Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“Mary. Do you live around here?”

Emily nodded. “If you want to call it living.” She pushed the wheeled basket that she had been loading from the washing machines over to a dryer and began pulling out big male shirts and pushing them in. “My boyfriend was coming out here to the university. I decided I’d come along, get a job, maybe pick up some credits in night classes.” She shut the door and moved to another dryer and began loading it. “How about you?”

“No. We’re just here for a day or two. Is it nice?”

Emily sat down on one of the plastic chairs near her. “I don’t know. It might be okay in the winter, because it couldn’t be this hot all year round.” She was watching Mary’s face, as though waiting for confirmation of the theory.

“I suppose not,” said Mary. “Where were you from before?”

“West Virginia,” said Emily. “As if you can’t tell from my accent.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard one from there before,” Mary said truthfully. “I think it’s nice.” Her mother had not permitted her to know people from the other side of the small North Carolina town they had lived in, let alone anybody from West Virginia, and she could not remember meeting any West Virginians since then. She supposed there just weren’t many.

“You said you were only here for a day or two. Are you and your husband on vacation?”

Mary smiled. “He’s not my husband. And we’re just here because we-he, really-is closing a deal. Then we’re going to California. We’re gypsies, I guess.”

“God, I envy you,” said Emily. Then her eyes looked surprised, and Mary knew that it had just slipped out. She had not intended to say it aloud.

“Why?” asked Mary. “Aren’t things working out here for you?”

Emily’s eyes were suddenly brimming, but the tears weren’t from sadness. They were tears of frustration and anger, the tears of a stubbed toe. “We’ve been here for three months-since June twenty-seventh-and it’s been exactly this hot. From the minute my parents found out we had left together, they’ve hung up on me. The only time I’ve heard my mother’s voice, she called me a whore, and my father won’t even do that. Danny, my boyfriend, is this big, dumb kid. He thinks that since the coach said he’s going to start on the freshman squad at tackle, he’s set for life, so he won’t even crack a book. He sits in front of the TV, because he’d rather see it than me. I can’t do night school this semester because the only job I could get was at night. If I’m not at work I’m here, or at the grocery store, or in that hot little apartment cooking.” She looked at the floor as though she were talking to herself. “I’ve got to do something, find something.”

Mary said, “I’m sorry Phoenix didn’t work out for you, but there are lots and lots of places.” She tried a bold experiment. “If you could get a ride to California, would you go?”

Emily stared at her for a moment, her mouth half open. “With you?”

Mary nodded. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning, and it takes about seven hours of driving to reach L.A.”

“What about your boyfriend? Will it be okay with him?”

Mary nodded. “You’ll like him a lot.” She looked at Emily judiciously. “I can’t promise anything, but he’s about to start a business, and he’s looking for people to work there.”

“I ought to go,” said Emily. “I really feel like it.”

Mary wrote down the name of the hotel, the street, and the room number on the margin of an advertisement in the People magazine, then tore it off and handed it to her. “Come tomorrow morning.”

“What time?” Emily asked anxiously.

“I wouldn’t come much after seven. Michael likes to get on the road early. And he’s not my boyfriend. Please don’t say that he is in front of him. He wouldn’t like that.”

“I really feel like it,” said Emily. “I’d love to walk out of here and never see Danny again. He thinks I don’t have any choice but to stay with him, because my parents have dumped me and I’m not in school or anything, so he treats me worse and worse. I’m beginning to hate him.”

“If you don’t want to go back there, you can come right now,” said Mary. “You can spend the night with us.”

Emily studied her, a bit uneasy. “Is this something weird?”

Mary shook her head. “It’s pretty straightforward. He’s been buying up land, and he’s going to build something like a dude ranch, a self-defense school for rich people. He knows about that.”

“I don’t mean the business,” Emily said. “I mean you and him. And now me.”

Mary said, “Not to me. I’m not interested in you that way. He might be, but since he hasn’t seen you, I can’t really predict. I just thought you looked like you could use a friend, but that you didn’t look as though it was all your fault. Sometimes you meet people who are all alone, but they also look like they’re mean, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise to anybody. You don’t. But if you’re worried about it, there’s no pressure. Ours isn’t the last car out of here.”

Emily opened a dryer and began to fold her clothes. She did it with the hasty efficiency of a person who was not devoting any thought to it. Mary returned to her magazine, holding her hand over the captions and trying to guess what they would be. Then Mary’s dryer stopped. She pushed one of the rolling baskets over to the machine and emptied it. When she returned, she saw that Emily was finished. She had packed up her laundry, and left Danny’s neatly folded on a counter. She helped Mary fold hers, and then followed her to the car.

On the way to the hotel, Mary tried to prepare Emily for Michael Parish. She did not tell her that he had still been Eric Watkins when she’d met him, but she did tell her that he had been born in South Africa and had started out as a soldier there. She told her that he had been in lots of armies of African countries after that. She went no further, because the details were all vague and probably jumbled in her mind. He had mentioned Uganda and Zimbabwe. He talked most often about the Congo, but it seemed to be both a place and a river, both of sizes that kept changing, and part of the river was not even in the country. There was no way of sorting out in which places he had been part of the government and in which an invader, or part of a group chasing invaders into another country.

She knew that the rank got higher each time, and it had not surprised her, because he was ambitious. Sometimes he had been a captain, sometimes a colonel. Unless colonel wasn’t a real rank, but was an honor the way it was in the South, where Colonel was just a name the chamber of commerce or even a club could give a man. He had once said he’d left South Africa because of the blacks. She had at first assumed it was because the change in the government had left the blacks in charge. But they were also in charge in Uganda, Zimbabwe, the Congo, and everywhere else he’d chosen to go, weren’t they? She had not pursued the issue very far.

She had helped him invent the name Michael Parish. He had not said why he didn’t want to be Eric Watkins anymore, but she knew it was for reasons that had to do with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and with the banks and licensing authorities in California. She was not sure whether the fault that had been found with Eric Watkins was something that had happened since he had come to the United States, or something he feared might have stuck to him from his early days in Africa.

Tonight, as Mary suffered through the farewell party, she still had not settled those details, although a good ten years had passed. They did not seem any more important now than they had then. She looked across the main lodge at Emily, who was surrounded by Helen Corrigan and her two classmates. Mary had been a good judge of character. She had also known from the beginning that Michael would find her attractive: Emily was so perfectly the opposite of Mary that he could hardly fail to think of her that way as soon as he saw them together. She had never doubted for a moment that Emily would acquiesce as soon as Michael signified a desire. Emily had as much as asked in the laundromat whether that would be part of it, and Mary had as much as confirmed it. She certainly had not denied it. She and Emily had at least shared some intelligence that included an understanding of what men were like.