Valdez parks his pickup away from the motel and walks the final two blocks, washed by swirling air from passing trucks that are rumbling along the six-lane. Huddled in his jacket against the chill, he pauses at the entrance where the tops of palm trees are bending in the wind and the moon looks like a silver plate behind the swaying fronds.
The night manager is a middle-aged Hispanic man, sitting with his feet propped on the counter, watching a small TV showing a Mexican soap opera where the actors have hairstyles and clothes that are twenty years out of date and they talk as if they’re about to fuck or fight each other.
The sheriff flashes his badge and the night manager looks at him nervously.
“You seen this guy?” asks Valdez, showing him a photograph of Audie Palmer.
“Yeah, I seen him, but not for a few days. His hair looks different now. Shorter.”
“Did he rent a room?”
“His girlfriend did. She’s on the second floor. Got a kiddie with her.”
“What number?”
The night manager checks the computer. “Two thirty-nine. Cassandra Brennan.”
“What sort of car does she drive?”
“Honda. Beat to shit. Loaded with stuff.”
Valdez points to the photograph again. “When did you last see him?”
“I don’t work days.”
“When?”
“Night before last. What’s he done?”
“He’s a wanted fugitive.” Valdez pockets the photograph. “The rooms on either side—are they occupied?”
“Not since two days ago.”
“I need a key.” Valdez takes the swipe card. “If I’m not back in five minutes I want you to call this number and say an officer needs help.”
“Why don’t you call?”
“I don’t know if I need help yet.”
Audie wakes with a strange certainty that he’s been dreaming but with no memory of the dream. He feels the familiar ache of something that has just dropped off the edge of his consciousness, almost glimpsed but now lost. His past feels like that—a swirl of dust and litter.
He opens his eyes, not knowing if he has heard a sound or felt a change in the air pressure. Out of bed, he goes to the window. It’s dark outside. Silent.
“What is it?” asks Cassie.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to leave now.”
“Why?”
“It’s time. You stay put. Don’t open the door unless it’s the police.”
Cassie hesitates and bites her bottom lip, as though trying to stop herself from saying something. Audie laces his boots and grabs his backpack. He opens the door a crack, looking both ways along the breezeway. Nothing seems to move in the parking lot, but he imagines figures lurking unseen all around him. The reception area is partially visible but he can’t see anyone behind the desk.
The breezeway angles to the right. Keeping close to the wall, he moves toward the stairs but hears someone coming. The nearest door is marked HOUSEKEEPING. Audie tries the handle, which rattles loosely. It’s a cheap lock. He forces it with his shoulder and steps inside, pulling the door closed. There are wet mops and brooms standing upright in a trolley.
A shadow passes the slatted door. He waits a few more seconds; fear trapped in his throat. At that moment he hears someone yell “Police!” and a woman scream. Audie is already running. At the bottom of the stairs he turns right and scurries crablike between parked cars until he reaches the rear wall. Up. Over. He lands heavily on the other side. Running again, he crosses a factory yard, finds an open gate to an access road. He can hear people yelling. Popping sounds. Alarms. Curses.
Valdez had always subscribed to the belief that the course of a person’s life is dictated by a handful of choices. These aren’t necessarily right or wrong decisions, but each of them plots a different path. What if he’d joined the marines instead of the state police? He could have finished up in Afghanistan or Iraq. He could be dead. What if he hadn’t been working the night Sandy was raped? He might never have met and comforted her. They might not have fallen in love. What if Max hadn’t come into their lives? There are so many “ifs” and “buts” and “maybes,” but only a handful of them had ever really counted, because they had the power to change a life.
Pausing outside the motel room, he checks his service revolver but makes the decision to put it back in his shoulder holster. Instead he pulls a second weapon that he keeps strapped to his leg below his right knee. It was something he was taught early in his career by a sheriff who had survived the cost-cutting purges and political correctness of the nineties—always have a throw-down because you never know when it might come in handy. His is a small semiautomatic pistol with a broken handle wrapped in plastic tape. Without a history. Untraceable.
He looks over the balcony. The parking lot is empty. Palm fronds are waving dark shadows on the concrete around the pool. Pressing his ear to the door of 239, he listens. Nothing. He slides the swipe key over the panel. A red light blinks green. The handle turns and opens a crack on a dark room.
A woman sits up suddenly, clutching a sheet around her. Wide-eyed. Wordless. Valdez scans the room, the beds, the floor, swinging the gun from side to side.
“Where is he?” he whispers.
The woman’s mouth opens. No sound emerges.
A shadow steps from the bathroom. Valdez reacts instinctively and yells, “Police!” Brightness leaps from the muzzle. The little girl gets thrown backward, her blood spraying across a mirror. Her mother screams. He swings the gun. Fires again. A hole appears in her forehead. Her body slumps sideways, slipping off the bed, pulling the sheets with her.
It all happens in a moment, yet it plays out in slow motion in his mind—swinging the gun, pulling the trigger, feeling the weapon recoil and his heart jump with each impact.
The shooting has stopped. Valdez stands frozen, guilty of panicking, guilty of overreaching. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist and tries to think clearly. Palmer was here. Where is he? What have I done?
Someone is running down the stairs. Valdez goes to the window and sees a shadowy figure running across the parking lot. Kicking open the connecting door, he sprints through the adjoining room, yelling, “STOP! POLICE! PUT YOUR WEAPON DOWN!”
He sprints along the breezeway, slipping his service revolver from its holster. Raising it above his head, he fires two shots in the air before leaping down the stairs and weaving between parked cars. He takes out his cell and hits 911.
“Shots fired. Officer in pursuit of armed fugitive…Airline Drive. Star City Inn. A woman and child have been shot. Paramedics needed.”
He jumps over a wall and runs on across a freight yard until he reaches a wide concrete culvert with a fetid stream running down the center of the drain. Swinging his weapon from side to side, he looks left and right, turning in a full circle, still on the phone. “I need backup and a chopper.”
“Can you still see the offender?”
“Affirmative. He’s heading east along the edge of the culvert. I got factories on my right. Trees on the left.”
“Can you give us a description?”
“I know who it is—Audie Palmer.”
“What’s he wearing?”
“It’s too dark to see.”
Cruisers are being sent to East Whitney Street, Oxford Street, and Victoria Drive. Soon he’ll hear sirens.
Valdez slows and comes to a stop. He bends, hands on knees, panting. Moisture runs into his eyes and down the hollow of his back. His chest heaves and he spits bile onto the broken concrete beneath his shoes. Cursing. Shaking. He wipes his hand over his mouth again, trying to slow down his mind and keep things in perspective. He has to think. Breathe. Plan.
Using a handkerchief, he wipes his prints from the throw-down handgun. Barrel. Trigger. Guard. Safety. Holding it over the culvert, he lets go. The weapon bounces twice on the concrete and finds water.
He takes a falsetto gasp for breath and raises the phone.
“I think I lost him.”
Audie follows the culvert south, splashing through stagnant pools where rats screech and scurry into holes and shopping carts have committed suicide by leaping off the bridges.
Unused to such an open battleground, he has to fight the pull of the empty space around him, feeling it try to rip him apart and scatter the pieces. For years he had walls around him, boundaries and razor wire; something braced against his back, so he didn’t have to fight on all sides.
How did the police know where he was? Cassie must have called someone. He doesn’t blame her. How was she to know? She’s young, already burned out, no longer sure that she’ll live forever, trying to bluff on a weak hand.
Audie has to keep moving forward because there is no way to back up or to start again. He heard shots being fired. The thought of it makes him feel dizzy, as though somebody has been shouting in his ear for hours and left him with an awful buzzing sensation in his head. He jogs past black sacks of garbage, ripe as body bags, and flat-roofed warehouses with metal doors. The gabled roofs of buildings stand out in sharp definition against the wispy fog and a moon that looks like a cut potato. Pausing beneath a railroad bridge, he takes off his boots and empties the water. Freight tracks lead east and west. He climbs out of the culvert and follows the tracks, stumbling over the rough scree, heading toward the brightening sky.
Cassie and Scarlett will be OK. They’ve done nothing wrong. They didn’t know he’d escaped from prison. He should never have asked for their help. He should never get close to anyone. Never make promises. That’s how this started. He made a promise to Belita. Then he made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t die in jail.
At the Kashmere Transit Center, he catches a bus into downtown with the shift workers and early morning commuters, still half asleep, resting their heads against the windows. Nobody makes eye contact. Nobody speaks. It’s not so different from being in prison, he thinks. You try to blend in rather than stand out.
Audie isn’t particularly distinctive or unique or striking, so why is he somebody’s punching bag, somebody’s punch? Playing now at a screen near you—Honey, I Butt-Fucked Junior.
The bus drops him in the shadows of Minute Maid Park. Exhausted, he wants to stop moving, but his mind can’t slow down. Lying down in a doorway he rests his head on his backpack and closes his eyes.