by Cameron Cain
Laughlin’s pale. I almost feel sorry for him.
Almost. “I’d send tech over anyway. Gus might’ve stepped on the asphalt somewhere and left a shoe-print. And hit up the DOT for traffic cam surveillance between midnight and two a.m. Could come in handy when I bring him in.”
I’m moving past. Laughlin puts out a crutch to stop me. “I need your contact info. Phone number, where you’re staying.”
I step around. It’s never worth it to try and explain that I’m not staying anywhere, that I don’t sleep when I’m on a case. Laughlin barks behind me, but he’s not going to catch up, and I don’t want him having my phone number. There’s something about being easily reachable that I’ve never liked.
Chapter 6
The sun’s going down. I start a tour of Gus’s known hang-outs, riding figure-eights around the freeways. A lot of the addresses are ratty holes in rotten walls with really nice cars out front. Gambling dens. I don’t go in, but I get some street meat here and there and eat on my bike, keeping an eye out for a five-foot-eleven doughboy with the fashion sense of a junkyard dog. There’s lots of them, just not the right one.
Night comes on. I visit an office under Gus’s name in Riverside. It’s in one of those anonymous parks where any given unit could be a mail-delivery vitamin business or a sweatshop specializing in dominatrix lingerie. I decide not to try the door. It would be a smart place to keep sensitive stuff, but that’s why I doubt Gus used it.
He’s an idiot. Where does an idiot go when he’s wanted for questioning?
“Home,” I say. I scoff, and it ripples down the silent office suites. Not even Gus is that big of a dope.
All the same, I head that direction. Cops will have cleared out by now, leaving Polly’s building empty. They’ve got lives, wives, dinner, kids, homework to help with or, if they’re another type, beer to drink in an armchair while a sporting event hypnotizes their day away. While the interstate blurs by me in a series of speedy lane changes, I think how that was the other part of mainstream law enforcement I could never stand: the order to go home.
“Go home, Fell,” they’d say. “Get some rest, come back fresh tomorrow.” Like I was supposed to ignore how tight the window is on kid cases. Like sleep mattered, like anything mattered, like everything else in the world that was going on — life, going on — was supposed to matter when this responsibility, my responsibility, was so huge. It had nothing to do with the parents. I tuned the parents out. Somebody else had to be the hand-holder; I was too busy. The Bureau didn’t like that. Female agents are de facto supposed to be the bleeding hearts while the men get to use their heads and bodies. The Bureau also didn’t like that I kept going, that I’d make more miles, that I’d turn in reports with night surveillance they didn’t approve.
That I’d do this, basically: pull up by a convenience store at the head of Polly’s street. Her neighborhood at night is a whole other animal. It looks dangerous enough in the day, but the dark is multiplying shadows, populating the streets with swaggering walks and tough talk. A boy with destroyed teeth looks in all directions as he climbs into a car with a grizzled guy behind the wheel. One corner up, a clutch of young men with navy blue ‘do rags are having an animated discussion. There’s a homeless — man? woman? — in the alley behind them, trying and failing to get bottle to mouth when the shakes are like an earthquake.
I zip my jacket all the way up and step onto the street.
“Hey, sweetness.” It’s the shortest but broadest of the guys on the corner. “You lost?”
“Not me,” I say. This in itself surprises them. I was supposed to keep quiet, keep walking, look down, scurry for safety. Instead I come even with them and nod at Polly’s building. “Did you know her?”
The guys look at each other, laughing. They can’t decide whether to be impressed or insulted that I’m not afraid.
The short guy is smart — he doesn’t pick one or the other. “Listen here now. We’re not running a kindergarten. And we don’t like a lot of uppity white bitches talking to us like we gotta do what they say.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t like you telling me ‘I know’. Like whatever I got to say, you know it already.”
It’s a perfect trap. I can’t say ‘I know’ again. I can’t ask questions, I can’t just decide to walk on — anything and everything I do will be read as a mark of disrespect.
Except maybe honesty. “She might not be dead.”
“What?”
“Polly,” I say, holding up her photo. Goofy smile and navy blue ‘do rag. “Did you give her that?”
He looks at his buddies like it should be obvious. “Little blond white girl walking all around here like nobody’s gonna notice. I told her she wears that, she’s not so out of place. People know she’s okay, she’s not like you. A tourist.” He turns his head to a side and spits.
I put the photo away.
“Lemme ask you,” he says, coming closer. He hulks up to me, giving his pecs a nice flex in the streetlight. If I had a rubber band around my wrist, I’d snap it for the third time today. “If Polly looked like us, would you be here?”
“If she won the lottery, yeah. That’s who hired me.”
“Okay, so you’d be here. Would the talk shows be hollering about it? Would it be national news? Would her black face be on the front page tomorrow?”
“No.”
“No,” he says. “No, it wouldn’t. Wouldn’t be any big deal at all.”
I say nothing. The truth is, it’s the truth. I’d be pissed too, but I’m not going to say that. I have the luxury of saying that. That’s the problem.
He shakes his head and backs up. “My uncle lives in there. ‘Lived’ now — they locked the place up. Once a white cop goes and hurts himself on the stairs, they notice it’s a shithole.”
“Did your uncle hear or see anything?”
“Saw that kitchen. He took a picture and showed it to me. You’re crazy if you think that girl’s alive.”
“I go until I’ve got a body.” I unzip a pocket that’s hard to get to. I don’t give out a lot of these. “Here.”
“The hell’s this?”
“If a kid ever goes missing around here and it isn’t any big deal at all, call that number.” I walk away. “And please don’t mess with my motorcycle.”
“White girl,” he says after me, “nobody wants your motorcycle. What the hell would I do with a motorcycle?”
Polly’s building is even more depressing at ten after midnight. I skip the front door and go around back instead, pulling my lock-picks from a pocket. The bolt is easy, but the knob takes an extra couple of minutes because the tumblers are corroded hunks of junk. All the same, I’m in in five minutes. I put my picks back, unzip another pocket, and take out my mini-flashlight, giving my coat a loving pat that makes all the zippers jangle. Best eight grand I ever spent.
Which, coincidentally, is how much this entire building is probably worth. And that might be generous. Wood warps up from the floor in rotted tongues pierced with rusty nails. There’s a combined smell of sewage, mold and way too much dust. Pick a direction and point, and you’d land on something broken: light fixtures, doorframes, holes in the wall with wires inside. I’m barely through the entryway, and the light from the street is pretty much gone, making my flashlight the only illumination. It scatters nests of cockroaches in the corners. This place looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, not hours.
I imagine coming home to this every day. I imagine watching my child come home to this every day.
The style screams 1950s to me. It’s more like a rooming house or a desperately low-quality bed and breakfast than an apartment building. I shine my light on the phone in the hall. It’s bright yellow, and it’s rotary dial. Beside it, the laundry room is neat, but the tile is peeling, the ceiling water-damaged. I go to the washers and speak in the tones of a normal conversation, testing the acoustics. It’s dead-quiet in here without individual units blaring TV’s or music,
but from where I stand I can see the door to IC. I picture Gus there, fiddling with a lock, taking his time so he can listen.
I boost myself to sit on a dryer. This is ridiculous. I don’t care how down and out you are, how many criminal contacts you have, or how few brain cells you’ve got to rub together — if you overheard, secondhand, that the spunky old lady upstairs won the big lottery jackpot, how would that lead to this? How am I sitting on a dryer right now, in a condemned apartment building, with a crime scene above me and a kid missing?
I hop off the dryer and go two rooms up the hall. “Building Superintendent” announces itself in a tarnished plaque on the door. I try the knob, it turns, and I walk into a smell that’s a concentration of the rest of the building, plus some. I groan, get my collar up to breathe into. My light sends colonies of roaches into hiding. Plates of unfinished food are everywhere. So are clothes. So is paper. The mess buries a desk that someone already tossed, but most of the chaos looks like it was here before. Gus couldn’t have devised a better way to discourage law enforcement from looking too hard. I sure as hell don’t want to go through this crap.
I do it anyway. The roaches get braver and more curious. The bottoms of my boots are coated in their guts by the time I establish that most of the paper is legit superintendent stuff: work orders, requests for parts, pay stubs. Cops or feds probably took most of the juicy bits already. I tear open a still-shrink-wrapped package of manila files and flip through them, thinking it’s the definition of wasted time. Except there’s a bump near the bottom that I’m not imagining, and when I get there, I find a key.
Not bad for an idiot — buying some office supplies, slipping this in and rewrapping the package. Frustrating that there’s not a note right next to it saying what the key might unlock. I pocket it.
The only other interesting find is, sadly, in the toilet tank. The water is so dark and rank that I suspect it didn’t receive a thorough pat-down like I’m doing — and/or the searcher wore those heavy-duty gloves that practically nullify your sense of touch — which means this slick brick at the bottom escaped their attention. I pull it out, toss it in the sink, and pull the plastic wrap off a fat stack of money with a driver’s license and passport rubber-banded to the top. “Joshua Lewis,” I read aloud, then turn on the tap as hot as it’ll run and soap my arm ’til it stings. As ID’s go, they’re not awful. They’re not great, but they’d do the job, especially if you’re making a dash at Mexico. I stuff them in my hip pocket, with the key, but the money’s not going to fit.
So I’m carrying about seven-K up the back stairs, riffling through the bills with my thumb and noting they’re non-sequential, mostly hundreds but plenty of twenties. Polly and Hattie’s apartment is criss-crossed with Crime Scene tape in such a way that I can’t just duck it and get through. I pass by for the moment, going for a look at the busted stairs. I peer over a line of Caution tape.
Laughlin’s lucky he got off with a broken leg. The hole he left is gaping. He must have grabbed onto the railing to avoid crashing through completely, because the wood’s rotted to mush. Termite holes make it look like honeycomb, and the larger of those holes contain the nests of newspaper coleslaw that suggest rats.
I go back to Polly’s, unzipping my easiest access pocket. I pull out my knife and butterfly it open, four shiny inches catching the gleam off my flashlight. Slitting the tape on a crime scene always feels like I’m unwrapping some godawful gift. A lot of abductions go down bloodless, so it’s been a while since I’ve walked into a horror-show like this. The worst part is that you can see the life under all the death. The photos on the wall, the bowl of fake grapes on the dining room table, the glass of water on the nightstand by the fold-out couch — maybe Hattie got thirsty, or maybe her dentures soaked there.
Polly got the bedroom. I knew it from the police reports, but now I’d know it from the boy band poster on the wall, the bright purple comforter.
I throw Gus’s cash in with the grapes, then flip my knife shut and put it away, in spite of wanting to slash something, cut somebody. I imagine what Hattie must have dreamed that night, the night she probably thought was the last night she’d ever spend in this dump. Whether she dreamed about a few thousand square feet with a yard, near a school that hadn’t had a shooting in its whole history. Walls she could hang these photos on without startling the insects as she hammered in the nails. Regular check-ups to verify she was still in remission, not worrying how she’d buy food next week. The bargain basement American dream.
I check out the bathroom. The medicine cabinet is falling apart, but I get it open, shining my light on what’s inside. I read prescriptions, wonder if their toothpaste whitened better than mine, and finally find Hattie’s makeup in a bag on the top shelf. I take out her eyebrow pencil and do a thick, fugly arch on my hand. I set that hand under a running faucet for several minutes. The pigment doesn’t budge.
A deafening sound has me covering my ears. I think momentarily that the killer must be back and conducting some kind of auditory warfare. But they’re chimes. The church bell is striking one.
“How the hell did they sleep through that every night?” I ask nobody.
But I know the answer. People can adapt to anything — even murder, even the process of standing in the spot where murders happened, and picturing it. I open my eyes. I swallow past a distinct need to throw up. “Okay,” I say. “It’s okay, it’s done. You’re here.”
I never got used to it. That’s why I’m better at it than anybody else. I never accepted that this is how it is, this is what happens, this is my job and when I clock out I have a life I try to function in. I did exactly the opposite. I decided that this is the evil I will fight, and I will do it by looking the abyss dead in the eye, letting it look right back at me.
And then? Then we dance.
I trace Hattie’s movements to the main door. “You’d have shouted, if you could still shout. You’d have told Polly to hide.” A nine-year-old hears that and goes under the bed. I return to Polly’s doorway, toeing the scratches in the floorboards. There’s a bright rose of blood where the scratches run out. I sit on the arm of the sofa and stare at it. It’s been typed as Polly’s — tech’s plastic yellow triangles are still scattered through the carnage. I put my chin in my hand. “Not a lot of blood,” I say, sounding moronic even to myself. She probably bled plenty more in here. The stuff’s layered all over the place: Hattie’s, Polly’s, and a few sprinkles they’re still trying to identify. Gus’s, probably.
“Probably,” I say.
Sure, probably. You get a spatter guy in here and he can peg who was standing where, to an extent. But all these TV shows now that create 3D models and arrive at a definite conclusion about what happened and how, they’re the ultimate illusion. You have to learn to live with a lot of probably.
I was never good at that, either.
I stalk to the entryway again and face in. The locks stick — Talia mentioned it. I get out my picks, lock the door from the inside, and put a clock on it. It takes me almost a minute. It’s not like I’ve got a key, but I’m no slouch at this. Ballpark it at twenty seconds, then, if you’ve got a key.
So you’re Gus, you’re an idiot, you decide you’re going to kill Hattie and Polly and claim the prize for yourself, somehow. You display the same flickers of intelligence you used to hide your getaway money and therefore remember to bring a silencer, but you simultaneously forget that you’ve got to jiggle the key before the lock will give?
As if my feet are outside of my control, they step back. One step, just far enough that Gus could be between me and the door. Between me and my targets. Say I’m not an idiot now. Say I’m somebody else entirely; say I’m a pro. Gus doesn’t want to give me the key, because he wants in on the action. More like he doesn’t want to be left out of the loop if the plan works and suddenly there’s eighty-million dollars to divvy up. I say fine — or my bosses say fine — and then this idiot is dicking with the lock for a full twenty-some seconds before we’re
inside. And, once we are, the idiot reacts to an old lady coming at him full-speed and moves so he’s blocking the whole doorway. He pops Hattie with two shots, but I can see they’re no good. She’s hit in the throat, so she’s not going to shout anymore, but now she’s going for the kitchen, for a drawer, and I’m not an idiot so I’m guessing that drawer is full of knives. I do the most logical thing.
“I shoot through Gus,” I say, raising my arms with a finger-gun at the end. “I go through the meat of his shoulder so I won’t have another body to deal with. Then I get around him, go to Hattie and deliver the kill-shots.” I walk it, stepping around a slumped Gus in the doorway, to the kitchen, where dried blood is lathered onto the floor.
“Then I go for Polly.”
Except I don’t. Like my feet are again separate from me, they won’t do it. They go to the hall instead. “No, I don’t go for Polly. I leave. I run out of here, because —”
Because why?
“Oh, Gus,” I say when I figure it out. “You stupid motherfucker.”
I’m the pro. I don’t shoot through Gus. I don’t want his blood at the scene, do I? No, that could trace back to me. So I go around Gus, giving him a good shove or kick to make him stop firing. I get to Hattie in the kitchen, I’m delivering the kill-shots —
“And Gus shoots me.”