Traffic is worse than anticipated. Wendell is bent over, pointing his scalp at Whistler when he bangs open the door. “Heard Ruther took over your case,” Wendall says.
“My only concern is finding a killer,” Whistler says without stopping.
“Don’t let me catch you lying down on the job,” Wendell calls.
There’s no doubt Wendell is the one distributing the pictures of Whistler stuck in his chair.
“Ass,” Whistler says to himself. He takes the steps two at a time. His knee hurts from falling out of bed, but the knock was superficial, no permanent damage. He crosses the squad room, noting that the lights are on and Ruther’s door is open. Coffee is brewing, so he finds his “Crafty Ass Bitch” mug and pulls the pot out long enough to tip his cup half full. He runs cold water to cool it down.
He knocks at Ruther’s door. “Any news from the hospital?”
“Good morning, bright eyes,” Ruther says. “As of last night, Zhang was still unconscious. Suzuki made it clear we are to be contacted the moment she wakes. They will call. The hospital sent over a full blood workup for Ted to read. After finding nothing to add to his direct observations, he concluded the wounds on Zhang were consistent with the attack on Harpole. Including a knot on the side of her head in the same spot Harpole had a laceration. But the strangulation was far more restrained. Otherwise, Zhang would be dead and not unconscious.”
Whistler hadn’t thought of that. The attacker is changing his MO. Wants to make it last. He files that away and says, “I’d like to take Suzuki to check Schmidt’s weak-ass alibi.”
Ruther takes a file from the center of a pile and tosses it to the far side of his desk. “That’s Schmidt’s record. It took a minute to dig it up. The name of his parole officer is there.”
“Thanks.”
“Listen, Diaz,” Ruther says. “You gotta pace yourself. This job will burn you up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘Yes, sir,’” Ruther mocks. “Don’t ‘yes, sir’ me. You could be onto something with this Flores case.” He pulls another file from the stack, pitches it over. Whistler flips it open. It consists of three pages: the initial report on Ginny Flores, a mandatory autopsy, and a few notes from a homicide detective. “You see that? I listened to you yesterday. I’m looking into it. But the rule is: keep it simple. Solve the part you can solve. Worry about the vast web of related deaths later. You see?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For future reference, run developments past me before broadcasting them to the squad. That was dirty pool.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ruther’s mustache goes wild. “You are one CH away from pissing me off and riding a desk permanently. My intention was to put you on hotline leads. You understand? I’m letting you check this alibi as a favor. I had to come down hard yesterday to keep you on task. Chasing endless sidetracks distracts from a case. I need you a hundred percent focused where I aim you.”
“Yes, sir,” Whistler says. He realizes his reply may further irritate Ruther and adds, “I understand. Thanks.”
“That’s more like it,” Ruther says.
At his desk, Whistler rolls his trick chair out of the way and takes a folding chair from the conference room to replace it. He drinks his coffee and looks through case notes until Suzuki wanders in.
“Oh man,” Suzuki says, “guess what my wife surprised me with last night?”
“Stop,” Whistler says. “I don’t want to know.” Suzuki looks injured. “But I do have a question.”
“Shoot,” Suzuki says.
Whistler lowers his voice, “What exactly is a CH?”
“It’s a technical term used in law enforcement. I can’t believe you don’t know it, Diaz. I thought you were smart.” Suzuki grins with pointed little teeth and holds up a finger and thumb with a tiny fraction of space between to demonstrate how small a measurement one CH is. “It’s the width of exactly one cunt hair.”
“God damn it,” Whistler says. “Grab your shit. Ruther is putting us to work.”
Whistler sends Suzuki to check the alibis Schmidt gave for the times of both known attacks. He implies it was Ruther’s idea. “When you’re finished, go talk to the parole officer. Here.” Whistler hands over Schmidt’s file. “Explain our suspicions and get whatever insights the guy wants to share. I’ll see you after lunch. If things go smoothly, we’ll pick up Schmidt before dinner.” Suzuki doesn’t seem bothered taking orders from Diaz.
Fifteen minutes later Whistler is driving along I-90 to talk to Schmidt’s boss, Gladsky. Driving his own car is not standard procedure, but no one has told him not to. This way he avoided asking Wendell to requisition a cruiser and having to explain why he’s such a delicate prima donna he can’t stand to ride in the same car as his partner.
Whistler tells himself it’s a way to cover more ground. Partners are for backup when making an arrest, but not needed for legwork. Divide and conquer, he tells himself. In truth, his head is pounding, and he’d give even odds on committing murder if confined in a tight space with Suzuki and his incessant lowbrow humor.
The drive takes less than half an hour. His GPS leads him to a gravel lot next to a pole barn compound surrounded by twelve-foot-high cyclone fence. The gate is open and the main building has a few cars parked around it and a two-story overhead door rolled open. Whistler parks, slips into his blazer, and walks through the open door. Inside he finds a white panel van with the words “Bug Off” printed large across one side. It’s identical to the one Allen drives. Near the back is an office with a couple windows looking onto the garage. Whistler can see a slender man with pale hair watching him. The man pushes open a door and stomps out to meet Whistler.
He has a severe look, sharp features, and a forceful presence. He advances fast, reminding Whistler of a shark slicing through dark water. His wrist sparkles as it swings, a flashy watch announcing his importance. The man extends his hand like a blade and cranks down hard on the bones in Whistler’s fingers before he can make a grip. “I’m Kaz Gladsky.” He steps a little too close, trying to intimidate. He doesn’t release his grasp for a long moment.
“I’m Detective Diaz. We spoke on the phone,” Whistler takes a step back, shows his badge. Gladsky wears a superior, smug expression, pleased to have forced Whistler to retreat. Whistler brushes his blazer open to reveal his firearm. Gladsky’s expression sobers. “As I said last time, your employees Allen Schmidt and Calvert Greene are witnesses to a crime.”
“Yes. I hope they were cooperative. Mr. Greene is in training. I hired him recently. We are growing here at Bug Off. Staffing is the most challenging thing running a small business. You wouldn’t know about that, working for the city, but running a small company is the hardest thing a man can do. Contracts and suppliers. Payroll, regulations, taxes. So much to deal with.”
“I’m sure. I’m here to get some background if I can. Friday the ninth, did you have a van over at the Echelon?”
“We contract with the Echelon. As of yesterday we have ongoing contracts with six hotels. We are growing almost too fast. If you decide to leave law enforcement, I’m looking to buy two new vans and staff up. Competitive wages.”
“Is there a way to check your records regarding the ninth?”
“Let’s go in here and ask my wife. She’s office manager.” He walks ahead of Whistler. “What exactly are you looking for?”
“Curious if Allen Schmidt was at the Echelon on or around the ninth?”
“Why would you think that?”
“A Bug Off van was spotted near a crime scene.” Whistler says it to apply pressure and see what oozes out. Then he adds, “He may be an unwitting witness to a crime.”
“Really? Well, I don’t know if Allen was there, but he has worked there. It was our second contract. He spent a couple months there earlier this year. Here we go,” he says, and opens the office door.
A young woman, tall and slender, turns. Her smile is radiant, her skin glows, and her hand rests protectively on
a belly swollen with child.
“My wife,” says Gladsky. “Svetlana.”
Dead Man Dreaming
The Bronco was purchased in the first year it was offered and one month before Calvert was born. Harry bought it for the winters up north, but it had also been the car that drove Calvert home from the hospital after his birth, two weeks past his due date. It was said infant Calvert had been reluctant to start living.
The years and the salted roads had done what one would expect to the boxy utility vehicle. By the time it was Calvert’s first car, it had seen some hard use. Though it’d been decades since Calvert owned it, while asleep in his small apartment, he finds himself driving it again.
The sky is black, no stars or moon. The damp, oppressive void presses hard on the windscreen. His hand knows where the wiper knob is, and when he engages it, rickety chrome arms lurch from the top of the windscreen, taking feeble, herky-jerky swipes at the increasing precipitation. Each time they pull back, the perished rubber blades stutter over the glass, setting his teeth on edge.
Visibility is bad and Calvert runs the defroster. The air that vents against the underside of the glass smells metallic and pushes a haze across his entire field of vision. He leans down and around the steering wheel to find a clear view of the road. He snaps off the heater and cracks the window beside him. The fog slowly dissolves.
His headlights are absorbed by the darkness. He stomps the floor switch for the high beams and the light gets weaker. He stomps to change them back and the lights dim again.
No white lines mark the road’s edge, no dividing line runs down the center. He doesn’t know the road’s name or where it goes. He’s lost. But feeling lost is not a new sensation and not, on its own, cause for panic.
Since his death, he’s been defined by a single-minded plodding toward basic understanding of what he lost and how he lost it while enduring a swirling storm of people living their lives around him. Despite having made peace with the general pointlessness of the passage of time, he doesn’t want to crash the ghost Bronco. He edges toward the center of the empty road, where the pavement is drier.
Great spans of asphalt pass under his tires. With each mile traveled, he becomes more anxious. Intuition tells him some unwanted event is imminent, something more vital to him than life or death. A reckoning. Perhaps he will be taken wherever one goes when one has finished walking the plane of existence called life. He eases his foot off the accelerator. A spring tip pokes through the seat and scratches at his back pocket.
He snaps on the AM radio, and a screech of static gives way to a reading of The Overcoat. The voice is speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent, as if Nikolai Gogol himself is breathing through the brittle speakers, talking directly to Calvert. Though he no longer remembers a word of Russian, Calvert understands the story perfectly. It makes complete illogical sense. His knowledge of literature must not reside in his jumbled brain, but instead be protected in the hollow of his torso.
He tops a slight rise and sees the glow of a lone traffic light a long way ahead. He loses time and crosses a considerable distance in a blink, finding himself at an intersection. The light turns yellow, then red. He grips the column shift and lugs the engine down, afraid of jamming the brakes on the wet pavement. When the ramshackle tub rattles to a stop, a loose piece of the rust-ravaged floor shudders free and gets stuck under the heel of Calvert’s clutch foot.
With the car resting in neutral, the air in the cab throbs in time to both his breathing and the monotone thrum of Gogol’s raspy description of the bleak, brown meal of a low-level bureaucrat in historic St. Petersburg. Or is it Leningrad?
He turns to ask the young woman if she knows which incarnation of the city the famous story is set in. Such a simple detail, a hard fact he carried for so long it has become soft around the edges. “Do you know?” However, when he glances, he finds the passenger seat empty. Too bad, he thinks. She is very bright. Her absence underscores his isolation.
There are no other cars, no buildings, strip malls, or distant houses. He can hear no night sounds: insects, dogs barking, wind. There is only the Bronco’s interior, the bludgeoning rain, the stuttering wipers, whatever his dying headlights capture, and a slick X of road lit by the overhead traffic lights. In his side mirror, he finds no sign of his own brake lights cast into the night behind him, as if he can’t plumb the depths of the moments he’s already lived.
The Bronco’s presence is a comfort. It is the last earthly remnant of Harry, his grandfather, who ended up raising Calvert. The Judge, as Harry was widely known, believed in the order of books on shelves, text in straight lines organized in columns, page after page, one meaning stacking on the next until a perfect complexity is achieved. Despite Harry’s sharp mind he’d never been good with his hands. The Bronco was not well cared for. It was, however, the car Calvert learned to drive. A fragment of his mind knows the car had rotted away in a dilapidated outbuilding behind a fishing cabin near Two Rivers, Wisconsin, an age ago. The shed had slowly curled in on the shell of the car, like a clenching fist crushing a beer can. In his dreamtime logic, and knowing he is a dead man, Calvert finds driving a dead car perfectly appropriate.
The signal light is long, practically eternal. He considers running it but finds himself in no particular hurry. He turns to the dilapidated bench seat between the rear wheels to make silly faces at Bump in her car seat. Bump isn’t there. There is no car seat. The absence is an infant-sized hole where vital organs should be.
Before he can ponder the vacant back seat, a set of headlights approach from behind, the high beams painful and momentarily blinding as they flash across his rearview mirror. He squeezes his eyes completely closed.
When they open, the car has pulled along his right side. He recognizes Meredith’s profile, as if he’d rolled over to find her looking at her phone before leaving the warmth of their bed. Her car is a black, shiny, European sedan—cold and hard like the husk of a water beetle, a car to take to a funeral.
His numb heart fires like he’s been resuscitated, as if injected with pure adrenaline. He draws a gust of air deep into the dusty back corners of his lungs. He waves and yells.
“Hey, Mere! Over here. I’m here. Next to you.”
She remains focused on the traffic light, revving her engine in anticipation. He reaches across the cab for the window crank, but his lap belt holds him away. He cranes his body, stretching his torso, fingers fiddling the air a fraction from the handle. He can’t reach. He mashes the button on his lap belt, but the latch has no give.
The rain comes hard. His left side gets wet from the gap in the window. The wipers continue to scrape ineffectually in front of him, and his engine ticks and rattles. The overhead traffic signal winks to green. Through runnels of water sheeting his windows, he watches Mere, sees her fail to look his way when her car accelerates across the intersection. He hears her tires shushing him as they roll, as he screams for her, as he dry sobs.
“I’m sorry,” he barks. Her taillights are evil red eyes, staring as she abandons him, smashes him, and leaves him a broken version of his former self.
He pounds the meat of his palm into the center cap of his steering wheel, over and over. It makes a clack clack clack noise, but the horn doesn’t sound. He presses the clutch so hard the deteriorated metal cracks. He shoves the shifter into first gear, but the transmission pushes back.
A blast of wind joins the downpour outside, and water lashes the car, inky waves washing down the windows. His shoulder is soaked. Wind gusts under the car, threatening to lift it from the ground. The road is a puddle, now a pond. Wet flecks come through the floor and get the back of Calvert’s ankles damp. The eerie green signal light goes sickly yellow. Gogol’s monologue gets louder, trying to be heard over the ruckus. The author’s accent gets thicker as his conviction pours into the old words, a literary conjuration.
Frantically, Calvert grinds the transmission until he finds a gear and pops the clutch. The light turns red, the intersection
bathed in blood. The engine torques hard on its motor mounts, wringing the vehicle like a damp dishtowel. The Bronco jerks backward. He smacks his forehead into the steering wheel as the car yanks him away. He tries to focus on the vanishing taillights of the woman he planned a family with, shared a life with, but something hot and sticky runs over his forehead and into his eyes. Before he can blink it away, she’s gone.
The Cure for an Existential Hangover
After falling in bed the previous night, Calvert slept like the dead. Something wakes him before the sun is up. He can feel it coming, a pressure behind his eyes, a painful burrowing under his forehead. This is death. His ripe lesion is spreading and engulfing his remaining soft tissue. His dark room is a padded coffin, and the lid is coming down. He finds he can’t move his limbs. He’s afraid, which he hadn’t expected. His mind plays a scene from his past, not a whole life flashing, but a specific hurtful flicker he’d rather not see. He watches as if it’s projected against the gray ceiling. He stares, unable to blink, unable to turn away.
Doctor Greene is there, the Calvert he once was. He’s in the driver’s seat of a car he would die in six months later. His likeness is initially soft around the edges, a plasma shadow gradually condensing into a solid. The Calvert cast on the ceiling turns the wheel and pulls to a curb. A young woman walks over and opens the passenger door. Her name is Kati. He’s excited to see her. She’s a Hungarian exchange student and one of his brightest pupils. He nominated her for an award. His letter of recommendation, and especially her excellent essay, persuaded the committee to honor Kati at an annual banquet. She asked Calvert to introduce her, to be a familiar face. He knows this as he watches her hips slide into the seat, as he sees her twist to find the seat belt.
“You look nice,” he says politely. Professionally.
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