by Sheena Kamal
Nate’s still body on the bed, Seb’s silence across the continent, the weight of Whisper’s need, and Bonnie’s last photo. They all add to my confusion. On top of it, I’m in a public place and feeling out of sorts with other people around. A middle-aged couple comes out of the room beside me, deep in conversation.
“Now that’s done,” the man says, with a great sigh of relief. “Maybe we can get a taxi to take us around, see some of the urban decay.”
I give them both a hard look as they pass by me. Urban decay as a notch on a tourist’s to-do list is about as insulting as you can get. To want to see the death of a city when it is still so alive. When Nate is, for the time being, still alive. Who are they to talk about death?
The detectives around the corner are speaking to Kev. Their voices travel. “. . . made the first 911 call about the incident at your home. The mobile number was registered to Nora Watts, a Canadian citizen who reported a break-in at her motel room in Midtown a few days ago.”
“Hang on,” says Kev. I hear another set of footsteps and a cool female voice asks to speak to Kev privately. She begins to explain something to him, her voice fading away as they step into Nate’s room.
The two detectives are left hanging. “So what,” begins one of them, “is a southwest Detroit thug doing in Midtown and now on the east side?”
It’s strange that it has taken me this long to recognize this voice. It is Sanchez, the cop from the motel. The one who told me I should take my tourism dollars to Ann Arbor. He’s with a woman cop.
“You sure he’s from over that way?” says the woman cop, whose voice I don’t recognize.
“The gang ink that Nora Watts saw wasn’t from the east side. Base of the neck. It’s a new signature going around.”
“I’ve seen that before,” says the woman. “What was the tattoo of?”
“She didn’t get a close enough look.”
“You think he saw it somewhere?”
“Happens. These morons get tats and sometimes they don’t even know what they mean. You think they’d heard of Google.”
“But what’s this Canadian got to do with any of it?”
Sanchez sighs. He sounds a hundred years old when he says, “Dope and bodies. That’s the gang scene in Detroit right now. She’s got a hit out on her. You can’t see that?”
I hear two new voices in the hall now. The doctor speaks to Kev, but I can’t hear them clearly. The woman detective says to Kev, “The witness to the shooting . . . any idea where we can find her?”
“Yeah, in the parking lot, probably,” says Kev.
“She’s here?”
“She was. Went that way.” I have no doubt he’s pointing in my direction.
I duck into a nearby room and wait for them to pass. It’s the room where the “urban decay” tourists had emerged from. There is an old woman on the bed, staring at me with suspicious eyes, clutching the covers to her chest. She opens her mouth to say something, but I beat her to it. “Your relatives are assholes,” I say to her.
She relaxes her grip on the bedsheets and sighs heavily. “Don’t I know it. Come all the way here to pay their respects when I haven’t heard from either of those bums in five years. They think they’re in my will. Ha!” There is a pause as she looks me up and down. “You here to steal from me?”
“Just avoiding someone.”
The woman closes her eyes. “Well, in that case, kid, stay as long as you like.”
I linger for about thirty minutes, then leave via the emergency exit with my hood pulled up and stray strands of hair tucked into my collar. Walking at a steady pace, neither slow nor fast to attract attention, I still feel like I’m being watched. Just like I did in Vancouver, only this time there’s no desire to meet my stalker face-to-face. I’ve made a mistake coming to the hospital, because this is the first place anyone who’s been tracking my movements will look. I have only my phone on me, and my wallet that was in my jeans pocket already when I dressed. Everything else, including my passport, is in that backpack at Nate’s place. Which I can’t go back to at the moment because it’s now the scene of a crime. I should have never gone there in the first place, but how was I to know that the motel robbery wasn’t a robbery at all? How was I to know I was still in danger of being followed, even here. Even in Detroit.
It’s tough being a cowboy. You’ve always gotta be looking over your shoulder.
34
It’s only when the college kid sees Whisper that the connection is made. He starts running, his backpack slipping off his shoulder and banging against his thigh. Whisper yanks the leash from Brazuca’s hand and takes off after him. They’re just two streets over from Crow’s town house. She snaps at his leg and he goes down. Then stands over the kid, who’s just about pissing his pants, with her teeth bared and a sliver of drool swinging above his face, until Brazuca catches up.
“Hey, Sunil,” Brazuca says, slightly out of breath.
“Get this thing off me!” Whisper’s dog walker is staring at her with fear in his big doe eyes.
Whisper snarls. It’s clear the antagonism is mutual.
Brazuca crosses his arms and leans against a streetlight. He’s spent the past few hours dozing in the car, waiting for the kid to leave the house. His leg is stiff and aching, but the college kid doesn’t have to know that. “Hmm, I don’t think you’re cut out to be a dog walker.”
“You’re telling me! I just needed the money, okay? You know what college fees are for international students, man? Then that dog gave me so much trouble and those scary white guys showed up—”
Brazuca suppresses a groan. Barely. “Did you just say ‘scary white guys’?”
“Hey, I don’t tell you what to be afraid of, dude. These guys . . . you ever seen a horror movie? Who’s always the bad guy in a horror movie?”
“A creepy little girl, usually. Did these scary white guys have hockey sticks and masks?”
Sunil blinks up at him. “No, they had guns. What planet are you from?” Sunil proceeds to describe the two idiot assholes Warsame followed from the Burnaby house.
Somehow Brazuca isn’t at all surprised. “What did you tell them?”
“They were asking about the lady who hired me. I told them everything. She pays like shit. Went to Detroit. Then they made me call her and find out where she was staying.”
“So you did.”
“It’s not like they gave me a choice!”
Whisper growls at his raised voice, so he lowers it to continue, careful to keep his eyes on her. “Did I not mention the guns? After I hung up with her they told me to forget about everything and just pretend that the whole thing didn’t happen. But I couldn’t look that dog in the eye, man. I just fucking couldn’t do it. It’s like she knew what I did.”
Brazuca thinks about this for a moment. He drums his fingers against his bad leg. “Where was she staying?” he asks.
“What?”
“The address you gave them.”
Sunil shrugs. “Somewhere in Midtown Detroit,” she said. “I think it was on Second Avenue—does that make sense? Called Motor Midtown Motel or Midtown Motor—”
“I got it.” He moves closer so that he’s standing directly over Sunil. “If something happens to Nora because of this, we’re coming back for you. Come on, girl,” says Brazuca, beckoning to Whisper.
She jumps off her old dog walker and trots after Brazuca without a backward look at Sunil sprawled on the ground. “I’m calling the cops!” Sunil shouts after them.
“Do it,” Brazuca says, knowing the kid likely won’t. How would he explain this whole mess?
As they walk away, he thinks about putting Whisper on leash, but she seems content enough to walk at his side until they get to the car. Last year, the two of them had combed the wild, rugged coastline of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. They had been looking for Nora then, too. He’s never had a pet, even as a child, so he can’t tell if Whisper’s instinct for Nora is just the natural way of things, or if the dog has s
omething special. He can’t shake the feeling that she knows something’s wrong. In her dislike for Sunil, the urgency in her step, her knowing eyes, she’s on high alert. After she’d found Nora washed up on a stretch of beach, her body shaded by rocks and trees, Brazuca had a taste of Whisper’s love for Nora. He will never underestimate it again. He wonders what has taken Nora away from her dog, and from Seb.
What could possibly be so important in Detroit?
He gets a feeling, a kind of bad omen. Or it would be, if he believed in things like omens. Which he doesn’t. Back in the car, he almost heads over to Bernard Lam’s place to close his case, but Sunil was right. There’s something about that dog that just won’t let up.
Like now, for example. She’s staring at him from the backseat, a rumble building in the back of her throat. Telling him, without words, that there are more important things to do.
35
Around the corner from the hospital, there’s a barbecue joint that sells cornbread squares the size of a shoebox and fried chicken to go along with it, if you’re curious about what the onset of a heart attack feels like. They also have free Wi-Fi, which is how they get people to stay once they’re in the door. I haven’t eaten much since yesterday and my stomach reminds me that though I can occasionally make it by on just one meal a day, this is the bare minimum.
The influx of carbs and sugar is saying I need a nap, but the late afternoon sun streaming through the windows keeps me awake. My laptop is in Nate’s basement. I can’t go back there right now, especially since I know that Sanchez is looking for me. But I still have work to do. I sit cross-legged on a wooden bench with my phone plugged into a charger I bought at the hospital gift shop. A chunk of cornbread obscures my peripheral vision. Ever since I had some on Retta’s front porch, I’ve been addicted to it. Plus, the American motto of quantity over quality is growing on me.
While I eat, I think about sporting logos. The Red Wings jerseys I’d seen at the bar sparked something. They reminded me a bit of the Hell’s Angels. Though the enthusiasm of rabid hockey fans is not unknown to me, I’m pretty sure that the man in my motel room didn’t get the Detroit Red Wings symbol tattooed on the base of his neck. Not Hell’s Angels, either, because I would have recognized it immediately. But, come to think of it, there was something about it that looked like a wing. With nothing better to go on, I narrow my searching of gang tattoos to birds. After an hour of staring at the body art of various gangsters on my phone, I have no answers but have gained a fresh appreciation for finding a good tattoo artist to ink your very original depiction of an eagle in flight. Long story short, it’s very important.
I close that search and start another, the search I’ve been working myself up to since I sat down. The newspaper clipping is somewhere in the bag I left at Nate’s place, but luckily I’d taken a photo of it before I put it away. Still, I don’t need to look at the photo to remember the names of the people I’m thinking about. Dearborn, Michigan, hosts the country’s largest Lebanese community. Many fled after a brutal civil war claimed countless lives. Just like in war zones everywhere, the people who could leave mostly did—and a lot of them inexplicably ended up in Michigan, of all the inhospitable locations they could have chosen. Why they came here is beyond me, but the Nasris seemed to have made a go of it. The bride in the photograph had gone to school in Montreal, so not only is there a Lebanese connection, there is also a Canadian one. Maybe she made a few friends at school and maybe one of them was my mother.
I don’t pull up the photo on my phone because I don’t need to see it. I don’t need to see my mother’s unfamiliar face, having been a part of public record for so many years, to know what it looks like. It has been imprinted into my memory since the moment I laid eyes on it. Her name was Sabrina Watts on my birth papers. In Hindi the name Sabrina means “everything.” In Latin, it refers to a river. In Arabic, it has something to do with patience. I think there’s also a Celtic origin of the name, but I have forgotten what it could be. Lorelei and I were aware our mother’s name was Sabrina. When we were children we would play games, imagining ourselves as princesses of various culturally charged garb. We never took the Hindi or Arabic versions of her name seriously, though, because her surname on our birth papers was Watts and that’s as Anglo as you can get. I know a little about what you can get away with on a child’s birth documents and the mother’s maiden name is always used unless she legally changed it before marriage—which is what she must have done. She must have only wanted to be known, even to us, as Sabrina Watts.
I suppress the desire to call my sister and ask her directly if she found anything about our mother, anything that I wouldn’t know. It’s not a given, as it might be in other families, that she would keep me in the loop. Her sisterly love only goes as far as it takes to show me to the door. I push Lorelei from my mind, because it is a continuous twist of the blade in my heart that she has excised me from her life. Instead I think about the woman in the newspaper photo. Did she know what happened to my father? Did she know why someone would want to kill him? Lorelei had dug up everything she could on his death before she went off to college. We’d still been talking back then. I know that it was marked definitively as a suicide.
But what if it wasn’t? I can’t deny that after talking to Kovaks I’ve stopped thinking about his death as a suicide.
The cornbread obscuring my peripheral vision is getting smaller by the minute, but it’s not so small that I can see the doorway clearly. So I’m not aware when Sanchez steps inside and sits down next to me on the bench. “Hi, Nora,” he says, eyeing the drumstick that has gone cold on my plate. “I was just walking by and I saw you sitting here. I thought, Hey! There’s that Canadian who got robbed at a motel. Excuse me, almost robbed. Remember me? Detective Sanchez?”
“No.” It’s such a blatant lie, but I’m so angry with myself for letting my guard down that I can’t help it. Maybe I can be forgiven because he’s now wearing a sweatshirt with the University of Michigan logo on it and has a baseball cap pulled low over his brow. He doesn’t particularly look like a cop today, but I’d seen him earlier at the hospital and I should have been paying attention.
“Oh, I think you do. I think you should go for a ride with me.”
“Nah. I’m good here.”
“Are you sure? Because I’m not. We could have a good time together, you and me. Down at the station. We can catch up. You’ll tell me what happened to Nate Marlowe and I’ll listen quietly and take notes. C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
It doesn’t sound like fun to me. Though phrased as a request, it’s really not. Sanchez smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. I’m used to cops looking at me this way, so it doesn’t faze me. I weigh my options. There aren’t that many.
In the end, both Sanchez and I know that I have no choice in the matter.
36
Sanchez seems cheerful as he leads me to a Ford Taurus parked illegally outside. He has picked up a brisket sandwich for the road and eats it in record time. His mood only improves on the drive to police headquarters, which I learn has been relocated to a former casino building.
I continue to stare out the window, watching the sun set. The last time I paid attention to a sunset was out on the rocks in Vancouver with Whisper. The Pacific Ocean lapped at the shore and Whisper fell asleep at my feet. Then we picked up Seb from the last rounds of his treatment and all went home to the town house. Thinking of this, I see that the difference between Detroit and Vancouver is more than mere distance. They might as well be two different planets. If there is natural beauty in Detroit, it’s so well hidden it might be lost forever.
Sanchez is still chatting about the new headquarters. “There’s also a crime lab,” he continues to explain. “And the Fire Department has their headquarters here, too.” We drive up the multiple-level parking garage to the fifth floor, where we go through various doors opened by Sanchez’s key card. There’s one hallway after another, then some more after that. I’ve lost all sense o
f direction by the time we arrive at a small room with hard plastic chairs arranged across a table from each other.
Sanchez excuses himself. He leaves without locking the door behind him. I’m not fooled by this, though, because the camera in the corner of the room is on and I know full well that I’m being watched. Have been watched since I sat down. I wonder if, when Sanchez comes back, he’ll be good cop or bad cop. I fall asleep thinking about it. When I wake up, there’s a cold cup of coffee at my elbow and Sanchez is sitting across from me with his head tilted back and his eyes closed.
I was not prepared for tired cop.
“Hey,” I say softly to him.
“Mmm, just like that,” he replies. Then he opens one eye to see what my reaction is. He laughs at my irritation. Turns into annoying cop. “I’m just joking.”
“Can we move this along?”
“Sure. Want some fresh coffee?”
“No.”
“Alright then.” He pulls out a notepad and takes his sweet time looking it over. I would wonder why he didn’t do this while I was asleep, but I know that mulling over notes is largely an act. He wants me to know that he has notes on me. But I refuse to be manipulated like this. I put my head back down on the table.
“Alright, alright. None of that.” When I sit up again, he’s back to tired cop.
“Nora Watts,” he says. “Canadian citizen, residing in Vancouver, British Columbia.” He looks at me over his notes. “Detroit is a long way from Vancouver. What’s the purpose of your visit here?”
“Tourism,” I say, which is what I told him back at the motel.
“Bullshit. What are you doing here, Nora?”
I think the real reason I’m here is because I have nothing but the past to hold on to. When Seb dies, my life will change again. It will just be me and Whisper and, for all her dedication to our life together, she’s a poor conversationalist. I suppose I have Bonnie, but I don’t. Not really. She’s as much of a stranger to me as I am to her. If she, for example, wanted to know how to follow someone without being detected, we could talk. I could also teach her how to pick a lock or slam her knuckles into someone’s throat so that she can buy some time to run away, but I hope to hell that she’ll never need to learn any of these things. I hope she doesn’t want to know me or my history, but if she ever comes to me to ask about her grandparents, I have nothing to tell her. I have nothing to tell myself.