by James Sallis
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“THING ABOUT IT IS, you sit there and you’re mad, but after a while the mad starts to get boring, so you move on, think about other stuff. How often do you get the chance, day to day, to just sit and think?”
Too often.
“And you for damn sure can’t sleep. Sounds like a train station down in there. Doors clanging, walls shaking, voices everywhere. Footsteps you hear from half a mile away. Deep thoughts, that’s what come to you. What’s it all about, why are we here, who am I. All that shit. Then you look around and all at once you see it’s like you’re back in college, this steaming mass of bodies, bullshit, attitude, big talk.”
Having never been to college, Sayles wouldn’t know. Back in the day, when he came on the job, high school was good enough; lot of old-timers didn’t have that. Nowadays, newbies like Graves, they knew everything. Stop for hot dogs at a roach coach and you’d hear about the industrial revolution. By the time your indigestion kicked in some miles down the road, they’d be on to union activity in the forties, maybe hum a bar or two of “Which Side Are You On?”
Truth to tell, Sayles often thought of his partner as pompous and full of himself, never far away from cutting one fine figure of fool. Kind of guy who grew up in Cedar Rapids on meat loaf and green bean casserole and just knew he was beyond all that. But Sayles also had to remember how many times he’d seen Graves turn on a dime, veering from his usual mode to sudden, wheels-down compassion in the presence of real pain.
Graves waved a hand. “And then I woke up.” He waited. “It’s the punch line—”
“I know, Graves. I know. But what the hell are you doing here? You just got out, right? Why aren’t you home? Showering, sleeping, having a stiff one?”
“And pass up all this?” He cast a glance, proud shepherd, out over the field of desks, chairs, side tables, and filing cabinets. “I would not, however, pass up a kind offer of breakfast.”
At the Early Bird, surrounded by lawyers prepping clients or puffing out cheeks at one another, businessmen with laptops, and slow-eyed hospital workers going off shift, Sayles heard about his partner’s prison experience, which sadly, unlike what people seemed to claim these days of just about anything from reading a bestseller to going to the dentist, had not changed his life.
As they ate, Sayles brought Graves up to speed on their cases, not that there was much speed to any of them. Janice Beck’s boyfriend had come in to confess, saying he put her and the child in the cedar chest to keep them “fresh” and keep the bugs away. They’d packed him off to the psych ward. The Navajo girl from the irrigation ditch, that one was starting to look not random like they first thought, or gang related, but like the stepmother’s doing; she’d had a hand in the pot, anyway. When Sayles came to Rankin’s shooting, he didn’t mention the doll connection, the note left for him at his home, or his Internet communications with an apparent witness.
“Something’ll turn up,” Graves said.
“Sure it will.” Tomorrow’s a new day and all that.
Two tables over, a man sat feeding the froth off his latte to his three-year-old, skimming it up half a spoonful at a time. Two servers, one male, one female, stood in the entryway by the kitchen door talking about a concert they’d been to. A woman walked out of the dress shop across the street with a single elegantly wrapped package.
All around him, people were going on with their lives, things pretty much the same day to day. Mothers were dying, husbands slipping away, new wars breaking out and old ones from years before continuing, but their lives went right on. Certainly not the first time he’d had the thought. Just seemed he was having it more and more often of late.
Then, and with no idea why he was doing this, Sayles leaned in close over the table and told Graves about Josie: how he’d got up and found her gone, the medications she’d ditched, the note, where she was.
Getting Graves home took some time. Road crews were tearing up Central again, and every alternate Sayles tried, Seventh, Osborn, turned out to be as hopeless. They sat through change after change of light at Indian School watching the light rail glide by. Sayles’s revelation had visibly subdued him, but his partner was wired. Nerves, adrenaline, sleeplessness. Residual anger. Sayles had told Graves how he sat outside the hospice some nights.
“And you don’t go in?”
Sayles shook his head.
“Why?”
Respect. Honor. Fear.
But how, not why, was the true question. How could he do that, not go inside, see her? Over and again we manage to convince ourselves that we’re doing what’s right, even when our actions violate another’s wishes, the will of society itself, and all good sense. It would be so easy for him to say, Josie really does want me there, or to decide that it had to be, after all, in her best interest. But a quieter voice always surfaced. Well, not so much surfaced as made its presence known. Like that unease that settles on you and you don’t know where it comes from.
Still a lot of day left when he got back to the squad. He paged through the five case folders on top. Sometimes something will jump out at you. Or something will seep in, do its work later, cause you to look at what’s on the table in a different way. One of his high school teachers had a favorite saying: You gotta take time to shake the jar.
So he shook and shook, and not much happened.
Late that afternoon he fielded a call to a Circle K where “some old dude was hanging around outside hassling customers” and it looked like there might be a body back in the alley. Patrol car called in asking for a supervisor or detective. Man was all of forty, possibly a deaf-mute, possibly just too addled to speak intelligibly. The body was the man’s ragged bedroll. Sayles gave him five dollars.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FROM ACROSS THE STREET he watched John Rankin hobble out the side door by the carport and stand in his robe and bare feet. The man had survived the gunshot, would have recovered in short order, but the cardiac arrest had drained him, tapped his body out. You could see the exhaustion in his walk, defeat in the slump of his body. Even at this remove, his skin looked gray. So they’d brought him around, but the heart had been damaged. And once the heart stopped, other organs started sliding south, so he probably had further damage, could be easing into kidney failure. Maybe even a touch of brain dysfunction, to judge by the slight drag of his left foot. A light stroke—or anoxia.
We spend as little time as possible dwelling on the shambles we’re likely to become, and for good reason. TV, movies, they save the guy’s life, the last you see of him he’s getting rolled out of the hospital in a bright chrome wheelchair. Never mind that he can’t feed himself, that his constant drool is so nasty it eats through his shirts, or that he pees himself constantly in little geysers that smell of rot.
Strange neighborhood out here, five minutes from the city, felt more like small town than suburb. Homes with sagging roofs and vehicles parked in the yard abutted others with manicured lawns and monogrammed shutters. One family up the street apparently lived in a front yard packed with chairs, an old couch, children’s wading pools and toys, a table or two, multiple coolers. Walking by another, he wondered when he’d last seen window boxes with flowers in them.
Two days, and no sign of the wife. Social worker of some kind, he remembered. Maybe his information was wrong and they’d split up before this. Or maybe she couldn’t handle what happened, packed it in and walked. Single car, the year-old Hyundai that stayed in the carport. Rankin would come out, pick up the newspaper or look around, go in. Once he came back out right away and half-pulled, half-pushed the recycle bin to curbside. The bench under the picture window in front of the house was thick with spiderwebs. Rankin turned the TV on when he got up in the morning, turned it off when he went to bed for the night. Light flickered against the drapes, and as dark fell you could watch the screen through them.
Okay, so he wasn’t going to let it go.
Not that he had much idea what he was doing here, what he expected. Just
he was paying attention, looking as always for the thing that didn’t fit.
Far as he could tell, the cop, Sayles, was out of the picture. He hadn’t expected much to come of that anyway, but hey, good for a try. Hadn’t found out anything more from him and didn’t look like he would. That left Rankin himself.
Christian had been watching for the better part of four days. If the guy’s life was nondescript before, now it had gone positively featureless. No visitors. No activity. No clothes other than T-shirt, boxers, and bathrobe, as far as he had seen. The TV went on, the TV went off. Lights did the same: living room, back bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. Simple points against which to graph a man’s life.
Of course, it wasn’t Rankin that he was watching.
The rental car smelled of stale fried food with an overlay of pine scent from someone’s misguided attempt to fix that. He’d looked at five or six before taking it. The others were spiff and clean and newish. This one wasn’t. He’d been out to check the neighborhood, knew what would fit in, what was likely to be noticed. He had a thermos of coffee, two sandwiches from a mom-and-pop convenience store, chocolate, an apple. A newspaper he could pretend to be reading should he draw anyone’s attention.
He was thinking how kids back in school, kids these days too, he was sure, always talked about being bored, and how he could never understand that. The way wind moved in the trees, the sheen of sunlight on glass or steel, a fly’s wings—everything was of interest. You just had to pay attention, you just had to look.
Reaching to roll down the window, he saw that his hand shook and swallowed one of the pills, followed it with coffee.
Evidence of kids everywhere here. The wading pools in the inside-out living room up the street, swing sets jutting above fences in backyards, bicycles in driveways, posters in windows.
Mr. Earll lived down the street from them when Christian was a kid. He was old, much older than the wife with whom he’d had two children. Old enough to be her father, everyone said, then paused before adding or worse. From Christian’s earliest memories, Mr. Earll had lived not in the house but in the garage around back, going in only for meals. Like he’d served his purpose and wasn’t of use anymore. Been a bachelor all his life and couldn’t get used to anything else, the kinder souls among them said. Had a TV out there, on which he watched all the comedies, Andy Griffith, Lucy, Danny Thomas, and never laughed. Maybe he went inside to sleep; Christian wondered. But he was always out there, and the TV was always on. Mr. Earll had been a teacher, taught science at the local high school for better than forty years. Yeah, the kids said, he’s so old he was around when they invented science.
Christian went to school with the younger brother, Jerry Earll, who acted like everything was perfectly normal back at the house. Hell, for him, it was normal. That age, we think whatever we see around us, that’s what there is. The old man died their junior year. His wife found him out there early one morning sitting in his ratty old recliner, TV on, nothing but a test pattern and static.
Christian’s eyes went to the tan Honda even before it turned into the street. He’d seen it, or one just like it, earlier today. Stock and boxy, three to five years old, no parking decals, bumper stickers, or other markers, local plate, tires good but had some miles on them. Single occupant. The Honda swung easily, unhurriedly, around the corner at Cumberland, headed his way. Christian picked up the newspaper.
Probably a neighborhood car, cutting through, cruising home. But as it reached Rankin’s house, he was sure the driver’s head turned that way, and turned back only after it was past. Then it was abreast of the rental. Three dents in the front fender spaced like on a pawn shop sign—so it was the car he’d seen earlier. Just as Christian lowered the newspaper, the driver looked his way.
Christian knew that face …
Suddenly dizzy, he put his head back on the seat. There was a moment when he felt the world spiraling down around him, contracting. Then nothing.
His left arm wouldn’t move.
His eyes opened to bright, bright lights. Water-stained tile ceiling. Faces. Then, in a rush, sounds.
“He’s coming up.”
“Sir, you’re all right, can you hear me?”
“I’m seeing redness and swelling by the IV site, Doctor.”
“Infiltrated?”
“Line’s patent. Reaction?”
“You’re in the hospital, sir. You passed out.”
“Ambye.”
“What?”
“Otics.”
Someone leaned close. Coffee on her breath.
It was the antibiotics. For years never had a problem. Then, last time, his skin turned so red it looked like he’d been boiled, and hives the size of marbles broke out everywhere. Armpits, groin, even (he’d swear) inside his eyelids.
“No sign of anaphylaxis.”
“Resp’s steady at fourteen, sat ninety-four, BS good bilaterally.”
Christian lifted his head. The arm was strapped down, with two IVs running piggyback. He tried again:
“Antibiotics.”
“You’re allergic?” Lilt to the soft voice, an accent. Nigerian, maybe.
He nodded, remembering how the young resident had insisted that he was not allergic, merely sensitive, to the cephalosporin he’d been given. Still a little goofy from sedation, he’d drifted off thinking how he was now a sensitive male. When he woke again, thanks to steroids, the hives were gone.
“Can you tell us your name, sir?” Duh-duh-DA-duh-duh-DA-duh.
This time, too, he was still a little goofy. He tried to remember what name was on the ID he’d been carrying and couldn’t.
“Christian,” he finally said.
“I’m sorry, are you asking for a minister, sir?”
“Christian. My name.” All these years, even when he thought of himself that way, he’d never used the name. “What everyone calls me.”
“Oh, I see. And how are you, Christian?”
“Okay.”
“Can you tell us what happened?”
He shook his head.
“Are you diabetic?”
“No.”
“Have you a history of heart problems? Seizures?”
“No.”
“The EMTs brought in meds. These were in the automobile with you. You were taking these?”
“Yes.”
“One is prescription, a common pain medication, quite strong. The other, we cannot identify.”
Belgium. He’d flown there from Paris. A ground-floor flat on the waterfront that looked more like a library or professor’s study than a physician’s office. He remembered bright red and yellow flowers on tall stems in a vase at the window. Dr. Van Veeteren had a poorly repaired harelip. He smelled of rosewater and stale cigarette smoke.
“Lab work’s in, Doctor.”
The woman above him turned away, turned back holding a sheet of printout paper. He watched her eyes move down it, then shift to him. She said nothing, but the question was in her eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHEN HE WOKE, he couldn’t feel his hand. Then he lifted it, into a faint burr of light from the window, and the pain started up. Not pain, really, more a simple insistence: rock in your shoe, the tooth you keep probing with your tongue. Blood had seeped into the bandage, turning it hard and crusty. It crackled when he pushed at it. There’ll be some leakage, the big-nosed doctor told him, blood, interstitial fluids—and scarring. But we’ll have to wait to see how much of that.
He had no idea what time it was. Dark, and he had slept, slept hard from the feel of it. For a moment when he first woke, he was disoriented, adrift, unsure where he was. Then the familiar sounds and light, the familiar smells, came to him.
Home.
Through the drapes (his mother, he remembered, always called them drapes, never curtains) he could see the moon, low in the sky, but he wasn’t really sure what that meant. Early in the night? Late?
She’d wanted to leave them
open, believing that the strained, pale light from outside would comfort him. He’d asked her, many times, not to, and she said Okay, I understand, you’re a big boy now, but she always forgot. Once she was gone, he would close them.
He got up and switched the computer on, typing awkwardly. With the three good fingers of his left hand, and the bandaged one in the way however he held it, it was like a man walking with a clubfoot or with one leg shorter than the other, limping and pitching. He checked mail, then ran his usual sites, rifling through them automatically, Downer Loads, The Great Illusion, The Real Triangle, Traveler. He watched the screen, and at some level he was reading, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
The comfort his mother had thought he might take from that light, he found in the dark. He loved the way the dark closed around him, held him. Everything slowing, slowly growing still and quiet. He relished, thrilled at, put off for as long as possible the moment he would reach to turn off the light. Mystery, incalculable freedom, and safety all swaddled together in that moment, in that other, wholly private world opening to him.
But also, of late, the dreams.
Opening his eyes, he had not known where he was. A bright room, movement all around him. Woman’s face above his. Her lips were moving but there was no sound. No sound anywhere, though people walked past, doors open and shut, carts and equipment wheeled by. He lifted his head, looked down at the arm strapped in place, paper tape over needles and puffy skin. His feet, splayed in a lazy V, looked like they were a mile away. He was nude, only a towel draped over his midsection. And more than sound was missing: he couldn’t feel his body.
But of course it wasn’t his body.
There was a blank then, white space in the dream or in his memory of the dream, he didn’t know which, and when it clicked back in, he was making his way down a stairway. He’d got clothes somewhere, too small but wearable, and blood ran down his arm where the tape and needles had been. The lights out here were harsh, stark. A sign on the door at the bottom of the stairs read