Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  The apartment door yawned; he stooped, stepped through the tape, and inside. Long, faint shadows fell dark on darker shadow gaps fanned across the room from vertical blinds on the west-facing windows. Blocky blue tape outlined where the body had lain. The little forensic flags still marked where evidence had been gathered or noted: the body’s position, bloody shoe prints, handprints, bullet hole through the arm of a chair, a shattered corner of tile, impact craters low in the concrete wall from which the shattered, useless slug fragments had been removed. Finn made a preliminary pass without his camera, moving just as he had before, same footwork, like an odd dance, slowly remembering as if by instinct the positions from which he originally took his photographs. Then he took his old camera from his backpack and began shooting new photographs because the outtakes back in his studio would not be enough for her.

  Flashclick.

  The room reeled under bursts of light that tore at the abiding darkness.

  Flashclick.

  The condominium still held the dead, he felt it, and tried not to think about all the transgressions he was committing by being there, against the law, against his own long-held rules of survival.

  He was out of his comfort zone. It felt amazing.

  There was only the soft squeak of Finn’s sneakers on the floor, the hush of his measured breathing, the slip-shuffle of the old Pentax doing its thing.

  —

  WATER WAS a miracle.

  Submerged in it, she could almost believe that nothing had happened to her spine, the hard rehab weeks since the shooting dissolved in the slick streaming forward motion, practically weightless, gliding and crashing onward, body lithe, turning, arms thrusting her through the water, steady, paced, swimming laps of the hospital pool and blowing off steam from her dustup with Lennox.

  Water sounds banged off the walls, the pool’s fractious surface shimmered with broken light. She loved the loneliness. No one wanting to know how she was feeling, what she was thinking, how she was coping. Her empty wheelchair waited at the far end of the pool, like an insult.

  The patronizing sympathy was the worst of it. People wanting so badly to know but afraid to ask what it felt like, if she was angry, or suicidal, or just depressed, but it was all about them, not her, projecting their worst fears on her, dipping their toes into her tragedy, and drawing them safely out again, horrified, unable to really comprehend how you adapt because you have to adapt; how you accept your new normal because there is no other option. Reality has quaked. You don’t think about it. You stumble forward and bring along what you can.

  The chair. The legs. Ineluctable.

  None of it was how they imagined it might be.

  One life died, another was born.

  Her breathing broke rhythm and she swallowed water and was forced to pull up, treading, coughing.

  And everything from that past life, from who she was, and what she had done? Up for grabs. She imagined that her legs were still scissoring below her. Phantom limbs she couldn’t feel and yet her mind still conjured the cool currents shivering her ghost feet and toes.

  Like Finn Miller.

  That was another life, wasn’t it? The moonlight that fell through the studio skylight. Where she early morning stood there barefoot in the wrinkled cocktail shift she’d slipped back on, the cold grain of the hardwood floor beneath her, and watching Finn sleep, wandering on legs she no longer had among the clotheslines of photographs, ghosted lunar pale, and the way her body felt, then, it wasn’t the sex, it was something else she’d never—new, it was like—a little scary—an unfamiliar sense of arriving, an odd quiet at the center.

  She remembered studying the photos. Seeing what she hadn’t seen a few hours before. Or, rather, not seeing what a good detective should have seen right away.

  She had unclipped the photo of Willa’s gun from the line and held it up next to a photo of Charlie’s body, just to be sure.

  Without waking Finn, she had left the loft, unsure what she should say, unwilling to confront what she had done (was it betrayal or escape?), distracting herself, as she always did, with the work at hand. She was in property lockup as the sun rose, rooting through an open bin containing puzzle pieces from the Charlie Ko murder. A sleepy graveyard-shift property watch officer had stood behind her with the key, asking what she was looking for.

  Bullet casings, she told him. She took up Willa’s bagged service weapon from the bin. “Where are the bullet casings?” she had asked aloud. The suspect allegedly fired the gun twice. The clerk didn’t know what she was talking about, and mm-hmmed mostly for show. He’d been told the recovered slug fragments were so degraded it wasn’t feasible to pull a conclusive rifling. Nobody’d mentioned casings.

  She had asked and he had shown her Finn’s official crime scene photos on a flat-screen monitor at the front desk; Riley clicked through them quickly, knowing they would confirm what she already knew from his studio.

  When Riley walked into the interview room at Sybil Brand jail, Willa was waiting, with one of her little girls on her lap and her anxious, gray-faced father sitting opposite and watching distractedly as the younger girl on his lap played Angry Birds on an off-brand smartphone.

  Willa’s public defender had stood and mumbled a greeting and motioned for Willa’s dad to take his granddaughters and go see what was holding up bail. The old man threw an uneasy look at Riley and collected the girls. The phone spilled from the younger girl’s hand and skittered to Riley’s feet, where she picked it up and handed it back, and Willa Ko said, “What do you say?” And the older girl had answered for her sister, “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Riley only had a couple questions. She had promised the public defender it wouldn’t take long.

  Willa said without prompting that she had not killed her husband, Charlie.

  Riley said, okay, that wasn’t one of my questions, but go ahead and finish your thought.

  Willa had measured her, then. Ever the soldier. She said, I’ve been with Charlie since high school. He was the most beautiful boy and I couldn’t believe it when he asked me out. He wasn’t perfect. I know that. And I was really mad at him. But we have the two little ones to think about.

  If you didn’t shoot him, who did? Riley asked.

  The public defender told Willa that she didn’t have to speculate, and she nodded but said to Riley that she didn’t know.

  How old?

  Carly’s six, Jade’s four.

  Charlie was a good father.

  He sure wanted to be.

  “Want” and “was” are two different things.

  I was away for a long time. Men can’t . . . really deal with loneliness, I don’t think.

  Sort of like how women can’t deal with betrayal?

  Willa frowned.

  Riley asked her question: What did you do with the bullet casings that were ejected from your gun when you shot him?

  Willa looked at her public defender, and he nodded, and she looked at Riley and just shrugged, noncommittal.

  And if you didn’t shoot him, why did you hide the gun?

  Willa explained that they’d agreed to meet after she got done with work. They were trying to figure things out. The door was open when she arrived, and she walked in and found Charlie on the floor. There was no emotion in her voice when she said she’d seen what dead looks like and Charlie was, but she had put her head down to his heart anyway, to listen, because, she said, it was Charlie and she was hoping somehow she was wrong and then Willa’s voice trailed off and after a moment she said that that was when she got his blood on her.

  Where was the gun?

  On the floor, she had said, right there. She heard a police radio coming down the hallway. She realized what it would look like, and so she took the gun and hid it.

  That was why she tested positive for GSR, her lawyer said.

  Riley asked the question s
he came to ask: You didn’t see the casings on the floor? You didn’t pick them up when you picked up the gun?

  For a moment Willa had held Riley’s gaze. The public defender told Riley his client had already answered the question, and Riley said not really, and Willa had said, no, ma’am, why would a soldier think of that?

  Which was when Riley had known for certain that Charlie Ko hadn’t been killed by his wife.

  The world went dark with a faint echoing click.

  The complete blackout yanked Riley back to the rehab pool where all of the lights, in-pool and overhead, everything had plunged into darkness, slowly relieved only by a feeble green bleed from an EXIT sign tucked around the corner where the doors were. Riley could hear the soft splish of her arms treading water, but she couldn’t see her hands causing it.

  “Hey!”

  Nobody answered her. At first, she thought a janitor or an orderly must have inadvertently flipped a switch thinking the pool was empty.

  “I’m still in here! Hello?”

  She was disoriented, couldn’t see to the sides of the pool, but told herself that if she swam slowly in any direction, eventually she’d find one.

  It didn’t calm her. She made her choice. And moving through the water, she thought she heard the faint click of footsteps on the deck tile. She stopped and heard nothing but the lap of water on the sides. She let a silence gather, waiting. Sensing someone there, waiting. Her arms were fatigued; she wouldn’t be able to tread water much longer. Keeping her arms under the surface, she began moving again, drifting really, trying to make as little noise as possible, straining to hear the soft footfall she was certain had resumed, but with no way of knowing whether she was swimming right toward it.

  —

  FINN HAD FINISHED his photo shoot, had put his camera into his backpack, and was hurrying away from the apartment when the elevator door gaped and caused him to duck into the stairwell to avoid being seen by whoever was coming out. He waited for the footsteps to pass, then cracked the door and watched a hulking white man walk down the corridor like he owned the place. High-wall haircut and a windbreaker, under it the bulge of a short-barreled nonregulation gun that Finn knew some of the local blues liked to carry off-duty. A cop? The weapon was out as soon as the new arrival saw that the crime scene seal had been breached. The big man had a key, pushed the door open, and listened for a long time, before he disappeared inside.

  While a voice in Finn’s head kept worrying, Walk away, walk away, he reemerged from the stairwell and crept back to the apartment and peered inside. Against all better judgment he wanted to know why someone else was, at this late hour, creeping the scene of a months-old murder.

  The living room was empty. He thought he heard a soft noise, deeper in the apartment, then nothing. He waited. But got impatient and went in again.

  It was as if the big man had vanished. What was he looking for? Riley would want to know. What had Finn missed? There was no one in the kitchen, the hallway to the bedrooms was dark and deserted. Finn listened: nothing. A television, faint, muffled, from the floor below. A hollow clearing of throat.

  He moved, again, soundless, deeper in. Deciding the big man had to be in the master bedroom, Finn convinced himself he would just go far enough to get a glimpse of the man, see what he was doing, and then get the hell out of there.

  But he saw no one in the bedroom, and heard the flushing of a toilet behind him too late and the bathroom door at the head of the hallway swung open and Finn, panicked, darted into the darkness of the master suite without considering that in so doing, he was trapping himself, because now the big armed man controlled the egress.

  “Hey, now.”

  Finn heard the hallway light switch flipped, but nothing happened, the power had been turned off. The heavy man began to move toward where he must have seen Finn’s shadow slip, and Finn, pulse skittering, pressed himself against the wall just inside the open doorway, holding his breath, understanding now that he was doomed, listening to the interlocutor’s relentless advance.

  “Yo. I could just park out here until it’s light.”

  He could, but Finn was pretty sure an armed man wouldn’t. He struggled to think, his chest so tight his shoulders ached. He pulled his camera from the backpack and held it in one claw hand, finger frozen on the shutter button.

  Finn had no plan. But the man’s big shoe found a squeaky toy in the darkness, it momentarily startled both of them, caused High-wall Hair to look down, and by the time he lifted his eyes Finn had lurched out of the bedroom with eyes closed and the Pentax held high like a talisman, a camera flash all he had to offer in his own defense.

  FOOM.

  Blinded, the big man threw one arm up and ducked, swung his other arm and gun hand out wildly at the afterimage of whoever was trying to get around him, so Finn set off another flash. The gun cracked against something fairly soft and hollow (Finn’s head) and the big man tapped the trigger and the gun went off, blowing a huge hole in the wall (first passing through the flutter of Finn’s shirt, nearly drilling him as he recoiled from the blow), a muzzle flash glimpsing a gypsum dust storm as, through it, Finn made his harrowing escape: pivoting, camera coming up again, pure instinct now:

  Flashclickflashclickflashclick.

  The big man tangled legs and stumbled. Finn, shoulder down, bouncing off man and wall, willed himself clear, blood smeared on the side of his face from the scrape of the gun; he blundered to the end of the hallway, out through the apartment, scattering evidence flags in his wake, snapped the police tape like he was crossing a crazed race finish line, out into the building corridor, to the stairwell doorway and down.

  As the fire door winged shut behind him, Finn could hear a big cop’s angry roar of disappointment, and the dry crackle of the police tape still flapping in disarray.

  —

  RILEY GROPED FOR THE EDGE COPING, found it, splashing a bit inelegant, frustrated and tired. She steadied herself and located the faint silvered outline of her chair. At the other end of the pool. Miles away.

  And now again she heard them: slow, careful footsteps on the tile deck. The room’s acoustics deceived, she still couldn’t tell where. Getting louder, coming closer? This side. She knew not to call out to it. She felt an unfamiliar panic rise wrought by her new helplessness. Fuck fuck fuck. She didn’t like it; tried to push it away, no no no. Went very still, silently pushed away from the coping and, helicoptering her arms under the water, began to swim back across the pool.

  So vulnerable. Drowning in blackness. Her eyes everywhere, and nowhere. The water no comfort now. How far to the other side? Nothing but shadows on shadows.

  A hand stabbed down from behind her and grabbed roughly at her arm. She stifled a scream and tried to twist away—

  “—Riley?” Lennox.

  “Oh, God, it’s you . . .” Now she could see his worried face.

  “Me. Yeah. Why are you swimming in the dark?”

  “The lights went out.” She thought it through, heart still racing, but the fear gone. “Probably on a timer. Is it late?”

  “I went to your room, they said you were down here.” Riley, still treading water, stared up at him, and he squatted down and rocked back on his heels. “I came to apologize for earlier.” His features were softened and made even more handsome by the dim light. Had she ever wanted him? She couldn’t remember. She’d wanted to be wanted. Had even that changed? “When you asked about . . .” Lennox thought for a moment, and started again. “Captain has said from the beginning he’ll consider bringing you back. But it’s going to be a desk job, Riley. Feel-good departmental PR.”

  “No.”

  “Filing and phoning. I know. That’s not who you are, baby. You’ve always been go-go-go.”

  Riley held the edge of the pool and pushed her wet hair all the way back on her head. “They don’t ever come out and tell you that you’re crippled,
like in a TV show, did you know that? Doctors hedge; it’s day by day, current status, letting you believe that maybe what’s happened will heal. They leave everything in flux, words measured, anything possible, but really they just don’t want to admit they can’t fix you. And meanwhile you make the necessary adjustments and accommodations. We’re prisoners of the one-way trip of time.”

  “Your smarts never take a break,” Lennox said fondly.

  “My whole life I’ve wanted to be a cop.” It came out hollow. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  Lennox shrugged, and smiled, easy, kind. “Marry me. Raise a family. I mean, hey, you wouldn’t have wanted to work once we had kids, anyway.”

  This is what happened, Riley thought. She pushed off, turned in the water, irritated, and started to sidestroke to where her chair was parked. Lennox stood and followed, pacing her along the side of the pool, misunderstanding everything. “And if you can’t have kids, we’ll adopt.” Getting no reaction, he tried “Riles, I’m so sorry.” And when that didn’t work, he said, “I’m sorry you got shot, I’m sorry you have to deal with—hell, I’d give you my legs if I could, but—and I’m sorry we have to talk about this now, but you keep pushing things, you know? And somebody’s got to say it, it’s time, and I love you—but you’ve got to stop pretending that things aren’t different now.”

  “Things.”

  “You know. Don’t play dumb.”

  “Maybe things were never what you thought.”

  She watched his expression change as he slowly understood what she might be telling him.