Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

In a way, that was exactly what Mary was. She had been Michael Parish’s first friend in this country. She had met him before he was Michael Parish, when he was still only Eric Watkins, and she had been the one who had known things. She had been sixteen, having for the first time gotten too far from North Carolina to be found and dragged back home. She spent time with a changing group of acquaintances, all of them young and from someplace else. Most of them slept in abandoned buildings south of Hollywood, and spent their days trying to get enough money for food and drink. When they did, they sometimes shared, and when they didn’t, they sometimes traded.

Mary O’Connor fit into that world easily. She had already learned that accepting the affection of boys came easily to her. It had always seemed to be the generous thing to do. And now when she did it, they shared their food, drinks, and even their money with her. It wasn’t ever a transaction; it was just that human beings were herd animals, and they accommodated each other’s needs to get along. Often, after she and one of the boys had formed a temporary alliance, she found that the affection she had been feigning had actually come to be.

For the year before she had met Eric Watkins, she had been living most of the time by shoplifting with two other girls, Darlene and Wendy. They would find a fresh shopping bag from a good store or two, then go into another store. Mary would step into the dressing room with one item to try on. On her way in, she would search the nearest stalls to find clothes that somebody had tried on unsuccessfully and left there. She would use a pair of wire cutters to remove the electronic tags from some of them and slip them into her bag. When she came out, she would very visibly return to the rack the single item she had tried on, and then leave. Darlene would be doing the same, while Wendy kept the clerk busy with requests and complaints.

Mary and her two friends would then station themselves beside an expensive, sporty car they found parked at a different shopping mall, usually near a music store. Mary would accost girls who passed and tell them wonderful stories. Sometimes she had driven a hundred miles from home against her parents’ orders, spent all her money on clothes, and discovered she was out of gas. Another time, she said she had been at a movie with a boyfriend, and he had gotten angry and left her there. She had no money, so she had charged some clothes at the mall, and now she was trying to convert them to cash to get home.

Some of the young girls she chose to hear her pitch were eager to help her because she seemed to be like them, and others were simply eager to take advantage of her misfortune. Even when they suspected she was lying they bought the clothes: the goods were the most desired and sought-after styles and brands, certified by the fact that they were the ones that girls before Mary had selected from all others in the store and wanted badly enough to try on. And they really were bargains. They had real price tags from fine stores to prove it.

One night she was with several acquaintances who had been sleeping in the back of an abandoned camper one of the boys had found parked on a side street a few days before. When she saw them on the street, they were on their way to buy dinner, so she went along. Then Eric Watkins turned up. She did not see him arrive. He just materialized in her peripheral vision on the street among the others, and they began to talk. He seemed to be no more than two or three years older than the oldest boy, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven, but he had a kind of self-assurance that made him a hundred years older than anyone.

After that evening, Eric Watkins showed up on the street twice more. Nobody in the group expressed much curiosity about what he was doing there, but when one of the boys asked where he was from, he said he had come from Australia, and had “gone walkabout.” Mary had pondered the phrase for a few days, partly because she liked the sound of it and partly because it meant that he was probably going to move on soon, and she was not sure how she felt about it. But the next time someone asked, he answered that he was from Canada and had registered at UCLA. The third time Eric Watkins simply came and took her.

He had always come on foot before, but this time he pulled up in a car, as she had known he would sometime. She was walking on Sunset with her friends Wendy and Darlene, and when he pulled up and stopped the car, all three of them stopped walking and looked for a moment. Then the other two had turned and walked on, while she had stepped to the curb and gotten into the car.

She had sat in the front seat beside him. Although she’d had no idea where he was going, or what he intended to do with her when he got there, she had sensed that all uncertainty was over. She had known from that moment not that she would be okay, because nobody could know that, but that she would be possessed, told what to do. The car door had slammed shut, and she had been home.

She and Eric Watkins had traveled for a time. Sometimes he would stop to work just long enough to buy them some new clothes and the next few tanks of gas, and then they would move on. Sometimes they would both get jobs and stay for several months. She would clean hotel rooms in the morning while he sold cars. He was very good at selling things, she supposed because he had a slight accent that sometimes sounded British, and the snobs would buy anything they were told to buy in an accent like that. In the evening she would wait tables at a restaurant while he worked as a bouncer in a bar. It seemed to be a job he had no difficulty getting, because he was an expert at unarmed combat. She had known when she had met him in Los Angeles that he had been a soldier for some extended period, because when everyone else was slouching on the street, maybe leaning on things as they talked, he would often slip into a stance with his hands clasped behind him and his feet exactly as far apart as his shoulders. You couldn’t grow up in the part of North Carolina where she had, surrounded by military bases, and not recognize parade rest.

She had been the one to pick up Emily. Mary had been in a laundromat in Phoenix, washing her clothes and Michael’s-he had just become Michael-so she could pack them clean before they went on the road again. She had noticed Emily, because Emily was not happy. They were about the same age, and Mary could see that Emily was washing some clothes that were hers, and some that belonged to a man. The place was hot as only a laundromat in Arizona-with eight commercial dryers going on high heat and surrounded by a mile of blacktop on every side-could be.

The sweat was making Emily’s curly, dark hair hang in ringlets. Mary said, “Hot in here.”

Emily turned her head quickly, startled. “What?”

Mary guessed that Emily had been so completely locked in her reverie of dissatisfaction that she was not actually sure that Mary had spoken. She looked relieved when Mary answered, “I said it was hot in here,” then giggled. “Did you ever notice that when you have to repeat something like that, you feel really dumb? Both of you listen to it very carefully while you’re saying it again, and when it’s over, it wasn’t actually telling anybody anything they didn’t know.”

Emily’s expression turned into something better than relief, a kind of fellow feeling, as Mary had hoped it would. Mary instinctively knew it was time to wait, so she picked up a magazine that somebody had left on the blue molded-plastic seat next to her. It was an issue of People. The cover had been torn off, but she could still tell. It was so old that the story the pages naturally opened to was about a hot new TV star-a pretty blond girl like all of them were-who had by now been around forever. Mary had never picked up the habit of reading for pleasure, but she did not mind looking at photographs, so she began to leaf through the magazine from back to front, letting her eyes trace the contours of the beautiful faces. After a few minutes she could sense that Emily was becoming increasingly agitated. As Mary serenely stared at the pictures, Emily’s movements became more quick and fluttery. Finally, Emily blurted out, “I’m Emily. What’s your name?”