Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  I had to give a version of that statement twice, first for the original officers responding, then to a couple of detectives who were probably from Internal Affairs. There’s always an IA investigation when an officer discharges a weapon. I wouldn’t be allowed back on the street until IA came to a conclusion about the righteousness of the shoot. I didn’t know how long it was going to be, but I was probably looking at the rest of the week at least.

  I leaned my head back in the seat of my Charger, waiting for the latest detective to return, and I thought that at least there would be no more ride-alongs with Ms. Whedon.

  It was a self-destructive thought, because I suddenly began wondering what the lawyer was going to make of my off-duty weapon discharge. It seemed almost certain that the woman would make it into something sinister, especially after my earlier outburst.

  One of the detectives came back with a clipboard and a plastic evidence bag. I was nodding even before the man said, “We need to take your gun for evidence.”

  I took it out, pulled out the magazine, and unchambered the last round. Gun, magazine, and lone bullet all went into the bag. He examined it once it was in the bag. “That isn’t standard issue, is it?”

  “No, it’s not the department’s gun. It’s mine.”

  He held it up to the streetlight and read, “Israeli Military Industries?”

  “Jericho 941. I prefer the way it handles.”

  He slid the clipboard toward me while he hefted my gun. “Light,” he said.

  I grunted agreement while filling out a description of my weapon for the chain of evidence, signing and dating the form. I gave it back to him, “I got one with a polymer frame.”

  “Like a Glock?”

  “Like a Glock with a safety.” Now I got to wonder what the lawyer was going to make of the fact that I preferred to carry my own weapon rather than a department-issue one.

  He took the paperwork and the Jericho, leaving me a receipt. I felt exposed without the gun. He said, “I think we’re done here.”

  You, maybe, I thought.

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it,” the detective added.

  “Pardon?”

  “Missing the guy,” he told me.

  “Thanks.”

  I rolled up the window and drove home.

  * * *

  —

  I pulled into the garage, allowed the door to slide down behind me, and finally allowed myself to react. Or, more accurately, I lost the ability to hold in my reaction. The moment I let go of the steering wheel, my hands began shaking. I stared at them as if they belonged to someone else, and even as the front of my mind was asking, What’s the matter with me? my vision was blurring.

  I still saw the old man pounding on my window. I still heard him talking to me in a language I shouldn’t be able to understand. Saw him attack the armored figure. Saw him cut down. I still felt his viscera sliding under my shaking hands as life drained from his body.

  And, with it, I saw my mother resting in a coffin, her face a livid mask that spoke more of the mortician’s art than it did of anything living.

  Have I cried for her yet?

  The question slammed me like a sledgehammer to my gut, and the self-imposed restraints to my emotions crumbled at the impact. I bent over the steering wheel, sobbing so violently that I made no real sound. I just drew in spastic violent breaths that stabbed my lungs and made my whole body tremble. Tears burned my cheeks, running down my neck to dampen my collar. I slammed my fists into my thighs like a six-year-old having a tantrum, hard enough that I was dimly aware I was bruising myself.

  I didn’t think. For a time that could have been minutes, could have been hours, my entire awareness was consumed completely by a white-hot flare of grief that burned through everything else in my brain. I screamed at the universe that had taken everything from me; sometimes I screamed words, and sometimes it was an inarticulate wail, and sometimes it was words in a language I didn’t remember. I was probably lucky that I was muffled by being inside the car and inside the garage, or my neighbors probably would have called 911.

  When I came back to myself, I was draped across the wheel, sucking in deep breaths. My throat hurt, my eyes burned, and my nose was running. I felt a deep ache in the tops of my legs.

  I pushed myself into a sitting position and composed myself before I got out of the car. Once inside my house, I walked into the bathroom to wash all the traces of my breakdown off my face.

  After violently scrubbing myself with a washcloth, I looked up and asked my memory of the old man, “Who are you?”

  I could have been asking the reflection staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. The red-rimmed eyes, the wild hair, the flushed cheeks, the painful frown that was almost a sneer—I could easily see the feral child my parents had adopted.

  “Who am I?” I asked myself.

  I turned away from the mirror quickly, telling myself, “I’m Dana Rohan. I’m a cop. And I am going to find out what the hell is going on.”

  * * *

  —

  I returned to the scene at three that morning.

  I wore a new holster carrying a 9mm Beretta that I’d retired five years ago. The gun was heavier than I was used to, but it shared the same ammunition as the Jericho—and the weight on my hip was a comfort against the onrushing weirdness.

  The Mark had been quiescent since shortly after the armored swordsman had vanished in front of me. I now suspected what those alien sensations had meant, and I had returned to the scene of the murder to confirm part of my suspicions.

  I stepped out of my parked car into a dead street in a dead city. This late at night, especially in the middle of the week, the life of the city retreated to small burning embers scattered at random. A few fast food joints, a gas station here or there, a few bars close to residential areas . . . those were the places where lights burned and people still moved. Here, close to downtown, everything was dark and closed.

  I rested my fingers on the fender of my car and told myself what I needed to do would only take a few moments, especially since I was pretty sure what I would find.

  I stepped away from my car and walked into the shadows hugging a closed storefront. Cloaked in the shadow of the doorway, no one looking on, I pulled the Mark into myself, asking its invisible fingers to press against me and push forward. One step and my car disappeared, leaving the street empty.

  I walked forward to the base of the streetlight where the old man had bled to death. I remembered the feeling of slick flesh moving uncomfortably under my hand as I had attempted the impossible task of stopping the bleeding.

  No trace of blood here, in a world whose clocks ran fifteen or twenty minutes behind my own.

  I didn’t expect any.

  Now, removed from the world where I lived, I was less concerned with being observed. Anyone here who saw a grim blonde woman vanish would never connect it back to me or the life I had built within my own world. I sucked in a breath and allowed the Mark to push me further.

  I walked around the base of the lamppost, the Mark pushing me through worlds with a shuddering pulselike intensity, the universe a stop-motion fantasy around me, more ephemeral than real.

  I stopped when I knew I walked the threshold across a world that now overlapped the time when I had met the old man. Inside, the glow of the Mark’s touch faded, like a second pulse gradually growing fainter. I stood, observing.

  This world matched the early evening I remembered, the streetlights having just come on, the sky purple with only the barest hint of fading daylight.

  And, unlike every other time I had done this, I saw no sign of the crime I was investigating. It gave me a chill far beyond the receding afterglow of using the Mark. I had stood in all manner of alternate pasts before, and while I knew they were not the pasts I knew—I wasn’t in them, after all—I had always been able to walk
toward a past where some version of what I sought was taking place.

  Here, I didn’t have anything: no assailant, no victim.

  If they were like me, with their own Mark, it made sense. If they were like me, they would be unique among the various pasts and futures I walked to. Perhaps it was that uniqueness that allowed us to walk between them.

  The man in the armor had vanished into some other world, moved beyond my ability to sense his presence.

  That was what I had been feeling with my Mark, wasn’t it? Invisible alien fingers almost touching, a feeling I had never sensed before—it was the presence of those others. Other Marks.

  When I walked home through the veil of worlds, I wondered if either of them had sensed my Mark. Could that have been why the old man had been pounding on my window?

  I stood by my car and shuddered a minute, thinking my own Mark might be touching other Marks, leading them to me. I froze, concentrating on the sensations from my Mark, trying to feel the presence of any others.

  At the moment, I felt nothing.

  Maybe if the armored man was too far away for me to sense, he was too far away to sense me. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. He hadn’t seemed anything but hostile, but he was also the only living person I knew of who was somehow like me.

  * * *

  —

  I came home after four, and I slept, but not well. I had nightmares of shadows chasing me, chasing my family, and they all spoke a language I shouldn’t understand.

  SEVEN

  I SPENT THE day sleepwalking through my job, tied to my desk composing reports, answering e-mail, and nursing a headache induced by sleep deprivation. I only talked to Jacob long enough to explain what was going on with me and IA, and not to expect me to do anything beyond paperwork until they finished their investigation.

  That caused a glance at Whedon, who was standing back and waiting for us to finish our conversation. He sighed and whispered to me, “Almost makes me wish I had to shoot someone.”

  “You can handle one lawyer.”

  “I’m sure I can, but if I do, I think it would get me arrested.”

  Even though I felt like crap, I couldn’t help smiling. “It’s justified force, self-defense.”

  “Yeah, but is it ever a good idea to piss off a lawyer?”

  My smile went away as I thought of my outburst yesterday. “I guess I’ll find out.”

  He squeezed my shoulder and tried to be reassuring. “It will all work out, Dana.”

  I watched him walk away. He had a self-assured stride that reminded me of a panther. A panther that has no idea what he’s talking about.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER an interview with Internal Affairs officers, I was officially put on administrative leave. The IA officers were refreshingly free of bullshit, which was a relief after days of dealing with Whedon. They didn’t think I’d be on leave for more than 48 hours, given the facts of the case. However, they also didn’t want me doing any more paperwork since, technically, that was still working.

  At three in the afternoon, I had nothing left to do. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I went to the gym. When I walked in, I had the room pretty much to myself. There was one other guy, someone I didn’t know, a curly-haired kid who looked barely out of high school. He was on the weight machine, doing bench presses. I noticed him glance at me when I came in, but I was in no mood to talk, so I went to the opposite side of the room to the treadmills.

  I warmed up slowly, but soon I was going full out. I found the rhythm of it comforting, pumping my legs, my lungs, my heart. It allowed me to switch off my brain for a while. One of the reasons I felt like crap most of the day wasn’t just the lack of sleep, but the fact I’d slept in too late to do my morning run. My body was used to two miles a day, and it became cranky if it didn’t get it.

  The kid moved to various stations on the weight machine, and he took longer than he needed to set the weights on the leg press—looking at me while he did so.

  It was almost amusing watching his attempt at being so self-consciously macho.

  I tweaked the controls to angle the treadmill up. If I was going to run inside, I might as well take advantage of it for the workout. My normal run was mostly on the flat, without any significant hills. Here, I had the chance to run up a twenty-degree grade. I attacked it almost as a response to the kid, who was doing leg reps with something like two hundred pounds.

  I think he might have done fifteen.

  The readout treadmill told me I had reached my second mile, and I decided to do another mile up the grade. I pushed myself up a nonexistent mountain as the kid stopped his weight training and looked at me without even trying to hide the fact he was looking at me.

  He seemed to want to say something, and I wondered why. I wasn’t the greatest looker even when I cleaned myself up. Right now? I was pushing myself, wearing a gray sweat suit that was practically soaked black with perspiration, and random strands of hair had come loose from my ponytail to stick to the side of my face. I could catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the windows on the other side of the weight machine. I looked as if I had just climbed out after falling into a swimming pool.

  I wished I could follow up my workout with a swim, but I had yet to find a swimsuit that completely covered the Mark.

  The kid never said what was on his mind. He left without talking to me. I didn’t know if I was disappointed or relieved.

  The treadmill beeped at me; my last mile was done. I lowered the grade and gradually slowed my pace for another quarter mile to cool down before stopping.

  I had moved on to punching the crap out of the heavy bag, pretending it was Whedon, when Jacob entered the gym.

  I didn’t notice him enter until he said, “Aren’t you hot in that getup?”

  I dropped my fists and stepped back from the heavy bag. Jacob stood in the doorway, watching me. In his hand was a manila folder. I shrugged and said, “So?” I walked to a chair where I’d thrown a towel and a bottle of water. I wiped the sweat off my face and said, “You know I’m off duty until IA dots all their ‘I’s and crosses all their ‘T’s?”

  “I know.”

  I threw the towel down and picked up the water.

  He continued. “They’re probably being more anal than usual with our little Justice Department lawyer running around. It’s not like you hit anything.”

  The way he said it, I knew it was a bit of gentle ribbing. I couldn’t even bring myself to smile. I had hit something.

  “I brought you this,” he said. “It’s a copy of the file on your John Doe from last night. You were asking for it, weren’t you?”

  I had. Not that I had mentioned it to Jacob. I had asked the guys in charge of the investigation. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  “Why did you want to see this?”

  “Are you serious? I had a man die in front of me—” My voice caught and turned into a pained whisper. “He came to me. I tried to stop the bleeding.”

  “Dana?”

  “My hands were inside him. . . .” My voice trailed off and I was panicked that I might start crying again, but somehow I held that back.

  “Dana, are you okay?”

  I was quiet for several seconds before I said flatly, “No.”

  “What’s going on with you?”

  “Do they have a picture of the victim in that file?”

  He nodded.

  “His back?”

  “Yeah. He’s got an elaborate tattoo, a full back piece—”

  I turned away from him and began sucking in deep breaths. I had been alone for too long, and I had no idea if I was strong enough to do what I was thinking of doing.

  “Dana?”

  “Shh, give me a moment.” I think I was shaking a little bit. I still had no real way to articulate what was wrong. Everything was wrong
. Ever since Mom died, I had felt as if all my carefully arranged life had begun sliding into something I didn’t know, something I couldn’t control. Not only was I torn up from losing the last family I ever had, I was aching over the loss of this complete stranger who shared my Mark. A stranger . . .

  I wasn’t reacting as if he was a stranger. I felt as if he was family. The Mark on him, like mine—what if he was a lost connection to my “real” family. Was that really what I was thinking? The idea hit me almost as hard as my mom’s death.

  I felt alone, abandoned—and I’d done all I could to push away the one person who cared. Why couldn’t I talk to Jacob?

  I didn’t understand myself anymore, if I ever had.

  “Dana?” he repeated quietly.

  I held my hand up without turning around. He said nothing more. If I did not start telling him what was happening, who would I tell? Everything that happened lately told me that the life I was pretending to live existed on borrowed time. Was I going to wait until it collapsed around me and just slipped away?

  Didn’t he deserve something before that happened, some sort of explanation?

  If things were going to fall apart, wouldn’t it be better if it was on my own terms?

  I bit my lip and said, “Jacob? I don’t show anyone this.”

  “What?”

  I sucked in a breath. Not everything, not all at once, but I could start. I grabbed the zipper on my top and yanked it down before I had a chance to reconsider. Then I shrugged out of the soaked top of my sweat suit, allowing it to fall down and drop to my waist. From there up, all I wore was a black sports bra. I heard him suck in a breath.

  Despite the bra, I felt as naked as I had when I’d been discovered in the shower by a Michael Rohan who had not been my father. I felt his gaze tracing my Mark, my secret scars, as if he was looking into the most intimate part of my life. As if, with the swirls of the Mark, he could see the way it rooted inside me, the way it made me feel.