'You look like you're somewhere else.'
'I do?' God, it was weird, but he felt some kind of sense of loss. Maybe it was because of what was going to happen to Maggie. A state of pre-mourning or something. His stomach felt empty. Not that he was hungry. It just felt like he hadn't eaten. And the sound of the car engine was too loud, high-pitched. Like an airplane.
'You know how I hate airports,' he said, for something to say.
'I've noticed, yeah.'
'You know why?'
She shrugged. 'They're no fun. Nobody likes them. Security checks, all that crap.'
'I've always hated them, long before the days of liquid bombs. First flight, I was nine or ten. We'd just got back from Spain, looking for Dad. The passengers were all clustered round the carousel at the baggage retrieval and there was this hubbub of chat floating around. You ever noticed airport acoustics?' He didn't wait for an answer. He was talking to himself anyway. 'There's this swell of noise. You can pick out layers, but no words. And over the top you can hear the sound of rattling cutlery, like it's in your headphones, and someone's telling you he's dead. Your father's dead. And you look over to a coffee shop that's a hundred feet away and someone's stacking cups, that's all, and you go, fuck me, that's what I'm hearing, my dad's okay. That's what happened to me, anyway. After our failed trip to find Dad. But I thought my hearing was buggered for good, and it filled me with, I don't know, dread, I suppose, hearing that voice, and I felt this pressure behind my eyes and I burst into tears.'
He felt her hand on his thigh, warming his tingling muscles.
'In fact, I wasn't so far wrong. My left ear's not so good, and maybe that's part of the problem. You know that, but did you know that my left eye's weaker than my right?'
'I didn't,' she said. 'But thanks for telling me.'
'And my left foot's smaller than my right. My dad used to say that I was 'all right'. Funny guy, my dad. That was his best English joke. He was proud of it.' He didn't want to tell her any more but he couldn't stop. 'Ironic, my issues with airports. Cause up to that point, I believed I wanted to travel the world when I grew up. Used to have a model plane I took everywhere with me. A spitfire. War plane. Type 356-Mk 22. Teardrop canopy. Built it from a kit. Painted it camouflage colours. Green, light and dark brown. But the nose, for some reason, I painted the nose a dark blue. The underbelly was a pale cream. Apart from the decals on the wingtips, the eyes. They were blue, like the nose, and I spent a long time with a fine brush giving them perfect little evenly spaced eyelashes.'
'Charlie.'
'My mum bought me the plane. She worked for a travel agency. Spent her days selling holidays to places she never saw herself. I'd never flown before. I don't remember her flying either. Just that once. My dad left us nothing. Just disappeared without even saying goodbye. She married that rich fuck, George, who was able to take her places she'd only dreamed about. But that was a long time later. My dad, Pablo, he just walked away one day without so much as a goodbye kiss.'
'Charlie.'
'As a kid, that plane represented an escape route. And yeah, those guns fitted in the wings were probably significant, too.'
'Charlie.' She put her hand on his shoulder.
'Am I a monster?' he asked her.
She squeezed, fingers massaging the muscle. 'Maybe in some people's eyes,' she said.
'In my mother's, you mean.'
She turned her head slightly, glanced through the loose chickenwire partition into the back. 'Yes.'
Carlos checked the rearview. Too dark to see much. But his brain compensated for the limitations of his eyes and he made out the bodybag, the heavy chains, the petrol cans, the holdall. 'And in yours?'
She didn't reply.
'Well?'
'I'm here, ain't I?' she said.
'You are,' he said. 'I'm sorry about that.'
She gave a little laugh. 'It's okay.'
But that wasn't what he'd meant.
'Tell me about you,' he said.
'What do you mean?'
He wanted to know everything. There were plenty of things she hadn't told him. Not just the reason she'd taken out the contract on his mother. No, other things. Trivial things. Things he shouldn't care about but which seemed to matter now. He didn't know if there'd been a sandpit at her infant school; didn't know the name of the boy she first held hands with; didn't know if she could ride a horse; didn't know the name of her favourite dolls or teddy bears; didn't know her mother's maiden name.
Sentimentality. He had to put a stop to it. Think of something else.
He pictured them dragging the bodybag out of the van, laying it on the ground. He heard himself tell Maggie he wanted to say goodbye. Saw himself pull down the zipper. Jordan's face staring back at him. 'Come closer,' Carlos said to Maggie. 'Say a few words.' She kept her distance, a few feet away, said she'd rather not. He nodded, said he understood. He pulled the zipper all the way down. He said, 'Okay,' to Jordan and the kid sat up, hair matted to his forehead from the heat inside the bodybag, gun in his hand. And Carlos said to Maggie, 'Are you sure there isn't anything you'd like to say?'
If she still didn't confess, facing certain death like that, then Carlos could assume it wasn't her who'd arranged the contract. And maybe he could let her go, like he'd promised his mother. Jordan, they'd agreed, was just to scare Maggie into admitting her guilt. Whatever happened afterwards, they'd have to divorce. He'd make sure he got custody. That wouldn't be a problem.
Course, the reality was that Carlos couldn't think of a scenario that didn't end up with Maggie having to take a long nap in the bodybag.
That's what he meant. It made his heart twitch.
But for now, all he said was, 'Nothing. It doesn't matter.'
A few minutes later, they were driving along a country road and Carlos was remembering his first time with Maggie — how she'd led him into his bedroom, yanked his trousers down to his knees, buried her head in his crotch, and moaned as she sucked and moaned and took her head away briefly to say fuck fuck fuck yeah and sucked and moaned until he spasmed and shuddered like a man in an electric chair, and then after she cleaned up with her t- shirt, she steered his mouth from nipple to nipple to bellybutton to crotch, telling him what he should do and where and how hard and fast and deep until she came in a series of fuck fuck fuck yeahs, but he just couldn't get it up again no matter how she coaxed and teased, so they didn't fuck until the following weekend — when he saw a flashing light in the rearview.
Couldn't be. Not now.
' Mierda,' he said.
'What?' Maggie asked.
'Behind us.'
She looked over her shoulder. 'Shit. So much for my idea of taking the back roads.'
'Just our fucking luck. You'd think the cops would have something better to do with their time than haul us up at two in the morning.' He couldn't think of a way out of this.
'We'll have to pull over,' Maggie said, confirming that she was out of ideas too.
'With a corpse in the back?'
'What do you suggest? This piece of junk can't outrun a police car.'
She was right. They didn't have a choice. He slowed to a crawl.
The police car overtook them, pulled into the side of the road, and stopped.
Carlos swore. He kept swearing. Puta, puta, puta. Fuck.
After a bit, somebody climbed out of the car. A young guy. Late teens, maybe. He wasn't in uniform.
'He's not a cop,' Carlos said to Maggie.
'Maybe he's a detective.'
'Too young.'
