The walk was long, but manageable, without water. Highpoint was even smaller than Redcourse and it did not take long to aquaint himself with the layout. There was a boarded up corner shop, "Margerie's," where the center must have been at some point. Most of the homes had no glass in their windows. They gaped, gouged eye sockets. Very little stirred. Some of the homes had fallen in. Where two story establishment should have been were piles of rubble and sink holes. There was the splash of graffiti here and there, but chronic sand squalls had stripped much of the towns identity away decades before. Nothing grew. No one stirred. Everything reflected the tan hue of the thin sand that had worked its way into Haver's every pore. He lit a 100 Black and took a short breath of the pine tar taste. It was foul enough to purge the oceanless beach head that had gathered on the back of his tongue on the long walk
Redcourse was a disaster. He was not familiar with New Mexico. That was a mistake. No one in Redcourse had much of a future to look forward to. There were few families, no industry, no police, and unreadable motivations behind every word and glance. Joe wasn't a step ahead for those torturous weeks; he was a ghost, a dreadnought striking deep, with precision, without mercy, and without hesitation from beyond all comprehensible range. Redcourse was an impossibility made real. He went in with a plan, with back up plans, with contigencies to the back up plans, but what good are plans that opperate within rules. He'd gotten too comfortable. He wouldn't slip again.
"It runs okay, yes? Nice more than others in town, but that says not much." He considered torturing her before then, but enough life was already leached from the towns open sewer of hope in the days preceding. They walked and talked across dry turf and cracked creek beds for almost an hour. Her broken English was difficult to follow but was also unabashed and honest for its sparseness. "He was here." They stood almost a mile outside of the slumped roofs of the farthest shacks from town on a mud flat that was baked nearly bone white. "Here, last night at home." She pointed back into town toward the brown lake near the center. "At my home." She paused for some time. Her jet black hair rested about her shoulders and caught the sunlight like a briar patch and reflected nothing. He passed her his box of 100 Blacks and she lit one with her own matchbook before continuing. "He was there. He take from me that car. I did not try to stop him." She held her hands up as though holding a shotgun and vigorously shook her head. "I don't care for car." She turned and started to walk back toward the sprawling array of hovels. "You take care of him. That's what I care." He watched her bronzed skin drift back into the hot wavering afternoon air before glancing down at the twin tire tracks pressed into the baked hard earth.
He walked the miles, counting each step along the way in his mind. Long before he took that walk he trained his body on walks like it back in the academy days, counting steps and gauging distances until he could do it down to within a yard or two. Coming back into camp with a wrong number, Joe would send him out again. "Negative," he would say. He never told him how far off he was or when he was getting close, but he learned. His body memorized its own mechanics and made his mind aware of every flexion of every fiber of his legs. Every degree of each swing of his arms was clear to him as the hands of a clock. He counted and conserved. Highpoint was supposed to be no more than eight miles out from Redcourse, so if he went too far he would know. He would need his strength when he caught up to Joe. He hadn't eaten well over the previous weeks, but Joe had. The bodies he was able to find attested fairly clearly to that fact. He didn't know what snapped Joe's mind until Redcourse. The children. The children without entrails. Without skin. The knives and nails. He knew now. The murders without suspects. They could all be closed, but not by Havermaye. Enough misery was enough. Some things should remain in the depths of night, blanketed in unknowable darkness, because to see them under the unflinching medical grade lights of penal justice, to attempts to put quanitfiable numbers on them, to even attempt to place a price on those crimes is madness enough. Enough invitations to the deepest circles of mental infirmity were already going around.
Havermaye was able, when he first arrived, to consult a yellowing map of Redcourse and the surrounding area. Highpoint lay to the north and a little west, sitting just beneath the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Just south was Redcourse New Mexico, and 92 miles south of Redcourse was a maximum security prison. Fifteen miles east of the prison was a minor military motor pool and scrap yard. Bordering these things on all sides were impassible deserts and artillery ranges, except for a single road, marked with a pencil, that lead directly to the Crown Mesa reservation and the end of an unmarked interstate. Joe's treads headed direclty to Highpoint, just across the New Mexico and Colorado state line.
The walk was long, but manageable, without water. Highpoint was even smaller than Redcourse and it did not take long to aquaint himself with the layout. There was a boarded up corner shop, "Margerie's," where the center must have been at some point. Most of the homes had no glass in their windows. They gaped, gouged eye sockets. Very little stirred. Some of the homes had fallen in. Where two story establishment should have been were piles of rubble and sink holes. There was the splash of graffiti here and there, but chronic sand squalls had stripped much of the towns identity away decades before. Nothing grew. No one stirred. Everything reflected the tan hue of the thin sand that had worked its way into Haver's every pore. He lit a 100 Black and took a short breath of the pine tar taste. It was foul enough to purge the oceanless beach head that had gathered on the back of his tongue on the long walk. He resisted the tempation to attempt an old west style showdown. Not only would Joe not show himself, but it was also the fastest way to have two slugs parked in either chamber of his heart.
He skirted the smooth faced stone of the buildings one at a time. Peering quickly into the dark windows before moving on to the next. He darted down alleys and avoided main drags. On his side was the thought that Joe had a life with him. Four people disappeared in Redcourse. Four people he could not snatch from the maw of Joe's insatiable madness. Three were children. Of the three he found only one in Redcourse and even then only in parts. Whatever demons Joe was trying to dispatch in the blood of children Haver would send back to hell soon enough.
He hunted in the blaring sunlight, finding even the rusted hulk of a pick-up truck with its fuel gauge clearly on empty. The dust on the shift knob and steering wheel was gone, but more important than that was a stain in the passenger seat that was still relatively wet. Whoever the kid was he was still alive when Joe reached Highpoint. But where! Havermaye turned now east, now west. Up and down street after street, but the only signs of life he could find was a dog. Then, nearly spinning in circles in the open streets and racking his brain he saw it. A shallow dune, speckled with a few yellow tendrils of dead grasses, and atop that dune a cottage. He quickly circled the little hill of sand. It was hardly a dune at all and a few bounding steps brought him up to the blind side of the cottage that he now could see up close was more of a storage shack. "Probably for that general store," he whispered to himself. He hadn't sweat much all afternoon, but now he found himself wiping his suddenly moist palm and his loose gray jeans. He swallowed hard and listened harder. This had to be it, unless that woman lied. "No time for second guesses," he thought.
He could hear him now even over the light wind that began to rattle tiny flecks of sand against the windward planks of the shack. Not the child. He could hear the soft, almost imperceptible, sigh of nylon against nylon. Joe was walking, maybe pacing, inside. He might have seen the map too. He might know the only way out of Highpoint is back through Redcourse. If he didn't know before he took off, he probably knew now. With deadly earnestness, Haver flit from the shack to scope the surrounding area. He took stock. "Shed, with fuel. Basement, locked from the outside, but tools inside. Abandoned in a hurry. No attic or loft discernible from outside," he counted these things off in his mind and with ease his mind began to pick its course of action. He would need to act quickly. The demons might not wait. He took a long shallow breath and climbed silently over a low window sill into what must have been an office. He took another longer shallower breath and drew the sun heated .45 from its holster at the small of his back and stepped quickly around the empty gray green desk huddling in the center of the room. Each footstep he took felt out the weak points in the floor boards and avoided them before any of his weight shifted. His action was more fluid than the articulations of a side winder at full tilt.
He felt sure, his movements rooted down through his heavy boots like bridge piers in a hurricane. He could feel the tightness of Joe's psyche in the air. He could hear his movements. Could nearly feel his torment. He should have killed him long ago. But how could he have known what either one of them would turn into. Like a water droplet hugging the lip of a pitcher he spun around the door frame into the even darker main room and raised the still hot, keen, edge of his weapon to his line of sight. Joe, feeling a shift in the air currents almost instantly spun, but stopped himself. His gun, a beastly .657 was no where to be seen. On the floor was an unassuming blade, a simple box cutter. The child was no where to be seen, but nothing could erase what Haver already saw in Redcourse. He approached Joe slowly to within ten feet to swiftly kick the blade to a corner of the dimly lit space.
For several long seconds neither one spoke. Haver knew Joe's instincts must be wreaking havoc on his every fiber. He released him from his burden. "Turn around. Face me. Do not move your hands at all." He watched Joe slowly turn, his teeth set hard, and his eyes that much harder. His nylon jacket was still somehow perfectly pristine despite the attrocities, despite the terrors, of the previous days. His eyes, though, spoke volumes. "I'm not going to let you continue this," he whispered, his voice just above the muted rattle of the windward wall planks. "You're not well. You haven't been for some time."
"I know. But I still have work to do," he offered with all the coolness of a man who knew the score and did not fear. "We don't choose ourselves you know. Someone has to pick the right ones," he continued, his voice flattening. "You didn't come to us because you loved your country. Or because you wanted to serve," a spark leapt from his eye and into Haver's.
"I did what I needed to do-"
"-to survive," Joe finished sharply. Involuntarily Haver's finger tensed on the trigger, his thumb tripping the safety catch in a movement only Joe's eyes could follow. "I took you in specifically because you couldn't love. But I didn't make you that way..." he was beginning to babble. Haver could feel Joe's grip on the real loosening. "Someone else chose you. Forced you out of that world of feeling, response, relationships. Humanness. That's where we come from. But none of us chooses."
"Its what we have to do to," Havermaye let him talk, softly depressing the resistance spring in the trigger to ninety percent compression. He would likely only have an instant to act, should Joe decide to act first. "I needed you Joe. Nothing made sense then."
"I know. It never does in the beginning. But I figured it out after you came along." His eyes softened for a moment, but the inferno of hate did not diminish. "You showed me the truth. Someone has to choose for you," he spread his feet shoulder width apart, one lightly before the other in the neutral attack stance. "And that's all I've been up to these years. Our ranks have grown thin and I, for one, have some work to do yet, understand? " His hands went slack, but it was the slackness of preparedness and infinite utility. Joe's breathing evened, and then leveled off into his deep well of a chest. The breath of combat readiness. As Havermaye watched him transform it felt like long minutes but it was only seconds, and like a fool Haver had stood nearly transfixed by the liquid perfection and control demonstrated in every instant of time.
LABELS: STORY1B
MONDAY, MARCH 9, 2009
“Don’t do it.” Havermaye studied his partner’s stance and wondered if there was an ember's chance in Winnipeg he could take on Joe.
Ten milliseconds was all it took for Joe to disarm him. Joe was smarter, faster, stronger, meaner. His Oxfords would glide across the tiles, like knights parrying a poorly constructed attack. His left arm would casually seize Haver by the collar. And through the glacial, monolithic calm, his eyes would flash briefly with a dose of pure, unadulterated hatred as the fingers of his right hand dug into Haver’s neck and ripped out his larynx.
Jesus. What the hell did he get himself into? This was Joe... who taught him how to clean a gun and gut a deer. Joe, who saved his life when he was two months out of the Academy. What was he thinking?
“He’s just a goddamn kid, Joe,” Haver gasped, throat choked with adrenaline.
The gun was steady. “Yeah?” Haver saw Joe's finger slide across the trigger guard, caressing it. “Just a kid?” The finger slipped in with a grace born of repetition. “Well...so was I.”
Havermaye lunged.
Joe was indeed quick. He whirled and fired a round before Havermaye's feet had even left the ground. It sliced through his coat, the burn an afterthought as he bear-hugged Joe and shoved him to the ground. They slid across the tile, Haver’s head buried into Joe’s chest, his forearms forming a triangle with vertices at Joe’s head and shoulder blades.
The thump as their heads slammed into the wall of the jacuzzi came as a surprise. Joe's grip on the gun loosened. Straining against the pain of throbbing brain matter, Haver pushed up and away from Joe, and came back down with all his weight concentrated into his elbow, directed at Joe's left wrist. Haver felt the wet crunch and saw the gun clatter to the floor. A millisecond later, he saw the flash in the corner of his eye as Joe's right fist connected, lifting Haver up and across the room.
He flew back, landed squarely on his ass, and saw the gun between his splayed legs. In an instant, he was standing, with the .45 shaking at Joe's crumpled frame, still bewildered at his good fortune.
“It's like that, huh?” Joe's voice was low and hoarse, almost an invalid's whisper. He grinned, coughed and spat a chunk of phlegm at Haver's feet.
Haver fired. And fired again and again, not caring if the dense floor would rebut with an unfortunate ricochet. When the clip was empty, he wiped the butt of the gun with his shirt and threw it at Joe.
From the corner of the room, the boy stared at him.
“Come.” The child nodded slowly, eyes still focused on Havermaye's. He stepped forward from the shadows, bare feet creasing the pools of blood, a mix of Joe's and that of his ill-fated antagonists. Haver pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and shoved them into the kid's palm.
“You get the hell out of here.” The child continued to stare.
“Get!”
The child, more stunned than terrified, limped away. Haver waited until he heard the front door slam before he went to work. He remembered everything Joe taught him. The saw was in the basement. The gasoline was in the shed. Always take your time. Always think it through.
The sun had already set by the time Haver finished. Haver looked back at the house, still burning bright. An appropriate requiem for Joe, he thought. The desert wind rippled his shirt and Haver buttoned up Joe's salvaged coat for extra warmth.
There would be plenty of time before the police got curious... days perhaps. He would rest for a while and then head east, toward where the sun rises. Haver instinctively reached into Joe's coat pocket to grab those powder blue sunglasses, but his hand instead found something round and metallic. He fished it out and held it so that he could see it in the flicker of the pyre. It was Joe's compass, still dotted with blood. Haver wiped it off and carefully returned it to his pocket. He stretched and sat down to watch the crimson flames fade and wither and die.
LABELS: STORY1B
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2009
He ran his fingers through his hair against his scalp and yawned. His tongue felt like a dead sea lion on a bed of sun parched cobblestones. Where was that honey tea, double sugar, no cream? Maybe he'd get a trim and a shape up at one of the "mom and pops" he passed on his way down to Olhawka. Withdrawing his hand he glanced at his roughened fingertips, now coated in grease with a healthy helping of soot. Maybe he'd go for a dip in the stream behind the diner first.
"Honey teas, double sugars, no creams." The waiter set that lunch bag brown tray down on the red and white checkered bar top beneath his elbows. "You can't smoke in here." He noticed the unlit Maverick 100 behind Havermaye's right ear.
"Have you got a light?" Haver reached out and drew the right most cup across the rattling faux thatch plastic weave of the tray. Right up to the tray's lip.
"You can't smoke in here." The waiter began to wring his hands in the front of his baggy, stained, white t-shirt. His eyes narrowing a bit. His jaw began to work. The tip of his tongue running over his chapped lips. There was an easy solution to morals and loyalty to established policy.
"Have you got a light?" Havermaye sighed, in a single motion bringing a crushed twenty dollar bill from the pocket inside his nylon jacket and the Maverick menthol light both within easy reach of the waiter. "Light it." The waiter, too short in Haver's eyes, to be much of a fighter jammed his balled fist into his courdoroy pocket and pulled out a matchbook. It took a few tries but he managed after a few coughing attempts to light it between his lips. Placing it in a milk saucer he slid it back over to Haver's elbow and withdrew the crumpled cash.
"Anything else for you?"
"That's all." Haver didn't bother to see if the waiter scowled or not before leaving him in peace. It didn't matter. 5.30 a.m. was no time for a fight. That's what Joe would have said. Scraping his tongue across the roof of his mouth, he brought the uncomfortably dainty cup to his lips and took a lengthy swill. Some pans rattled in the kitchen, snapping him out of his daze. "I did it again, didn't I," he mumbled glancing down at the two cups of tea. "Joe would have been drinking that one. Talking about how no one makes tea like his grandmother," he took a long drag, "glad I don't have to hear that shit anymore." He glanced over his shoulder through the glass front of the tired diner. The sun would be coming up soon. He had an instinct for time that was spot on. Saved his life more than a few times, but there was no rush now. There wasn't a police car for miles in Olhawka. No one comes to the middle of Appalachia to committ crimes. Only to start over. There's something in the air that makes a man feel new. Maybe not so new as much as forgiven. Forgotten.
"You can't leave with that," the waiter barked, his drawling roots scratching through his previous facade of refinement. Haver paused at the front door he'd come in fifteen minutes earlier, tea cup in one hand cigarette in the other. It felt strange not to have Joe's hand flying up, flat against his chest, trapping Haver's fist inside the breast of his leather jacket as it gripped the silver .45's butt with toxic purpose and raw nerve. It felt strange not having a .45 holstered there at all.
The waiter's white skin, impossibly, grew paler. Another dumpy stump of a man peeked out from behind the kitchen doorjamb with eyes like a squirrel. Probably the owner. Haver slowly turned his wrist and tipped the last dregs of tea onto the scuffed black and white tile floor, before gently placing the cup on the backrest of one of the lime green booth seats.
"All finished." He zipped up his flimsy plastic collar, clamped the Maverick between his teeth, and headed out into the crisp but foggy air. "Never thought I would find myself wearing a pair of running shoes," he thought as he walked, the fog beginning to take on the harshness of an autumn overcast sunrise. "But I did see myself behind your shades," he chuckled, pulling Joe's powder blue sun glasses out of the jacket pocket. He blew the light dusting of ash off the lens, rubbed some of the soot from bridge, and eased them into place. They were fairly comfortable, but he did still miss his old boots. The old girls could take a pounding like nothing else and keep on trucking.
He walked past the tail end of the '97 every man sedan he stole and drove to hell all the way from Colorado. One out of the original three hubcabs somehow managed to hang on all the way to Olhawka, but at this point there was more life in Haver's missing left canine tooth than in that entire heap combined. At the edge of the dirt road he glanced left and then right, either end stretching on into the early morning mist with equal promise. Jamming his hands into his shallow jacket pockets he turned right.
A smile began to crease his lips for the first time in days. It was too bad Joe wasn't around to see it. Just plain tragic. Against all reason a tune began to escape his lips as he kicked a couple of pebbles along the way. Havermaye couldn't admit it out loud, but for the first time in a long time things were starting to look up in a big way. Bigger than his mom and pop could have dreamed out in Wyoming. Bigger than he himself had ever hoped for.
LABELS: STORY1B
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