Jodi Compton - Hailey's War

So in Oxnard I got off the road and made a phone call. Shay didn’t sound happy to hear my voice, but I had paid him his rent in full, so he didn’t have a lot of grounds on which to act aggrieved.

“Has anyone been around looking for me?” I asked him, trying to sound casual.

In Gualala, I’d unwisely identified myself to Quentin as a “one-hundred-thirty-five-pound bike messenger.” There weren’t that many messenger services in the city. If Skouras’s guys had wanted to, they could have narrowed it down.

“Looking for you? No,” Shay said. “You’re not in trouble with the cops, are you? Jesus, that’s all I need.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not that. But I’m thinking, can you maybe grab a few things, and I can meet you somewhere else? Like your place?”

It was hard to imagine Skouras’s men staking out my place long-term, but as Serena would have told me, it’s paranoia that keeps you alive.

“You can’t just go and get what you want?” he demanded, irritated.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I can’t.”

“Fine,” he sighed, sounding exasperated. “Tell me what you need and I’ll get it.”

“Thanks. It’s not much, I promise,” I said.

Shay had given me directions to an address at the edge of the Haight. Parking was easier than it should have been, but then, it was two days until Christmas. Some of Shay’s neighbors were likely out of town, traveling to visit relatives. The many darkened windows around me testified to that.

But at Shay’s place, a tall, narrow Victorian, light glowed behind the closed blind of the front window. I climbed the front steps and rang his doorbell.

Shay answered his door dressed in jeans and a sweater.

“What’s up?” I said. “Thanks for doing this.”

“Hailey,” he said, inclining his head for me to step inside. “Come on back.”

I followed him across the smooth polished wood of a short entry hall. When we entered the living room, I saw figures on the periphery of my vision and turned sharply to recognize them: Babyface and Quentin.

I went for the SIG, but not fast enough. A third guy stepped out of the shadows and grabbed me, twisting me around into a rigid and painful hold.

Quentin swaggered forward. His dark-blond hair was freshly cut and his face was bright with enjoyment.

“Well, look who it is,” he said. “It’s Staff Sergeant Henry Cain’s daughter, Hailey.” He smiled widely. He’d been imagining saying that for some time now.

I looked at Shay. “You bastard.”

I would have liked to think that Shay hadn’t done this willingly, that they’d braced him and threatened everything he held dear, but he didn’t have the strained look of someone whose home and life had been invaded. Instead, his eyes were hooded, the guarded expression of guilt.

“Was it money?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If you give these guys what they want, you’ll come out of this just fine.”

“No, I won’t, Shay,” I told him.

Quentin had called it, long ago in Gualala: You’ll be dead by Christmas . That was two days from now, and all signs suggested I was not going to live that long. In the words of the first Bridge suicide: This is as far as I go .

Babyface said to Quentin, “Go get the car.”

It was morning on the Gulf Coast, maybe around ten or so. My little bar and grill was out at the end of the pier. The waters of the Gulf looked a lot like the Pacific. A gentle breeze, which should have been tangy and salt-scented, jangled the clear glass bulbs strung along the roofline, the ones I’d light up tonight when we were open for business.

Right now I was at work at a big tin sink like you saw in fish markets, the kind with a white cutting board on the side. The surface of the cutting board had the shallow marks of many knives in it. I was cutting into a catfish with the boning knife I’d once held on Serena. Occasionally I washed away the catfish’s blood with an extendable hose that could be pulled out from the faucet, but there was always more. The smell of blood obscured that of the ocean.

I scraped viscera over to one side, kept slicing. My hand hurt a little bit, the little finger that Babyface had broken. I’d thought it was healed, but now it stung.

“Hey, sugar.”

CJ’s long arms slipped around me, and he put his face down into my hair, the way he used to when we’d gone dancing together.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“What are you making?”

“Catfish. You wanted me to learn to fix something Cajun for you. This was just caught.” I nudged my chin at the choppy ocean. “Out there.”

CJ said, “Catfish is a river fish.”

My hand, holding the knife, shook a little. “Then it’s swordfish,” I said, and suddenly it was.

“Are you sure they catch swordfish around here?”

“Why are you making this so hard?” I demanded, slapping the knife down. “It has to be something, CJ. I need something to explain the smell of the blood.”

Scent was the hardest sense to re-create in memory or imagination. I wished I could create the smell of salt water for this, but I couldn’t. I smelled only blood. This was a fragile fantasy, too ready to fall apart.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” he said.

“I am, too,” I said.

I turned around to look at him, the wind playing with his reddish-blond hair and the material of his loose white shirt. He was wearing undoubtedly expensive sunglasses with lenses that looked smoked, like something from the Victorian era. He seemed at ease, unhurt, and I was happy, too, because whatever happened to me, CJ was safe in his vita felix .

I put my arms up around his neck and drew him to me. “I’ve been so stupid,” I said, murmuring against his neck.

“How?” he asked.

There was a chaplain at school who used to favor that passage from Ecclesiastes, with the refrain All is vanity . And it was, my whole life. Not just the past few months, running around pretending I could be the protector of innocent girls and newborn babies, imagining I could thwart Skouras and his whole machine, but even before that, my dream of being a second lieutenant in the Army, of commanding my own troops and making the world a little safer. All of it, vanity.

How many of the stupid, glory-seeking things I’d done had been to burn up the frustrated energy of not being able to have him? What a bloody fucking waste. So what if some of his genes were some of my genes? Who the hell cared? Now I was going to die, far away, having protected him but never fully loved him.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Shhh,” CJ said. “Baby, it’s all right. I’m going to help you.” He cupped his hands under my jawline and kissed me, then his hands went to my shoulders, gently pushing me down.

I went with what he wanted, kneeling and pushing up his shirt and rubbing my cheek against the skin of his flat stomach, then unhooking his belt and pulling his faded Levi’s down. My hands left streaks of blood on his bare thighs but it didn’t bother him, or me. I took him deep in my mouth.

“That’s it,” he said, leaning back against the railing of the pier. “Good girl.”

CJ’s hands, the ones that cupped my nascent breasts at thirteen, now spread through my hair and against the bones of my skull. “Everything’s all right, baby,” he said.

The lightbulbs swayed in the wind, and I closed my eyes and concentrated on his rhythm.

“Hailey,” he said, “Hailey, I love you,” and his hands tightened convulsively in my hair as he finished.

And suddenly I was on the floor, my face against dirty, industrial-gray carpet , coughing and choking. The fantasy broke up because when Quentin finished making me give him head at gunpoint, he pulled me off him and shoved me unceremoniously facedown on the floor. I hadn’t been able to break my fall because my hands were cuffed behind my back.