by James Sallis
They’d been to the hospital, then to every convenience store, gas station, coffeehouse, bar, and hole-in-the-wall nearby. Adding old-fashioned legwork to the enpixeled shadowboxing that, if you believed TV shows, solved all the crimes these days.
Sayles was thinking about one where the agents, detectives, whatever they were, rarely stepped out from behind handheld computers, oversize screens, and smart boards. They’d talk, the resident geek would hit the keyboard, after a while a couple of them would wander outside for a brief car chase or gun battle, then they’d be back in the game room. Need information? Rub the lamp. Driver’s license, passport, school and employment records, bank statements … all a keystroke away. Need photos? Tap into the security cameras at the pawnshop across the street.
How many viewers, he wondered, paused to think what this said about rights to privacy? Or stopped to wonder how easily these agents, detectives, whatever they were (fictional, of course), might be able to track you cradle to grave, follow you through damn near every hour of your day and days.
Not exactly the way it went, here in the real world. For all his reaching and all his volleys, Graves hadn’t got jackshit on Dollman.
Out there in the night, twin spotlights lashed the sky. Some store’s grand opening, or a bar hustling customers, or a sale at one of the stretch of car lots along Camelback. And someone forgot to shut down the lights.
When dogs play, a level-voiced announcer was saying on TV, they employ actions common to such activities as actual fighting, or mating—biting, mounting, and so on. It becomes important for them to signal their intent, to broadcast what they want.
The social order requires that the dogs agree to play and not to eat one another or fight or try to mate.
Despite himself, Sayles broke into laughter.
So, zilch on the Internet, and the legwork hadn’t done them any better. One half-assed lead from the backroom guy at a flower shop. Guy’s arms were about the diameter of a baseball bat, dark brown and shrunken-looking, as if they’d been half-cooked. The tattoos that once covered them had faded away, remnants of their color serving only to add to the skin’s unhealthy look.
He remembered, he said, because he’d been sitting outside on a long-delayed break, this humongous, hurry-up order for carnations and sunflowers, some poncy school thing out Mesa way. He was about to light his cigarette when he saw this soldier coming down the street. That’s what he said: soldier. “Man looked like shit, you know? And I’m thinking, Whoa … seen this before. Fuck flashbacks, they’re bullshit—propaganda, you with me?—but for a minute there I thought I was back in country.”
The timing was right, and when Graves asked what direction the soldier came from, the man pointed north, where at that moment a medevac helicopter was settling onto the hospital roof. But that was it. The man had nothing more to tell them, and neither did anyone else.
Luckily, Lieutenant Byerlein wasn’t hands-on, content to be left alone to tidy up paperwork and study for the law courses he was forever taking. They told him they’d be pursuing leads on another case, might run into overtime. They wouldn’t put in for it, but the presumption would cover their absence from the squad, use of department resources, working off shift, and, they hoped, whatever else came up.
Whatever else had not, in their minds, included something like forty hours straight without much by way of break or food. Sayles’s eyes wouldn’t focus for more than minutes at a time. He could feel his body blurring, the border between it and the world around him breaking down, dissolving.
When he turned back from the window, Graves had resumed his seat by the computer. His finger hit the keys, a single sharp peck. His eyes went from what was on the screen to Sayles.
“Yo,” he said. “If you told me, I don’t remember, how’d you get onto the doll thing in the first place?”
“Came from a CI, when I was trolling. Didn’t think anything of it till I got the message.”
“From Dollman.”
“Right.”
“And it said ‘I sell dolls’?”
Sayles nodded.
“Interesting.” Graves’s chair was still. “You think he advertises?”
Sayles walked over behind him.
Graves pointed to a line of text on the screen. “This is from Lock & Load, basically a newsletter for mercenaries. Private security, bodyguard work, like that. And this, this, this”—he looked up at Sayles—“are off the Web, message boards at three different sites.”
Please confirm shipment of the doll ordered Feb 10.
I am an avid collector, and am interested in purchasing one of your exceptional dolls.
Would like to obtain another doll from you. Please contact me ASAP.
Please inform me whether you have dolls still for sale.
“The first one’s from a couple years back.” Graves did something that changed the screen. The other messages dimmed, leaving the last two highlighted. “These were sent through the same IP, roughly the same time of day, a week apart. Hang on … Here’s a third, just posted.”
I am looking for a special doll for a special friend.
Graves dragged it across the screen to line up with the other two, stared a moment, then looked up. “They’re talking about something other than dolls.”
“One definitely gets that feeling.”
“All worded similarly, could easily be to the same person.”
“Form and placement suggesting they don’t know the seller. Lot of walls between.”
“So, it’s not dolls, what is he selling, what are they trying to buy?” Graves pointed to the two highlighted lines. “Whoever posted these, if it’s the same person, he seems … eager?”
“Doesn’t help us much. We don’t even know who they are.”
Graves hit more keys. “Maybe it does. They’re looking, same as we are. And it’s not them we’re looking for.” Screens bloomed, dropped to the bottom. “These are ads, right? Break them down, that’s what they are. So …”
His chair went back into motion, two inches forward, two inches back.
“So we place our own ads.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
WHEN HE TOOK THE CHILI to Mrs. Flores, she’d insisted on dishing it into one of her own bowls and sending his bowl back home with him. Jimmie stood by the kitchen door waiting. Her friend Felix was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass and a bottle of liquor. Jimmie had never seen that except in movies. Felix asked how his hand was, how he was doing.
Chili was about the only thing his father ever cooked. He’d make gallons of it in this big cast-iron pot and they’d live for a week off that and boxes of crackers, which the old man always called saltines. Jimmie still liked the chili but he didn’t fix it much, and he always wound up throwing a lot of it away.
He wondered if Felix and Mrs. Flores would really eat it.
Chopping onions and peppers and all had been a little scary at first, and he figured it to be that way for a while. Early this morning he’d been awakened by his hand hurting. Then when he held it up, he realized that it wasn’t hurting at all; he’d been dreaming that it hurt. He didn’t remember much of the rest of the dream. He was in a room somewhere, blond furniture squared against the walls, pictures above, flowers, mountains, bodies of water—what he imagined a motel room might look like.
And lizards. There were lizards in his dream. Now he remembered that.
They were everywhere: on the ceiling above him, silhouetted in the window against light from outside, peering over the edge of picture frames. All of them perfectly still.
The other day, after he read to the old folks at the hospital and was packing up to go, Mrs. Drummond approached him to say they were having a holiday get-together for everyone and she hoped that Jimmie and his parents would come. It would be so nice, she said, pausing on the word, to get the chance to meet them, and to tell them how much Jimmie’s work there was appreciated.
Duck and run time.
He had to wonder if he was growing carel
ess, complacent, taking too much for granted. And all at once he had remembered his father saying “That’s how they get you, boy. Nice home, cushy job, comforts.” It was the flip side of his old man’s other habitual diatribe: “They keep you under their thumb, boy. Always pushing, always bearing down, till you can’t move, can’t breathe.”
Leaving the hospital, he had passed a sign in the hallway, yellow and black, Danger at the top, Hazardous Materials Area and Authorized Personnel Only to the right beside a circle enclosing a slashed-out human figure. It occurred to him then that much of what parents tell children is hazardous material and should come with such warning labels.
This was one of those days when nothing felt right. Dreams. Lizards. His bedclothes looked like something that had been used to wrap leftover food. Even the house seemed vaguely unfamiliar when he came in from running the chili down to Mrs. Flores. He supposed that making the chili had been his try to get things back the way they were. And he wondered how much of the world’s activity was aimed toward trying to get things back the way they were—or back the way people imagined things were.
The kitchen, of course, was a mess. And that was something he could fix.
Half an hour later there’s a rack full of clean dishes, the hot water heater out in the utility room’s thumping as it recharges, there are pools of water on counter and floor, and he doesn’t remember any of it.
Kind of scary. Where had he been?
Then, slowly, it came back.
He was in a yard, then a house. Blankets folded and stacked on the couch, pillow with a pink pillowcase on top. Shelves packed with display dishes and knickknacks, paintings on the wall, long curtains at the windows. He walks through an arched doorway into the kitchen. Coffee makings, pans, empty cans in the trash, lunch meat and old eggs in the refrigerator. A table with stacks of paper, a computer, pens, a notebook. He is going through it all. Slowly going through it all.
He watches as his hands pull a legal pad toward him and write, Please contact me. This is for you alone. I sell dolls.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
HE BLINKED, trying to make sense of what he saw, what he thought he saw.
Dark shapes at the window, against the light. Like pods or small fish. Commas. Leaves. The f-holes of violins and guitars. Then, as his eyes moved from there to the wall and ceiling, more of them. Six, eight, a dozen. And one, he realizes now, on his hand. He lifts the hand slowly, moves it closer to his face, and the two of them watch one another. Its skin is cool and dry, tissue-thin, amazingly soft. With each breath its sides flare. He sees the tiny, intricate cage of ribs.
What a beautiful thing it is.
And so many of them, so many of these small beautiful things that fill the world around us, unnoticed, unacknowledged, unseen.
He remembered the kid saying “Hope you like lizards.”
Well, yeah.
Popping the top off his last orange juice, he did the same with the computer, gulped as it booted up. Just past dawn, six or a little after, maybe? So that was the most sleep he’d had in a single stretch for a while. Odd that he hadn’t needed desperately to pee when he woke up. He checked his feet and ankles. A little swelling, not a lot more than normal. Hand shaking some, he’d noticed that earlier with the lizard, but if there was discoloration, jaundice, he couldn’t see it.
The lizards had begun retreating.
Because he was up and moving around? Or because they had duties to attend to?
Geckos. Amazing little creatures. Feet an absolute marvel of nature’s trial-and-error engineering. That many in plain sight, there’d be nests, in the walls, or right outside. A single parthenogenetic female could populate an island. New ones were tiny—tadpole-size. They moved like mercury, tails often left behind with confused attackers as they sped away.
And now, a confused attacker was what he himself had become.
All those years, he never much pondered what he did. What it meant, what he left behind as he walked away. He’d known early on, from navigating the situation at home and from his reading, that he was a problem solver. That’s what life was, a string of problems to be solved. And what he did for his living, from inception through planning to execution—from start, to had to, to happen—that was no different.
But this time the had to hadn’t happened.
Problem.
And he still hadn’t peed. God help him if his kidneys were shutting down. He turned to look out the window where the morning built slowly, filling itself with the sound of cars and birds and garage doors and shouting children.
God help him.
How had that got in his head? Not a metaphor he owned—for all his belief that we understand our world and guide our lives by metaphors, that we can scarcely think without them.
What of animals, then? Did they think abstractly? When animals played—was that abstract thought? Obviously, from the paw twitches and changes in breathing as they slept, they dreamed. The smells surrounding it were a dog’s metaphors.
Did the gecko sit on the ceiling remembering where it was born, the warmth, other bodies? Did it think how it lost its tail, wonder how long before the new one grew, even as it waited for the fly to land within striking distance?
—And exactly where, he thought, looking back at his hands to resurface, did all that come from?
He reached again to probe at his ankle and decided to let it be.
Back in country he’d served as de facto medic. Everyone came to him with their complaints and questions, wanting advice: rash and athlete’s foot, sores, shrunken dicks, swollen dicks, constipation, bleeding gums, hangnails, torn muscles, night sweats. Not much he or anyone else could do about most of it.
Just like this.
For so long, time held no meaning for him, one day like another, years little more than a jumble of passing seasons. Now time was solidifying around him.
You grow up hearing these things people are saying over and over all around you, He’s a good man, It’s in her blood, I should have known, Live and let live, and you never give them much thought. They’re just there, like rocks or walls or sky. Then one day you stop and think, What the hell’s that mean? The one that always got him was Everything happens for a reason.
Sure it does.
He shouldered his attention back to the computer, cruising the sites that, bone-weary and distracted, he’d given up on last night, after the kid left. The two older messages inquiring about dolls were there, of course.
And interestingly enough, crowded up against those at both sites, this one:
Special doll for sale.
The one you’ve been looking for.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THEY’D BEEN OUTSIDE Rankin’s house going on five hours now. Situation like this, you used up conversation topics pretty fast, not that they hadn’t already, all these years they’d worked together. So they were sitting there silently. Graves was thinking about Sayles’s wife, and about an old case.
He got dispatched to a house out in Mesa where the kid, fourteen or so, had been refusing to eat, claiming it was to purify himself or somesuch thing. He was so weak he couldn’t get out of bed, looked like a praying mantis with a human face. The kid’s sister, three years younger, had dialed 911. Uniforms responded, saw what was going on, and called back in for a detective. Over the following days Graves had watched parents, doctors, and courts fight over whether the kid could and should be force-fed. They were still fighting when, at the hospital, the kid picked up an infection that took him out.
Graves unscrewed the cap off a bottle of Arrowhead water, took a slug. Offered it and put the cap back. “We don’t have a clue what we’re looking for.”
“Nope.”
It wasn’t much of a connection, but for the time being it was what they had. Maybe the guy the paramedics had picked up out here, the one who went AWOL at the hospital, was involved, maybe he was the one they were looking for. Dollman. Maybe he’d return. Maybe he was already here.
Maybe their p
ockets had big holes in them.
All told, it was a quiet neighborhood. Mainly Anglo, so not much life on the street, houses closed off, yards empty. Just people dodging from house to car and back, the odd few out mowing or whacking weeds. Guy five houses over working in his garage with the door cranked open, classic rock seeping from a cheap boom box.
A kid went by on his bike, backpack laced onto the handlebars. An old bike, looked like one Graves himself might have had as a kid, not one of these spiffy new things with a dozen gears and skinny-ass tires. In truly great shape, though. Kid probably ought to be in school, Graves thought; then thought that it wasn’t any of his business.
Half hour or so later, without saying anything, he and Sayles watched an older man come around the southeast corner and walk slowly down the sidewalk on Rankin’s side. He was wearing a light summer suit, or a sportcoat and slacks, and limping. Going past the house, no pause, no change, he continued on around the long curve and out of sight.
Graves turned on the radio low. Sayles glanced his way but didn’t say anything.
“Give it another hour and pack it in?”
“Okay by me,” Sayles said.
Guy on the newscast was going on about this holiday tragedy, how some family’s father got laid off with a wife in the hospital and three young kids at home. Yeah, right, Graves thought. Tragedy. Tragedy was about fatal flaws, about bottoming out emotionally, physically, spiritually. Tragedy was a twelve-year-old killed by gangs on his way to school, the eighty-year-old judge who’d sat thousands of cases and now couldn’t remember where or who he was. You had air space to fill, it got filled—like gas filling whatever container it’s put into. And knowing how insignificant most of it was, you cranked it, shifted to hyperbole, smeared lipstick on the pig. This guy? Pitiable, yes. But a couple towns over from tragic.