The Terror of Living (10 page)

    The man held out his hand. "Grady Fisher. We did a year together. After that, I didn't see you anymore. Must have got out. Doesn't look like you're doing too bad for yourself."

    Hunt looked up at him. He didn't offer his name or his hand. "You always prelude a question like that?"

    "Like what?"

    "By asking the question, 'Can I ask you a question?'"

    "I didn't want to be impolite." He closed his hand and let it drop to his side.

    Hunt stared back at him. "This boat will get me just about anywhere when the tanks are full."

    "Sorry if I intruded."

    Hunt didn't say anything. He finished coiling the rope and stuffed it into a low compartment.

    "I'm a cook," Grady said. He patted the case with his free hand, smiling as if Hunt had asked him what the bag was for. "I was wondering if you might be going fishing?"

    He had a funny way of talking, slow at times, almost stuttering, more curious and melodic than anything. Hunt thought about this. The man wouldn't leave; he was just sitting there watching Hunt. "What's in the case?" Hunt asked.

    "Oh, this," he said, as if he'd just remembered he'd been holding it. "These are my knives." Hunt gave him another look. He was ready to leave, but the idea of a man carrying knives around in broad daylight interested him. It seemed completely rational when he thought of it. He probably passed a chef every day of his life, with a collection of knives sitting shotgun right beside him. "Let me show you." Grady put the case down on the dock and unzipped the top. "I've been collecting them for years."

    The only two things Hunt could identify were a hacksaw and a large chef's knife - he guessed the blade to be about twelve inches long. "Those look very nice," Hunt said. The man smiled and gave a little giggle. He unfolded the sides until they were laid out as two halves on the dock, the knives fully exposed.

    "Go on," Grady said. "Pick one up. The weight on them is counterbalanced so it doesn't feel like anything when they make their first cut. You have to be careful sometimes. It's like cutting fish with a laser beam."

    Hunt looked up at Grady, and the whole while, Grady was just looking back at him with the same goofy half smile. The girl behind them on the far dock made a shout of discovery, but the two men didn't look away. "What's this one for?" Hunt asked, bringing a small knife out of the bag.

    Grady looked down at the knife. "Careful," he said. "Witnesses."

    Hunt gave him a look.

    "Just a little Monroe humor, that's all," Grady said. "That's a boning knife. I use it mostly for small jobs." He pointed to his own shoulder and showed Hunt where the ligaments and tendons ran.

    "They say Jacques Pepin can debone a chicken in five seconds. Do you know who he is?"

    "What does your shoulder have in common with a chicken?"

    "More than you'd expect."

    Hunt looked down at the knife in his hand.

    Grady held out his hand and Hunt passed the knife back to him. "Just finished gutting a little Asian piglet," Grady said with that same disfigured giggle. "Beautiful little thing. Keep your knives sharp and they'll cut through just about anything." He smiled, and the thin, almost colorless line of hair over his lip flattened.

    Hunt held up the hacksaw. "That thing is sort of a brute," Grady said. "Just what you think it is. I use it mostly on the bigger jobs, whole pigs, leg of lamb. Separating the large into the small." He made a little motion with his hands, imagining the cuts. "I could do it blindfolded if I had to."

    "That right?"

    "That's right."

    "I wish I could talk more, but-"

    "You have to go," Grady finished.

    "Yes."

    "It was a real pleasure," Grady said, holding out his hand for Hunt to take.

    The hand Hunt took was thicker than he'd expected, filled with muscle and a little plump. "Perhaps one day you'll get that boat."

    "Yes, perhaps." Grady stood watching Hunt as he untied the boat and pushed it a few feet into the water. The engines started and Hunt felt the back dig in. The Bayliner moved out and around, aiming for the edge of the rock jetty. When Hunt looked back, Grady was still standing there, his case of knives in his hand, just staring.

    GRADY DROVE AN OLD NISSAN WITH A SQUARE BODY and four doors, registered under an alias. He watched Hunt pull out and make the turn into open water. Then he walked back to his car and opened his bag. Under the seat he had an AR-15 with retractable stock and carbine switched for use as a long-range rifle, measuring about the same length as the hacksaw, a foot and a half with the stock closed. He placed it in the bag.

    Watching Hunt handle the knives had given him a thrill the way some animals played with their food before eating it. "Let him do the exchange, then do it," the lawyer had said on the phone. It was a shame he'd need to use something like a rifle to do something so simple.

    The padlock on the marina gate took him fifteen seconds to pick. He pushed the thing closed behind him and snapped the lock back on the gate again. He was carrying the bag, and when he found a midnight blue boat with twin Volvo engines, he threw the bag over and then stepped aboard.

    TWELVE HOURS EARLIER, EDDIE HAD PUT IT TO HUNT like this: "You run and they'll use Nora to get to you. You take Nora and they'll use me." Eddie laughed as though something was funny. There wasn't one funny thing about it, but he couldn't stop the nervous laughter. "The kid is dead. He's fucking gone. It took them about five hours after he arrived to arrange it. The only reason you're not dead is because you had the sense to get out of there. They're not too happy about the lost product, but you're not a liability to them. They figure we owe them. The way it was put to me was that they've invested in us and they want a favorable return."

    Hunt could hear the news playing in the other room. The weatherman warned of showers turning to snow later in the week. Through the doorway he could see the back of the couch and Nora sitting on it. "Jesus, Eddie. When did we start working with people like this?"

    "I'm telling you to protect yourself."

    "He was just some kid. Twenty-two years old."

    "Look, Hunt, these people like to be in control. If it had been you in there, they would have done the same thing. You're lucky. But we still owe these people some work."

    "Why don't we run now? What's stopping us?"

    "How many times have you mortgaged this house? You have anything in the bank? You started out in this business trying to put a straight life together, but now it's more like you use the money to keep the straight life afloat. If you want to run, you're going to need to stay hidden, and that takes money. Because you're not coming back."

    "You would help us, wouldn't you, Eddie?"

    "I would help you if I could. I'm just as broke as you. That car out there and my boat are about all I have to show for myself. I'm just like you."

    "But we've made money, haven't we?"

    "We've made it, but everything is in cash, the boat, the car. I've been playing it pretty close to the heart. This was supposed to be our big break, our time to really make money."

    "This is amazing," Hunt said. "It's just amazing. I get out of

    Monroe and I can't find a job, I can't even go to school. I'm just scraping by, hoping my bets at the track hold up. So I take this thing with you to make a little money and all the time-twenty years-" Hunt stopped here, his voice caught somewhere deep in his throat like a piece of meat swallowed too fast. Year after year after year, he kept adding, putting the time together in his mind, adding it all up, his life and what it amounted to. "Two decades," he said. "I'm building this life for that long and this is what it comes down to."

    "We owe these people money, Hunt. I don't know what else to tell you. There's nothing else we can do about it. We do this job and we're on our way. It's simple. We both knew how it could be when we started on this."

    "How many more times will there be?"

    "As many as it takes."

    "Doesn't it make you uneasy, what they did to the kid? Doesn't that make you want to run?"

    "What do you want me to say?"

    Hunt placed his hands on the table. He looked over at him. "They've got us good, don't they? "

    "Yes, they do," Eddie said. "And the sickest thing is, it makes them happy."

    HUNT PUSHED THE THROTTLE FORWARD ON THE BOAT until the speedometer read fifteen knots. Twenty years he'd been making this run. And he could do it now almost without a second thought. It was strange to him that over all those years he had thought of himself as independent. He had Eddie. He always had Eddie, but they were more partners than anything else. At the age of nineteen he'd been a prisoner. Just a year out of childhood, just a year beyond the watch of parents and the guidance of teachers and coaches, people who had at one point or another meant something to him. He laughed a bit at the thought, remembering how they'd all considered themselves prisoners in school. But it wasn't a thing like prison or being held captive. He had disappeared in Monroe. Stood in one place and just disappeared, like a magician doing a magic trick. One moment there, the next gone.

    It hadn't started all at once. His lawyer was the first one to disappear. Hunt could understand a thing like that, where a man doesn't come because he's not being paid anymore. That made sense. A few friends would visit. They'd hold their baby pictures up to the glass so Hunt could see. They'd write him letters from exotic places and Hunt would lie in his bed and smell the paper. He would run his fingers along the envelope and look at the postmark. He liked to know where something had been. He liked to see that it had a location and a date and that it had traveled that long distance to him.

    The last letter he taped to his wall was dated sometime in the early eighties. What could they say to him anymore: Tough break, better luck next time? There was nothing to say about the thing he'd done, nothing that would ever make it better for him. He felt this, lying there in the cell at night with the pages of the letter drifting there on the wall. He felt that loneliness of disappearing, of fading away. The letter hung there for a year before he took it down.

    A high school coach came once to see him, the man dressed not as Hunt remembered him but in a simple pair of jeans, a striped polo shirt. It made Hunt sad to see him like this. To see the expression that crossed his face. Nothing filled Hunt with more despair than seeing a look of pity streak across another's face. That had nearly done it. That had nearly killed him. Beat him better than anyone could ever have beaten him physically Pride was a mass murderer in prison, and many nights, the men alone in their cells, it took who it could.

    His mother would write letters because she could not see him. She tried several times to visit, but every time she came, she cried, and Hunt could do nothing but sit there and watch her pain. To know that he had caused it and that there was nothing he could do about it, no comfort or help he could give, was, of all the things he endured, the worst.

    " WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE, EDDIE?"

     Eddie eyed Nora. She'd just come back in from seeing Bobby Drake off.

    "What are you doing, Nora? Giving tours to strangers?"

    "He was just a boy looking for some riding lessons."

    "He could be anybody."

    "Him?"

    Eddie walked to the window and put a finger to the blinds and looked out on the front lawn. "Yes, Nora, him."

    Nora went into the kitchen and he could hear her pouring a glass of water from the faucet. When she came back into the room, he was still standing at the window. "Why are you still here, Eddie?"

    "I'm looking out for you," he said. "I'm looking out for Hunt."

    "Do we need looking after?" Nora walked over to the table and sat down. She wouldn't meet Eddie's eyes.

    Eddie didn't say anything. He was trying to decide if he should leave. If he should just get out now, if he could leave the two of them, leave them like he'd left the kid, waiting in the cell, waiting to get his head smashed in. Eddie couldn't do it. Not to Nora, at least. He couldn't leave her. All she had done to be wrapped up in this was love Hunt. Eddie couldn't punish her for something like that. There would be punishment enough.

    "You ever think what would happen if you lost your vision?" Eddie said. He hadn't meant it to sound threatening, but it had, like he was going to do it. "You know what I mean, go blind. You ever think of that?"

    "Doesn't seem like a very nice question."

    "It's not."

    "Not a question, or not nice?"

    "Not a question. Forget it, Nora. I'm just thinking out loud, that's all."

    "Well, then no. No, I'd expect it doesn't feel very good."

    "I'm saying I feel like that. I feel like I've gone blind, and I have everything I went into it with but I can't see the walls, and I reach out to touch them and I'm just feeling my way along. That's how I feel. That's where we are, just feeling the walls, and I don't like it, but it's the best thing for us, for you and me, and Hunt. The best way we know how to go on and the only way we're ever going to find our way."