9
COLFAX, WASHINGTON
Three a.m., but every light in the trailer blazed. Tom Miller sat at the kitchen table, reading about Roswell. He had slept no more than three hours a night since Allie left. He was starting to wonder if he was dead already, waiting in Purgatory for Allie to resurrect him.
If she didn’t . . . he would stay here until he ran out of money and the sheriff’s deputies made him leave. Three, four years tops. Then he’d have nothing left of her. Not even the memories this place gave him, that first night she’d stayed over, the first time they’d made love. The way they’d walked along the railroad tracks, feeling the steel vibrate as the big trains rolled close.
On the day they kicked him out, he’d drive west until he came to the coast south of Cape Flattery, the big cliffs over the Pacific. He’d bust the Highway 101 guardrails and see if that fancy pickup could fly.
Problem solved.
Meantime, he had empty hours to fill. He smoked the pot Allie had left. He reread his Sniper School manuals. He delved into the Internet’s dark corners, the ones filled with conspiracy theories about Masons and Jews. Them. He couldn’t stop thinking about that last conversation, the night before Allie left. What she’d said. And left unsaid.
I’m dirty inside.
Like trying to punish God. No point even thinking about it.
What hurt the most, Allie hadn’t trusted him to protect her. She knew he’d fought in Afghanistan. Was she afraid he didn’t love her enough to do the same for her? Or that he wasn’t big enough to face the truth?
He went looking for it. He learned that the Illuminati were working to establish a New World Order. That the Mafia had assassinated John F. Kennedy. That the World Health Organization had invented AIDS to destroy Africa. That President Bush had ordered the September 11 attacks, and the Mossad had carried them out.
In Miller’s lucid moments, he understood that he was filling his brain with junk as a way to avoid thinking about Allie. But with every bong hit, the fantasies wormed their way deeper into him. They weren’t true.
Unless they were.
He tried to call Willie Coole, his old platoon sergeant, to talk. The number was out of service. Maybe Willie had troubles of his own.
Tonight, he was reading about Roswell, UFOs. Even high, he couldn’t buy the UFO stuff. A bunch of aliens were smart enough to build spaceships. Then they got lost in New Mexico and let the government lock them up. Miller knew firsthand the U.S. military could barely handle a bunch of ragheads. It wouldn’t have much chance against the eight-eyed monsters of Alpha Centauri SEAL Team Infinity.
Most analysts think the aliens were moved to a secure facility at Area 51, in the Nevada desert—
One ironclad rule: The weirder the font, the weirder the conspiracy theory.
A knock on the trailer’s front door jolted him from his reverie. His first stoned thought was that the aliens had come. He grabbed the 9-millimeter that he kept under the sink.
“Who’s there?”
“Tom?”
They sat side by side on the couch, not quite touching. Like their first night. She reached for the bong, pushed it away. Miller wanted to smash it. He didn’t need to be high anymore. He didn’t need anything but her.
“Everything in my life that’s good, I blow it up.”
“There’s nothing you can say to blow us up.”
“Guess where I went?”
“Back to L.A.?”
“Sioux Falls. South Dakota. Ever been?”
“It’s on my top ten list.”
“You’re funny. Twelve hundred miles. A day and a half on the bus. I got there, seven o’clock at night, I found a motel, cleaned myself up. And I did what I always do: Went to a bar—an after-work place—let guys buy me drinks.” She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was crying.
“It’s okay, babe.” Although the thought of her being with someone else, some insurance agent in a suit, made him want to set the world on fire.
“It’s not what you think. I could only think of you. I had to leave.”
Somehow, he knew the story didn’t end there. He wanted to tell her, Whatever it is, don’t say it, I don’t want to know. But he didn’t.
“I went back to the room. I couldn’t sleep. All night. I was waiting for a sign. Then I saw him on TV, and that afternoon I went back out. And I didn’t go anywhere nice, I went to the worst place I could find and I—”
“Stop.”
“Wasn’t even any pleasure in it—”
“Stop, Allie.”
“Forgive me.”
He loved her more than he ever had. Hated her, too.
“After a couple days of that, I knew I had to come back to you or die—those were my only choices—and I wasn’t ready to die yet. Here I am.”
“What did you mean, you saw him on TV? Who’s him?”
She shook her head.
“I’ve only told this to three people ever and none of them believed me. They said I was crazy, Tom.”
“You’re not crazy.”
She reached for the bong and lighter and then put them down.
“You know how I told you I grew up in San Antone, my parents got divorced when I was twelve, me and my mom went to Chicago?”
“Sure.”
“It’s too bright in here, Tom, I can’t do it this way.”
He turned off every light but one and came back to her.
“The truth is, when I was eleven, both my parents died. Car accident. Three of my grands were dead, the fourth had Alzheimer’s. My dad didn’t have family; my mom had one sister up in Illinois. Terri. She was a few years younger than my mom, maybe thirty-one, thirty-two, when my folks died. I only saw her a couple times growing up. Looking back, my mom didn’t want me near her.”
“But they sent you to her?”
“She was my closest relative, she put her hand up, she got me. She must have wanted the money; my dad had insurance from his job. She was divorced, no kids. She worked at a law firm, lived in an apartment on the North Side, the rich part of Chicago. But she’d always had a coke problem, and the insurance made it worse. Took her six months to burn through the money and then she started looking around for what else she could sell.”
“Allie.”
“Think I’m pretty now, you should have seen me then. A twelve-year-old with a twenty-year-old’s body. She let me try coke. Of course I loved it. She told me we’d have fun—she’d do it, too, we’d be like sisters—the men were rich, they’d take care of us. I should have said no, Tom. I let her, I did. I wanted it—” her voice sliding now like a Ferrari on ice.
He wrapped his arms around her, and she shuddered against him. “You were twelve.”
“Yeah, it started a week before my thirteenth birthday. I’ll never forget, this apartment high up, taking off my skirt, looking out the window at Lake Michigan, and the wind was blowing, rattling the glass—”
“I’ll kill her.”
“You can’t.”
“I was a sniper, Allie, I’ll shoot her from a half mile away and she’ll be dead before she hits the ground.”
“She’s dead, Tom. OD’d years ago.”
“I’ll kill her again.”
She smiled in the dark, wrinkled herself close to him.
“We got on the circuit.”
“The what?”
“It’s funny, I forget sometimes you can’t read my mind. All over the Midwest and the South, guys who would pay five or ten thousand for a night with me. I never saw any money, but I heard Terri talking about it. There were politicians. And religious guys, too—”
“Religious guys?”
“I remember two different—what do they call them?—megachurches, and one bishop, Catholic, Terri told me to call him Bishop, said he liked it. He’s actually a cardinal now. I mean, I don’t want to exaggerate, it wasn’t hundreds, maybe thirty guys. Forty. I stopped counting. One day, I woke up and realized it was my fifteenth birthday, and I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I would throw myself out the window or cut my wrists, whatever, but I was done. I told my aunt I would tell the police. She told me no one would believe me, they’d say I was troubled, a druggie looking for attention. They’d lock me up in a crazy hospital. I guess I believed her.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Allie.”
She started to cry again. “I should have told someone, not just for me, because right now, this week, this month, there’s another girl getting broken in. That’s what my aunt said when we were riding the elevator up that first time: Don’t worry, they’ll break you in easy.”
Miller thought of his rifle, sighting down the scope.
“I stole a thousand dollars and two of her rings and I took a bus to L.A. Been running away from myself ever since. But, you know, wherever you go, there you are. The worst part is, I still see some of them on television sometimes. They got famous. They made me into this and nothing happened to them. They have their lives and their families, and they’re probably still doing it.”
“Who are they?”
“I told you.” Her voice small and desperate.
“Names, Allie. Who’s the one you saw on TV in Sioux Falls?”
She must have heard the murder in his voice. “Doesn’t matter—”
He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. “Tell me.”
“Please. Tom.” Her voice was calm, but her eyes were wide and panicked.
“If you didn’t want me to do anything, why come back? So you could live here until you freak out and take off again? I didn’t know I was such a good lay.”
“Please—”
“I’m on your side, Allie.”
The pistol was on the table by the couch. She stood, grabbed for it, aimed it at his chest. A two-handed grip. A professional grip. One of the few mistakes she ever made, though he didn’t realize at the time. He watched, not moving, as she eased off the safety.
“Do it. Doesn’t scare me. You leaving again, that’s what scares me.”
The pistol drooped in her hands until finally she put it down and knelt on the floor in front of him. “Maybe you’re not scared, but I am, Tom. I hear them laughing every day.”
“Then let’s make them stop.”
At the end, he’d realize what a perfect mark he’d made, how perfectly she’d played him. She’d even said no when he first offered to kill. She’d led him as easily as a child.
Even at the time, though, he felt a glimmer of doubt. An interstate sex ring that played on preteen virgins? An evil cokehead aunt? The convenient lack of any other relatives? He could have checked her story, he knew. He could have asked for details.
But when she looked at him that night, he knew he wouldn’t. Something terrible had happened to Allie. She’d come to him for help. Wasn’t his place to question her. The others had called her crazy. Not him. He would believe her. He would protect her.
He would be her knight.