“Officer, is it ok if we leave, it’s getting late?” I asked.
“Hold on,” he said, not looking at me, “I gotta just take care of this and then I can let you go.”
The Channel 7 crew marched right onto the lawn, started to do a live feed. The cop straightened his tie. This was his chance to get on TV. He marched over and chatted to them for a couple of minutes.
And then, to my absolute amazement, who should get out of a red Toyota Camry on the other side of the street but Detective David Redhorse. All five feet of him. Jesus Christ. Now I understood. Redhorse was looking for us. He had stuck up a wanted poster at the cop shop or put the word out asking the police to hold for questioning any young men with Australian-sounding accents. So after Klimmer’s murder, Redhorse had gone to the train station to stake it out. He had seen the pair of us run onto the train and decided to follow. We seemed a little suspicious. But then we’d talked to him and his suspicions had been allayed a little. He thought we were ok. I was even injured, but it wasn’t a gunshot wound and the facts they knew at that stage were that the suspects were Hispanic and (because the cop had fired and seen me fall) that one of them had been hit by a bullet.
Still, something had been nagging at Redhorse, he’d checked out our story and hadn’t liked it and then come looking for us at the Holburn Hotel. Of course we weren’t there. It had clearly worried him. Two Australian boys who perhaps looked a little like the two Spanish boys that had killed Klimmer. John had cut his hair, but there was nothing he could do about his height. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but it was something that he wanted to follow up.
And Redhorse himself scared me. A digger. A good peeler. His Denver Nuggets cap was on slantwise, his jeans and T-shirt were dirty, like he’d come from dinner or yard work, but appearances were deceiving, I could see that.
Redhorse lit himself a cigarette, took in the scene, and started making his way across to the cop.
“Let’s go,” I said to Amber.
I walked her fast along the street. We hurried down a long alley.
When we turned the street corner, Amber grabbed me. She led me under a big overhang at the entrance to an elementary school. She threw me up against the wall.
“You lied to him,” she said.
“I did.”
“You’re an illegal immigrant. All that stuff on your résumé is fake, isn’t it? Everything except for the address on your paycheck.”
“Not everything was a—”
She kissed me. She thrust her body against me and kissed me hard. Leaning up on her tiptoes, biting my lips. She took my hands and placed them on her breasts and we moved together backward into the shadow of the overhang. Her hands searched under my shirt and she touched my back and chest with her fingernails. She grabbed my ass with her right hand and pulled me closer. With her left she began unbuttoning my jeans.
“Right here,” she said. “Right now.”
“Madness,” I said as I grabbed for the zipper on her black jeans. She stopped me and pulled down her jeans and then her panties. She held me and shoved me inside her. She was dripping wet. I leaned back against the wall and she leaned on me and climbed on me and I fucked her the way only a junkie can. Need and desire and displacement and hunger and concentration and pain.
“You’re killing me,” she said.
“I—”
“Don’t stop,” she said.
And when I came, she came, and I groaned and she yelled and bit her finger and laughed.
“I’m breathless,” she said.
The whole thing couldn’t have taken five minutes. She kissed me and zipped herself up. I buttoned my jeans and looked at her and caught my breath. Amber had a little crazy in her: this, the stolen money in the pizzeria. A Venus in a sweatshirt. Everything you could ever think and more. And yet a sadness about her too, a sense of loss, a hunger that needed filled.
“We better get back,” she said.
She took my hand and we walked in silence along the streets, past the bungalows and mock Tudors and ranch-style houses, past mailboxes and strip malls and dog walkers and lovers and illicit men watering their lawn under cover of night.
She let go of my hand when we made it to the van. All the others inside, waiting impatiently. Robert wound down his window.
“Come on, you two, it’s been a trying evening for everyone, l-let’s get home,” he yelled.
I sat near the window. I stank of smoke. Everyone was polite, ignored it, didn’t mention it. Amber said nothing.
They dropped me on Colfax.
I watched them turn the van.
Amber in the front passenger seat.
You should run, Alex, I told myself. Run, now. Now that you’ve seen Redhorse. You should go.
Time had passed since Klimmer’s death and the cop resources were stretched thin. We could have gotten out of town easily. A million different ways. And yet I knew it was too late. The hooks were in.
Amber.
Stupid to remain.
I knew I wouldn’t tell John about Redhorse and I wouldn’t tell him about her.
The van drove off. Through the window I could see her brushing that golden hair.
I stood there. Coughed.
The whores. The homeless. The wide street. The black sky. The tail-lights diminishing. Standing there staring after the van, even when it had long since gone.
9: THE SUTRA OF DESIRE
Haze covers Lookout Mountain. A calm sky. Aegean blue. Jets bending diagonals. The stillness becoming deeper and more taut. A silent vacancy. An absence from airport to aqueduct. It’s early yet. A stray dog. A tailless cat. A girl in a black stole.
The foothills close as a spider on the ceiling.
Hawk’s-eye view.
A street made more straight by the perfect right angles formed at intersections. Light sucked sideways from the vast eastern sun.
Worry has you by the hair.
Enemies from compass point to azimuth.
But not on this morning of ivory cloud, azure heaven, and the friendly boiling local star.
And only a moment ago this was the mythic plain, a migration path for bison and the Comanche nation.
Imagine an archer the instant before release. Before the Spanish, before the horses. Poised and under discipline of sudden death. That same feeling. The template for success or disaster. Blood, either way.
Mosquitoes above the windowsill.
The dead sunflowers.
The thock of arrows in the stampeding herd.
The braves running on to catch more game. The butchers remaining with their long knives of antler and bone.
“Noo nu puetsuku u punine,” they call to one another before they part.
That was then. The city’s pulse a drumbeat of cars and feet. A million people breathing in unison as the alarm sounds seven.
It’s not worse, merely different.
The right angles, symmetry. The smell of cannabis, garbage, eucalyptus. Urine.
My father would say that the Comanche missed out on the great secret of the universe. The linking of the five most important numbers in mathematics by the formula eiπ + 1 = 0.
My father.
What does he know?
Nothing.
Voices in the living room.
The pair of them.
Laughing, talking.
And then the silence betrays a more intimate encounter still.
A knock. A third voice.
Two men and a girl.
Happy.
She’s cooking.
They want me to come out but they think I’m sleeping. They’re letting me lie in. Still, the smell of food is bringing me back to life.
Even a junkie has to eat sometimes.
But if I don’t go out, the world out there can’t hurt me.