by James Sallis
“It would help if we had some idea what we’re looking for,” Graves said.
“And how often does that happen, that we know what we’re looking for?” Sayles reached over and turned off the radio. “But in this case it’s quite conceivable that we’re looking for a Honda”—he nodded toward the tan car pulling abreast of them—“that went by at 9:36 and again at 13:42.”
Single occupant, male, brown hair. Sayles was scribbling the plate number on the pad clipped to the dash. “Be a good time to have a cam—”
Graves held up his cell phone. “Got it.”
The plate went with a rental from National—not the Honda.
“Now there’s a surprise,” Sayles said.
The car itself matched four recently reported missing, including one from long-term parking at Sky Harbor.
“Okay, two surprises.”
Sayles was peering out at the long, almost empty room. He had a way of doing that, Graves thought, like he’d suddenly surfaced from somewhere else. “Where the hell is everyone?”
“Holiday. Everyone the bosses figure we can do without is home.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“About what?”
“The bosses, to start with. Then about how much work actually gets done around here.”
“Guess it could … We want to put the plate and vehicle out there?”
“Yes.”
Graves picked up the phone.
“No.”
He put it back.
“This guy took the car from long-term parking, not a glitch, not a wobble. Grabbed plates somewhere else and swapped them. What’s that tell us?”
“He gets things done.”
“Right. He’s the guy we’re looking for. Has to be.”
“But you don’t want a flag up?”
“He knows how things work, he probably knows a lot about what we do, too. Right now the car’s all we have. Let’s not give him a push to ditch it.”
“So, what? We take up full-time residence outside Rankin’s house, wait for this guy to cruise by?”
“Maybe.”
“Okay. What’s plan B, then?”
“Hell if I know.”
As they talked, Graves had been rummaging in his computer. Now his fingers paused on the keyboard.
“Here’s another surprise.”
“Okay.”
“A posting just like what we put up, advertising a doll for sale. ‘One of the rarest, maybe one of a kind.’ ”
“Our man?”
“It doesn’t feel like it, does it?”
“If it’s not him, not Dollman, then who is it?”
“Someone looking for him? Same as we are.”
He felt it the minute he walked in.
All the drive home this thing had been turning over and over in his head. Same as we are, Graves had said. Maybe so, maybe not—which described this whole mess, start to finish. Rankin was alive, but someone, for some reason, was dogging him. Maybe the shooter, maybe not. They had the car, the Honda, that the someone was in—and which could disappear at any moment. And then there was Dollman, who had seen it—seen something—go down. Was he part of it? Maybe so, maybe not. And these ads. Did they mean anything? Or were they just another dead end?
Round and round. Over and over. He was still thinking about it when he opened the front door.
Then he wasn’t.
Because he felt the change then.
There was nothing different about the room. His neat stack of blankets and pillows remained on the couch. Room tidied up, but the carpet unswept for some time now, a haze of dust on shelves and knickknacks. That familiar musty, long-unaired smell.
She was in the kitchen, sitting at the table. The nurse he’d met at the hospice stood off a bit, near the refrigerator, and nodded. He stopped in the doorway.
“You’re keeping late hours, Dale.”
“As always.”
“You remember Judy Zelazny. She’s off duty, but when I told her my thoughts, she insisted upon bringing me.” Her hands were in her lap. She had lost more weight. The blue bandanna on her head matched the blouse she was wearing. “The old year is almost gone, Dale. I wanted to come and thank you for it. And to wish you a happier new one.”
“I could have come—”
“I needed it to be here, in our world, Dale. Not there.”
“I understand.”
“You always did.”
She stood, hands on the table, then straightened and walked toward him. He could see that Ms. Zelazny’s impulse was to step up and help, but she pulled back. Josie came to him and he held her. He felt the curve of her ribs, like a boat’s hull, felt her heart beating just beneath the skin. There was so little left of her.
“I miss you,” he said. And feeling her tremble, helped her back to the chair.
“I’ll wait in the other room,” Ms. Zelazny said.
So much came back to him, so many memories in a flood—he could see the same in her eyes—and yet, so little to say. He sat watching her chest heave as she caught her breath.
“I have to get back soon,” she said. “It’s good to see you smile.”
“A few more minutes …”
“There are always a few more minutes, Dale.”
Not always, he would think later as he watched Ms. Zelazny’s van pull away. But for now there was small talk: others at the hospice, how was Graves doing, the crazy neighbor who the whole time they’d been in the house had kept building a fence and tearing it down, the bar that just reopened under new management for the fourth time this year up the street, the young woman in a long dress and plain dark clothes she watched go by each day outside her window.
Then she was gone. He sat on the couch, not really thinking, not really remembering, just there, floating, strangely free. He heard cars pass, someone blowing wildly into a trumpet or trombone, a moth buzzing at the window, what sounded like thunder far off, blood pounding in his ears. When he looked up, it was morning and Graves stood by the open front door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THESE TWO WERE ABOUT as subtle as a preacher’s fart during a moment of silence for the dearly departed.
Keep walking.
No question it was a stakeout, and almost certainly what’s his name, Sayles. And his Sancho Panza. Question was, why. The shooting had gone cold by now, the cops had to have better things to do, Rankin was alive, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around to care. So why were these two still on the train? They didn’t know that Rankin had other eyes on him, or about the new doll postings—couldn’t. Or could they?
So he kept walking, carrying his plastic bag—like he’d run up the street for a pint of ice cream or milk and was heading back home.
Heading home. He was, of course. Just like in all those gruesome, mournful Protestant hymns.
But not right now.
He stuffed the plastic bag in a mailbox as he passed. With the cops hibernating in their car, he was out of here, didn’t need protective coloration anymore. He couldn’t even remember what was in the bag, something he’d picked up at a Circle K or AM/PM.
You always think your life is heading for something: some grand turning point, the moral decision that will define you forever after, an outcome. Medical school. Happiness. A profession. Family. Saving the free world.
A block or so up from Rankin’s, as he’d come out of the alleyway where trash bins and abandoned furniture stood sentry, a bicycle had passed on the street. Nice old bike, knapsack threaded through the handlebars. Kind of bike, back in his day it might have had plastic streamers coming off the handlebar grips. The rider, early teens maybe, looked to be deep in thought, and Christian wondered now if the boy thought he was heading for something.
The tan Honda had come by twice, once a couple of hours back, give or take, while he was sitting on a low wall up the street with a newspaper he’d snagged, again not too long after he spotted the stakeout, just before he ditched the plastic bag.
&nb
sp; That night he had one of those dreams where he knew he was dreaming, where sometimes it seemed he was the central character, it was happening to him, and other times like he was just watching from a distance, a mute witness. He was standing in an apartment that looked familiar but continued on forever, on into shadow past the couch, table, chairs, and rugs he knew. At first he was speaking to someone, but then the someone became an image, a photograph or an uncompleted painting, or a mirror, but it wasn’t himself he saw in it.
You thought you would change the world, the image’s voice said, no trace of threat or challenge, simply conversational.
Maybe … once, he responded. Then: Don’t we all, when we’re young?
We lose the dream.
Maybe we have to, to go on. Or maybe we only misplace it, as we do so much else.
Is that why we are all so sad?
Are we? Sad? How can we be, with life so full around us, with so very much in the world to engage us?
But always the bad ending.
Is the ending what matters?
He woke in sheets damp with his sweat. Without pain, though, and strangely at peace. Needing desperately to pee. Pitch-black outside and in. Had there been another power outage? He stumbled over the chair on his way to the window, looked out, and still could see nothing. It was then he realized he was blind.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
HE HAD HIS MONKEY WIFE in his backpack, the backpack lashed to the handlebars, and he was wondering where everyone was. This wasn’t a way he usually came. Nor did he know why he took the route today. Got to the end of his street, to the edge of his neighborhood, then turned on impulse into Fern. Fern was a long, long street that snaked through three different apartment complexes. The street was unnaturally wide but, because the apartment lots were dense with trees, didn’t look or feel wide. It looked narrow and dark, and it felt claustrophobic.
Having run the chute, he spilled out into this neighborhood, something with Gables in the name, he saw on one of those little signs they add to the regular street signs. Coral Gables, Green Gables, Clark Gables, something like that. Like this was some special, defined place, apart from the jumble.
He was thinking about the people he read to, wondering what their lives were like. Dark and narrow, like the street he just left? Or bright, empty, and unlived-in, like this Whatever Gables?
One of the few signs of life was a couple of men sitting in a car at curbside. They both faced forward, the driver slouched down, the other sitting up straight—maybe looking for something? Neither was talking.
What did those people at the center think about? What kind of expectations, what kind of memories, did they have? He was pretty sure they hadn’t imagined their lives coming down to what they were.
Last night he had foundered in a dream, the world gone pitch-black around him, him feeling his way, one hand high, one low, along a wall. No memory or idea where the wall might lead, but it was solid, it was what he had to hold on to, it was there. He sensed (maybe, he thought later, maybe it was the sound of his own breathing reflected back at him) that he was coming to something, an end, a corner, a doorway. Then he had come fully awake and realized he was in his bedroom, pressed up against the inside wall, paralyzed.
The dream stayed with him, an afterimage superimposed on everything he saw and touched around him, making it all seem vaguely unreal or distant. The dream was beside him through breakfast and the clean-up, there through a much-needed shower as he examined his finger (healing, but still no sensation in it), there as he sat at his computer, there for the run through his regular sites. Only when he’d settled to work did it fade.
He had three e-mails inquiring after shipments. This was not good—and not like him at all. Those items should have gone out days ago. He responded, apologizing, pleading a sudden upswing in business and promising immediate shipment or, if that proved unsatisfactory, a full refund.
Two of the items, he had boxed and ready to go. He printed a label for the third and left it in the printer tray to remind himself, then e-mailed for pickup.
Both a collector in Michigan and what appeared to be a small specialty museum in Ohio had e-mailed about the antique optics set he had posted, eleven lenses used maybe a hundred years ago to test vision, each lens in its own leather case, the set itself housed in a beautifully crafted teakwood box.
Another requested additional photos of the child’s pink porcelain tea service.
A man to whom he had sold a small banjo with the painting of a blackface minstrel on its head and, later, a “Rastus” ventriloquist dummy, e-mailed to ask if by chance he had come across any new examples of plantation art.
The rest of the e-mails were straightforward and easily dealt with. After that, and after he wrote a couple of checks, yearly insurance on the house, and a “donation” payment to the free clinic (This is not a bill), he was done.
He clicked back over to his favorite sites and backed through the subsequent commentary—was it real? a hoax? what did it say, and what did it really say?—to the latest entry from Traveler. He read the posting over and over.
My stay here has been short. I have seen so little of your world, finally, and have understood less.
Never forget that yours is a world of great beauty: these clouds, these trees, running water, the caress of wind. Yet so many of you do not live in it; you only visit; and choose instead to live in a world of words, of theories.
That night, thinking of Traveler’s posting, he remembered how it had felt riding his bike that afternoon, how he had been all alone moving through the world, he remembered the sun’s warmth, the wind on his skin, and he remembered the faces of the people he read for, as though he had brought them something precious, something extraordinary, instead of just a story from an old secondhand book.
Jimmie walked through the kitchen into the garage. Here was a story, too, one he had pieced together. Apparently, after his mother left, his father had gone out, bought heavy storage boxes from a moving company, and packed up everything he deemed hers. The boxes sat as they had sat for years, perfectly stacked, perfectly aligned, against the garage’s rear wall, a solid block two deep, four wide, and taller than he was, each box carefully labeled.
Jimmie went out to the porch, to the glider whose frame had rusted through last year so that now one side dragged on the floor. He heard, from another porch, another house, someone shouting angrily. The moon was bright. It hung in the sky out over the Superstitions and seemed not to move at all, as though it had all the time in the world.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“AND HOW DO YOU feel about that?” Graves looked out to where a fat man and a car needing a tire change were fighting it out at curbside. “Listen to me, I sound like some damn social worker.”
Sayles laughed. “Yeah. You have to talk about it,” he said. “Get it out there. Don’t hold in.”
“Learn to let go.”
Sayles glanced over as the light changed. “Man, I feel so much better now.”
Graves was about to tell him enjoy it while you can, the bill’s coming, but Sayles went on.
“How I feel, is that she was saying good-bye.”
Graves made no response. They were pulling into an area that had once been central Phoenix but was now a two-mile stretch of crumbling churches, front-room tax preparers, the odd chiropractor, and blasted houses, some of them caved in or partially burned out.
“Interesting choice for a meeting place,” Sayles said.
“The mall?”
“Fight your way past the skateboarders covering the parking lot, you get to the old folks inside. Median age is what, sixteen? Fit right in.”
“There’s a Denny’s, round the back.”
“That thing’s still there? That used to be the regular stop out this way when I first went on the force.”
“Like most of us, it’s not what it used to be, but it is still there.”
A scatter of bedraggled cars occupied the parking lot. Most of the mall’s bus
iness these days came from the neighborhood, or got bussed in. Besides, it was early in the day. Close to a dozen Hispanic males stood by one of the entrances, hoping for day work.
“You think there’s anything to this?”
“Has to be.” Graves looked out at the hopeful workers. “Those guys have families, you think?”
“Most of them. Here and back home.”
Graves shook his head. “That sucks.”
“Yep.”
“Well … Like I told you, I went in early, thinking I’d at least do a run-through and update on our files—you know, the cases we’ve been ignoring? I’d just got started when the first e-mail came in.”
“And it said—”
“Dolls. I hit reply and sent a question mark. When he came back with Officer Sayles?, I said yes. He wanted to know if you were still interested in someone connected with a shooting at the Brell building. The message was garbled, but readable. No way I thought it was really him, not at first, and there was all kinds of weirdness—misspellings, run-ons. But he had the correct address for the shooting.”
“And he asked for help.”
“Not in so many words, but that’s what came across. Said he had been contacted by the person he thought responsible for the incident.”
“Still guarding his words.”
“Right. And that he’d set up a meet he was unable to make. Just let it hang there. So after a minute of staring at the cursor blinking, I said maybe I, meaning we, could help with that, make the meet for him. That’s when he sent through the details. I asked how we could contact him, but he was gone. Dead air.”
Sayles pulled in at the Denny’s. Two other cars in the lot, those plus a pickup with sideboards made of scrap lumber, filled with yard tools and palm cuttings.
“We been chasing this guy how long, and he comes and finds us?”
“Hey, it works for deer hunters.”
“Graves, you’re a city boy, what the hell do you know about hunting?”