by James Sallis
EMERGENCY EXIT
AN ALARM WILL SOUND
and he stood there a moment in indecision. A man and woman came out onto the landing above, talking loudly, and paused before continuing upward. Their feet rang on the steel stairs.
He looked down at the body supporting him. This was the opposite of the comfort to be found in darkness. He was in a strange place, unsure of himself and surroundings, exposed, vulnerable …
Who was exposed and vulnerable?
Jimmie tried to remember if he had ever before dreamed as someone else. Others in dreams changed, sure, the walk-ons, the companions, but weren’t people always themselves in their dreams?
No sense in putting this off. Whatever he was doing, he’d best be about it.
Choose.
Act.
The door had one of those lever bars on it. He touched it, ready to push, steeling himself for the alarm. The bandage was there, hard and crusty, on the hand at the end of someone else’s arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WHAT HE COULDN’T GET OVER, was his sense of violation.
The hallway was long and without windows, painted bright yellow in an attempt to counter the dimness and shut-in feel. Free-form paintings running low on the walls had been done by children from the local school, she’d told him. Lots of fat-bodied animals with stick-figure legs.
“I’m afraid I may have called you for nothing,” she said now. “And overstepped. Seriously overstepped?” She reached reflexively to push back her hair; either the close-cropped style was recent, or it was a habit she couldn’t shake. Her name tag read Ms. Zelazny, RN. She’d introduced herself on the phone as Judy. “I took it upon myself …” Her hand barely grazed his shoulder. “I am so sorry.”
“The important thing is, she’s better now.”
“Out of danger, as they say, yes. For the time being.”
“As they also say.” He looked in through the glass portion of the door. “What happened?”
“She stopped breathing. Her blood pressure bottomed out. Usually … You know that she refuses all medication? Accepts only basic care?”
He nodded. Now he knew.
“Once in a great while she’ll ask for a Tylenol. I think … I shouldn’t be saying this, but I think the pain just got to be too much for her. She gave up—just for a moment.”
The nurse was quiet then, giving him time. He could hear her breathing there beside him, almost feel the warmth of her skin.
“She said she didn’t want to fight this. In the note she left me. That it wasn’t in me to understand.”
“We don’t know what’s in us, do we? We think we do. Then …”
Sayles had conducted thousands of interviews. He knew when an explanation was coming. You could see the story starting up in their eyes, the shift in body balance, a certain charge in the air.
“My mother, my biological mother, died in a prison hospital. She was alone, surrounded by people she didn’t know, had no family to speak of. I’ve always wondered what she might have been thinking, there at the end. No one should …”
Elevator doors opened and a food cart rolled off. It made a terrible clatter and smelled of gravy.
“I shouldn’t have called, I’m sorry. It was not my place.”
“I’m glad you did. Thank you.” He looked back into the room. An aide was repositioning Josie on her side, tucking pillows behind and around. “It would be better if she doesn’t know I was here.”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose it might. If there’s anything …”
He smiled and started back down the hall, wondering what Judy Zelazny’s incomplete sentences, her trailings off, said about who she was, her connection to the world.
Outside, he watched a couple of dust devils skip and spin about the parking lot, then got in the car. He sat there a while, his thoughts skittering to and fro like the dust devils and every bit as insubstantial, nervous movement with no purpose, no purchase.
The moon hung high over Camelback, full and orange. Against scattered clouds he could see smoke gathering from a fire off to the west, industrial by the look of it, out by the White Tanks, maybe.
He got home with no memory of starting the car, or of the drive. Hung his sport coat on one of the hooks inside the kitchen door, pulled a beer from the refrigerator, and thumbed on the computer, thinking to read the news. Mostly he stayed off the computer at home, got enough of that on the job, but he’d canceled the newspaper months ago—they kept piling up outside, unretrieved—and was seriously in arrears with the world and its goings-on. Plus, he didn’t want to think. Not tonight.
But it wasn’t to be. In turn he attempted to focus on war news, financial news, political news, and sports news, and failed with each pass. Even the op-eds and columns seemed incomprehensible. As though it were all taking place in some land far removed from his own.
He had put the new glasses on and taken them off again repeatedly while surfing. Every time he got new ones, he went through a period when he was certain they’d done the prescription wrong, but this was worse than usual. He simply couldn’t or wouldn’t keep the damned things on. Stubbornness? Since, when it came right down to it, he saw fine with them.
He grabbed a second beer, went into the front room, and turned on the TV. His last possible refuge—but with the first light from the screen, memories of Josie, of her TV forever on, forever whispering, slammed into him. He clicked through channel after channel barely seeing what was before him, a Victor Mature movie, reruns of Kojak, religious programming, Hispanic stations, long-winded ads for exercise equipment, knife sets, and revolutionary cleaning supplies, before coming to rest at KAET. A nature show about, of all things, the mating patterns of insects. He sat watching, thinking vaguely that this world, the insect world, seemed to him no more alien than one in which people tried to sell memorial plates to insomniacs and day sleepers at three A.M.
The show about insects gave way to one about birds, and he remembered a story that had been passing around the station for years. Apocryphal, for all he knew, but the older cops swore by it. Happened way back, they said. This guy, just someone off the street, no one the family knew or anything like that, had killed a man and his wife and two kids in their beds. So next he goes into the kitchen and makes himself a sandwich. Eats it and puts on coffee. And while the coffee’s brewing, he goes through the house methodically killing the family pets. Scoops fish out of the tank and throws them on the floor, steps on them. Slits the dog’s throat with a chef’s knife from the kitchen. Strangles the parakeet. Next week, on a call from a neighbor, they find him in another house. Man and his son are dead, he’s in the kitchen eating a bowl of Cheerios. Hasn’t got to the dog or cat yet.
Sayles thought about how so many stories come down to good and evil, guy in the white hat and guy in the black, hawk and dove, this struggle between them, like one will win. You saw and read and heard that long enough, you started to believe it, started to think like that. But the bad stuff is right there with you, always. It’s the friend you’re walking down the street with, you’re both talking away, then he turns and there’s something different in his eyes, or in yours. And you both go quiet.
Sayles switched the TV off and sat listening to the sounds of the house around him, familiar sounds, comforting sounds, waiting for light to start up. It was out there somewhere in the night, feeling its way blindly toward him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FIRST THING HE HAD TO DO was get to an ATM, buy some decent clothes that fit and would allow him to blend in. Lucky his shoes had made it to the room with him, at least. None of his clothes had. He’d grabbed pants and a shirt from the room next to his, single bed with an old man who watched his every move and never made a sound. He’d already pulled back the inner soles of his shoes to check on the bank cards stashed there for emergencies. But this too-small polyester shirt and these orangish slacks with trampled cuffs wouldn’t do.
They’d rolled him up to a room, finally, stretcher piloted by a young
Asian man who wheeled at what seemed double speed through halls and doorways, avoiding crash after crash by scant millimeters. Hot on their trail came Miss Feyn from Admissions. It was imperative that she get information. Each time she asked his name, Social Security number, home address, insurance carrier, he would begin to answer, then nod off. The drugs they’d given him, of course. She shuffled her papers and feet, looked out the window, and finally said, I’ll have to come back later.
Filling the space Miss Feyn left appeared a nurse who never gave her name, welcomed him to the unit, and explained that, if there was nothing he needed at the moment, they were getting ready for shift change and someone would be with him shortly to get him checked in and settled.
So he waited. Heard elevator doors open and close, loud greetings, laughter, banter. In a few minutes that subsided, and he knew they were in report, one or two left behind at the nurse’s station to keep watch, the rest in seclusion.
He rolled his legs over the side of the bed and sat for moments as the room stopped pitching and weaving, then experimentally stood. Not too unsteadily—and not bad, considering all that had gone down. Ripping off the tape, he pulled the IVs one by one, pushed and held his thumb against each site to minimize bleeding. His blood ran thin; minor cuts would bleed and bleed.
That done, he slipped on his shoes and went next door to borrow clothing from his neighbor.
As he walked past the nurse’s station, the woman sitting there looked up. He smiled, thanked her, and added that he’d be back for the next visiting hours.
The alarm hadn’t sounded when he went out the door, but the heat had slammed into him, left him shaken, breathless. He walked slowly, clamping down with his will, deep breath, hold, exhale, and soon enough was a fair imitation of normal. Four blocks along, he found a Circle K.
There were two ahead of him. An Hispanic man in his early twenties repeatedly reinserted his card as he leafed through the growing collection of transaction slips. An older woman, wearing what these days they called business casual, waited behind him; with each new try she rolled her eyes. When at last the young man gave up and her turn came, she counted her money, recounted it, placed the bills precisely in her pocketbook, filed away the transaction slip with what looked to be a year’s worth of them, then painstakingly fitted her bank card back into the foremost photo sleeve. At the counter she bought a bottled water and a lottery ticket.
Two hours later, scrubbed and still wet, with the air conditioner vent blowing up at him, he stood at the window of the Tropicana Motel, whose palm-tree sign, pool, and desk clerk had all seen better days, though probably not a hell of a lot better. The pool bore a layer of leaves and mostly dead insects that in fact looked much like the desk clerk’s skin. Foot-high weeds grew from cracks in the parking lot. Many of the doors he passed on the way to his room showed signs of having been in the past forcibly sprung.
In an adjoining room a TV played. There was something wrong with the TV, or with the reception, so that the sound was mostly static, but no one seemed to care. Maybe they’d gone out, or checked out, and left it on. But he’d heard the toilet flush over there a while back.
The bleeding had stopped, the dizziness hadn’t. And he didn’t have his pills. Everything else was replaceable. The pills weren’t. But then … maybe that was just as well. He held up his hand and willed the tremor to stop. It did—or he persuaded himself that it had. And why would it matter which was true?
No pills. What he did have was a drive he hadn’t known for a long time now, muscle, a purpose behind his actions: finding who had attacked John Rankin. Why he was doing it remained opaque, impenetrable. Not pride. Not honor. Certainly not a sense of justice. But there it was, the road before him. And finally the why didn’t matter any more than the truth of whether or not his tremors had actually stopped.
In early youth he’d read a lot of fiction. Novels like Treasure Island and the Tom Swift books, short stories published by the dozen in magazines back then, Redbook, Argosy, Boy’s Life. Over time it came to him that most fiction, maybe all of it, from the grandest tales to the most commonplace, was about things that were missing. Family, lovers, sustenance, peace, ideals. At the heart of all those stories were emptinesses, yearnings, hollows that couldn’t be filled—as though bereavement were hardwired into mankind.
And that was a thing he never felt, could not understand. Like music.
It was then he knew that he was different. Apart somehow, exempt. Not different in the way every adolescent feels, but substantially, deeply, definitively different, in ways that couldn’t be breached.
And now, comically, he seemed to have his answer to a question he had felt no need to ask. Finding his usurper, finding Rankin’s attacker. A passion, a purpose.
Back in Rankin’s hospital room he had stood, pretending to note something on his clipboard, something about the lines supplying medical gases, as he tracked approaching footsteps. Turned to confront a man in gray suit, blue shirt. A man with strong hands who seemed out of place, who didn’t quite fit. A cop or hospital official, he had thought at the time, though neither seemed likely.
Then, before he woke up in the hospital himself, the driver of a tan Honda with three dents in the front fender, cruising by Rankin’s house a second time. And the face turning toward him the same as the one back in Rankin’s hospital room.
He was sure of it.
That night in his sleep he took his place in a long line of people moving slowly forward, inch by inch, hundreds of them, people as far as he could see, people ahead of him, people behind. No one knew where they were going. No one left the line. They continued to move forward. Slowly. By inches. Beneath a sky neither dark nor light.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GRAVES ALWAYS THOUGHT of himself as a private man. Always tried to respect the privacy of others.
This thing with Sayles, though. With Josie, her there in the what-do-you-call-it, the hospice, and him not going to see her. Sitting out front of the place like some damn teenager or stalker. Hard not to say something.
He’d been thinking about it ever since Sayles dropped him off at his house.
He was sitting in his favorite spot, the glider on the back porch, looking out on oleanders that cut the yard off from all else, holding a beer that he kept forgetting to drink. The oleanders were tugging at the phone lines again. He’d have to take care of that soon. But he’d bought the house for the oleanders as much as for anything else. Walked right through the house onto the back porch and said he’d take it. Never had a house before. Even back when Jennie was around, they’d rented. They talked about freedom a lot back then.
Freedom.
Big words, big ideas. Fit okay when you were young. And it wasn’t that you outgrew them, it was just that after a while you started looking silly wearing them.
Back then, you’d have had a hard time picking anyone less likely to become a cop. He’d been in grad school, studying history. And Jennie was making perfumes, candles, what she called essences, selling them at art fairs and gift shops, then got into Internet sales early on. Jennie was rich now, living in Mexico, some kind of artist’s colony. He heard from her every month or so by e-mail.
Hell, even he had trouble reconstructing how it happened. They ran out of money, of course. So much for the MA. He taught as a sub, mostly elementary school, which he hated, then a procession of I’m-not-really-just-a-worker jobs: bookstore sales, editing a trade publication, project manager at a credit card company. Fielded calls at a suicide prevention center for a time. Ended up clerking in a law office where police frequently came to be deposed or coached prior to testimony. He’d talk to them on breaks, hang with them as they waited their turn.
Shazam.
Before he knows it he’s sitting in a patrol car that stinks of feet and fast food and gasoline fumes watching a kid that’s not more than twelve years old run out of a mom-and-pop store carrying a gun big as his head.
He understands his limits, never had pretentions t
o being a great cop. He does the job. He thinks and acts in straight lines. He’s smarter than most, and quick, so he did well as a line officer, moved up the line at a steady pace.
Years back, he’d taken one of those left brain/right brain tests. A woman in silhouette spinning endlessly. If you saw the spin as counterclockwise, it meant the left brain, the logical part, was dominant. Clockwise, the right brain, the creative side, was dominant. That woman had never spun other than counterclockwise for him, and never would.
Unlike Sayles, he’s predictable. Same procedures, same moves, again and again. No sudden connections, none of those damned patterns Sayles was always talking about, just A to B to C; he goes off to the side, he loses it.
Sayles probably never gave much thought to being a great cop either, but he was.
Another man to value his privacy, too. Kept things to himself. Thought others didn’t know what was going on—like this thing with Josie. Sure, he didn’t have the details, she was sick, some kind of breakdown maybe, but anyone close to Sayles who paid attention couldn’t help but see the changes in him from day to day. Man was being buffeted. Graves would look over and catch him just sitting at the computer, motionless, and know he’d slipped sideways to somewhere else. Graves would look away, never said anything. You wanted privacy for yourself, you respected that of others.
Then there was this Rankin thing. Not that he was talking about it a lot, but he wasn’t talking much about other cases either. And his not talking about it was kind of the point, wasn’t it?
Probably had no idea that Graves knew how hard he was reaching out on this. Dolls. What was that all about? And why the secrecy, when it was their case, they were both supposed to be working it?
He’d walked past and caught the screen a couple of times, Sayles back-and-forthing with a guy Graves suspected had something to do with all this.