T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Micah Stroud, Anise Reed, Dave LaJoy, Alicia Penner, Wilson Gutierrez.

They’re at the car now, the faint lines where Ed had bent over the hood to erase the graffiti with rubbing compound and a whole lot of elbow grease still showing in evidence of what she’s up against, and she feels so sad suddenly, so overwhelmed, that she just drops her arms to her side and stands there in confusion while cars back out around her and her mother catches herself in the middle of a reminiscence about a concert she once attended at the Hollywood Bowl with Alma’s father, with Greg, to ask her what’s the matter.

But the thing is, she can’t answer because she doesn’t know.

“Alma?” Her mother’s voice is like the soft beating of a wing in the dark. “Are you all right?”

And there it is again, the weakness, the feeling of helplessness and exhaustion, the nausea rising in her as if something’s come unstoppered, and she’s barely aware of opening her arms to her mother’s embrace and of holding her there in the rain and the flaring red flicker of the brake lights of a hundred cars while the night passes overhead and Micah Stroud sits alone in his dressing room, bathed in sweat.

In the morning, she feels nauseous all over again, nauseous for no reason, leaning over the toilet till whatever it was — whatever it is — comes up in a quick liquid burn to float there briefly before vanishing in a descending coil of water.

H e pays cash for the wire cutters, five pairs, standing in line with an assortment of off-duty housewives, daytime drunks and chipper retirees at Home Depot, the most anonymous place in the world, and nobody looks at him twice. Or maybe they do, because of the dreads, but so what? He’s a citizen just like them, a man with ready cash and a need for a particular tool for a particular job and he’s waiting his turn without complaint, though all the customers in front of him — seven, to be exact — are leaning into carts piled up like houses on wheels with every sort of crap imaginable, stainless-steel toilet paper dispensers, closet organizers, bug zappers, ceramic garden trolls. The indolent fat woman at the checkout counter lifts the scanner as if it’s a set of barbells. The intercom rattles on mercilessly. Jets — the airport is right around the corner — blast overhead at ever-shorter intervals. Everybody wants to stop and chat.

Eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes to make a simple purchase because customer service is a notion as foreign to these people as paying an honest price for an honest product. He loathes places like this — as a small-business owner, he ought to, what with Costco and Best Buy and all the rest undercutting him twenty-four/seven — and he would have gone to the locally owned hardware store in the upper village instead of driving all the way out here to park in the middle of this paved wasteland except for the fact that they know him there, know him well, and for this purchase what he wants above all else is anonymity. Yes, and Welcome to Home Depot, shoppers .

In the car, on the way back to the marina, he’s making mental lists, running through the details to be sure he hasn’t forgotten anything. The black cap is on the seat beside him, the shades clamped over his eyes, the sunblock in his daypack — along with a sweatshirt in the event it turns cold and a plastic poncho to keep the rain off him because rain is in the forecast, always in the forecast for February, the one month out of the year you can count on it. For food, he’s made up three sandwiches, two peanut butter, one Swiss and tomato, and he’s got a baggie of trail mix and two PowerBars for energy, plus a liter bottle of water — you can’t trust what’s out there on the island, especially when you’ve got pig carcasses rotting all over the place. A compass, though he isn’t exactly sure how to use it and won’t need it in any case — stick to the canyon and the fence line, that’s his plan, and that’s what he’s going to tell everybody else too. Because whatever you do, don’t get lost. You get lost and you’ll be swimming home.

He parks in his usual place, across the lot from the close-in spots where people ding your doors and fenders without thinking twice about it and well away from the eucalyptus trees along the fringes, which tend to lose their branches this time of year (that’s all he needs, a smashed windshield waiting for him when he comes dragging in off the boat). Wilson has his card key — he didn’t want people attracting notice waiting for him outside the gate, so Wilson has already ushered them in — and he flips open his cell to call him as he digs out the daypack and pulls the cap down over his eyes. It’s just past ten, the weather holding steady. There’s a breeze off the ocean, clouds riding past to eradicate the sun and bring it back again like a bad connection, and he’s hitting Wilson’s number and thinking rain can only benefit them because it’ll keep the pig killers under wraps and mask any boat making its way out to the island, so yes, let it rain. Let it rain like holy hell.

Wilson answers on the first ring: “Yeah?”

“I’ll be at the gate in two minutes. Everybody there?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“ Pretty much? What the fuck you mean, pretty much? Are they there or not?” He’s chopping along, in a hurry now, the sea black and oily-looking, running up the boat ramp at the edge of the lot in a pissing yellow foam, which means it’s going to be rough beyond the breakwater. “The reporter, right? Don’t tell me—”

“She called. Says she’s running late.”

“Shit. I told her. I warned her—” And he’s just working himself up when he turns the corner by the restrooms and there she is — Toni Walsh, in an Easter-egg-pink slicker and matching sandals, her flayed quasi-red hair beating at her face like sea drift, standing there at the locked gate, looking puzzled. “Hey,” he calls out, snatching a quick look round him to make sure no one’s watching (nobody is: the place is all but deserted because there’s weather coming down and everybody knows it). “Toni, hi.” And then, working up a smile as he closes the distance between them, he finds a harmless enough phrase to toss at her: “All set?”

The look she gives him, as if she’s never laid eyes on him before, as if they haven’t planned all this out on the phone and met twice on the back deck at Longboards to trade information about the progress of the killing and the temporary restraining order Phil Schwartz filed for him (which apparently did nothing more than raise the judge’s eyebrows), makes him wonder. The wind whips her hair and he sees she’s attached a seasickness patch to the side of her neck, just under her earlobe, as if it’s a piece of flesh-colored jewelry. Is she going to be all right with this? Her irises are the color of silt, the sclera cracked and veined, last night’s mascara clumped in her lashes. She’s clutching her cell phone in one hand, a pink designer bag the size of a suitcase in the other.

For a long moment, she just stares at him, a strand of salmon-colored hair caught in the corner of her mouth.

“You brought your camera, right?” he says, skipping the formalities. “Because you’re going to want to take pictures, to document some of this. .”

“You said we’d be back by seven, isn’t that what you said?”

“Yeah, thereabouts. Seven, seven-thirty. I figure we get there by maybe twelve-thirty or so, you come up the canyon with us and see what’s what, snap a few photos — and then we do what we have to do and we’re back on board by dark. Then it’s two and a half hours across. Give or take.”

“Good,” she says, “good.” No smile, no hello, no thanks for the hot tip, no hiking boots for Christ’s sake . “Because I have a date”—and here’s the smile, finally, a compression of the lips and an erratic flicker of the eyes to suggest there’s a brain working in there after all—“like at eight? And I’m going to need to get home and clean up, you know?”