No Man's Land (2 page)

“Clear,” somebody said.

She cast a quick glance at the
control booth, where Tommy Allenby, her longtime director, stood with
a fake grin plastered on his face, making the victory sign with his
fingers. She smiled back and stepped away from the desk. The
affirmation from Tommy was little more than force of habit. In the
seven years the show had been on national television, Melanie had
steadily taken over what would normally have been the duties of the
director, leaving Tommy in the role of little more than a
cheerleader. A well-paid cheerleader, as she’d been forced to
remind him earlier in the year when he’d threatened to quit. Since
then, their relationship had become cool and strictly professional.
It had come to her ears that he’d been shopping his services to
other programs. After considering confronting him on the matter,
she’d decided to let him test the waters. Might be better that way.
Better for both of them. As she moved across the set, Leslie Hall,
her executive assistant, began jabbering in her ear. “We’ve got
another taping at nine-fifteen tomorrow.”

“What have we got?”

Leslie ran down the list of crimes
and criminals scheduled for next week’s show. A pair of Midwest
bank robbers, who, after nine bank robberies, were still at large. A
missing father of four, whose slaughtered family had been discovered
in the basement of their home and a recap of the year to date. Each
half hour episode of
American Manhunt
consisted of three
segments. The inclusion of a recap meant they were short on current
material and were using the compilation as filler.

“It’s not much,” Melanie
sneered. “We just did a recap. You tell Martin we need better
content.” They all knew. After seven successful years, the show was
beginning to fizzle. The mob was fickle. The onslaught of reality
programs was eating away at their ratings. Melanie jabbed a long,
manicured finger at the floor. “Producers who don’t produce find
something else to do for a living.”

Leslie assured her the message would
get through to Martin Wells, the show’s executive producer. She
began to say that Martin was surely doing the best he could, but
Melanie cut her off by throwing up what only Leslie could translate
as a disgusted hand and kept walking. “Tommy wants to have an
all-staff meeting on—” Leslie tried.

“We don’t need an all-staff,”
Melanie countered quickly, her heels clicking harder on the floor.
“Anything that needs covering we can go over on Friday.”

Leslie jotted notes on her pad. “The
Berens people would like to have a word with you about the—”

Another wave of her hand. This time
negative. “Have them talk to Trudy.”

They were off the set now, walking
quickly down the hall toward Melanie’s dressing room. Third door on
the left. “This afternoon—” Leslie began.

“This afternoon. I’m going to the
beach with Brian. Period. End of story.” Another hand gesture. This
one like the cutting of a knife. “I stood him up twice last week
and it’s not going to happen again today.”

Melanie pulled open the dressing room
door, stepped into the cool quiet and closed the door. She crossed
the room to the lighted makeup table and began to work at removing
the layer of makeup the technicians plastered and painted over her
face prior to each taping.

Other than cosmetics, the only thing
on the table was the framed photograph of Melanie and Brian’s first
and only child, Samantha, a smiling four-year-old whose guileless
grin could warm the coldest of hearts. Samantha’s headless and
armless torso had been found behind a Chevron station in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, ten years ago next month. Plucked from beneath the
gaze of a nineteen-year-old babysitter whose anguished cries for help
had gone unheeded, Samantha had been missing for four days before her
mangled body had been found. Neither the missing pieces of her body
nor her murderer had ever been found. Once the funeral was over, once
the pain and the initial shock had subsided and the endless stream of
phone calls had begun to taper off, the experience of losing their
only child had affected Brian and Melanie in completely different
manners. Brian retreated into a shell of self-loathing, blaming
himself for not being there when his daughter needed him most,
neglecting his successful criminal law practice, alienating his
longtime friends and his family in favor of a three-year drinking
binge from which he very nearly failed to emerge. Only in the past
year or so had his former relationships begun to take on the kind of
genuine warmth that had been the hallmark of his earlier life. For
all intents and purposes, he’d put the matter behind him. As long
as you didn’t look into his eyes too deeply. Nobody except Melanie
did, so it wasn’t a problem.

Melanie, on the other hand, had gone
fey. Lapsed into a controlled rage, determined that no other child
should suffer like hers had, the Michigan housewife began a campaign
for the protection of children, demanding that local law enforcement
agencies initiate school awareness programs, demanding that state
lawmakers enact legislation designed to protect children from the
kind of interagency jurisdictional finger-pointing that had allowed
her daughter to be kidnapped in broad daylight from a public park,
had allowed some scum to hold her daughter for four days before
dumping her torso behind a gas station like so much garbage . . . a
tragedy abetted in some measure because local law enforcement powers
were unaccustomed to cooperating with one another. By the time her
rage began to subside, nearly three years later, Melanie had
testified repeatedly before the U.S. Congress, had appeared on every
talk show from Larry King to Leno, had been primarily or partly
responsible for eleven separate pieces of legislation designed to
protect children, including the Amber Alert System, and had, by
virtue of her sheer ubiquity, been offered her own reality TV
program,
American Manhunt,
which for the past seven years she
had used as a personal medium for the expiation of her guilt and
anger.

After seven successful years, all in
the top twenty-five, ratings had recently begun to slide. It was no
surprise. As any number of astute critics had pointed out,
American
Manhunt
was the seminal program of the new “reality television”
craze sweeping the airways. Everything from the
FBI Files
to
Survivor
owed its existence to the groundbreaking work done by
American Manhunt
. Not only had the show spawned its own
competition, but, as some wit had once pointed out, no one had ever
gone broke underestimating the attention span of the American public.
Thus far, Melanie had managed to keep the matter in perspective. Not
only was seven years a darn good run, but she was presently engaged
in negotiations with a major production company for her own daytime
talk show.

“Oprah with an edge,” they said.

Having removed the last of the TV
makeup, Melanie applied SPF forty-five sunscreen to her face,
followed by a careful layer of translucent powder. She puckered up
for a final application of Beach Coral lip gloss and was good to go.
All she needed to do was change into her beach clothes and sandals.
Melanie rose to her feet She was halfway across the room when her
dressing room door popped open. Assistant Producer Patricia Goodman
walked into the room. Patricia was fat and fifty; she was also Marty
Wells’s niece or cousin or something, which, as far as Melanie was
concerned, explained why someone with a job description so nebulous
was still on the set. Patricia closed the door behind herself and
looked up at Melanie. “The girls are ready whenever you are,” she
said in a bored voice.

Melanie stopped in her tracks, a
small glimmer of memory picking at her consciousness. “What girls?”

“The twenty-five job shadow girls.”
When Melanie did nothing but frown, Patricia went on. “The high
school girls. You’re going to spend the afternoon showing them
around the production lot. Showing them the ins and outs of the
business. You’re their hero. Remember?”

It came to her then. There’d been a
contest. In all the local high schools. Selling magazine
subscriptions or something. Winners got to come down and follow
Melanie around for an afternoon.

Melanie walked quickly to the
mahogany gateleg table she used for a desk. She pushed paperwork
aside until she could read the cluttered calendar below. There it
was. One to five, with a dinner in the cafeteria to follow. Right
there in black and white. She banged the table with the flat of her
hand. “Son of a bitch,” she said.

Patricia took a step back to stand
with the door against the back of her dress.

“Problem?”

“Of course there’s a problem. I
was going to—” She stopped herself, not wanting to lay out the
dirty laundry of her life in front of Patricia. Unwilling to mention
the growing distance between Brian and herself. The recriminations or
worse yet, the silences. She waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be
along in five,” she said instead.

She waited until Patricia had let
herself out, then jabbed a button on her phone. Leslie picked up.
“Call Brian for me. Tell him something’s come up. Tell him—”
Again she stopped herself.

“Tell him I’m sorry, but
something’s come up.”

She returned the receiver to the
cradle, took a deep breath and headed for the door.

Cutter Kehoe was a genetic rarity. A
third generation Biker, directly descended from that aberrant strain
of humanity for whom the term
white trash
had so astutely been
coined. These were the recycled slag of an older civilization, the
misfits, wastrels and whiners who became the dejected camp followers
of the new nation’s hardy pioneers. Always a day late and a dollar
short, arriving after the good stuff had long been spoken for, they
were without roots, so they kept moving west, toward the unclaimed
land, until moving became a way of life rather than simply a habit,
and the notion of honest toil became a last resort rather than a
calling.

Some fell into cracks along the way,
choosing life as Kentucky hillbillies, West Virginia coal miners, as
Okies and Texas dirt farmers. Their inbred descendants are still
there, still lolling about porches, eking out marginal lives on
hardscrabble land, still hostile to outsiders and prone to
unpredictable acts of violence. Kehoe’s grandfather Jimmy made it
all the way to sunny California before the blood took over,
propelling him on a suicide ride atop the new Indian Superchief he’d
bought with his separation bonus. Armed and drunk, he was still
looking back under his G.M. Ford arm at the Highway Patrol car when
the motorcycle hit the threecable guardrail at just over a hundred.
His pregnant common-law wife, Patricia Bostitch, identified the
initials inside his engineer boots.

Kehoe was the only man outside the
Special Containment Wing who lived alone in a two-man cell. They
couldn’t prove he’d killed the skinhead, so they couldn’t
officially adjust his sentence and stick him in Extreme Punishment.
By the time the yard bulls had forced the crowd apart, the little guy
with the red SS bars tattooed on the back of each hand had spilled
his purple contents out onto the concrete, his pinched face
quizzical, as if amazed at how his organs had slid through his slick
fingers, rolling out onto the rough stone, where they gleamed and
quivered like sea life. Reviews of the yard videotapes were
inconclusive, so Kehoe got ninety days in his own little cell in A
Building, as far away from his Biker buddies as the heat could put
him. A Building was where they kept the droolers and the chesters,
the habitual baby rapers and those fuckers who were so out of it you
couldn’t even let them loose in a maximum security prison. The
thinking was that a few months with the gomers and goners might give
Kehoe a little humility. After a week, even the wet brains stayed on
the far side of the yard. After two weeks, Kehoe had the yard to
himself.

Kehoe was the first man Driver
liberated. He came out of his cell with a swagger usually reserved
for Saturday night bar fights, head swinging, silent, moving on the
balls of his feet, checking both directions of the empty walkway.

“Kehoe,” the voice rang from the
overhead speaker. His eyes found the speaker and the little black
camera. “Yeah . . . who’s runnin’ his mouth there?” he asked.

“Driver.”

Kehoe scowled and thought it over.
“That really you, Captainman?”

“Sure as Kurtz is watching cartoons
on the inside of his skull.”

Kehoe broke into a grin. “They
surely ain’t gonna like you taking over the intercom, Captainman.
Gonna get you down in the SCW for sure.”

“No time soon,” came the reply.

“Where you at, Captainman?”

“The control pod.”

Kehoe stopped moving . . . looked at
the camera again. “You shittin’ me.”

“Why don’t you come on up and
join me?” Driver said. Before Kehoe could respond, the security
gate at the far end of the concourse began to slide aside. Kehoe took
a step back. The voice sounded again.

“No death penalty in Arizona,
Cutter. What are they gonna do? Give you another life sentence?”

Kehoe grinned again and pointed at
the camera. He moved with a loose-jointed quality that belied his
long, ropy arms and enormous hands. “You got a point there, Doc.
Other than ninety at a time in the SCW . . . really ain’t much the
blues can do to a pair of no-parole lifers like us, now is there?”

“Not a damn thing,” rang from the
ceiling.

“What you got in mind, Captainman?”

“I got hell to pay in mind, Cutter.
Hell on wheels.”

The notion seemed to satisfy Kehoe.
He hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets and started down the
walkway toward the elevator, knocking on windows as he ambled down
the cellblock. Driver flipped a half a dozen switches, then sat back
in the chair. Watching Kehoe walk brought it all back to him. That
first week in Walla Walla. How he could tell there was somebody else
in the block other than him. How the trustees would make chitchat
when they brought him meals, but would pass nary a word with whoever
else was down there at the end of the row.