“You were really nasty to me after I shot that black woman. I heard the commotion, then ran in and saw her biting and scratching you and going for your eyes, so I did it. That’s all. And since then you’ve been hurting my feelings. Is it because a woman was about to kick your ass, and I’m the witness? Or is it because I’m a woman and I saved you?”
Paul’s consciousness alternated between the sting of her accusation and a hollow amusement at the irrationality of it. When he was able to stabilize his emotions for a moment, he said, “I wanted to scare her, not kill her.”
“You scared her, all right.”
“If I had wanted her dead, I would have shot her myself. I had a gun. You knew that.”
“I knew it, and so did she. I didn’t want her to get her hands on it and kill us both.”
“Okay,” he said. “You fired because you didn’t have confidence that I could keep her alive long enough to get her to talk. So I had to spend an hour cleaning up, and then another hour taking the house apart to find out what she could have told us.”
“We’re here, and it’s because I found the phone number.”
“Yes, we’re here—about an hour too late to have caught her packing and killed her before Jack Till got to her. Those two extra hours in Henderson start to look bigger now, don’t they?”
“So I finally think I understand.”
It was a battle for clarification. Their fights were always like this, the anger of the struggle forcing each of them to reveal the resentments they had resolved to hide, but finding they needed to use them as ammunition. His sense of structure told him that the fight was nearly at its core now, and soon he could know what it had been about. “What is it that you understand?”
“You haven’t been romantic since we left home. Are you just angry at me for shooting her, or are you losing interest?”
“I’m not losing interest in you. I’m with you practically all the time, aren’t I? Maybe that’s the problem.”
“I don’t mean being around. I mean—you know.”
“Sex?” It always astounded Paul that she had such a hard time saying even the word, given her history.
“Yes. You’ve been so cold and distant. You haven’t been very interested in me for a long time.”
“We’ve been working every minute. I’m interested, but I don’t know when anything could have happened. When we haven’t been on an airplane, we’ve been in a car.” He took his eyes away from the cars ahead of him moving slowly toward the gate. “I love you. Don’t ever forget the trouble we went through to be together. That’s how much I wanted you.”
“Wanted?”
“Want.”
She leaned over to throw her arms around his neck and put a soft kiss on his cheek. “Let’s kill them now and rent a room.”
There was the sound of a horn behind them, and Paul glanced into the rearview mirror. This time it was a middle-aged woman who had noticed that he had let five or six extra feet of space open up between his bumper and the trunk of the two teenagers’ car. “Just keep your eyes on their car,” he said.
It still rankled Paul that Sylvie had accused him of being defeated by that young black woman in Henderson. Sylvie had killed her and left him no way to defend himself from the accusation of weakness. He had been just about to incapacitate the young woman when Sylvie had rushed in, hysterical, and shot her. He knew a dozen ways to immobilize a smaller opponent like that woman. He had been training in martial arts since he was a teenager.
He had been without any sense of direction as a boy. It had seemed to him that the gravity that held most other people to some path had no effect on him. People around him, even his own brothers and sisters, seemed to have some image they were growing into, some template that they were learning to fit.
Paul had balance, control, and coordination, so he thought he might be good at sports, but he had a difficult time finding the right one. He was tall and thin, so the basketball team had seemed a possibility, but he found that the countless hours of shooting a basket, rebounding, and shooting again that made other boys good players made him bored. He tried football, but it was like the punishment for some forbidden act that he had not even had the pleasure of committing. Then he found a karate class in a storefront on his way home from school. In karate he could use everything about himself—his long reach, his high kick, his coordination, his energy, his anger.
By the age of fifteen, he had already become a dangerous boy. He had little to do with the other students at school, but when he walked down the hall, he cut a path through the crowd like an icebreaker, straight and undeviating, bumping aside anyone who didn’t see him coming and forcing those who did to go around him. One afternoon a boy pushed back, hard. Paul spun with the push, held the boy’s arm and broke it, then delivered a series of quick blows that left the boy unconscious and bleeding in the hallway.
That evening after his mother came home from work, the police arrived and took Paul to the station. They asked him a lot of questions, and then locked him up for the night. Paul’s mother went to the station and tried to get him out, but the police weren’t yet sure how serious the charges would be, so they stalled. Finally he had been sent to a juvenile facility in the mountains for thirty days. That was where he had gotten his first paying job.
When he had been there for about two weeks and won four fights, three boys from the North Valley came to him and explained that they had a problem. They had been working as street pushers for a marijuana dealer. They had been in a feud with boys who worked for a rival dealer, and it had given one of them an idea. They would rob their own dealer’s house, and then blame it on their competitors. The flaw in the scheme was that when they had broken into the house, a neighbor had seen them. The dealer they worked for was terrifying. He had several plantations in remote parts of national forests, tended by small groups of armed men. Each time a crop was ripe they picked it, bagged it, and packed it out on foot. The dealer had plenty of men from these crews to find and kill the boys if he learned what they had done. They needed to kill the neighbor before he saw them again and recognized them, but they were all going to be in the juvenile camp for at least two months.
They knew Paul was getting out in a couple of weeks. They were willing to tell him where they had hidden a gun and pay him a thousand dollars each to kill the neighbor. Paul said, “All right.” As soon as he was out of juvenile camp, he went to the address they had given him, found the gun, went to the neighbor’s house, and shot him while he slept. Paul had finally discovered his sport.
Paul had been doing paying jobs for a lot of years before he’d ever met Sylvie. It was incredible to him that she would attack his competence just to win points in some stupid argument. He forced himself to be calm. Nobody ever said women fought fair, and nobody ever sought out women because they were logical.
Behind him a horn sounded again, this time a long, loud blare.
21
JACK TILL SWIVELED in his seat to see what the honking was about, but all he could determine was that it had come from one of the cars in the line behind him. A car had stopped in the aisle to let him out so it could take his parking space. The boy with a black baseball cap who was driving made Till uneasy because he was talking to his girlfriend instead of watching, but Till backed out and moved off.
Till turned out of the parking lot and drove west, away from the harbor. He wanted to be on a freeway heading south before the afternoon rush hour. He knew the importance of momentum to a witness like Wendy Harper. If things seemed to be stalled and faltering, she would begin to rethink her choices. He watched her closely whenever he was forced to stop at a traffic signal or wait for an obstruction to clear, and he could detect the nervous mannerisms he feared: looking out the side window at familiar buildings, her thumb running back and forth along the door handle. San Francisco was still home. He hadn’t gotten her out of town yet. She could open the door at any stop, slip out, and know her way around.