T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

“And don’t pretend you don’t know where he is — you had a relationship with him. For what, two, three months now?”

“I told you,” she said, “he’s in the woods.”

“You getting smart with me? Because if you want to get smart, we can continue this down at the station.”

“No,” she said, “really. I don’t know where he is, I mean, other than that. I told you, he left here yesterday morning, and I haven’t seen him since. Or heard from him. Really.”

“And yet you took him to the hospital for medication.”

“Yes, but I didn’t—”

“That makes you an accessory right there.”

“I didn’t know —”

“You didn’t know he killed an unarmed man in cold blood?”

She shook her head.

“Or today. What about today? You know he killed another man today, right this afternoon? While you were what, knitting ?”

It was all too much. She didn’t have to listen to this — whoever said she had to listen to this? He was a liar. He was just trying to get to her because he was the criminal, not Adam. “I don’t knit,” she said. “And I have no contract with you — how many times do I have to tell you people?” Kutya squirmed. He let out a low growl and the lights flashed in the yard. She shot a furious glance round the room, the cops, the poor dog — Christabel, where was Christabel? “You know what you are?” she said.

He just sat there, his lips zipped tight, trying to burn his eyes right through her.

“You’re just an actor, that’s all. Somebody in a costume. Like you’re dressed up for Halloween. And you know something else? I’m not into trick-or-treating.”

IN THE END, THEY must have believed her — and Christabel too, Christabel who by that point was scared sober and wearing a face like something she’d picked up off the floor — because eventually they took their muddy boots and clanking belts and double-barreled shotguns and faded back into the night, but not without taking two plastic bags of what they called evidence with them and leaving a patrol car just down the street with its lights off and two cops inside to see if she was going to run out into the woods, find her way to Adam and somehow warn him off. Which she would have, if she could. Because it was all lies and if you had to pick sides here she knew which one she was on. Adam never hurt anybody. And even if he did, even if it was true, whoever it was probably had it coming.

The cops left a vacuum behind them, whoosh, all the air sucked right out of the place. One minute the house was an armed camp and the next it was deserted. They’d also left a mess. Her clothes were scattered around the bedroom, drawers pulled out, closets yawning open. The kitchen floor was all tracked up and they’d left it that way because what did they care about freemen on the land and personal property or individual rights or anything else for that matter, but she didn’t have the heart to take a mop to it before she went to bed and when she woke up from a night’s worth of poisonous dreams, she didn’t have the energy. Ditto for Christabel, who at least didn’t have to go into work, thank god, because it was Saturday.

When she got up and came into the kitchen at something like half past six, Christabel was already sitting there at the table drinking black coffee and staring out the window. She was wearing a T-shirt she’d managed to put on backwards under a cardigan that hung loose over her butt and bare thighs, last night’s makeup caking under her eyes and her hair looking as if she’d been fighting a windstorm all night long. Kutya lay curled up under the table, his dreadlocks filthy from the mud out in the yard — the mud on the floor, for that matter — and he never even lifted his head when she stepped into the room. Christabel didn’t turn to look at her. She didn’t say hi or good morning. All she said was, “Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever been through anything like that, not in my whole life. Not even that time I was in the accident.”

“Me either.”

“I was so scared.”

All she could do was nod. She went to the counter and poured herself a cup of coffee, then lightened it with a splash of milk and stirred in two heaping teaspoons of sugar, real sugar and not that artificial crap. She’d worry about calories later. Calories were the least of her problems.

“You know, you can’t say I didn’t warn you,” and here Christabel turned to look up at her out of bloodshot eyes, eyes that weren’t even that pretty, really, but just a dull fixed brown.

She just shook her head, very slowly, the injustice of it all settling on her like a coat made out of lead, like one of those things they make you wear when they take X-rays of your chest. “Yeah, you warned me, all right, but since when do I have to listen?”

“Oh, Christ! You’re not going to defend him, are you? He’s a nut case. He killed two people. He could have killed us !”

“So the cops say. You believe the cops?”

She saw now that Christabel was holding something in her left hand, a slice of color, the sharp concentrated gleam of the Cloud sucked down to earth: her cellphone. “I believe this,” she said.

And there it was, Adam’s face staring out of the phone, Adam’s face everywhere, on every site, proof run wild. He’d shot and killed two men, and here were their faces, their names and biographies, and she realized with a jolt that she knew one of them from the high school, and how strange it was to think he was dead— slain —and would never walk those corridors again or stand before a class of kids who might have loved him or hated him but had the same festering hormones and the same issues the class before them had had and the class after them would have and all the classes before and since. He was dead. Art Tolleson. He was dead and Adam had killed him.

She went into the living room and flicked on the TV and it was on every channel. The sheriff — and it was his face on the screen now, the poser with the grappling-hook eyes who’d sat right there in her own house and harassed her for the better part of an hour — was giving a press conference and telling everybody to stay calm even though he was cordoning off the entire forest range, from the middle fork of the Ten Mile in the north to Big River in the south, coast to mountains, and that no one was to be allowed in for any purpose whatever until the threat had been neutralized. And what about Route 20? Route 20 was a major artery, as was the Coast Highway, and they would remain open to traffic, but he cautioned people not to linger or get out of their cars — the suspect was armed and dangerous and if anyone encountered him or knew anything of his whereabouts they should call 911. Then up came the picture of Adam, full-screen — a picture, she realized, that must have been a mug shot from one of his past brushes with the system, but the thing was, he didn’t look anything like Adam, not the Adam she knew. He looked like a thug, with his shaved head and one eye half-closed as a result of whatever struggle he must have put up when they were trying to take him into custody — and they must have gang-piled him because he was a rock and he could have taken on any three of them all by himself. .

But then that was no way to think. The way to think was of how to cut him loose, all knowledge and memory of him, to forget him and move on. To Nevada. The sooner the better. “Okay,” she said, nodding at Christabel, who’d joined her in front of the TV, “you were right, I admit it, and I should never have even thought about dating him—”

Christabel made a little noise of disapproval in her throat. “I’ve said it before”—she gave her a sharp glance out of those mud brown eyes with their dead eyeliner and faded mascara, Christabel the righteous, Christabel in the aftermath, picking through the wreckage—“I never could tell what you saw in him, anyway.”