“So …,” he says.
“So?”
“We gotta give this up, man. We can turn over what we’ve got to the cops and let them run with it.”
I say nothing.
“It's too dangerous,” he goes on. “We followed our leads and came up with squat. I mean, this is someone's life we’re playing with here.”
Part of me wants to agree, to give in and give up what we know. But it feels wrong. I can’t do it.
“Duncan, if he pushed that woman this morning—”
“It wasn’t him.” I break in on Vinny. “They say the pusher was Hispanic. We’re looking for a white guy.”
“Our guy could be a hunchbacked Indian dwarf for all we know.”
“The whole thing—it's wrong for him. You saw the shots of what he did to those animals. That's how he gets his rush. He's a cutter, not a pusher.”
“Says who? What do you know? You skim a couple books and suddenly you’re some kind of FBI profiler. That's crap. You gotta let this go. What were you going to do even if you found the guy, flash your bus pass and put him under arrest?”
I let out a sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Exactly. You don’t know. You’re not thinking straight. The cops can track this guy down.”
“The cops don’t care. They don’t have the time to hunt down potential killers—they’ve got real ones crawling all over them. We’re getting close here, Vin.”
“We’re getting nowhere. What if the guy doesn’t even work at the mall anymore? What if he's a janitor there, or some office geek in administration? You gonna follow everybody home?”
“I don’t know.” That's all I can think to say. But it pretty much says it all. I don’t know anything anymore. Even the most concrete lead I’ve got, the receipt, could be nothing. What's to say he didn’t just pick it up off the floor of the subway for something to scribble on? He could be anywhere. Anyone.
It's quiet on both ends of the line.
“Okay,” I say. “Look, you don’t have to be in on this anymore. It's my problem.”
“It's not that easy, man,” he says. “I can’t just sit on this and wait till bodies start turning up.”
“Give me some time.”
“Might not be any time left.”
We kick it around some more and agree to meet after I get off work. I know what he's saying, and maybe he's right. I’m out of my league. I can’t save anyone.
But I just can’t let it go.
TWENTY-EIGHT
When Jacob finally gets back around two, I can tell he's had a liquid lunch. And by liquid I don’t mean a protein shake, not unless they’ve started making them with vodka. It isn’t obvious or anything. But if you see someone eight hours a day, five days a week, you know what to expect from them. So when he starts talking to me more than his usual grouching and grunts, I know something's up.
“You know,” he says, leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling. “Nothing ever changes down here. Could be summer up on the surface, could be winter. But the temperature in this room stays the same. The seasons can’t reach this far down. You know what the drivers and the conductors call this place?”
I shrug. “The dungeon?” My own pet name for it.
“Hah. No. They call it the morgue. Where careers come to die.”
My brain's already exhausted and I’m not in the mood to listen, but this is the only time he's ever really talked to me.
“This is where they put you on ice,” he mumbles.
“So they sent you down here?”
He takes so long to answer I’m thinking he didn’t hear me. But then he says: “No. I put myself on ice.”
I could ask why, but I already know the story.
“I’m the only driver who ever asked to come down here.” He tugs at his ear thoughtfully. “This is where they used to send suspended drivers. I thought I’d only stay a few weeks, but I found out I fit here in the morgue. It's quiet, nothing changes. The world could go up in smoke and we wouldn’t feel a thing.”
Jacob fixes on me with his booze-blurred eyes.
“But you don’t belong here, kid,” he says. “When your time's up, just run and don’t look back.”
He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes like he's going to doze off.
Jacob's wrong about me, though. I belong here as much as he does. We’re both in hiding; he's just been at it longer.
“I’m going to go get some lunch,” I say, not sure if he's still conscious.
His eyes stay closed, but he says, “Go ahead.”
Back in the stacks, I grab the pair of sunglasses I skimmed out of one of the Y sale boxes. Their time has expired, and I know they'll look perfect on me. I hear the dungeon door open and close, and I’m wiping the glasses on my jeans to clean some dust when the bell rings.
What part of “I’m on lunch” does the old man not understand?
When I get to the front, there's a guy standing on the other side of the counter. He's wearing glasses thick enough to distort his eyes, making them look larger than they should. Jacob glances back at me.
“Before you go,” he says, “check for one more thing. Looking for a book.”
“What's the title?” I ask.
Jacob shakes his head. “He says there's no title, just a plain cover. A brown leather-bound book, with yellow edges on the pages. Lost it a couple weeks ago. Check the shelves.”
I stare back at Jacob. I think my heart stops beating—I’m definitely not breathing. I don’t move my head, but my eyes shift to where the man with the glasses is standing. He's about six feet tall and looks solid, with dark buzz-cut hair. His face is seriously acne-scarred. He looks back at me like I’m an insect he's thinking of stepping on.
“Sometime today!” Jacob prods me.
That breaks me out of it. I manage to turn and disappear into the stacks.
I never dreamed he might come looking for his diary. Right now, the book is sitting in my closet under my old hockey equipment. And now, after all the time I’ve spent searching for him, Roach comes and finds me.
I know you, I want to shout at him. I know what you are.
I stare at the shelves in a blind confusion, swallowing back a growing panic. I breathe in deeply and let it out with a shudder.
Get a grip! Focus! What do I do, now that I’ve found him?
After another ragged breath, it comes to me. Simple. Follow him home, get an address, then hand everything over to the cops in a nice little package.
That's the plan, only like all my plans it's kind of blurry— I’m not big on thinking things through. That's what Vinny's for. But there's no time anyway. Just act normal. Like all roaches, he's probably super-sensitive to what's going on around him. I don’t want to suddenly turn on the lights and lose him when he runs and hides.
I give it another half minute, like I’m actually looking for his book. Then I walk back to the counter with a blank face.
“No. Nothing,” I tell him. “Must not have been turned in.”
There's a weird moment there where Roach just stares at me with his strangely vacant mud-brown eyes. Distorted behind those lenses, they seem to see more than they should, and more deeply. Then he grunts, turns to the door and leaves.
Jacob eases back into his chair again, staring into space with his eyelids drooping.
I grab a clean-looking Budweiser cap off the top of the New Arrivals box. I make sure there's nothing disgusting inside and put it on. I’ve got my shades, too. Now that Roach has seen me, I'll need a little camouflage.
“Okay,” I tell Jacob. “I’m taking off now.”
But he's already dozing, chin drooping toward his chest.
I listen by the door until I hear the elevator closing in the hall; then I bolt. The elevator moves like an arthritic turtle. Taking the stairs two at a time, I can beat or at least tie him on a race to the subway level. Still, it's six flights of stairs, and my lungs give out around five. The stairwell feels as if it's been sucke
d dry of oxygen. I stumble and end up taking the last flight using my hands as well as my feet.
Opening the door at the top, I look down the wide hall, past the maintenance offices to where the elevator doors are closing. There he is, walking away. I notice for the first time he's wearing the blue shirt and gray pants that are part of the uniform of Yorkdale security. I give him some room, keeping pace, only rushing a bit when he gets to the end of the hall and turns left. I can’t lose him now.
We go through the main entrance of Bay Station. There's enough of a crowd coming and going from downtown this afternoon that I can stay close but still hidden.
Following him down to the platform, I track where he looks and what he's looking at. Not real big on subtlety, Roach stares at the women he passes like he's at a strip club and they’re here for his amusement. Maybe it's only because I know how he thinks, but the way he stares, he's not just undressing women with his eyes—he's dissecting them.
The train comes and Roach gets on the first car, like I knew he would. Now that he's told me his secrets, I know him better than anybody. Getting on the second car so he doesn’t catch on to me, I stand watching through the window of the door that connects the cars.
We transfer at Spadina to another line, the one that leads out past Yorkdale, ending at Downsview. Everything's flowing now, and I can almost see his moves before he makes them. In my nightmares he was a faceless shadow, unreachable and unstoppable. Now that I have him in sight, he's shrunk down to human form, evil in a plain wrapper. And I’ve become the shadow, his shadow, following him all the way home.
I watch him watching potential targets. He must have been panicked when he realized his diary was missing, must have finally worked back in his head to where he lost it. All his twisted fantasies spelled out. I’m sure he never dreamed his precious book would be used to bring him down.
I’m expecting him to get off at Yorkdale—makes sense if he's working two to ten—but we pass it by and he's still here. I breathe out a sigh. If he’d gone to work, it would have meant more late-night surveillance, waiting till his shift ended. But now it looks like he's leading me straight back to his comfort zone. Me and Vinny focused on the closing shift at the mall, which made sense, considering Roach's target list and hunting times. But it's looking like he worked six A.M. to two, then came over to the lost and found. I guess even a killer has to work a different shift occasionally.
Getting off at Wilson Station, I trail him to the bus loop. This is the tricky part. I have to get on the bus with him. There's no other way. Pulling down the brim of my cap, hoping he won’t see past the shades and the Bud cap, I get in line with him five people back. I stare at the floor when I board. He grabs a single seat and I pass him by, moving to the rear.
The Sheppard Avenue bus pulls out of the loop and into traffic. This bus route weaves through the Wilson Heights neighborhood until it hits Sheppard. Looking out the window at the houses and low-rises, I can see in my mind's eye the map Vinny customized, with all the red and green dots, old and new crimes clustered here in the Heights. Fires in empty houses, in Dumpsters and construction sites. Mutilated cats chained to telephone poles in the alleys. These are his own personal killing fields.
The overcast sky lends its gray color to these streets, making them look old and lifeless. I’m seeing things through the filter of his words in the diary, where everything tastes of death and decay. What happened to him when he was a kid—all the twisted things he only hints at, the events that made him—happened here.
Roach only rides three stops, six or seven blocks. He's not the only one getting off the bus, so I try and keep a couple of people between us in case he looks back. He steps out and turns left. I give him plenty of room. So close now, I don’t want to spook him.
At the corner up ahead, he waits for the light to cross Faywood Boulevard. Scared he might look my way, I duck into a convenience store. Right on cue, two seconds later he glances down the sidewalk where I would have been. We’re in a weird kind of synch—I’m reading his moves before he even makes them. This is what it must be like to be good at chess, able to see five moves ahead.
I let him get halfway across the intersection before leaving the store. The light goes red, and I can’t wait another minute for it to change again, so when he goes right on Cedar Road out of sight, I sprint across and almost get pancaked by a truck. At least the driver doesn’t honk and attract attention to me.
It's a good thing I moved fast or I would have lost him. When I catch sight of him again he's climbing the stairs to a place on Cedar, third house in from the corner. Roach checks the mail, pulls out what looks like a magazine from the box and goes inside.
Cedar is a quiet tree-lined street, with houses a little worn around the edges.
Five minutes go by with me standing there, focused on the closed door. This is it. I’ve found the place. I do a walk-by, trying to keep my face forward while searching for any movement in the windows from the corner of my eye. The curtains are all drawn. Nothing to see except the number eighteen on the door. It's a short block, and when I get to the end I take a stroll around to the back alley to see the rear of the house.
Telephone poles run down the alley. I can’t help wondering if he used any of them to hang up one of those cats. In a bizarre way, the neighborhood seems a little familiar, like I’ve already read the guidebook for it.
Number eighteen doesn’t look much different from the rear, except for a couple of oil drums in the backyard. They could be for burning leaves. Or for storing a body. No, that's crazy! You don’t dump a body in a drum in your backyard in the middle of summer. It would stink up the whole block. One of the drums has its top on, sealed shut. But that means nothing.
I’m getting a little shaky. Not thinking straight. I blink the sweat out of my eyes.
The back curtains are drawn. The windows of the basement, where Roach talked about being caged by his grandmother, are all painted black. Maybe he still keeps his room down there.
But is that all he's keeping down there? When he lost the diary he was still planning and preparing, but that was two weeks ago. He's had time to finally go over the edge and grab one of his targets. A woman to keep in his old cage.
Behind those blacked-out windows right now, he could be performing more of his experiments. But not on mice anymore.
I’m supposed to turn everything over to the cops now; that's what I promised Vinny. Give them the diary, the address. Lead them here and point him out.
But I don’t know. Are they going to buy it? The diary is more of a scrapbook than a smoking gun. Would they even bring him in for questioning?
How long would it take to convince them this is real? I’ve already been down that road, and it went nowhere.
And is there any time left?
I pull off the Bud cap and run my hand through my sweaty hair.
God, I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I go down to the end of the alley. It leads back onto Faywood. Across the street on the corner there's a coffee shop. I walk over, just to be moving, to give me time to think. From inside the coffee shop I’ve got a good view of the front of number eighteen Cedar Road. I buy a brownie and go sit by the window. Jacob will be pissed if this thing eats up the rest of the day. But he always seems pissed. How will I know the difference?
Two bites into my brownie, Roach leaves his house wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He goes and waits at the bus stop across the street from me on Faywood. I shift seats so I’m hidden behind a cactus on the counter.
A minute later the bus comes. For a second I debate if I can still tail him without giving myself away. But I stay there, watching past the thorns of the cactus as he gets on.
I know what I told Vinny, but now that I’m here everything's different. I’ve got this idea. It's what Vin would call a seriously stupid idea.
The bus pulls away and I’m left staring at number eighteen over on Cedar.
I get up and go to the counter.
�
�Is there a pay phone?”
TWENTY-NINE
“Yeah,” a bored voice answers on the fourth ring.
“Hey, Wayne. It's me. You doing anything?”
“Duncan. No. I’m doing nothing,” he says. “And I plan on doing some more nothing later on.”
“Remember what you were saying yesterday, about going straight?”
“I have been legal for twenty-four hours now. I think I’m cured.”
“Well, how about starting your new legal life tomorrow? I need a little favor.”
“An illegal favor?”
“What's illegal, anyway? Just someone else's rules, isn’t that what you used to say?”
Part of me hates myself for doing this; it's like I’m waving a needle in front of an addict. Wayne's always been the devil on my shoulder—now I’m the devil on his. But I’m desperate. I need him.
“Legal is in the eye of the beholder,” Wayne says. Beneath the joking I hear a sad edge to his voice. I try and block it out.
“I just need you to pick a lock. You can still do that, right?”
“The fingers never forget. What kind of lock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what's the lock on?”
“A door. To a house.”
He's quiet on the other end, and I’m holding my breath. He can’t say no.
“Sounds like a B and E,” Wayne says, serious now.
“It's not really a break and enter. Not for you. All you have to do is work the lock. Just get me in. For you, you’re not going to be entering. And it's not really breaking either. You’re just… opening.”
“Right. Opening. So what, you’re gonna rob some place?”
“I’m not going to take anything.”
“Then why—”
“It would take too long, man. There's kind of a time crunch. I understand if you can’t do it.” It kills me to say that last part. I’m standing here at the phone in the coffee shop with my eyes squeezed shut, silently begging him to come do this for me.
After an eternity, Wayne says, “I can only do simple locks. No dead bolts.”
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