No Man's Land (15 page)

She pulled her phone from her pocket, thumbed it on and waited to
see what service was going to be like. Three lines. Way better than
back at the prison, where she’d tried several times but had been
unable to establish a connection. She pushed nine, then autodial. The
phone rang six times before the voice said. “Hello.”

“Helen, it’s Melanie.”

“Oh.” The phone company was telling the truth. You
could
hear a pin drop. Melanie grimaced at the phone. The reception told
her Brian’s mother had wasted no time taking sides. Not that she’d
ever been on Melanie’s side. No . . . they’d never gotten along.
Freud would have had a field day. Classic case of Mommy competing
with the wife for the son’s affections. Add to that the fact that
people of Helen Martyn’s social standing don’t welcome incursions
from army brats like Melanie Harris and you had what could be
charitably described as fourteen years of mutual forbearance. Melanie
kept her voice cheery. “Brian there?” she inquired. Helen
hesitated. “Oh . . . I don’t know . . . uh . . .”

And then Melanie heard his voice in the background.

“Your wife,” she heard Helen say.

A minute passed before Brian came on the line. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

“How’s the weather in Arizona?”

“Windy. What about Michigan?”

“Dad says you’re all over the tube.”

“How is he?”

His timing told her something was amiss. “He’s getting on. His
memory’s not what it used to be. He forgets things these days.”

A moment passed, neither of them willing to use the “A”

word. Brian changed the subject. “He says the show’s getting a
lot of press.”

“We’re on a bit of a roll. What about you?”

“I’ve been so busy I haven’t even got my bags unpacked yet.”

“Busy with what?”

“You know; settling in. Catching up on old times. That kind of
thing.” Another voice could be heard in the background. A woman’s
voice. Not Helen.

“Who’s that?” Melanie asked. She heard his intake of breath.

“Patricia,” he said. “Patricia Lee . . . you remember
Patricia don’t you?” Melanie used her voice training to keep her
tone neutral. “I remember,” she said. How could she forget?
Patricia had been Brian’s high school sweetheart. The girl he’d
been expected to marry. Her father was a state appellate court judge.
All very incestuous you know. At least until Melanie appeared and
gummed up the plan.

“What’s she doing there?” Melanie asked with a bit more of
an edge in her voice than she would have preferred.

“She’s helping me find an apartment.”

“Oh really?”

“She’s in real estate.”

“Still married to Larry?”

“Harry, and no. They got a divorce four years ago.”

“Somehow I could have guessed.”

A strained silence settled over the connection. “So anyway,”

Brian said after a long moment. “You kinda caught me on the way
out.”

“I can be home in a few days.” The words were out of her lips
before her brain had a chance to censor them. “We could maybe—”

“I’m not coming back to California, Mel. Not now. Not ever.
Not gonna happen. Place never felt like home to me anyway. I always
felt like I was on a bad vacation.”

“Brian please . . . we could—”

“Please,” he said. “Listen, Mel, I understand. You’re a
big TV star and all. No way you can give it all up for a life as a
lawyer’s wife in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I don’t blame you.”
When she didn’t respond, he went on. “We’re just too different
from each other. We want different things.”

“We didn’t used to.”

“That was a long time ago. Before Samantha. Before every thing.”

“Yeah,” she said softly.

“I ran into Stan Rummer yesterday,” he said, naming another
old high school chum. Another lawyer. She remembered then, and her
heart froze in her chest. “Mr. D . . . I . . . V . . . O . . . R .
. . C . . . E, Detroit.” she spelled it out like his obnoxious TV
commercial used to. “Stan still trading in human misery is he?”

“We need to talk, Mel.”

She felt him squirm. “So talk.”

“Not now.”

Patricia’s voice rose in the background.

“Tell her to shut the fuck up.”

He paused and gathered himself like he always did when she swore.
“Listen . . . I gotta go.”

“With her?”

“I told you. I’m looking for an apartment.”

“Brian,” she said. “Maybe . . .”

A dial tone told her the conversation was over. Melanie Harris
pulled the phone from her ear, used her thumb to turn it off, then
dropped it into her jacket pocket. The dust devil had disappeared
from view. She wondered whether it had gained speed and whisked off
to parts unknown or whether it had simply run out of steam, uncoiling
to an ignominious stop, dropping its collected contents back to the
desert floor to await the next thrilling ride in the sky, maybe a
million years hence.

The wind rose, flapping her collar, plastering the coat to her
chest. She reached up, as if to hold a hat in place, and squinted her
eyes so hard she was blind. On the inside of her eyelids she could
see the interior of Brian’s parents’ house, straight out of Ethan
Allen. All very traditional. Full of oriental carpets and warm wood.
In her mind’s eye it was always decorated for the holidays, with
Christmas music playing, with bows and red ribbons everywhere and the
biggest Christmas tree they could fit through the double doors
holding court in the living room. When she opened her eyes, Marty
Wells was a hundred yards away, walking briskly in her direction. The
wind had again lifted his careful comb-over from his head. She could
tell from his stride. He thought he had something special.

“Good?” she asked.

“Better,” he said, grabbing the handle and pulling open the
motor home’s door. He used a thick red folder to shepherd her
inside. The air inside was still and old. Marty used his free hand to
pat the shingle of hair back into place. “Get this,” he said with
a wink. “This all started with what they said was a medical checkup
for this Driver guy. Right? That’s how he got out of his cell and
how this whole thing started.”

“So?”

“So . . . it wasn’t medical at all. It was a psych
appointment.”

“Really.”

“He’d been exhibiting disassociative behavior.”

“Like?”

“Losing it. Not knowing who he was or where he was. Going into
loud diatribes with himself.” He tapped the folder with his
forefinger. “He was losing his mind. That’s why they were taking
him to see the shrink. They were afraid he was going nuts.”

“And nobody’s got this but us?”

“Nope.”

“And we can prove this?”

“Absolutely.”

“Cause I don’t want to be doing a Dan Rather here, Marty.”

“We’ve got everything. All the paperwork. Everything.”

“And the source?”

“The source’s got enough money to disappear. I spent damn near
the whole fall budget on this and the video.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Don’t worry about it. We’re hot right now.” The twinkle
returned to his eye. “You heard the numbers?”

She shook her head.

“We pulled a seventeen share last night. Third highest rating of
the year. Only the Super Bowl and the
Survivor
finale had a
bigger number. They’ll find us some more money, believe you me they
will.”

“That explains the calls I’ve been getting from network all
morning. People I’ve been trying to get ahold of for a month.”

“We’ve been reborn,” Marty announced. “I’m going to ask
for a ‘Special Edition’ to go on tomorrow night.”

“Think they’ll go for it?”

“They’ll wet their pants.”

“We can reuse a lot of the stock prison stuff.”

“Plus whatever we get from the press conference this afternoon.”

Marty moved quickly forward, slipping into the driver’s seat and
starting the engine.

“Let’s get it on tape,” he said.

Somehow, she couldn’t get the sound of Christmas music to leave
her head.

Elias Romero was late and greatly agitated. On his way home to
change his suit, he’d found Iris Cruz sitting in her red Toyota
Camry . . . parked diagonally across the street from his driveway . .
. sitting there big as life for all the world to see. With his hands
shaking and his pulse pounding in his ears, he’d stepped on the
accelerator and sped all the way to the end of the street and turned
right. Iris stayed a semidiscreet block behind him as they ran all
the way to the end of Linda Vista Boulevard, out past the last of the
houses, out to where they’d paved it and put in sidewalks and
driveways, in case, sometime in the future, they needed to build more
houses. It was nothing but desert with driveways. Kinda eerie like
some sci-fi flick or something. Like the giant ants had eaten up
everything and moved on.

Reaching the back of the cul-de-sac, Elias Romero swung his
Lincoln Town Car in a wide arc and stopped, facing back the way he’d
come. Iris pulled up alongside. Their windows slid down
simultaneously.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” Romero growled.

“You come to my house? You—”

She cut him off. “I need to talk to you,” she said. G.M. Ford
“We got ways. You got no cause to be coming to my house.”

Iris’s eyes narrowed. She could feel her anger and indignation
rising in her throat like molten metal. “What? You afraid that
skinny wife of yours gonna find out. Afraid she gonna find out you
been droppin’ your pants on my bedroom floor.”

“Hey now . . . don’t be startin’ that stuff with me. What we
did is between you and me. We agreed.”

“What we agreed was that you was leaving that bitch and we was
gonna be together.” When he didn’t reply, she prodded. “Well
didn’t we?”

Romero started to bluster but changed his mind. He lowered his
voice. Started talking like he did in bed. “Hey now,” he soothed.
“They’s a lotta things goin’ on right now. We get past all of
this . . . you know, back to normal—”

“Don’t you dare,” Iris interrupted. “Don’t you dare
start that shit with me, Elias Romero. Don’t you dare dis me like
that. Bad enough I listened to that shit once. Now you tryin’ to
feed it to me again. What kind of idiot you think I am?”

Romero sat for a moment. The breeze soothed his overheated cheeks.

“What do you want?” he said finally.

“I’m taking my sick leave, my comp time and my unused vacation
days . . . I’m going back home for a while.”

“Mexico?”

She nodded.

“Chasin’ that husband of yours.”

“Got nothing to do with Esteban,” she said. “Esteban’s a
weakling and a loser. Couldn’t take being dishonored by the
gringos. I don’t need him no more neither. I just had enough of all
of this. I need to get away for a while.”

“Don’t matter anyway,” he said. “All that’s going on
here . . . there’s no way I can cut you that much slack. Hell,
Randall would lose their minds if I . . .”

She raised her voice. “The paperwork is on your desk. Sign it.
You don’t want me and your precious wife having a little
conversation, you just sign those damn papers.”

“Don’t be threatening me, woman,” he said.

“You didn’t fool me for a minute, Elias Romero. I knew what
you was coming round for. You just like all the rest of them.”

“If you knew, baby,” he mocked, “how come you so pissed
off?”

“I’m pissed off ’cause you let me believe it. ’Cause you
know a woman is ruled by her heart and you watched me forget myself
and you didn’t say nothing. My heart wasn’t as important to you
as your dick was.”

“Ain’t nothing is,” he said with a wicked smile.

“That’s the sad part, Mr. Elias Romero. Hearts don’t matter
to you ’cause your sorry ass isn’t even got two percent of the
milk of human kindness. You’re pathetic, that’s what you are.”

Before he could reply, her window slid closed. He began to sputter
at the tinted glass, but by that time, she’d dropped it in reverse,
backed up, swung past his fender and roared back they way they’d
come in a cloud of dust.

Elias Romero spent a minute and a half cursing and strangling his
steering wheel. With a sigh, he checked his watch, swore again and
put the car in gear, headed for town.

The parking lot for the Musket Community Center was overflowing.
Seemed like every remote satellite truck in the country was sitting
out there with its blind white eye pointing at the heavens. Inside,
the place was jammed to the rafters with reporters. With the prison’s
administration building little more than a pile of rubble, the
community center was now the only place within fifty miles big enough
to hold a press conference. He’d had to park at the far end of town
and walk down.

By the time he slid into position on the dais, Asuega was already
finished offering the Randall Corporation’s deep, abiding sorrow to
the loved ones of those killed in the riot and the corporation’s
sincere regrets that an incident such as this had taken place at all.
He was now assuring the audience that all practices and procedures
would be reviewed with an eye for strengthening security at what was
already America’s premier maximum security prison. He paused for a
moment, shuffled his note cards and began again.

“
As of this time, a total of three people remain unaccounted
for.”
A buzz of anticipation rose from the crowd. “
Two
inmates and
one civilian.”
The buzz got louder. “
Inmate
number nine nine
three six four. Clarence Albert Kehoe.
Imprisoned in the State of
Mississippi in nineteen
seventy-eight for killing three people in a
bar fight. Found
guilty in nineteen eighty of killing another prisoner and sent to a
maximum security prison in Walla Walla, Washington, where he again
killed a fellow inmate. Suspected in the
deaths of four other
inmates and deemed a habitual offender, Mr.
Kehoe was finally
sent to Meza Azul Correctional Facility in nineteen ninety-seven and
housed in the Special Containment wing.”
Asuega looked up at
the sea of cameras. “
Mr. Kehoe is to be considered armed and
extremely dangerous.”
Asuega waited until the volley of shouted
questions subsided and continued. “
Inmate number one o nine five
six three. Timothy Haynes Driver. Found guilty in King County,
Washington, of
two counts of aggravated murder. Serving two
concurrent sentences of life without the possibility of parole.
Assigned to Walla
Walla Penitentiary, Mr. Driver assaulted and
blinded another inmate during his first week of incarceration. During
the course of
the incident, Mr. Driver also seriously wounded
a correctional officer. In nineteen ninety-eight, Mr. Driver was sent
to Meza Azul
and contained in the Extreme Punishment section
of the Special
Containment wing. Mr. Driver is considered to
be armed and extremely dangerous.”