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  Amanda dismissed Willie’s remarks with a motion of her hand. She looked from the window, saw that the Bronco had left the highway. ‘What’s your next move?’

  Drumm shrugged. ‘About all I can do at the moment is make out a report and send the paperwork down the line and it’ll eventually land on the desk of somebody in the Program. Trouble is, the Program works in deeply mysterious ways which makes it tough for your average joe homicide cop to get a foot in the door.’

  Deeply mysterious ways, she thought. Secrets that should have been impenetrable – except they weren’t.

  The cabin came in sight, located among dense trees. It had been constructed in the Seventies by Amanda’s father, Morgan Scholes, who’d bought 150 acres of pine forest and spent weekends building his sanctuary. He’d worked with the devout concentration he brought to all his activities, sunk a well and installed a generator. Two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, toilet and shower. A phone line had been brought in five years ago, a convenience Scholes had paid for handsomely. The number was unlisted. The cabin was a capsule that could be reached only by means of a narrow dirt track through the forest, an isolated retreat from the grind of the city and the red-hot freeways.

  Drumm parked near the cabin, but didn’t switch off the engine. ‘I don’t think I should come inside, Amanda. Two acts of trespass in one day, serious overkill.’

  She opened the passenger door and stared at the windows, looking for a sign of Rhees.

  ‘I miss seeing you around,’ Drumm said.

  ‘The same for me, Willie.’

  ‘I hear they already gave your old job to Dominic Concannon.’

  ‘He’s OK,’ she said. ‘He’s a decent lawyer, if that’s not an oxymoron.’

  ‘But he’s not Amanda Scholes.’ Drumm placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Words of wisdom for you: put all this shit out of your mind.’

  She stepped out of the vehicle and stood staring up at Drumm. ‘All of it?’

  ‘Every bit. Forget I ever came here. Just get on with your life.’

  She shut the door, rapped her knuckles against it and watched Drumm swing the Bronco round and head back down the track. When it had faded out of sight she turned and walked towards the cabin. She hesitated a moment before going inside.

  Rhees sat at the table, which was covered with his papers and poetry books. Last night he’d been preparing his lecture material for the Fall semester. His notes were written in a minuscule hand she couldn’t decipher.

  She had an affection for Rhees’s quiet world of poetry. He wrote some himself on occasions, such as her birthday, when she’d find a short poem sealed inside an envelope and attached to a gift. Glasses halfway down his nose, he laboured over his verse like a man with a scalpel. Sometimes he hummed old Welsh tunes quietly. There was a bardic streak in Rhees.

  Without raising his face from his books, Rhees said, ‘You just had to look, didn’t you?’

  She needed coffee. She spooned three scoops into the basket then plugged the percolator into the wall. She noticed her hand trembled a little.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You like morgues?’

  ‘No, I don’t like morgues. I wanted to be sure.’

  The coffee began to perc. Amanda played with a wayward strand of hair. She noticed a grey streak.

  ‘Galindez was scum, Amanda,’ Rhees said.

  ‘Yeah, I know what he was,’ she said. ‘I became very familiar with his rap-sheet. A nasty murder in Tucson, reduced through the usual legal legerdemain to a manslaughter rap. Early parole. A couple of rape charges, but he walked on those because nobody wanted to talk. Assisting Sanchez in gun-running to some very peculiar people in Mexico.’

  ‘So a violent man comes to a violent end. Poetic justice.’

  Amanda took a fresh pack of cigarettes from a drawer and tore off the Cellophane. She stood with her back to the sink, smoking, smelling the coffee.

  Rhees said, ‘Look, you were the one who decided you’d reached the end of the line. You wrote the letter of resignation. There was no gun to your head.’

  Amanda poured two cups of coffee and carried them to the table. ‘And I’m happy with the decision,’ she said.

  ‘But something clings to you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to think so.’

  He looked at her over the rim of his cup.

  ‘It just bothers me, John.’

  ‘You’re carrying useless baggage.’

  ‘I’m not going to get involved again,’ she said.

  ‘Then drop it. Because Galindez turns up dead, suddenly you’re ticking over.’ Rhees waved the fumes of her cigarette aside. ‘I wish you’d quit smoking.’

  ‘It’s on my list to stop.’

  ‘This list of yours. Two things you haven’t crossed off: smoking’s one.’

  Amanda put the cigarette out in an old jamjar lid filled with stubs. ‘Galindez happens to have been a major witness I used. Without him, Sanchez might be a free man. You think Galindez was scum? He was a minor demon compared to Sanchez. But Galindez makes a deal. I wasn’t exactly over the moon with that –’

  He interrupted her. ‘A month ago you were a very unhappy human being. Insomnia, immune system precarious, prone to flu bugs, eating junk food, chewing down Dalmane every night like it was going out of style. You walked round like a ghost evicted from a house she was haunting. You were wandering the borderline of a nervous breakdown. Remember?’

  ‘I don’t really need reminding, thanks.’ The sense of living on an edge. The feeling that panic was always somewhere nearby. Shallow sleep overflowing with bad dreams. A deep dread she couldn’t define. She’d felt fractured, falling to pieces. Now she couldn’t even remember the words she’d written in her letter of resignation, only how Luke Basha, the State Attorney-General, had counselled her to think again. All you need is a vacation, he’d said. You’ve been working too hard. It goes deeper than that, Luke, she’d said. It goes a long way down. She couldn’t recall the press conference either, the way she’d answered questions about her resignation, what reasons she’d given. She only remembered the popping of cameras and sounds coming out of her mouth and a dark jagged pain in her head.

  Rhees said, ‘We talked it over, Amanda. Your state of mind. Your health. But the decision was yours in the end.’ He tapped the back of her hand in an agitated manner. ‘The law sucks. Your own words. Just look at the way you’ve been this last month. Colour’s coming back to your face. Sex-drive restored. You sleep nights for the first time in an age. Life’s worth living again. The question is, does the law suck enough for you to cross it off this list of yours?’

  She walked round the tiny kitchen and paused at the window. Sunlight sloped through the pines. Why couldn’t she just enjoy all this and forget everything else? She approached him, placed her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘Look, it’s not like I’m reversing a decision I already made. I want to stay up here. I want to make myself feel, what’s the word … clean again. I just happen to think I ought to talk to Lew Bascombe myself.’

  ‘Who’s Bascombe?’

  ‘He’s the liaison guy with the Program. I’ll tell him he should look into a possible breach of security.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you can’t get Drumm to do that.’

  ‘Because I’m better acquainted with Lew than Willie is. I’ll just dump it on Bascombe’s desk.’

  ‘And leave it there?’ Rhees looked doubtful.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll leave it there. I’ll drive down to the city tomorrow. You want to keep me company?’

  ‘On one condition. We get back here by bedtime.’

  ‘I promise.’

  She opened the kitchen door and stared out into the pines. Deep in the reaches of the forest, coyotes howled, then there was the babylike cry of something dying. A small deer, a stray cat, something.

  Amanda shuddered. ‘I hate that.’

  ‘Serenity has its downside,’ Rhees said.

  The whimpering died and silence closed in again. She
imagined coyotes feeding: a flurry of blood and fur. She remembered Galindez and she drew closer to Rhees.

  ‘Let’s go to bed and get into something passionate,’ she said.

  Rhees shut the door. ‘I just remembered,’ he said. ‘I left my fishing-rod on the bank.’

  ‘It’s not your fishing-rod I have in mind, John.’

  6

  The woman reads the green sign through the bugsmeared window of her car. Tuba City.

  Chooba City. Where the hell is that?

  There’s a coffee-shop up the street with a light blinking. I’ll stop there, I gotta stop somewhere. She’s exhausted, she feels the weariness in her bones, deeper than that, deeper than the marrow even – in her heart, what’s left of it. She parks the car behind the coffee-shop so it can’t be seen from the main drag. The night is dark and hot and dry and she feels like a landslide victim, smothered and blind and struggling for something to breathe.

  She goes inside, takes a table away from the window and watches the waitress walk towards her with a pad in her hand. The waitress has this slinky sideways manner of walking, like an old beauty queen, maybe Miss Tuba City 1964, something. The light in this place is bad, low-wattage.

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Coffee. We got some nice Danish, you interested?’

  ‘Just coffee. No cream. Please.’

  Coffee – black and strong. She knows she needs to move again, get back in the car and drive, because no place is safe. She looks at her watch, but what’s the point? Time don’t matter, time don’t have a significant meaning, only distance, distance is everything.

  She opens her purse, sees the sealed envelope with the scribbled note inside. She wonders if her handwriting is readable, if she’s spelled things the right way. She doesn’t have a home address, only the office. If it goes to the office, they’ll forward it. What if they don’t?

  The coffee comes. She sips it, taps her fingers on the table, watches the window, sees cars passing down the strip, cars heading out into the hot dark night, cars going everywhere and nowhere. She takes a napkin from the dispenser on her table and crumples it in her hand. Gotta go, keep moving, because you don’t know what’s behind you. Only one thing you know, the men are back there in the dark and they’re coming. Only thing you can be sure of.

  The men.

  The napkin falls into the coffee and she pulls it out. It’s sodden and brown and she makes a wad of it in her fist. There’s no ashtray so she drops the wet thing on the floor, but now her hand is wet and she has to take another napkin from the dispenser to dry her palm. All this fuss, these napkins all joined together coming out the slot. She can hear the sound of herself falling apart.

  She covers her eyes with her fingers. She needs sleep, she needs to put her head down and sleep. How long since she lay on that narrow iron bed in the mildewed motel room with the broken-down swamp-cooler? Her hand is shaky. She wonders if anyone notices, but nobody’s looking at her. They don’t care in a roadside place like this, nobody cares, nobody cares anywhere, no matter where you go it’s the same thing.

  She finishes the coffee, gets up, walks into the rest room and washes her face, avoiding the mirror. She doesn’t want to see her reflection: a ruin. The rest room smells of heather or lilac, she can’t tell which. It all comes out of an aerosol can anyway, it’s all chemicals. She goes back into the coffee-shop.

  ‘There a phone?’ she asks.

  The waitress points with a yellow pencil to the far side of the room.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says.

  She goes between tables to the pay phone, closes the door and digs coins out of her purse. This is another thing on top of everything else: running low on funds. She picks up the receiver, something happens inside her head, like an echo, like a ghost whispering in her skull. It’s because she needs sleep, she can’t keep going like this. You get hallucinations. You see stuff ain’t there. You dream except you’re not sleeping.

  What she sees are flashes of light in the dark. She pushes the memory away, but it comes back immediately. How the night changed and the temperature tumbled to zero.

  Coins in the slot. What’s the number, remember the number: 6035 something, something, something. She punches the buttons and shuts her eyes. Let her answer, let her answer.

  It rings and rings. She thinks of an empty house, the phone ringing and nobody to hear.

  OK, she tries the other number. It’s the same guy as before that answers.

  ‘Are you the woman who called yesterday?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m calling from Chooba City,’ she says, and wonders why she gives out this information. Off-guard, going round in a trance, fear makes you crazy.

  ‘Listen, I’ll give you the number where –’

  She hangs up, a clattering sound. The man – she don’t know who he is, could be anybody. Another trapdoor you fall through. She cries, salt liquid fills the back of her throat and sinuses. She weeps with her face pressed against the phone.

  The letter. She opens her purse and she walks to the waitress, handing her the crumpled envelope. ‘Please. Can you mail this for me?’

  The waitress says, ‘It ain’t stamped, honey.’

  She presses a couple of quarters into the waitress’s hand and hurries out of the coffee-shop. She’s still crying as she rushes to the parking-lot and unlocks the car and gets behind the wheel. There’s a stink of fried-food wrappers.

  Drive, just drive, don’t think. Make-believe you’re maybe on vacation, a woman just touring here and there, some carefree divorcee. She turns the key in the ignition. How far away are the men? she wonders. How far?

  7

  The city in the distance was the colour of a dull penny in the afternoon sun. On either side of the freeway heat shimmered in dry brown hills. Amanda opened the sun-roof of the VW and a warm breeze ruffled her hair. ‘Bascombe said he’d see me at three – in and out. Also I’d like to stop a minute at the house before we head back. I need to pick up some books.’

  ‘What books?’

  ‘A biography of Lincoln I was reading before we rushed off to the mountains. Also a saga I’m halfway through. It’s nice to read something that isn’t a legal brief.’

  Rhees studied the road and said, ‘Maybe we should drop in on your father.’

  ‘Why not? He’s always liked you, John. He likes to think you’re a good influence on me.’

  ‘A man of impeccable judgement,’ Rhees said.

  Amanda had her arm across the back of the driver’s seat. She watched Rhees’s face for a time, the line of his lean jaw, the thoughtful grey eyes. There was a reliability about that face. He’d never disappoint, never betray. She felt safe with Rhees.

  The freeway sliced through the heart of the city. To the left were the spires of downtown, concrete and glass shining. On the right, in purple shadows, were shacks and shanties and laundry hanging motionless on lines. Beyond, suburbs stretched away into a muslin haze.

  Rhees said, ‘We could live year-round at the cabin. I could easily cram all my classes into two days a week, if I grovel in front of the department chairman.’

  Amanda glanced at him. He was perfectly serious about this. A permanent move to the cabin. He’d mentioned it before. ‘What would I do with my time?’ she asked.

  ‘Read, learn how to fish. We’ll get a snowmobile and you can whizz across the landscape.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  In truth, she hadn’t given her future much thought. She had space in her life for the first time in years. She woke mornings knowing she didn’t have 200 appointments and interviews with cops and the mind-numbing stress of courtroom appearances. Liberty exhilarated her, but it was a condition she suspected couldn’t last. She’d worked too hard for as long as she could remember – law school, two years in a firm where she’d shuffled corporate papers, three years in a DA’s office in southern California, another two in northern Arizona, then eight years in Phoenix, the last three of which she’d spent as Special Prosecutor in the
State Attorney-General’s crime task force. Her CV was overloaded.

  ‘I’d probably feel guilty not doing something,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure I approve of the idea of you supporting me when my savings run out. I’d feel like a kept woman.’

  ‘A kept woman. Has a sexy ring to it.’ Rhees smiled and headed downtown. He found a parking space a couple of blocks from the Federal Building.

  She suddenly remembered she’d dreamed last night of Galindez, his body rocking through black water, creatures feeding on his flesh. She wished he’d been washed down another river in a state 1,000 miles away. She wished she and Rhees had been in Hawaii or Fiji when Willie Drumm had appeared. Wish, wish, wish.

  And now she was back in the city where there were too many reminders of the job she’d walked away from, the work that had squeezed her dry.

  The law sucks, she thought. She’d been wrong when she’d said that. It was the way law was manipulated that had depleted and disenchanted her, the sleaze of bargaining with defence attorneys in the fashion of dope merchants squabbling about the price of coke, the lack of any moral coherence underpinning the decrepit machinery of justice. A sense of morality was unfashionable, derisory even. To get a conviction, you had to sleep with the enemy. You had to make all kinds of deals and some churned your stomach, others dripped like acid on your heart – like the commitment she’d made to Reuben Galindez. Give me everything you know about Sanchez, Rube, and in return you’ll get a new life. Manslaughter? Rape? Illicit traffic of weapons in contravention of federal laws? Hey, no problem. Testify against Sanchez and presto you get a new identity and a house in a distant state and enough money to kick-start you. Welcome to the Federal Witness Protection Program, Mr Galindez.

  She opened the passenger door, but didn’t get out at once. ‘Sometimes it just blows me away to remember how naïve I was,’ she said. There was a trace of sadness in her voice. ‘I used to believe the law had a purity of sorts, but every shitty deal you cut clouds the picture and diminishes your faith. Finally you become a non-believer.’