Dennis Yates - Minus Tide

He’d wanted to talk to her but was afraid he’d only frighten her more. Where is your little girl, he remembered thinking. And then everything that happened next was a blur, Duane’s tires billowing smoke after making a sudden U-turn in the middle of the highway and speeding back toward Sarah who tripped and fell as she tried to get away. Duane wasn’t drunk tonight but wired on something stronger and he’d jumped out of his car and run after the woman whose only place to go was an empty phone booth. When she slammed the door shut in his face he’d started to punch webs into the glass while she tried to find change in her purse with shaking hands.

“You goddamn bitch!” His eyes were dark and pitted and drew the night like iron filaments being pulled toward a magnet. And then Duane was no longer thinking about his current emotional pain, but trying to wrap his mind around why his testicles suddenly felt as if they’d just been crudely wired to an electrical outlet.

After he collapsed to the ground screaming, he’d tried his best to roll over and get a look at his attacker. Mikhail saw it coming and applied the stun gun to the back of Duane’s neck, not caring if he’d gone too far. Duane had writhed some more and pissed himself before his limbs went limp and he lay quietly on the ground with cigarette butts clinging to his face. Mikhail had watched him breathe while he decided what to do next. One idea had been burning a hole through him in the past few days.

When he turned his head toward the phone booth, Sarah was standing frozen behind the cracked glass, her face washed in tears. He looked into her eyes and didn’t see what he’d expected. The animal who had beat her was now lying helpless in front of her, and clutched in Mikhail’s hand glittered the knife his mother had once given him as a young man.

“Don’t you want me to kill him?”

“Go away!” she’d screamed.

She had no reason to trust Mikhail. She didn’t even know him, had only seen him riding around with the sheriff and glimpsed him once when he’d driven by the house. When she’d asked Duane who the man was, he’d just stared ahead and pretended he hadn’t heard her.

Yet he learned that she’d left her child with her sister. That she planned to start a new life in Southern California and would send for her daughter as soon as she could. It wasn’t a very good plan but it was all she had. She feared Duane would kill her if he saw her again. She told him all that she knew about the smuggling operation and who was involved, but she hadn’t figured out how Mikhail fit in, had no idea how much higher up the food chain he was than the sheriff or her husband. She brought up the subject a couple of times and each time he warned her it was a bad idea.

He’d insisted on driving her as far as she wanted, to be sure that Duane didn’t try to follow. Sarah cried off and on until they reached the redwoods. In a small town strip mall she bought new clothes and some hair coloring. When they checked into motels he slept in a chair next to door where he could be ready for trouble. One night they’d stayed up later than usual talking, and before he’d turned off the lights she’d asked him if he would hold her…

On nights that she couldn’t distract herself by reading, Ann would spend hours listening to the street sounds coming from outside. James thought it was strange when she’d told him about it-of how she’d imagine plotlines based each passersby, see them come to life like films projected in her mind. Sometimes she heard people singing and that always made her think of home, of being down near the docks on a clear dawn where the older fishermen still knew songs from their grandfathers. And then there were nights she wished she could erase from memory-popping gunfire, screaming derelicts and the footfalls of demons scratching the sidewalk as they passed below her apartment window.

Two nights before James had come home bleeding and they’d returned to Traitor, Ann had left work early with a migraine. She’d turned out almost all of the lights to see if she could coax it into backing off. Her neighbors across the hall were having a party and so far their noise hadn’t bothered her. It was the street outside that caused tension the most, but somehow she’d managed to fall asleep despite the random shrieks of police cars and ambulances, people carrying on conversations that she couldn’t hear clearly enough to understand, yet loud enough that her mind would conjure its own interpretations. In the middle of the night she’d awakened to the sound of someone at the door. She’d reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, fully expecting James to moan at her and roll over, except that his side of the bed was empty.

When James didn’t open the door right away, she worried that maybe he’d left his key again in his bellman’s uniform. The hotel was a twenty minute walk away and he probably was in no mood to wade back through the army of crazies that roamed the streets at this hour. Blurry from ineffective migraine pills, Ann got out of bed and half-sleep walked to the door and automatically reached for the chain to unlatch it before her eyes were drawn down toward the doorknob turning back and forth, the tumblers of the old brass mechanism inside grinding like knives being sharpened.

It took her a moment to find her breath again, to direct it through her trembling mouth. She’d asked who it was but got no answer, and when she’d squinted through the peephole, there was a man she didn’t know standing in the yellowed hallway. She didn’t think she’d seen him before, but she was never sure. She did know it wasn’t James because the man had a much more imposing frame, with massive shoulders that stretched to both ends of the fisheye. The doorknob stopped.

“I hear you.”

Ann had held her breath. He’d looked directly at her and she’d seen a cool malevolence she’d never encountered before. Later she would remember the misshapen contours of his face, as if it were a melted mass of cooled steel. When she didn’t say anything, he’d put his ear up against the door and puffed on a cigarette.

“I know you’re there.”

She’d edged back from the door and squeezed the fire in her temples with both palms, willing herself not to cry, feeling the sting start at the corners of her eyes. Cigarette smoke curled up from under the door and invaded her room. Who was he? What did he want?

Her mind flashed on a shoebox were she’d hidden the.38. She hadn’t told James that she’d brought it-he would have thought she was nuts. How would you know who you’re really shooting at-he’d asked her once when she’d taken him outside to target practice at her grandfather’s house-when you don’t remember faces like the rest of us? He was still trying to understand how her system worked, and at the time she wasn’t even sure either until she’d met the specialist in Portland. Later she’d tried to explain her condition to him, of how she’d trained her mind to pick out details most people would miss and how her memory organized them.

The doorknob began to move more frantically. She’d heard a deep grunt, and then the door shuddered as the man threw his weight into it until the wood made cracking sounds.

She was about to get the.38 before the outside hall was suddenly filled with music and drunken laughter. The neighbor’s party was breaking up. She’d looked through the door again and saw that the man was gone. When James got back, she’d told him about what had happened and watched the blood drain from his face. He’d paced the apartment, asking her dozens of questions that she was unable to answer.

When she asked him if he knew who had been at the door he’d switched gears, had told her the guy was probably a drunk from across the hall who thought it would be fun to mess around, that it was only her imagination must have made it seem more than that. She was in no shape to argue. She’d gone back to bed and cried while James sat by the window drinking from a bottle of stolen hotel wine until dawn.