Rough Draft (6 page)

“I don't care. If you'd rather not be the one for whatever reason, religion or something, I don't mind. But you have to decide right now. I've got other business to take care of.”

The man looked at him. He was cowering. It was what animals did when they were cornered. They signaled the attacker that they offered no resistance. They were not a threat. It sometimes worked in the wild. Sometimes they escaped by cowering. But in a hotel room in Milwaukee it was useless.

Hal stared at the man and said nothing. Randy sighed.

“All right,” Randy said.

“Which is it?”

“I guess I'd rather do it myself. If it's all the same to you.”

Hal stepped over to the bedside table and picked up the pistol.

“It's better in the shower,” Hal said. “Less noise, less mess.”

The man followed Hal into the bedroom. He hesitated a moment outside the shower, grimacing at Hal like he'd changed his mind. Hal just looked back at him, hard, unblinking. Then Randy began to strip off his clothes and when he was down to his underpants, he said, “Can I leave these on?”

“Sure,” Hal said. “Whatever you want.”

Randy got in the shower in his underpants and turned on the water. The hot water and the cold, getting it the right temperature. Then he stepped under the full force of the spray. Hal handed him the pistol. The man looked at the gun in his hand and he looked at Hal.

“I could shoot you,” he said.

Hal nodded.

“You could try.”

The man put his face into the stream of water, then he looked back at Hal. He was holding the pistol by his side.

“I fucked up,” the man said. “I thought I was so smart.”

“Sorry to inconvenience you,” Hal said.

Randy looked at him. Puzzled. He swallowed.

He raised the pistol and pressed the muzzle against his temple.

He cocked the hammer back. Then he took the barrel away from his temple and slid it into his mouth.

His hand quivered, but he could not bring himself to fire.

He withdrew the barrel and looked at Hal.

“I'm not sure how to do it, which way is best.”

“A big gun like that,” Hal said. “One way is probably as good as the other.”

“All right,” Randy said. “All right then.”

He jammed the barrel against his temple. He closed his eyes hard and fired.

Hal stepped back to avoid the spray. He watched Randy Gianetti's body slump to the floor of the shower.

Hal stayed there a few seconds more, watching the blood swirl down the silver drain. Randy Gianetti was twitching. But he didn't twitch for long.

* * *

The taxi driver took Hal to an electronics store. Best one in Milwaukee. It looked like every other electronics store to Hal.

“Wait for me,” Hal told the taxi driver. “I've got a plane to catch.”

He went in the store and found a young clerk. He was a boy with long hair and a skinny face. He had acne and was chewing gum.

“Help you?” the boy said.

“I want the Internet,” Hal said.

“Do what?”

“I want the Internet. I want to carry it with me.”

“Oh,” the boy said. “You mean wireless. A cell phone built into a palm-top computer. Is that what you're talking about?”

“All right,” Hal said. “Let me see it.”

“I've got the Nokia 9000IL Communicator. It's got a 386 processor, hands-free speakerphone, mobile Internet access, fourteen ounces, three-hour active battery life. That's my top-of-the-line model.”

“Show it to me.”

“It ain't cheap,” the boy said. “Close to a thousand bucks.”

“Show it to me now.”

The boy took a longer look at Hal. Hearing the thing Hal could bring to his voice, the thing that made the boy's bristles stiffen.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said. “Right away.”

“And then you're going to explain it to me. How it works. How I find this place,
Deathwatch.com.
”

“What's that, a Web page?”

“I guess so.”

“Sure, no problem,” the kid said. “I'll just see if we got the Nokia in stock. They're pretty cool.”

“Good,” Hal said. “I'll wait here.”

The boy trotted away.

Hal stood at the counter and looked up at the televisions mounted high on the wall. Ten television sets and all of them
were showing Hal. Hal Bonner, the main feature, a guy standing at a counter looking up at himself, like he was waiting for the man on the screen to do something. To smile or make a joke. But Hal did nothing. He simply waited and watched himself wait in each of the ten screens mounted high on the wall.

Hannah Keller had just passed the hundred-page mark in
Fifth Story.
Book number five, the most recent outing for Erin Barkley. Thirty-one years old, Erin worked as a PIO for Miami PD. But that's where the similarity between Erin and Hannah ended.

For one thing Erin had a rich and varied sex life. A new man every book. Sometimes two or three in the same book, as footloose and lecherous as any guy. While Hannah, on the other hand, had nearly given up on men. In the last year there'd been a cop, a lawyer, an accountant, and two realtors. All washouts. Lately, she'd begun to wonder if maybe she needed an aura-adjustment. Sending out the wrong signals, Angry Broad Alert. Don't Even Think About Flirting With Me, Asshole. Even after all these years she was still man-shy from her quick and disastrous marriage to Pieter Thomasson. Randall's father had turned out to be a philanderer of the lowest kind, and that betrayal left her scarred, brooding, overcautious. And now the bastard had reappeared, as if he were determined to destroy what marginal serenity she'd managed to achieve.

After six years as a single mother, six years living mostly inside her head, whatever adult social skills Hannah Keller once had were long gone. Ten hours a day she wrote the books, then spent what little free time she had with Randall. Most weekends she took one day off, coaxing her son out to a movie or the mall. Occasionally she managed to get him to go along on a bicycle ride into the Grove or out the long asphalt strip into Shark Valley, the edge of the Everglades. But
it was such a chore to pry the boy away from his computer and out of the house that she'd all but given up trying to reignite Randall's youthful enthusiasm for the outdoors.

If it weren't for Erin Barkley, Hannah would've completely lost touch with adult pleasures. Erin was a childless single woman. She drove her car fast and stayed out till dawn, dancing, bar hopping, jumping in and out of bed with virtual strangers. She had a smart-ass mouth and a renegade view of justice and was a gifted marksman. Erin wasn't the least bit reluctant to pull the trigger when she needed to, and was willing to overstep the boundaries of the law if that's what it took to nail the thugs and psychos who managed to elude traditional law enforcement.

It was fantasy stuff, of course, Hannah indulging her vigilante yearnings, working off years of frustration from the job, and all that stored-up anger over her parents' unsolved murders. Using the novels to get some small measure of emotional vengeance.

In
Fifth Story
Erin Barkley was on the trail of the person who had twice attempted to kill twelve-year-old Jamie Newsome, a child model. A week after Jamie narrowly missed being struck by a speeding car, two high-powered rifle shots struck the wall of the fifth-floor balcony of her parents' Grove Isle apartment only inches from where Jamie sat doing her homework.

Of course, Hannah knew that Jamie was a stand-in for Randall. A kid in harm's way who teetered uneasily between childhood and maturity. All Hannah's anxiety about Randall's safety and his fragile mental health was submerged in this fictional character. What Erin Barkley was trying to accomplish was something Hannah could only dream of doing, pry aside the defiantly bland adolescent mask to see what shadowy and desperate emotions might be percolating beneath it.

So far, in those first hundred pages, Erin Barkley's investigation had led her to a small-time hood named Owen Band who ran a seedy strip joint on Miami Beach, a half block
from the headquarters of the modeling agency that represented Jamie Newsome.

Hannah had no idea what Band had to do with the attempts on this young girl's life. In fact, she usually had no clear notion of what was coming next in any of her books. She didn't use outlines. She'd decided that she'd rather make a dozen wrong turns along the way than plan everything out so carefully that each day's writing was ruled by the predrawn map. She was a reader first and a writer second. Why in the world would she bother writing the book if she already knew how it was going to turn out?

Today, just before Hannah broke for lunch, Erin Barkley was questioning Owen Band in the office of his strip club when suddenly Owen lurched to one side and blood spouted from the side of his head. It was an amazing and totally unexpected moment. Hannah didn't know who shot him or why. Perhaps the shot was actually intended for Erin, or was meant to implicate her. Or maybe, given the nature of Miami, it was simply stray gunfire from some botched holdup going on nearby.

As Owen Band spilled his lifeblood onto the desk before him, Hannah got up, went to the kitchen, made a turkey sandwich, and took it out to the front porch table to eat.

The house she'd bought after her parents were killed was more than eighty years old, ancient by Miami standards, with a glinting tin roof and a screened-in porch that ran the full length of the front. Edging the property was a tall, solid wood fence overgrown with purple and orange bougainvillea, totally blocking from view the surrounding neighborhood. The old house had oak floors, a coral fireplace, a dozen ceiling fans, and its several French doors opened out onto a wide yard of neatly laid out avocado and mango trees, remnants of the grove that early in the century had spread all over that part of Dade County. Some mornings when Hannah sat out on the porch in one of the wicker rockers sipping her coffee, she could hear the faint echoes of those tenacious New England pioneers who had cleared and tamed that
harsh subtropical tangle. And whenever she returned home after any sort of journey, just the sight of that shady two acres and the solid old farmhouse soothed the clatter in her pulse.

That afternoon the sky was clear and the last of the orange jasmine was still in bloom, cloying the air around the porch. As she finished her sandwich, she drew in a deep perfumed breath, feeling a ripple of energy and quiet pleasure. There were wild parrots squawking in the avocado trees and a blue jay scolding them in reply. She watched the birds fuss at each other for a minute, maybe something she could use, a little moment of atmosphere in her story.

She had about an hour and a half before Randall got home from school. If she was lucky that was long enough for Erin to check Owen Band's pulse, then run out into the alley behind the strip club and stumble on the next complication.

Misty was parked among the mothers. Their vans and sport utility vehicles lined the street outside Pinecrest Middle School. The mothers visited with each other or talked on their cell phones while they waited for the afternoon bell to ring.

Misty was in her powder blue Corolla with the peeling Naugahyde top. She was parked beneath a gumbo limb tree a half block east of the school. Nobody paid any attention to her. If they did, they'd probably think she was a maid, a housekeeper, someone like that, waiting to pick up young Travis or Michelle or whatever the hell cute names they were using this year.

One of her derringers lay on her lap. Small, but heavy. Its mechanisms were reliable and made firm, satisfying clicks. The derringer was loaded with two .38 slugs. It was Misty's belief that if you couldn't bring down your target with two shots, you shouldn't own a gun at all.

Out her windshield she watched the mothers. They were dressed in summery outfits, creamy beiges or pastels, or else bright-colored workout clothes. These women had nothing but leisure time. They had expensive hair and subtle makeup
and they moved with slinky assurance. They were married to lawyers or accountants or bankers or stockbrokers. Misty knew their husbands, because it was guys like them who frequented the downtown Hooters where she worked, and drank draft beer and stared at Misty's breasts, always angling their heads to get a shot down her top, glimpse her nipples.

Misty didn't look like any of the mothers. First, she was very pale. Deathly white is how some people described her. She didn't mind that. It was kind of a compliment really. Set her apart. Her white skin was smooth, tight, but it simply wouldn't hold a tan. Her eyes were dark green, the shade of ripe avocados. Her hair was metallic red with a brassy orange undertone. It was her natural color, but it didn't look as natural as some of the bottle blonds waiting for their kids.

Compared to the mothers, Misty had a gawky body. Wide bony shoulders, long thin arms, pigeon-toed stance, hefty tits, and a little slump in her shoulders she couldn't seem to get rid of. She practiced sometimes in the bathroom mirror in her apartment, standing up on a chair so she could see herself. Pulling her shoulders back, lifting her head up, angling her hips this way or that, but everything she did looked phony, only made her seem more awkward.

After they brought their kids to school each morning, these yummy mummies spent the morning at their health clubs burning off their few remaining fat cells in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Jazz dancing or doing karate moves, keeping themselves lean and taut. Then they went home, ate a stick of celery for lunch, had a sip of ten-dollar water, and came early to pick up their kids after school, and put on this fashion show for all the other mothers.

After school some of their kids played soccer. Some went to karate class or tennis practice or golf lessons. These pampered kids, their perfect lives.

Misty had been destined to be one of them. That was her birthright. To be married to a fast-track lawyer or a surgeon. Living in this part of town, or the Gables, or along the bay, a big boat bobbing out back. Waiting every afternoon at two-thirty
for her cute blond kid to come rushing out of school and jump into her arms.