Trust No One Page 9

  I watched the news obsessively for some news about an attempt on Caruthers’s life, but as the months dragged out, I tuned in less and less. Winter got so cold it froze the ears and tails off cats. I jerked awake at 2:18 every night, my arms clutching at Frank as he bled out. After six months Callie’s home line was disconnected, so I risked a call to her at work.

  Leaning against the pay phone at the back of the poolhall, sticky with sweat and trapped air, I pressed the familiar buttons. I’d gulped down a few beers to shore up my courage, and my buzz turned the whole thing into a dream—the sound of her, my shaky words, so much resentment and pain that neither of us could stop talking to breathe. She demanded to see me. When I told her it wasn’t safe, she yelled at me until I eased the phone back onto its cradle.

  I spent a sleepless week worried that they’d monitored the call and were coming to throw me in jail, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  A few nights later, I came across Liffman outside the bar, shooting a pistol at a moose-crossing sign. His night-vision goggles were askew, and he staggered under the weight of the booze, but he cracked that sign again and again. The cops had wisely parked at a good distance and sat smoking on the curb, waiting for him to pass out. But Liffman, I’d learned, never passed out.

  As he fumbled with a reload, I approached. Callie had never let Frank take me shooting, but I’d been around his guns enough to be calm in their presence. “Liffman.”

  “Yuh, Nicky?”

  “What do you say we get you some sleep so tonight doesn’t cut into your drinking tomorrow.”

  It took a few moments for him to decipher the words through the booze. Then a smile cracked his wind-chapped face, and he slid the gun into his pocket and trudged home. The cops waved as we passed.

  The next day at work, while whacking the head off a sockeye, he gave me that missing-tooth grin. “You ready for when they come for you?”

  I kept working.

  He lopped off a few more heads, flicked them to the bin, the pink spray specking his corded forearms. “I am. I’m ready for those motherfuckers. DEA, IRS. Shit, when the black suits come sniffin’, I’ll be a trace in the wind. Or a round in their chest.”

  When the whistle blew, I followed him out to his truck. He never turned around, but he unlocked the passenger side first, left the door standing open. I got in.

  I said, “I don’t want to be at the mercy of anyone ever again.”

  We drove out to the nowhere tundra and sat on his hood, draining a six-pack and squinting into the white. He pulled a pistol from his parka pocket and aimed it at my face. His head was crooked, his black curls hanging down like a curtain fringe. He was smiling, and it wasn’t a pretty smile.

  I said, “Liffman.”

  “Wanna learn how to shoot?”

  “Yeah.”

  He walked off twenty paces and crunched the bottles into the snow. We shot. He drank the next six-pack himself. We shot some more. When I turned to reload, I heard a flicking sound, and he had a knife out, low and mean at his side. He faked a swing at my head, the blade whistling by so close I could feel the air move.

  “Knife fight?”

  I said, “That, too.”

  Every six months I sent Callie a card at work telling her I was alive and okay, delivered through a remailing service in Utah so it would bear a different postmark. Another lesson from the school of Liffman. The service would alert me if the letter bounced back as undeliverable, so I’d know if she quit or moved. I was terrified she’d get sick and wouldn’t be able to contact me, or that she’d die scared and alone. Those sporadic cards served as my lifeline to her.

  I moved to Washington and snagged a job driving a delivery truck for a bakery. And then, two years later, to Oregon, where I worked mornings on a road crew and earned a nightschool B.A.

  I felt like a hermit crab trying out new shells, looking for a fit. I didn’t realize it consciously at first, but I was inching my way toward Los Angeles.

  Nine years after that first flight, I finally came home. When the plane touched down at LAX, I was so ashen that the kindly schoolteacher next to me offered his airsickness bag. The first weeks were awful. Some nights I lay awake, wrapped around a pillow, eyes on the door, until sunlight fell through the dusty motel drapes. Other times I prayed they would come just to get it over with. But, slowly, perspective returned. They had to know that if I hadn’t talked all this time, I had nothing to say. Surely they had moved on.

  I waited a month to track down Callie. She was living in a big white house in Pasadena. Frank’s hefty life-insurance policy had bought her a nice piece of property. Coming up the walk, I almost puked in the tulips. When Callie opened the door, she stood perfectly erect, her face motionless except for the tears streaming down her cheeks. We hugged and sat and talked, and I told her some of where I’d been. I lied, too—those lies of omission that had become part of who I was, blank spaces at the center of me. I said I’d fled because of guilt alone, and given what I’d done, that was plausible enough.

  She gave me Frank’s steamer trunk, which she’d filled with some of my personal things and held on to all these years. But after six months, we hardly saw each other. I still didn’t want to risk telling her the whole truth, so there were buried land mines everywhere. And Callie had a whole other life that I didn’t fit into, no matter how hard she tried to let me. I drove by her house a few times, sat in my car, and watched the impassive face of the large white house. And I heard an echo of the big guy’s voice, just after he flipped me the envelope filled with traveler’s checks. You don’t talk about this to anyone. Ever. Or we’ll know. And we’ll know who you talked to also. We won’t be nearly as accommodating next go-round. To you or her. I could no longer bring myself to stroll up that nice suburban walk and ring the doorbell. On my third or fourth trip, as night fell and the lights began clicking on upstairs, a neighbor slowed in passing to cast a suspicious glance at my crappy little Honda. The drawn reflection I saw in my rearview was alarming even to me. I had become that troubling watcher in the night. That dark, idling car at the curb, beyond the curtains. The thought of someone outside my mother’s house, scaring her, finally drove me off for good.

  I tried to resume my old life. But I quickly learned it wasn’t there waiting for me. My friends, too, had moved or moved on. Seeing them brought home just how much I’d lost. How bad the damage was, burned into my character like a convict’s brand. One day I’d been a seventeen-year-old with a Nintendo and a decent life forecast. The next I was a grown-up on the run. Secretive, itinerant, alone with my guilt and those dwindling traveler’s checks. And then just my guilt.

  I drove to Bob’s Big Boy one night. I didn’t get past the parking lot. The huge picture windows were lit up like a Norman Rockwell. All those kids eating and drinking, talking about movies and lying about getting laid. I was brought up short there outside, like a bum contemplating a lavish window display. I didn’t think about everything I didn’t have, but everything those kids did. Envy flared, of course, but when it burned away, I said a silent prayer for them, that their lives would stay blissfully uncomplicated, that for many more years they would be able to take everything for granted.

  I had to start over. And I gave it my best shot. Make new friends. Build a different life. Cut my bitterness with gratitude for what I still had. I tried to live up to Callie’s hopes for me by not spending my life looking over my shoulder. Now and then, when I’d see a dark sedan or hear a voice of a certain timbre, I’d feel a flicker of the old fear, a snake’s tongue moving along my spine. At any moment they could pounce on me and throw me in a cell, charge me with a murder I didn’t commit.

  But they didn’t. I got a job helping people who were homeless. I managed to become a part of society, so if I did get hauled off, I could feel like my life had been worth something.

  I had finally found calm, or at least my version of it.

  And then I awoke one night to see the end of a black rope coiled on my bal
cony.

  CHAPTER 14

  The silence was what told me I had finished talking. I emerged from the stupor of my thoughts as if rousing from a deep sleep, pressed into the present tense by the couch arm in my lower back, the floor beneath my feet, the sensation of nearly unbearable vulnerability, as if I’d been skinned and dangled above salt water.

  Induma glanced away, her dark eyes darker than usual. Then she slid down the torn-up couch and embraced me, pressing my cheek to her chest. I couldn’t move. We stayed like that a few minutes, and then I raised my hand and put it on her forearm.

  She set her other hand on top of mine and said, “I will help you.”

  She stood and straightened out her clothes. With effort she produced a smile for me. The door thumped to the carpet, and she was gone.

  I jolted awake at 2:18. Experience had taught me to lie flat and draw deep breaths, to picture the soothing roll of the ocean. Soon the panic lifted and I came back to my body, safe in the darkness.

  Clever, the tricks our minds play on us. The meanspirited reminders they think we require. Given the past twenty-four hours, it was no surprise that the habit had reasserted itself, but still, the thought of it stung. I’d convinced myself it was behind me. The return to the old pattern seemed proof that I’d failed. My deficiencies had been waiting there all along, hibernating just beneath the surface like a bad memory.

  It was ungodly hot, my pillow drenched. My air conditioner was awful. It made a lot of noise and didn’t put out much, like a sitcom wife. It didn’t help that I kept the windows and sliding glass door closed and locked even on muggy summer nights. I lay on my slashed mattress, restless and miserable.

  But comfort doesn’t matter. Security matters.

  I spoke Frank’s name to the darkness as I sometimes did. I knew it was weird—embarrassing, even—but I did it because it was the only thing I had left of him, really. I did it to keep him alive. Now I was doing it out of habit. For years it was the one thing I was sure of. Tonight it didn’t feel quite that way.

  How were Frank and an old war buddy linked to a rucksack of cash? The bills were new, dated last year, but even so, it didn’t mean they weren’t merely the latest move in a ploy stretching back to Frank’s last months. Frank was a man with secrets, but I’d known him well, better than I’d known anyone except Callie. Whatever his involvement with Charlie, or with whatever had surfaced in the weeks before his murder, he would have acted aboveboard. I tried to convince myself and got mostly there. Mostly.

  I was exhausted, yet wide awake. I turned on the TV, my analgesic of choice. Daffy Duck was being stared down by a little mob guy with a big hat. I mouthed the line with him: Okay, duck, no more stallin’, see?

  It was no use. I got up, dressed, and double-checked the locks and windows. About ten years ago, I realized I wasn’t checking for my safety. So why? Compulsion, certainly. Partly out of respect for the dead. I knew my way around this apartment in the dark; I’d walked it with my eyes closed.

  After Induma had left, I’d cleaned up, bagging my broken possessions and dumping more down the chute than was necessary. I’d hammered the front door into the jamb with two nails, which I now tested with my thumb. They’d prove at least as effective as the dead bolt had been last night. Cracking the dishwasher, I checked the bundles of hundred-dollar bills that I’d laid beneath the bottom tray. I closed the door, setting a paper clip on the right top corner so it would fall if someone looked in there.

  I opened the sliding door, passed through the torn-out screen, and straddled the balcony parapet. The three-story drop was menacing, but the telephone pole was within easy reach, one of the reasons I’d selected the apartment. Liffman’s Rules: Always leave yourself a getaway. Timing my lunge, I grabbed the footholds without having to go airborne, then pulled myself across onto the pole. I climbed down and walked to my Ford pickup.

  I told myself I wasn’t sure where I was going, but of course I knew.

  Aside from a different shade of paint, a goose mailbox, and the Realtor sign hammered in the front lawn, Frank’s house looked the same. I parked up the street, walked back, and stood staring at the house from across the way. I thought of a rucksack stuffed with a hundred eighty grand and Frank’s tattoo and how he’d hugged me that one time and called us a family. I thought, Please don’t be a lie.

  I slipped through the side gate and circled the house, peering inside. Some of the furniture was still there, and a few boxes, but whoever had been living there was mostly moved out. The old porch swing remained. I placed a hand on the peeling wood but couldn’t bring myself to sit. Then I confronted the back door I’d stumbled through that night to find Frank. I wondered if this was the feeling that killers got when they returned to the scene of the crime to roll in the dirt of their misdeeds.

  The door was locked, but the pivot latch on the kitchen’s sash window was tired and pulled open readily with an upward jostling of the pane. I stepped inside, easing the window shut behind me.

  I walked into the living room and sat in a slipcovered armchair, setting my feet before the spot where I’d held Frank while he died. I stared at the rag rug for a while. I’d driven by the house when I’d first moved back, and one or two other times when I really missed him, when I wanted to breathe the air he’d breathed, walk the streets he’d walked. These walls held my favorite memories. And, of course, some others, too.

  I slid off the chair onto my knees and turned back the rug, revealing the bleached stain in the floorboards. It had yellowed over the years. It smelled of dust and rot. I wondered if the last owners had been oblivious to the blood spilled here.

  I smoothed the rug back into place and walked silently into the kitchen. The old alarm keypad, still cracked from Callie’s fist, was no longer hooked up to anything. Padding up the hall, I saw that my old bedroom had been converted into a sewing room. For a time I stood beneath that high rectangle of window and stared up at the smog-smeared night sky.

  Comfort. Security.

  Caruthers’s words came back to me from yesterday afternoon : A single bad decision can open a world of lamentable consequences.

  I asked myself the same questions I’d been mulling over half my life. What if I’d just let the phone ring that night? What if I hadn’t climbed into the back of that sedan?

  My footsteps seemed amplified in the small house. Same Medeco locks on the back door. I looked into the master bedroom, which was nothing like I remembered it. No sweaters cramming the top shelf of the closet. No scattering of partly read books on the nightstand. No stack of sketch pads on the bureau, cloudy with charcoal. I went back out and faced the front door. The same. The window dressings had changed, and I wondered if the security catches Frank had installed were still there. I pulled back the curtain, and fright hit me so fast and hard that I crouched in paralyzed shock.

  A short way up the shadowy street, a car was pulled to the curb in front of my truck. A figure stood at my driver’s-side window. He either sensed movement from the house or was looking for it, and the dark oval of his head wobbled slightly as it rotated. He was looking at me.

  I jerked my hand back, letting the curtain fall closed, my breath sucking in with a screech. An engine turned over.

  And then something unexpected happened. My reaction shifted, away from fear, to a fuck-it urge for confrontation, no matter the stakes. Seventeen years ago I’d exited this house on trembling legs, but now I found myself charging the front door, spoiling for a fight. By the time I was off the porch, the car was already around the corner, the whine of its acceleration rising in pitch but fading with distance. When I reached my truck, there was nothing but crickets and the machine-gun strafing of a high-power sprinkler. A spasm of energy spun me in a full circle, but I spotted no one anywhere.

  My mouth dry from the scare, I hurried back, closed and locked the door, and left the way I’d come in. At my truck, I pulled a flashlight from the glove box, slid beneath, and examined the undercarriage, as Liffman had taught me. The gas tan
k also showed no signs of tampering.

  When I climbed into the truck and set my hands on the steering wheel, they were still shaking. I squeezed the wheel, doing my best to still them. When I looked up, I noticed a slip of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. Like a valet stub. But I hadn’t valeted, not in months.

  I climbed out and tugged it from under the rubber blade. A film-processing slip from a photo place on Ventura Boulevard. A single roll. Ready for pickup today at noon. The order number and pickup time were preprinted, the name and phone number spaces left blank. The only human mark was the black circle around Thursday. The film had probably been dropped in an overnight box rather than brought to a counter.

  I got into the truck once more and stared through the windshield at nothing. My fear bled into curiosity and back again. A panicky urge overtook me. To drive away from all this. Keep moving until I wound up at a new city, a different apartment, a cannery in Alaska. But no matter how hard I tried to give in to the urge, some part of me wouldn’t allow it this time. I had reached some turning point that I hadn’t even known I was approaching.

  I headed home. After monkeying my way up the telephone pole, I checked the locks, the paper clip, and the two nails through the front door, then sat on my mattress, staring at the damn photomat slip. My bones ached from last night’s explosion, and my shirt chafed the raw skin of my chest.

  When I closed my eyes, I saw again in the darkness those familiar ideograms, blue ink faded into flesh. TRUST NO ONE.

  To find the answers that I needed, I’d have to source Charlie’s connection with Frank beyond Okinawa. How had Induma put it? Maybe it’s time to look for some new allies. Or new candor with old ones.

  I got up and moved the television off Frank’s trunk and onto the floor. The lid creaked as I pried it up. I dug around until I came up with what I was looking for. A creased photo of Callie from so many years ago. At the beach, squinting into the sun, one hand pinning back her thick, unruly hair. That face, almost as familiar as my own, though I hadn’t seen it for years.