Baja hasn’t paid for the T-shirts and jeans yet, have they? No, they give nice clean pesos to your broker, who takes a little cut and passes your money on to the cartel in Sinaloa. A little tariff fraud in the meanwhile to sweeten the pot. That’s how you get your money to Mexico.
She taps the notebook.
And it was all your idea.
I don’t know nothing about that. About the money. I’m just a low-level guy.
Low-level guy! Oh my god, that is so not you. You’re amazing, I’m amazed. This is next level! It’s really very sophisticated.
He closes the notebook and pushes it away. He gazes at the ceiling.
A sophisticated dude wouldn’t have lost the notebook, he suddenly says.
But you even handled that right! You were suuuuuuper cool. For nine months you laid low. For nine months I watched you sip beers on your front porch and go to the boxing gym and eat dinner with your girl. Girls.
He shakes his head at that. At all of it.
So nine months you drive the speed limit and drink club soda when you go out. I was worried you wouldn’t come back. Because you knew this notebook was out there. I was worried you’d just drop out and live on whatever capital you got stashed away.
Where’d you get it?
Hotel housekeeper. Her brother got picked up by ICE. She thought it might help him. And it did. But it helped us even more.
He closes his eyes, breathes deep. Counting his remaining chances.
I’m not saying shit. I’m not some wab just across don’t know he got rights.
Okay, Oscar, forget I said anything. I should just go. You’ve got a lawyer coming—
No! Sit down! Óyeme! Sit down!
He’s begun to see a few moves ahead, what few moves he has left. His lawyer will come, he’ll get out, he’ll go home, his phone will be silent, no one will talk to him, he’ll bed down with his pistol, jump at every sound, he won’t sleep, he’ll nod off, startle awake . . . all his adjacent possibles trending in one awful direction.
Please, he says. Please sit. I’m asking you please.
He swallows. He blinks. He’s seeing that it’s all come down to her. She is his adjacent possible.
Oscar, your lawyer will explain—
He shakes his head. Theirs, not mine.
Right, the cartel lawyer. She knocks on the two-way mirror for Childs, knowing for damn certain no one’s called a lawyer yet. The call might not have even gone out yet. Let me check.
He keeps folding his hands together. They writhe.
I can’t be here. I’m a dead man.
You’re fine—
Alive ain’t nothing but a mask I’m wearing. ¿Sabé?
She sits. Crosses her arms. Time to take the last chance away. Now that he’s naked.
But you were saying you’re just a low-level guy. Right? Isn’t that right?
We don’t need to do that bullshit no more. I’m not playing here. This is the real now. You know what I am. And you know I’m fucked.
She sticks it in: Oscar, you can’t even see fucked from where you are.
Please, he says. Help me, he says.
She stands. His arms hang at his sides, his head lolled back in the attitude of someone freshly shot.
He stood totally still, no movement. Like his whole body was driftwood. He’d changed so much. The stress, the wire he’d been compelled to wear, the lies he was made to tell. The waiting for the end, the outcome. He had no cool, no dominance about him anymore. He’d been rotted out.
“Hey. Oscar. Remember when we first met? You thought you were a dead man. But look. You’re here. You’re not dead.”
“I could’ve died like a man,” he said, moving finally, a grim shaking of his head. “Gone out with pride. But no. I’m just one of your snitches instead.”
“But it doesn’t have to end like—”
“This is never gonna end,” he said, leaning his face forward, saying obviously to her, are you dumb, are you retarded, light from the lamp on the floor catching him for a moment before he moved back again into the blue dark.
“We’re just in a pause, Oscar. I was gonna call when I got back.”
“No. No.” The snap of his voice like a switch. “You trapped me. You made me weak. You liked me weak. Chingá, you actually got me to beg you. You had me so twisted up . . . and you made me think you cared about me. You put this dream in my head. You asked me to follow you, and I did. I am so stupid.”
His grip on the gun was loose, wrong. He didn’t handle a gun, had never been a killer. He was a manager, not some sicario.
Maybe he’d miss. Was it down to that? Bad aim?
“Oscar. This is normal. The stress, the feelings, they get intense. I feel them too.”
“No, no, you did it on purpose. This is your way. You made me dream this bullshit dream.”
She was no good at shit like this. She took options away. She cornered people. Doors, she closed. She didn’t give people a choice, choices, a chance. Not really.
Spin it. Spin this.
“You chose to cooperate, Oscar,” she said, and he winced at the truth in it. “And that was a brave choice, a good choice. You did the right thing.”
She yearned to believe what she was saying. She had to. She had to hope he could see the candid sympathy in her eyes.
“The right thing.” He shook his head. “No. This is the right thing.”
He pressed the gun barrel to his own temple.
The gun flashed, and he dropped.
She gasped so hard it hurt. Her ears rang and hurt and her head tilted dizzily and then she realized she was stumbling toward Oscar on the floor. She kicked the gun away from his hand and knelt and felt for a pulse and then stopped. There was no remedy for this. The ringing slapped and syncopated in her ears, and she realized it was her own heart.
She raised her eyes to Bronwyn. He was still stuck there at the wall, as though something iron and strong held him fast.