45

THE DAY WAS DARK and wet as it usually is in Portland, Oregon. The rain came down in cold sheets, but it didn’t seem to bother the small, furtive-looking man who walked alone by Eagle Creek in Benson State Park.

He wore a Trailblazers sweatshirt and, like most Portlanders, seemed to be impervious to the weather.

Only a rookie to the rainy, brooding countryside would wear a raincoat or carry an umbrella. And this man was not a rookie.

He’d lived in Portland for many years and could barely remember the earlier part of his life, the one in which he’d robbed banks with Adam Moore. He knew that some people might find it exciting, but to Eddie Larsen of Portland, Billy Chase barely existed anymore.

After all, wasn’t that what the West was all about? Starting over, rebirthing yourself as the guys in AA (of which he’d been a member for twenty-five years now) called it.

Sure, that was it. Of course it was.

You made mistakes, and you moved on and learned from them and became a different person. A person with a kid, a lovely daughter named Rose, and a great wife, Martha, and you didn’t spend your time looking back.

What was the profit in that?

He walked faster now, hoping, praying that the Feds were around him, protecting him.

Christ, he didn’t want to die at the hands of a madman!

He’d worked so hard to break his old dope habits, wanted to stay healthy so he could see his daughter grow up and get married and maybe even have grandchildren.

Had to keep healthy.

Never even thought about the past until they came and told him that it was coming after him.

It was so unfair. He might get a bullet in his head or the lunatic from L.A. (and how he hated L.A. now that he was a good Portlander, with his sustainable garden and windmill-powered house. All those L.A. phonies with their emphasis on materialism. Ugh, how had he ever stood living there all those years?).

Where the fuck was he? Oh, yeah, the unfairness of it. Jesus, the loony might jump on his back from an overhanging tree that the Feds missed and stab him in the throat.

And for something he didn’t even do!

Was it his fault that Billy Chase, the drug addict, held up a store and that a kid fell and hurt his head and died?

Well, yeah, technically, but couldn’t anyone who wasn’t a fucking lunatic see it was an accident? A freak thing?

Well, come on. Of course they could. They could even see that he, Billy Chase, was a victim himself. Wasn’t he? Yeah, a victim of . . . the Mafia who sold drugs to kids, which was what he was when all this shit happened about ten million years ago. Anyone with half a social conscience could see that.

Anyone except this freakin’ fanatic, this Roy Ayres. This guy couldn’t get over it. What was his problem? Was he too sensitive or something?

Hell, couldn’t Ayres see it was another guy who had killed his kid? No, that was wrong — not even killed him, just scared him.

Maybe that was what was wrong. Ayres and his family were just too fucking sensitive.

The sensitive little family.

Whining about his lost son all his life. Christ, people in other countries lose kids every day. How about Iraq? Lots of Iraq kids die in car bombings and shit every day, and do their parents walk around obsessing about it all the time? No, they get on with their lives. But he has to kill an overly sensitive guy’s kid. Jesus!

The sensitive guy with the sensitive gun.

Couldn’t anyone see how he’d changed? What a great guy he was now?

Fuck, couldn’t Mr. Sensitive just have another kid? What the fuck was wrong with him anyway? You have a dick; stick it in another woman and presto, new baby! No . . . no . . . It was the L.A. thing, the sense of entitlement. They said the kid was a genius; that was why the guy couldn’t get over losing him. But come on, everybody in fucking L.A. thought their kids were fucking geniuses. The assholes had Mr. Workingman, Bruce Springsteen, play at their school fund-raisers so the kids would grow up thinking they could be great, too, and their trendy parents made them do fucking calculus problems when they were one year old. And what did they grow up to be? Hack movie makers who did dumb horror films, or else they turned into lame reality-TV producers named Barry and Mel. Not geniuses at all, but hustlers who sold cheap dogshit movies and didn’t even care about global warming!

Like Eddie did.

He worried about it every day, and just because he’d had a little accident a few years ago, he might die here. And leave his daughter, who was a genius and was being raised right . . .

He sure hoped the Feds were out there somewhere. Jesus, he felt like he might piss himself. Oh, man . . .

Walk faster, breathe in and out.

The world just wasn’t fair. That was it.

He wondered if, when he died, he’d see the kid he maybe killed pointing at him and teasing him as he was sent via bullet train to hell.

Terry Ayres was dressed in a black hoodie and dark vinyl track pants. He waited next to a huge evergreen tree, though he didn’t know the tree’s name. Terry didn’t know the name of any trees or plants. To him they were blotches of light and leaves, and bark. Names were too hard.

He spent most of his life watching movies and television and lived in a cloudy blur of action plots and tenth-rate sitcom dialogue. Random speeches bisected his thick skull, speeches from terrible, shitty sitcoms. He heard floating voices say, “Your mother’s coming for the weekend. Oh, noooo! Hide the good jewelry.” He didn’t know where he’d heard this speech. Or what the original context was. In fact he wasn’t big on “context” at all. It was just an isolated speech from some show he’d barely been conscious he was watching. Other speeches flew through his head, too. “Oh, no, it’s fat Albert” was one he heard again and again. And “Get your mother-in-law out of here right now and don’t twitch your nose, you cunt.” He didn’t know if that last one was real or he’d rewritten it.

Really, Terry thought sometimes, when he had brief moments of actual consciousness, there was no real Terry. He didn’t exist. Not like other people, with a solid sense of . . . what did they call it? . . . “self.” Nah, he was more like a cloud than a person.

The thought made him laugh, which was not what he was supposed to do. Not out here in the rain. Not out here on this little hill looking down at the man in the sweatshirt with the Blazers written on it.

Terry wondered if the Blazers would be good this year.

Or if they would all get put in jail again.

The Portland Jailbreakers. Ha ha.

He shouldn’t be thinking of that either.

He wished Roy was here with him. He liked to do things with Roy because Roy made him feel secure and happy. And competent.

Roy, for example, would know the names of the trees and would know exactly when was the best time to kill this shit- head who himself killed Roy’s son, Jimmy, who was going to put Terry in pictures.

It was true, Terry thought. He already had a movie picked out called The Scar, and Terry was going to play this heroic cop who gets a scar and then turns bad because prejudiced people laugh at him but then who gets some kind of redemption at the end and saves a kid. Or the world. One of them. Terry liked the world better than the kid. But Jimmy had told him the world might be too hard on their budget for the movie, which was two hundred grand.

Still, either way, it sounded great to Terry, who had even tried reading the script but gave up two pages in. Print on a page was like angry bees buzzing in his head. He was a Valley guy who liked to look at pictures, and hear people make statements about how they’d found their true calling. How they redeemed their lost lives.

Terry was a Redemption Junkie.

Stuff you saw on Oprah.

He’d found his, that was for sure. Doing jobs like this for his bro.

Thing is, Roy knew how to use him. And this was the way! Like in a movie. He was the action hero, like Arnie before he became Senator . . . or was it Governor? Yeah, Governor.

Terry was a guy who really only lived for Big Scenes. Action stuff .

Like the night he pretended to run over Jack Harper and let Roy/Charlie “save Jack,” which took any suspicion off Charlie.

Or the time he knocked Charlie in the head at Jack’s house, which was so cool.

Like a movie. Terminator or Die Hard.

But this was the greatest role of all.

Shooting the guy that killed Jimmy The Genius.

Jimmy who had a million ideas for horror films and was going to be the next Steven Spielberg, was going to make Scar, in which he would play an action hero.

He ran through the whole plot of Scar again, imagining girls lining up outside of Mann’s Chinese Theater, all of them down on their knees with their perfect collagen-lipped mouths open, ready to suck him off .

Yeah, there was no business like show business.

And now the guy was almost across the field and it was his job to cut him off , right there by the tree line (wonder what they were called . . . Jimmy would know if he wasn’t dead).

The idea was to cut him off and to shoot him in the face.

Why in the face?

Because in his pocket Terry had a picture of the guy Billy Chase, and he had to be sure it was really him and not a decoy guy.

That’s why. He had to remember that.

He loped down the hill with his Winchester in his hands. There it was: the perfect little hillside spot.

Chase would have to come through here.

And when he did . . . well, then, blotto.

Red-mist city, yessir!

And years of pain, missing being a star in Jimmy’s movie Scar (in which he was the star, this cop guy with a scar who . . .).

He sat on a tree limb to steady the barrel and waited for Billy to come up the trail; waited, waited.

And then, out of nowhere, the trees around him seemed to be alive with what at first seemed like walking branches.

Holy shit!

Things — no, not things — people coming out of nowhere, and all of them with big guns trained on him.

Like he was Scar, and the cops were after him, but this time there was no redemption, no “saving the day” and no fucking parade.

They had him.

But he was smart for once — very smart — and gave up pronto, laying his rifle down on the ground and then falling down next to it on his knees, his hands clasped at the back of his head.

They had him. Shit! He’d really hoped he would get to shoot that guy Chase in the face. Wotta drag!