Vector

by James Abel

  Hodge is not bleeding but he’s staring at Tom in terror, gagging and clawing at his face as Tom tries to unbuckle the belt. Hodge’s breathing is crazy fast. Tom’s head hurts badly—myfaultmyfault I made Mr. Gruntz take Hodge. It is hard to breathe or think.

  But he gets Hodge out, and sees that other than the terror, Hodge is okay. He’s OKAY! Tom’s relief is so profound that he wants to sit down, but he can’t, because two other boys still need to get out.

  The front of the van flickers with fire.

  He tells Hodge to wait, sit on a rock, and he runs to the van, reaches in with Mr. Gruntz, pulls out Larry Benton, and half drags out blathering Kendall Black. Both boys are bleeding and crying. Mr. Gruntz is white-faced and says, “I’m sorry.” Tom shouts at him about the cell phone, and Mr. Gruntz puts his face in his hands and cries tears and says, “I was just going to check my messages.” Suddenly the van bursts into flame, fierce and yellow. The blast of heat whips into Tom’s face.

  Hodge has fallen asleep.

  No, not asleep.

  Hodge is lying sideways, toppled off the big snow-covered rock where he was sitting. No breath comes from his mouth. His little hands—gloves off—are twisted near his throat, as if he’d clutched at it. There is hardly any blood. No big injury. Tom sees the smallest, silliest-looking cut on the side of Hodge’s neck. He tells Hodge to wake up, open his eyes. He shouts it. He grips Hodge by the ski jacket and shakes him. He is still screaming as Mr. Gruntz pulls him off, and then police are there and putting out the fire and firemen are helping the boys climb up the ravine, and a stranger, a woman, is dragging Tom up the hill toward an ambulance and all he can do is scream, “Help Hodge!”

  Later he will learn that Hodge drowned. The cut in the neck came from glass driving into his trachea, piercing an artery, shooting blood into his lungs. He drowned just as surely as if water had flooded in there. What Tom had taken for panic had been choking. The boy drowned on his own blood while Tom was trying to help the others.

  “You could not have saved him, son,” the doctor says. “Do you hear? Say that you heard it. Look at me. Tom!”

  Later a police detective comes to the house and tells Tom that Mr. Gruntz says he never used his cell phone in the car, that Tom must be mistaken. The detective explains that the police have a way to check if someone was using a phone at a particular moment. Gruntz never made a call.

  “He wasn’t using it! He was starting to! He told me!”

  “Maybe you just think that! Everything happened fast.”

  “You killed Hodge!” Tom shouts at Mr. Gruntz, in the hospital. And at the funeral. Tom waits outside Mr. Gruntz’s condo and screams, “You murdered Hodge,” whenever Gruntz walks in or out. He tells anyone who will listen what Mr. Gruntz did to his brother. He calls up a reporter at the newspaper and tells her, too. Mr. Gruntz doesn’t look sorry about it anymore. He looks mad. And the detective comes back and tells Mom that if Tom doesn’t stop bothering Mr. Gruntz there will be “consequences,” but Mom is in no shape to do anything but cry and smoke dope and sleep.

  Gunther doesn’t know what to do either. He takes Tom to a church to talk to a priest, a compassionate-looking older man with gray hair and a bald dome on top. The priest listens to Tom, and almost seems like he will cry. The priest tells Tom that God does things that look mysterious, but actually have a purpose.

  “You mean God killed Hodge?”

  “I mean that we can’t understand God because his ways are complicated.”

  “It’s not complicated! Hodge died!”

  “Let me read you something from the bible.”

  “I don’t want to hear the bible! I want you to tell me WHY HODGE GOT KILLED! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!”

  “Watch your language, son.”

  Gunther announces a month later that the house is “no fun” anymore. “You must both get over this. Bad things happen. I will be moving back to Germany next month.”

  Mom tells Tom that they’re leaving Breckenridge and moving to Denver, to live with his grandparents and “have a more serious life.”

  “I thought you said my grandparents were dead.”

  “To me they were. I need to grow up now and they can help. You’ll like them. We both need to change. No more drinking. Or dope. I’ve gotten a job in a gallery in Denver. And, Tom, I promise you, I mean it, no more men.”

  • • •

  Tennessee welcomes you, the sign read. Tom was in the mountains now, past Asheville, and the land descended and rapidly flattened. Once it had supported tobacco farms or dirt roads funneling slave-grown cotton east to the ocean, west to the Mississippi.

  I-40 traffic slowed as he reached the outskirts of Memphis. He exited the highway by the Mississippi waterfront. He passed the big University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. The revived neighborhood offered upscale souvenir shops and cobblestone plazas, and he saw crowds of tourists wandering about on a lazy weekend. No malaria fear here! Cars bore license plates from many states, so Tom’s Colorado one blended in. The city had the vibrant feel of a place where the population was exploding. Working from his hand-drawn map, he got turned around for a few minutes, made a wrong turn, entered a commercial zone . . . Hooters, Pancake House . . . and passed into something more calmly residential, with fine old antebellum houses and blooming trees where moss hung from two-hundred-year-old branches that once shaded Confederate troops. He turned the car around and headed back toward the waterfront.

  No more men for me, Mom had told him. I swear it this time.

  She’d been honest about it.

  Until Hobart Haines came along.

  • • •

  Tom reached the waterfront, and the wide, muddy Mississippi River. Crowds flowed toward the landings and park abutting the waterway, or back to the restaurants and greenways. Tom saw the tall white twin stacks of the riverboat Queen of the Mississippi, docking by the busy Beale Street Landing. He passed a brewpub and an old tobacco exchange converted to souvenir shops. A summer arts festival was in progress. When Tom had scouted this place it was practically empty, but now streets were packed and there were stages set up for bluegrass bands.

  Tom strolled the paths along the riverfront, growing frustrated. There were too many eyes here. He could not risk a release. The last thing he needed was for some stranger to see him freeing mosquitoes. He had a lie prepared if that happened—I’m with the University, studying them—but only a fool would risk using it.

  Also, unlike New York, where people avoided eye contact, here passersby nodded hi. A crowd had gathered to hear a popular North Carolina folk singer, Philip Gerard, perform his new hit song, “Robert Johnson and the Devil.”

  Tom Fargo almost fell as a drunk bumped into him, apologized, and lurched away. Giving up, he remembered the name of a city park, his fallback point, a small lake off Wolf River, a wetland Mississippi tributary just a few miles north on State Route 51.

  Tom made it back to the parking area and strolled toward the dead end where he’d left the Subaru. Cars were packed into diagonal spaces like horses tethered to poles two hundred years back.

  As Tom approached the Subaru he slowed and his heartbeat rose. He spotted a couple of blue-and-white city police cars there, blocking his way out.

  It can’t be for me.

  There was a small crowd. One police car was parked so close to the Subaru that it almost touched it. Another vehicle—a Chevy Tahoe—had apparently backed into his door. The Subaru’s driver-side door was bent in; worse, he saw with horror, there was a rip in the door where the impact had taken place.

  Inside that door were the mosquitoes.

  Tom started to turn away but spotted a fat woman standing with one of the policemen, pointing Tom’s way. He had a feeling that the busybody was telling the cop that the Subaru was his car. Maybe she’d seen him park. The larger cop was comin
g toward Tom. It was too late to turn away now. Too late to come back later when there would just be a note or ticket on his car.

  “Is this your car, sir?”

  The woman gripped the other cop’s arm, clearly insisting, yes, that’s the man. The officer before Tom had a jarhead haircut and attentive stare and seemed quite fit. There were too many people here to start a fight. Even if he were inside the Subaru, it was impossible to drive off with cars blocking his way. Could he ram his way out? He told himself that what he felt was not a fear problem but an adrenaline problem. Control the adrenaline, he thought.

  “Yes, sir!” he said, acting indignant, glaring at the trio of teenagers by the offending Chevy. “What the hell happened here?”

  “They hit your car, sir. They actually called us to report it. I know one of those kids. Relax. May I see your license and registration? You’re from Colorado, I see.”

  To protest would only make the cop suspicious. Tom reached for his wallet and remembered it was in the car. He would have to open the glove compartment to get it. But the Sig Sauer was there, too. Then he saw something that froze his blood.

  A small dot, a mosquito, was climbing out of the Subaru’s driver-side door through the rip in the metal.

  The impact must have busted a carrying case.

  A second insect appeared. There were more than three thousand insects in there. What would happen if hundreds of them began crawling and flying out?

  “The registration is in the glove compartment,” Tom said, heading for the passenger-side door, hoping to distract them from the rip on the other side. They were all watching him.

  Which will I come out with? he asked himself, opening the compartment. The registration? Or the gun?

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Get us into that apartment,” I ordered the police locksmith. I was in a black rage over the twenty-four-hour wait for a search warrant. I couldn’t believe that judges had denied our request, even after the dead bodies of Tom Fargo’s neighbors had been found, murdered, across the hall.

  “Goddamn liberal judges. He never came home. Never came to the shop. No sign of the damn car.” Eddie mimicked the reason for the delay. “There’s no proof! No evidence! You can’t just break into any apartment near a crime scene.”

  With us in the foyer was Detective Jamal and an NYPD canine handler named Kovics and his four-year-old German shepherd, Dorothy. Yellow crime-scene tape hung off the door across the hall. Forensics crews had left, and the bodies were long gone. The dog was trained to detect chemicals in which mosquitoes are shipped. Sucrose solutions vary in taste and flavoring. Manufacturers add lemon or caramel to enhance taste. Dorothy would also allegedly alert to the smell of Parafilm, which to humans has no odor at all.

  Dorothy strained at her leash as the eyes of the British jockeys in the lithographs on the wall seemed to watch the locksmith pull out the Medeco. My anger was a steady drumbeat in my skull. In the Marines I’d never had to deal with search warrants.

  “I’m going in anyway,” I’d told Jamal yesterday.

  “No, you’re not.” With two uniformed officers, he blocked the way. “Not without probable cause.”

  “Two bodies aren’t probable cause?” Eddie asked.

  “That’s like saying anytime anyone is killed, police can enter any residence within a hundred yards.”

  “Well, why can’t they?” Izabel asked.

  “I’m frustrated, too,” Jamal said, “but I see the point. I grew up in Bed-Stuy. If open entry was the rule, I would have spent my whole childhood watching cops turn our apartment and neighbors’ places upside down. Sir, if you go in, I’ve been ordered to arrest you.” Jamal had folded his arms. He didn’t like it. But he meant it. At least he looked miserable over it. I gave him credit for that.

  Finally, Jamal located a seventy-six-year-old judge who wrote the warrant, not caring if the entry was declared invalid later. The judge told us, “If you find something, this will reach the Supreme Court. I always wanted one of my rulings to do that. Better late than never.”

  The dog handler was a small, athletic man, and ex-Army. As the door opened, he ordered Dorothy, in a high, squeaky voice, “Play the game! Go, girl!”

  Dorothy ran in. If she found a person she’d bark and corner him. If she found a body she’d bark. The apartment was sunny and immaculate with high ceilings and no sign of life or struggle. Dorothy’s claws made scraping sounds on the bare floor or were muted by throw rugs. I heard her excited breathing as she ran from couch to coffee table to corners.

  Nothing.

  Dorothy disappeared into the bedroom.

  She came out. Nothing.

  The bathroom.

  Lots of South American folk art hung on the walls. I saw a painting of Brazilian rubber tappers in the forest, reminding me of people I’d seen on the ferry in Rondônia. We’re close. I saw clay vases, crudely made, marked with yellow and black geometric patterns similar to ones I’d seen in the market in Porto Velho. I saw blowguns mounted in glass and a headdress with beads and parrot feathers. The apartment was a mini-gallery. The coffee table offered colorful photography books. From the Amazon.

  Dorothy stopped before an interesting oddity in the place, a thick closed door blocking entrance to a built-in room-within-a-room, clearly not part of the original layout. Just a square enclosure in the middle of the loft. Musical practice room, maybe, to shield neighbors from noise. A soundproof cave where a drummer could bang away.

  “Or a darkroom,” Izabel speculated.

  Dorothy lay down in front of the door and stared at it, ears straight up.

  “She’s alerted,” Kovics said.

  “It’s locked.”

  Eddie said with caution, “Rigged to blow?”

  We regarded the room from two feet away. I asked Kovics, “Is Dorothy trained to detect explosives?”

  “That was her original job.”

  “Which does she smell now? Explosives or chemicals?”

  Kovics leaned down and rubbed his knuckles over the dog’s head, roughly. He scratched inside Dorothy’s ears. The dog never shifted her gaze.

  “Good girl. Find the boomboom,” Kovics said. “Where’s the boomboom?”

  Dorothy immediately stood and, door ignored, began searching again in the rest of the apartment.

  “I think we’re okay here,” Kovics said.

  “You think? Or we are?” Eddie said, taking a step back.

  “Call the bomb squad,” demanded Isabel.

  Dorothy was moving along the baseboards, sniffing, a four-footed, living divining rod.

  Kovics nodded with a confidence that Eddie did not feel. “If there were explosives in there she wouldn’t have left.”

  The locksmith breached the room as Eddie moved back. The inside had been cleaned out. Wire shelves were empty. The block tabletop was shiny bare. There was a corkboard with puncture marks from tacks. I smelled Clorox and Lysol. Someone had gone over these surfaces with double care.

  “Nothing here, so why lock it?” I mused.

  Dorothy was back again. She’d found no explosives in the apartment. Inside the darkroom she lay down, long nose pointed directly into the shadow beneath a counter. Her ears were straight up. Alert!

  “Good girrrrrl,” Kovics said in the high, squeaky voice, rubbing Dorothy’s ears.

  “How can she smell anything over Clorox?” Izabel asked, wrinkling her nose, crouching down to see what was under the counter.

  Kovics bristled at the slight. “Dorothy has two hundred twenty-five million olfactory receptors in her nose, to your five million. She can smell a body twenty feet below an ice-covered river, and differentiate between human blood and a squirrel’s.”

  Izabel Santo’s feet were sticking out from beneath the worktable. She grunted and her sneakers scraped the floor as she pushed back into view. She held up a ripped scrap o
f paper. On it, blue labeling: PARAFILM M LABORATORY FILM.

  My breath caught. This was the “false skin” used in the shipment of mosquitoes, the film laid over their carrying containers, blocking exit, but allowing them to feed through the surface on stored blood.

  Eddie rocked back on his heels. These days he unconsciously massaged his arm that had been injured in Brazil when he was thinking.

  “You did it, Tom,” he said.

  • • •

  Jamal used the siren and dome light on our way to the art gallery. This time, he easily obtained search warrant permission on the way. The break-in team met us at the grate. Inside, Dorothy made a beeline to the basement and alerted in front of a wooden box stamped RONDÔNIA, inside of which we found a half dozen Indian-made ceramic vases. The pattern on the side was familiar.

  “Uno, I think we just found the carrying cases,” Eddie said. “Now where’s the goddamn guy?”

  • • •

  This time when I called Ray Havlicek he came on the line immediately. He was still in Illinois, where the search for contacts of the dead terrorists was under way. FBI agents were questioning other students who had taken classes with the dead men, workers in a Northwestern University lab, and a cousin in prison in Joliet. When I explained what we’d found, Ray’s breathing slowed audibly. He whistled when he heard about the Parafilm.

  “So! Two groups at least! Chicago and back East.”

  “He’s disappeared. I think we should go public, ID him. Anybody see this guy? Or car? He’s wanted for questioning in relation to the attacks and two murders in New York.”

  “I’ll run the idea past the Director.”

  “We should announce it now, Ray.”