by James Sallis
“YOU DOING OKAY, though. Right?”
“Fine. Police were here?”
“I saw them in the front yard and came on over, to be sure you were all right. Someone reported a prowler in the neighborhood.”
Mrs. Flores had waved from her porch and started toward Jimmie when he turned onto the street.
“They weren’t trying to get in the house?”
“Checking yards is what they said. Just going down the line.”
Pausing at the door, he said, “If you’ll wait, I can get that pan for you,” but she followed him in and stood by the front door. He went to the kitchen and came back with the pan. “Sorry it’s taken so long to return it. The enchiladas were great. Delicious.”
“Your mother doesn’t cook much?”
“Sure she does. But not Mexican food.”
“I could show you how to make them, just the same as me, if you’re interested.”
“Thank you.”
Her eyes had been glancing around the room. Now they met his.
“How long have they been gone?” she said.
“What?”
“Your parents. How long?”
“They—”
“Lots of people don’t notice what doesn’t have to do with them. Some do. I’ve suspected for a while now. You’re a smart boy, you’ve done good.” She shook her head. “People up here baby their children so much. But don’t worry, no one will hear it from me. Where I come from …” She didn’t say anything for a moment. “The way you’re brought up, the way you think, a lot about that doesn’t change. But listen.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You need anything, you have a problem, whatever it is, you come to me, okay? Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am, I can.”
“That’s good.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Flores.”
He watched her go down the walk, thinking how she got around like a much younger, much thinner woman than she was. Back on the porch, in her rocker, she waved and bent over to retrieve her glass of iced tea. Jimmie went inside, picking up the scatter of mail by the door. A thick 4 × 8 envelope remained lodged in the mail slot, and he looked at the return address, typed, cavities of the o’s and e’s dark with old ink. Slowdown Time, a collector’s site and occasional supplier, and one of the few to still put out a print catalog.
Hungry, he went into the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. He was standing looking in the refrigerator when he heard floorboards creak.
Someone was on the back porch trying to look in. They couldn’t see much, of course, not with the tight-gauge screen door and curtains. But they shouldn’t be there. She shouldn’t be there.
A woman.
Who now had stepped off the porch and, hands cupped around her face, was trying to see in through the windows above the sink. Her hair was gathered on top somehow.
She tapped on the window.
“Hello? I can see you in there. James—is that you?”
Someone who knew him, then. Or knew about him. Someone who had come looking for him. A tumble of thoughts went through his mind, none of them good.
First the police, now this.
When he opened the door and saw her, he knew. She’d changed, but not that much. She looked younger than he remembered. Had on loose jeans, a T-shirt with a dressy jacket over it, flat-heeled black shoes. He remembered the hair thing now, a French twist, she always wore her hair like that when she got dressed up. There seemed an odd lightness to her.
“Jimmie? Is that you? My God, how you’ve grown!”
He stepped back from the door, and she came in. Limping? Favoring her left leg, at any rate. She reached up to smooth her hair. Nails cut short, not long the way he remembered them.
“Where’s your father? Where’s Jim?”
“He’s not around.”
She took a glass out of the cabinet, ran it full from the tap, and turned, leaning against the sink. The glass was one of his from when he was much younger. It had bears on it.
“I guess I can’t hope that you’re glad to see me. But it sure makes me smile to see you. You look good, Jimmie.”
She drank the water in one long swallow.
“You’re in, what, the eighth grade now? High school?”
“Something like that.”
“And I bet your grades are good.”
After a moment he said, “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“I did want to see you.” She rinsed the glass and put it in the sink. “But I need to talk to Jim, to your father.”
“After all this time.”
“It’s not really that long, Jimmie.”
“And you two haven’t been in touch?”
“Why would we be in touch?”
He looked away.
“Jimmie …” She took a single step toward him. “What was between your father and me, it stays there, okay? Between us.”
“If you say so.”
“Is he still working at Ralph’s? I can swing by there. I have to be getting back pretty soon.”
“He’s not there.”
“Okay. Where, then?”
“You think you’re the only one who can leave?”
She looked around, a scatter of visual clues coming together behind her eyes. “It’s just you, isn’t it?” she said.
Jimmie nodded. “He didn’t stay too long after you … left. Went away. Whatever you did. It’s been a year now.”
“And you’re okay? How did you get by? What are you living on?”
“I sold your silver dollars.”
“My what?”
“Your silver dollars, the ones your grandfather gave you. In the bottom of your chest of drawers. And Dad’s car. And some other things.”
“I’ll bet you did. Oh, Jimmie! What have we done, how did this all happen?”
“I’m okay with it. I’m good.”
“So it would seem. The need for parenting is obviously overstated. Not that you ever had much of that.”
She took another step toward him, saw him struggle to avoid instinctively stepping back, and stepped back herself.
“You don’t know where James has gone, then? He hasn’t written, called?”
“No idea.”
“Well … I guess that either complicates things or simplifies them.”
She had idled about the kitchen and now stood by the refrigerator, finger lightly on a sheet of composition paper layered with faded crayon. Buildings jutted dark-eyed above empty streets. The entire upper third of the sheet was heavily scribbled with black. He had held the crayon on its side and pushed hard, back and forth.
“I remember this. You’d seen some movie on TV, aliens who looked like giant rutabagas come to destroy the world. They started taking over people’s minds, one by one. You drew this the next day and told us ‘This is how it’s really going to happen.’ You were five. As you got bigger we kept moving it up on the door. Now just look where it is.”
She went back to the window. “And look where we are.” Then, turning, “I can’t stay, Jimmie. But is it okay if I come back from time to time? When I can?”
“If you want to.”
“Good. I’ll see you soon, then. You take care of yourself. But that’s exactly what you have been doing, isn’t it?”
He stood inside the door after she left, looking out into the bare backyard. Had he really played out there? It seemed so unlikely, or so long ago. He saw that the screen on the door was pushed in at the bottom. He’d have to fix that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DOLLS.
What the hell did dolls have to do with anything?
It had come up in talking to Hector, his usual he-maybe-heard-someone-heard that was half the time garbage, the other half incomprehensible, with once in a great while a tiny sliver of something substantial stuck between. Then when he got home from his shift and from sitting in his car outside the hospice for over an hour, watching shapes and shadows move around inside the windows, there it was,
on the pad: Please contact me. This is for you alone. I sell dolls. He’d mixed a drink and sat down to go through his notes.
Dolls.
And now he found himself looking at that sunset over Camelback again. Thing had been getting lots of screen time of late. Graves was off testifying at a hearing, guy they’d finally busted for ag assault after giving the poor SOB, a vet, three walks. This time they hadn’t been able to smooth it over, and truthfully hadn’t been much inclined to do so.
Down the row between desks, Robert came plodding with his cart and his earphones plugged not into an iPod but into one of those pocket-size transistor radios you never saw anymore, one he’d had, he kept telling everyone, since he was a kid. The mailman, even though no one got mail anymore. Mostly Robert passed out memos and requests for donations and the like, and those things that were addressed to specific people, he generally got them wrong. His father had worked the job for nineteen years, had five months to go till retirement and pension before he made a routine traffic stop, got slammed with the door then run over four or five times. Didn’t even make it to the hospital. Right after that, the chief gave his kid this job and he’s had it ever since, going on ten, twelve years now. Robert’s around thirty.
Sayles thanked him and looked at the envelope Robert had handed him. He’d take it over to Barry Vandiver later.
Robert, always a steady-rolling, keep-it-moving sort even with nothing to do, which was most of the time, lingered by Sayles’s desk. Sayles watched him pull out the earplugs and carefully place them in his shirt pocket with the radio.
“You got a minute, Detective? Can I ask you something?”
“Sure thing.” He pushed a chair a couple of inches Robert’s way with his foot, but Robert remained standing.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I found something, and I don’t know what to do.” His eyes met Sayles’s and slid away again. “I was looking for something I just up and remembered, a shirt my dad used to wear, pretty blue one with red roses, I thought it might fit me now. All his things are in the closet in the other bedroom.”
After ten or twelve years? Sayles thought.
“But I couldn’t find the shirt at first. It was all folded up in a plastic bag from the cleaners, with some dress shirts, in a box on the top shelf. This was in the box, too.”
Robert held out a slim notebook, the kind a lot of cops use for taking notes at the scene. It came from the same pocket he kept the radio in. Sayles took it and looked at the first page, then leafed quickly through. Names in one column—mostly initials—with dates and sums of money. Little doubt what this was. Thousands upon thousands of dollars over the years.
Sayles looked back up at Robert. Did he know? Always hard to tell how much Robert understood about things. Couldn’t read it in his eyes, his face. A glimmer, maybe. A suspicion.
Most people, when they ask what they should do, they’re only wanting your validation for what they’ve already done or decided to do: Tell me I’m right. This was different. Robert was authentically asking for advice.
“What did your mother say?”
“She doesn’t talk to me much these days. Besides, I haven’t told her yet.”
“Don’t.” Sayles handed him the notebook. “It’s nothing. Put it back in the box, Robert.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Back in the box and leave it there.”
“Okay. Thank you, Detective.” Robert replaced the notebook, pulled out the earphones and fingered them into his ears, pushed his cart on down the line.
Maybe ten words had passed between them all these years. So why had Robert picked him to talk to about this? To share what might be the only moral dilemma he’d ever—
Well, that was stupid. For all he knew, behind the apparent blandness, behind the dullness, Robert’s every hour might be chockful of dilemmas, moral and otherwise. Things we all take for granted could be pitched battles—
And that was just as stupid from the other direction.
The closer you looked at the simplest thing, the deeper you dug, the more complicated it got. How could anyone ever fall folly to believing he understood anything?
Robert had parked his cart squarely by the wall, poured out dregs of coffee from both carafes, and begun rinsing them preparatory to making fresh.
Dolls.
And who was this guy? He’d had Lee Volheim, the department IT man he knew best, follow up on the e-mail. Bounced through half a dozen servers, Volheim said, commercial origin, a library, print shop, cybercafé. Like that. Best he could do.
Doll Seller: We should meet, Sayles had sent, suggesting an open, public place.
No, came the reply. He’d had to wait some time for it, as it bounced (he now knew) like a pinball from bumper to bumper.
Where then?
Here.
?
On the Web.
Right, Sayles thought. Here. Where you can remain a ghost.
Just after that, he and Graves had pulled a call, attempted murder. Turned out to be one of the expensive office complexes on Scottsdale Road near Biltmore Fashion Park, all copper-colored glass and reflected sunlight. Walked in on a man sitting at his desk and gone as pale as anyone Sayles’d ever seen. His right hand was pinned to the desk, teak from the look of it, with a letter opener shaped like a tiny samurai sword. His secretary, the swordsman, sat in a chair nearby, knees carefully together, hands on the chair arms, smiling.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
OKAY, SO HE’D SPENT most of the night throwing up, remains of his broiled fish and steamed vegetables swimming about the sink. He’d had to take his fingers and work the mess into the drain, water on full force the whole time. That didn’t mean he was getting worse, getting closer. It could be these damn pills.
Sure it could. Or it could be the ozone layer. Or all the wastes, detergents, meds, and solvents leached into the water from the sewers and from there into the ground—like those wiping out whole species of birds and amphibians.
Sure.
Sunken eyes, hollows, shadow. Waxlike skin. The light coming from above the bathroom mirror in this Motel 8 or Paradise Motel or whatever the hell it was would make even a healthy, young man look ghostly. There were four bulbs set six inches apart. He held up his hand and turned: four dovetailed images on the wall. When he opened his hand, sixteen fingers moved all together. But not his blurred vision—not this time.
He came out of the bathroom as from a cave, blinking; past his window, daylight was kicking out its first footholds. He watched a bus disgorge its load of the last of the night folk heading home and replace them with those just beginning their day, wondering how many of them might be thinking about their lives, where they’d wound up, where they’d began, the curves and crooks and bland mystery of it all, all these Jonahs.
He had an hour before he was supposed to contact this cop, Sayles. Time enough for breakfast. And while his throat constricted at the thought of food, he needed to eat something, keep his strength up.
He had oatmeal at the cybercafé, eating slowly, and managed to keep it down. Sat there, because a blind man came in halfway through, seeing-eye dog curled beneath his table, remembering Witch.
Back in the day. He was renting this tiny house outside town, driving in for classes three days a week in a Dodge that, whenever it rained or got really humid, spewed smoke like a dragon. Ellie had moved in that August. Few months later she showed up—he and a paper on microeconomics were locked in a death struggle—with “a surprise for you,” the surprise, out in her truck, being a sodden, swayback mutt of a dog she’d found advertised on the bulletin board at the Laundromat. Witch had immediately taken to him, would sit by his desk for hours as he studied, then get up and politely scratch at the door to go out. He’d watch her vanish into the high corn.
Then one afternoon she came back with blood on her muzzle, followed shortly by the landlord, Mr. Brenneman, who informed him that Witch had killed one
of his sheep.
Christian apologized, and offered to pay, wondering how much a sheep might cost and where the hell he thought he’d get the money.
Mr. Brenneman didn’t respond right away.
“Generally,” he said, “we have to put them down, son. Once they get the taste for blood, they don’t stop.”
For better than a week, Christian kept Witch in, then one day, absorbed in schoolwork, without thinking about it when she scratched at the door, he got up and let her out. Sitting there peering hard into the latticework of quadratic equations, hoping that his vision somehow would clear, he heard the two shotgun blasts and knew instantly what they were. Hands poised above, he listened to the hum of his typewriter fill the new silence.
Within the month, Ellie was gone as well. And within the year, everything else of his life—as he sat enjungled, with undershirt, pants, a world-class case of athlete’s foot, beer for breakfast, and no silence anywhere.
Finishing his oatmeal, Christian checked the clock again.
Time.
He had just signed on, moments later, when he heard a crash and someone saying, first softly, then loudly, “Joe? Joe?” Instantly, even after all these years, he was in go mode: battlefield breathing, eyes taking it all in, jamming the pieces together at some level below conscious thought. Man stood to get a refill, went down with mug in hand, took the table with him. Woman looking down, still sitting, round table rocking back and forth, dark stain (coffee? blood?) spreading on her skirt.
“Somebody …?” she said.
And Christian was there, beside the man. Carotid pulse thready, skin pale and clammy, diaphoretic. Respirations shallow but regular.
“Sir, can you hear me?”
A nod.
“Open your eyes.”
He did, and they darted about startled, so he’d definitely been out. Pupils equal. And he tracked Christian’s finger when asked.
“Ma’am, does he have heart problems that you know of?”
“I don’t think so. He was just saying that he hadn’t eaten all day.”
Which probably meant that he hadn’t drunk much of anything either. Christian was already dragging the chair over, propping the man’s legs up on it.