At Ease with the Dead (12 page)

A good question, one I'd asked myself. I still didn't have an answer for it.

I stayed there at the Wrights' for another half an hour, finishing up the coffee and brandy. As I was leaving, both Alice and Lisa insisted that I come see them the next time I visited El Paso.

When I thanked them for the dinner and said good-bye, I was careful not to look down at the breasts sliding comfortably beneath the red silk of Lisa's blouse. And I was careful not to invite either of them—I couldn't invite Alice without inviting Lisa—to get in touch with me if they ever came to Santa Fe. Outside their house, walking to the Subaru, proud of myself, I slapped an invisible merit badge on my back. After only a moment, it felt like a sack of potatoes.

I parked the station wagon in the motel lot and walked down the sidewalk. My room was set back down a kind of alleyway, an alcove in the building. The alleyway was lit by two spotlights, one bolted high up onto each wall.

I'd reached the door, snagged the keys from my blazer pocket, when I heard the scuff of shoe leather against cement. I turned.

There were three of them, moving toward me without any hurry. They were all big, and they all wore stocking masks.

11

F
or an instant, absurdly, I thought they were the three men from Lake Asayi. Somehow they'd tracked me down, spent months doing it, and now finally they were going to take their revenge.

But these three were larger and they were considerably more menacing.

There's something obscene and horrific about a stocking mask. The taut translucent fabric distorts the face, reminding you of the malleability of flesh, its fragility, its transience. It transforms the eyes and mouth to evil slits, the nose to a grotesque blob, turns them all into a vision, dreadful, repellent, vaguely remembered from ancient sweat-soaked dreams.

The man in the middle, probably the leader, was the biggest of the three. He wore jeans and a zippered red windbreaker. I think the two outriders were wearing jeans too, but by this time I had stopped paying attention to anyone's attire.

The instinctive reaction was terror.
Run.
Scream and gibber if you must, but
run.

But the wall was at my back. Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

Forget the door. They'd be on top of me by the time I unlocked it, and then we'd all be inside the room. Where they could kick me to pieces in privacy and comfort.

There was a foot of space between the two outriders and the wall and another foot between each of them and the leader.

They were about three yards away now, still moving toward me, slowly, relentlessly. No one had said a word.

When you can't retreat and when surrender seems most likely fatal, you attack. It was the only choice I had. The only option that gave me the possibility of leaving that alley without being very badly hurt, or very badly dead.

I sucked in a deep lungful of air. Then, raising my arms in front of me like a tackle, bellowing the way I had at Lake Asayi, I ran at them.

For a moment, startled, they stopped their advance. The man in the center put his hands to grapple with mine, and I kicked him in the crotch as hard as I could. He doubled over, hissing, and I rammed him toward the outrider on my left.

The motel key was still in my hand and I held it like a dagger. As I swerved around the big man in the center, I stabbed out toward the outrider on the right, clawing it across his face. I felt the nylon stocking rip and the flesh beneath it split apart.

He shrieked, and then I was past him, on my way to the alley's entrance.

And then I wasn't. The man on the left had untangled himself from the leader and dived for me. His hand snared my ankle and I went down.

I hit the cement skidding on my knees and the palms of my hands. Cloth and skin shredded beneath me. I tumbled over in a roll, more momentum than strategy, and then I was up again, stumbling, but stumbling in the right direction. I was at the entrance when a diesel cab slammed into my back.

Suddenly I was moving more quickly than my legs wanted to. I shot toward the Subaru, and I would've shattered my shins against the bumper if I hadn't slammed my wounded hands against the hood. I went spinning over the fender and came down on hands and knees in the space between the station wagon and the next car.

I pushed myself up, but by then one of them was at me, slamming a fist into my kidney. I gasped and swung around and struck out wildly, backhanded. My knuckles crashed into his face and he jerked back, and then the other man was there and a fist was coming in for my throat. I dodged away but it smashed against my shoulder, and then the first guy was back, pummeling me. Fists happened for a while, and kicks and gouges, a flurry of hands and elbows and knees, and then finally they had me, arms and legs pinioned, and everyone was breathing heavily, and the third man, the leader, was limping toward us from the entrance to the alleyway with a knife in his hand.

Fifty yards away, cars cruised serenely by. Just another Thursday night in El Paso.

Walking with a slight stoop, the leader limped closer. For the first time I noticed, under the taut nylon, beneath the deformed nose, a smudge of gray.

A mustache. Have to remember that.

Why? So I could put it on the résumé?

“
Hijo de puta
,” the leader said calmly. Son of a whore.

They were the first words anyone had spoken since I stepped out of the Subaru.

He was about five feet away when suddenly he was lit up, brilliantly, as though by flood lights. And suddenly a car horn was exploding behind me, honking frantically, off and on. I felt the two men at my sides wrench themselves around to look, and then the leader was shouting “
Vamanos
,” over the blare of the horn. And then they were gone and I was leaning, head lowered, against the Subaru.

I heard a car door slam, heard a quick clicking of heels against pavement. I felt a hand on my back, and Lisa Wright was saying, “Joshua?
Joshua
?”

“Joshua, you're being ridiculous,” Lisa Wright called out from the bedroom, beyond the thin wooden door.

“Probably,” I called out over my shoulder.

“You should see a doctor.”

“Uh-huh.” This was the third or fourth time she'd told me.

In socks and shorts I bent forward and studied my face in the mirror. A small triangular gouge at the curve of my cheek—one of the men in the alley must've been wearing a ring. The wound had stopped bleeding and started throbbing.

Lisa called out: “Why do grown men sometimes act like idiots?”

“Beats me.”

She had helped me get the first-aid kit from the glove compartment of the Subaru—my hands had a hard time with the car door. I'd made her wait in the chair while I did my repairs in the bathroom. It had taken me a while, because I couldn't begin until I caught my breath and stopped shaking.

But finally I'd been able to clean myself off, smear Neosporin on my palms, wrap them with gauze, and tape them.

Now, assessing the damage in the mirror, I decided I was lucky. I still had all my teeth. My lip was split, but that had stopped bleeding too. By tomorrow morning, probably, it would be the size of a flounder. By then, too, I'd have a nice bruise highlighting that gouge, and two or three more down along my rib cage. But no ribs were cracked, no bones were broken. The worst visible injury was to the knees of my pants, which'd been vaporized, and to my palms, which'd been scraped raw.

So had my pride. The three men had frightened me, and badly. Even now, safe in the bathroom, I still could see those smooth bullet-shaped heads coming toward me.

Fortunately for all of us, wounded pride doesn't show.

Outwardly, I seemed almost presentable, and if it weren't for every muscle in my body feeling as though it'd been hacksawed into pieces, and for my hands feeling as though I'd been juggling hot waffle irons, I was absolutely tip-top.

The pain would be worse later, when I stopped moving. Thing to do now was keep moving.

I opened the door a crack and asked Lisa to get me a clean shirt and a clean pair of jeans from my suitcase. A few moments later she was there in her red Oriental outfit, handing them over.

“Let me drive you to the emergency room,” she said.

“No thanks,” I told her.

I was holding the door open by only five inches. Lisa suddenly smiled. The blue eyes looked down the length of the door, looked back at my face, and she said, “It's not as though you've got something I haven't seen before, you know.”

I smiled back. “Then you're not missing anything now. Thanks for the clothes. See you in a minute.”

I closed the door and leaned against it. My virtue, such as it was, still intact.

But the rest of me feeling a bit foolish. I'd be blushing next and fluttering my eyelashes.

Gingerly, using only my fingertips, I eased into the khaki shirt and buttoned it. Gingerly I pulled on the jeans and zippered them. No problem at all, except for Lisa's presence fifteen feet away. If she hadn't been there, I could've whimpered and screamed all I wanted.

I fished my wallet out of the ruined jeans and levered it into my back pocket. Then I opened the door and stepped out into the room.

Lisa sat silently in the chair, watching me. She'd hung her coat—a black, full-length wool job, like a London bobby's uniform coat—on the rack by the door.

I crossed the room to my suitcase, which lay open on the chair by the television. I dug out my flashy sky-blue running shoes—$14.95 at Payless—and brought them over to the bed. Sat down, slipped them on, laced them up.

“Okay,” I said, and stood up. Gingerly. “Let's go get a drink.”

She looked at me for a moment, frowning. At last she said, “You should be in bed, Joshua.”

“Later. I think an anesthetic is in order.” There were codeine tablets in the first-aid kit, but I wanted to ask her some questions, and I didn't want to ask them here. Even as banged-up as I was, I thought that the bright blue eyes and the round firm breasts made the room suddenly too small.

“So,” I said, setting the drinks on the wooden table, “what's a nice girl like you doing in a neighborhood like mine?” I swung around, gingerly, and sat down in the chair opposite hers.

We'd come in her car, with her driving, to the bar where I'd met Grober. It wasn't chic, certainly, but it had the advantage of being nearby. Jim was still behind the counter, but the afternoon customers had been replaced by the evening shift. The place was a little busier than it had been, but not much. It was a lot more quiet, no Tammy Wynette on the jukebox. These were serious drinkers, professionals, and they didn't want any distractions.

Lisa smiled. The blue eyes looked at me in a level stare. “I came to your room to see if you wanted to sleep with me.”

“Ah,” I said. Pretty soon I actually would be blushing. “And what did you tell Alice?”

“I told her,” still smiling, “that I was going to your motel room to see if you wanted to sleep with me.”

“Ah,” I said. When you find a word you like, stick with it. “What did Alice say to that?”

“She said she thought you were married. I told her I didn't think so. You're not wearing a ring.”

“Lot of married men don't wear rings.”

She nodded. “But you would, I think.”

I shrugged, took a sip of my bourbon.

“Wouldn't you,” she said.

“Probably.”

She raised her drink, a margarita, and sipped at it. “So you're not.”

“No.”

“But you've got a woman.” With a pointed pink tongue-tip, she licked some salt from her upper lip.

I smiled. “
Got
in what sense?”

She frowned as though mildly irritated. “Do we have to play games, Joshua? You're in love with some woman. A simple question. Yes or no.”

“Yes,” I told her.

She nodded. “And you don't play around.”

“No.”

She nodded again, raised the margarita, sipped at it. “Not even,” she said, and licked away some more salt, “not even when you're hundreds of miles away and she'd never know.”

“Right. It'd make things complicated.”

She nodded again, looked down at her drink, then back up at me. “I turn you on, though, don't I?”

She'd said it so seriously that I had to smile. “Lisa—”

Holding up her right hand like a traffic cop, she said, “A simple question. Yes or no.”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded. “Okay. Good.” She smiled. “If she weren't around, you'd want me. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” A single nod, final, definitive. “I'll settle for that.” She smiled again. “For the time being.”

I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“What?” Eyebrows raised. Beautiful face open and unguarded. She still lived in a world, I suddenly realized, where people told the truth and betrayals were a surprise.

“Did you or Alice tell anyone where I was staying? The name of the motel?”

She shook her head. “I didn't. I don't think she did, either.” She frowned. “Those three men? You think they were after you?”

“I know they were after me. I'd like to find out if there was anything personal in it.”

“I didn't tell anyone,” she repeated. “And why would they be after you? In particular, I mean.”

“I don't know.”

“We get our share of muggings here. Like any big city.”

I nodded. Got their share of tire-slashings too, probably. But a mugging and a tire-slashing both, the same person on the same day?

“I'll ask Alice,” she said again. She smiled. “She really likes you, you know.”

“I like her.”

The smile widened. “She's wonderful, isn't she? She's taken care of me since my parents died. She and Edgar, my grandfather. He died about five years ago.”

Seemed like a lot of death for one young life.