Nameless Night

by G. M. Ford

  “Nope.”

  “That’s fucked up, man.”

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “What we gonna do now?”

  “We probably better get out of here,” Randy said.

  Acey looked pained. “We just got here.”

  “Best we keep moving.”

  “Wasn’t nobody following us here, dog. We was careful.”

  “They’ll be along.”

  “How they gonna find us?”

  “I don’t know, but they will.”

  Randy stuffed the torn and bloody shirt into the wastebasket, picked up his bag, and headed for the door. Acey tagged along behind.

  “I’m hungry, dog,” he said as they closed the door and started down the littered walkway along the front of the motel.

  “Soon as we get up the road a ways, we’ll stop and get something to eat.”

  Acey kicked an empty Diet Coke can, sending it spinning off in front of them.

  “What you gonna do after you get rid of me?”

  “No idea,” Randy said.

  Acey kicked the can again, sending it clanking end over end this time.

  “You goin’ back to dat house.”

  “Maybe,” Randy said. He eyed the kid sideways, wondering how a nine-year-old could be so adept at reading his intentions. Of course he was going back to the house.

  What had she called it?…A little charade. And something about the guy…how the dude kept using the name…like he was talking about himself in the third person or something…almost as if…Randy nearly missed a step on the sidewalk. He stopped walking. Acey kept going…as if maybe Wes Howard wasn’t his name either…all of which made it possible that Randy was really Wes Howard after all…and then he heard her voice again…it isn’t like he’s coming back, she’d said. He who? Randy wondered.

  Was she referring to him? Didn’t sound like it, and how would she have any idea whether or not he was going to come back? And what were all those papers she felt a need to hide in the bomb shelter? And what was she…

  The sight of the car scattered his thoughts. He kept walking as he found the keys and pushed the green button. Acey got in and was ready to go as Randy slid into the driver’s seat and buckled up. Above his head, one of the buttons on the headliner was blinking a blue light. On Star. Randy wondered whether it always blinked and he just hadn’t noticed, or whether this was something new. He looked over at Acey. The look of terror painted on the kid’s face froze the blood in Randy’s veins.

  Slowly he turned his eyes toward the front of the car. Chester Berry. The cop. Big old bruise running all the way across his forehead. Big black automatic pointed at Randy’s head. Jaw wired shut so’s his tongue could heal. He growled an order that sounded like: “Gggowwwwdcar.”

  “I think he wants us to get out,” Acey said.

  “Stay put,” Randy said.

  “Gggowwwwdcar,” louder this time. Chester Berry was waving the gun back and forth. “Gggowwwwduckingcar,” he roared through a mouthful of gauze.

  Randy showed his palms, then made like he was reaching for the door handle, instead dropping the Mercedes into reverse, crimping the wheel, and flooring it. A slug came roaring in the open window, passing so close beneath Randy’s chin that it rattled his teeth.

  “Hang on,” he said to Acey as the car rocketed backward. He heard two more shots and then another as he straightened the wheel and bounced out into the street. He dumped the car into drive and went speeding off in the direction of the ocean. In the rearview mirror, he saw Berry come out from between buildings, assume the combat position, and then change his mind, choosing instead to go ambling back out of sight.

  Like he was in no hurry at all, Randy thought to himself. Like…like he could find us whenever he wanted to.

  A minute later, the blue light began to blink. “Shit,” Randy said out loud. He made two quick right turns and then squealed the car to a stop at the curb. The blue light blinked incessantly now.

  He got out of the car, looked around, and there it was…right in front of his face, a little black square, no bigger that a matchbox, right at the junction of the roof and the back window. He hurried back, grabbed hold of it with his fingers, and ripped it from its magnetic mooring. He jerked until the wire broke and then threw the antenna in the street. He ran back to the driver’s side and jumped into the car.

  The blue On Star light was cold and dead. He turned to Acey. His exultation at finding how Berry had found them died in his throat. The kid sat staring straight ahead. Sounded like his breathing was labored…like he had a lot of congestion in his lungs…except the sucking noise wasn’t coming from his mouth…it was coming from…Randy reached over and touched him. His hand came back warm and sticky. That noise again…coming from the bubbling hole in his chest.

  “Oh, Jesus,” escaped Randy’s lips.

  32

  Landon Street was a zoo. The first “shirtsleeve” day of the year. Couldn’t have been much more than sixty degrees or so, but after a tumultuous winter and early spring, anything in the vicinity of a warm day was greeted with unbounded enthusiasm.

  Helen and Ken stepped aside and let a pair of baggy-pants skateboarders thread their way up the sidewalk. Joggers wound their way through the crowded sidewalks, showing acres of pale skin to the crackheads and the junkies and the panhandlers who’d crawled squinting from winter dens and returned to their haunts along the avenue.

  “I really think he was the best,” Helen said. “I’ve always loved the old ones with Sean Connery, but this guy…”—she waved a hand—“this guy was a dish.” She pretended to wipe sweat from her brow. “Whatshisname…”

  “Daniel Craig,” Ken filled in.

  “I mean…” The hand across the brow again.

  They’d just been to the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. Something about Daniel Craig had pushed her buttons. Her breathing got shallow every time he came on-screen, which was about 99 percent of the time. At one particularly erotic moment, she’d leaned so far forward her Coke spilled onto the floor.

  “It was good,” Ken said. “More like the books than the others.” He made a disgusted face. “None of the supertechnology crap. None of the toys. No giants with steel teeth. No foolishness like that.”

  “How about an ice cream?” Helen asked.

  Ken threw an arm around her shoulder, pulling her out of the way of another pair of skateboarders, whose noisy wheels ground over the uneven concrete like an oncoming train. She leaned against his chest and watched as the skaters propelled themselves through the crowd.

  “Cherry Garcia?” Ken asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Walking through a crowd, holding each other close, isn’t the easiest thing to do. They’d had to dodge this way and that and even come to a complete stop a couple of times before they made it to Ben & Jerry’s.

  “On me,” Helen announced as they slid through the door. “You got the movie. I’ll get the ice cream.”

  Ken didn’t argue. Instead, he sidled over to the only empty table and took a seat. The table was a mess. A deconstructed newspaper not only covered the table but was stuck to the surface here and there by what appeared to be ice cream residue.

  Ken couldn’t deal with that kind of clutter. While Helen waited in line, he borrowed a wet rag from the busboy, wiped the table, and then began reorganizing the newspaper. By the time he had it reassembled, Helen was on her way to the table with a pair of ice cream cups, Cherry Garcia for her, vanilla for him.

  Ken spooned ice cream into his mouth as Helen got settled in her seat. He pointed down at the blaring newspaper headline. HOPE FOUND?

  “What about this whole missing-guy thing?” Ken said.

  Helen was nodding. “I only caught part of it this morning, so what?…The FBI has found this guy or something?”

  “No,” Ken said. “A confidential FBI source says they recently ran a set of prints through their system and the prints came up as his.”

  “After all th
ese years?”

  “Could be the prints are that old, too.”

  “Do they know where he is?”

  “No,” Ken said. “Just that his prints showed up.”

  “Remind me about this Hope guy,” she said around a mouthful of Cherry Garcia.

  “You remember…the astronaut…guy was scheduled to blast off on the Venture mission. Went missing the night before the scheduled liftoff. Big to-do over whether they were going to postpone the mission…then they decided to replace him…thing takes off okay, completes the mission in space…”

  She poked the air with her ice-cream spoon. “…and then the ship burns up in the atmosphere during reentry.”

  “Killing everybody on board,” Ken finished. “And, as far as I know, nobody’s ever seen or heard from Adrian Hope again.”

  “Isn’t he supposed to have been in some way…involved?”

  Ken waved a disgusted hand. “All that’s just conspiracy theory. All those TV shows and the stuff in the magazines…that’s somebody making a buck. It’s all bunk. Nobody’s ever proved anything one way or another.”

  “You never know,” she teased in a singsong voice.

  “If anybody knew anything, they’d have sold it to the media by now.”

  With the matter seemingly settled, they went back to the serious business of spooning ice cream into their mouths. Halfway through his nearest scoop, Ken turned the paper over. A gray inset box below the fold caught his attention. The headline asked: GILL THE SOURCE?

  According to staff reporter Wayne Fontana, unconfirmed sources within the FBI were now reporting that the fingerprints in question had been submitted for analysis by none other than Queen Anne County district attorney Bruce Gill, whose office was, at this time, refusing comment on the matter.

  Ken swiveled the paper Helen’s way. He pointed to the beginning of the insert. Helen leaned forward. Her spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. She pulled the paper closer, read, then reread the article. She set her ice-cream cup on the table and looked up at Ken. “No way,” she said.

  “Be a hell of a coincidence.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “And the state never fingerprinted him?”

  She made a rude noise with her lips. “Are you kidding? Fingerprints cost money. The state doesn’t spend money on retards.”

  “The timing’s right. He’s been missing for nearly seven years.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said.

  Ken turned the paper back his way, put his index finger down at the bottom of the original article, and then started turning pages. He picked up the paper and held it close to his face. A moment later, he folded the paper into quarters and again turned it Helen’s way. The picture was of a well-built young man holding a basketball. Late twenties maybe. Nobody Helen had ever seen before. The caption read: Adrian Hope. She looked at the hands. Her breath caught in her throat.

  “Do you suppose?” she whispered.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” Ken cautioned.

  “You’re right,” she conceded. “This isn’t something we want to go off half-cocked about.”

  “No kidding.”

  They ate slowly, passing the newspaper back and forth as they spooned away.

  Ken left a two-dollar tip. They sidestepped their way through the crowded shop, back to the sidewalk, where they crossed Landon, walked half a block, and started downhill toward Arbor Street.

  They walked arm in arm in silence along the sun-dappled sidewalk. Helen wondered whether the silence was for the possibility of Paul turning out to be this Adrian Hope or something in the feel of the moment that merely discouraged dialogue.

  They jaywalked across Arbor Street, stepping up over the high granite curbstones at just about the spot where Paul Hardy had been struck by the car. Inwardly, Helen winced and kept her eyes in front of her.

  Three strides before turning up the front walk, the sound of shoes slapping on pavement pulled her attention toward the street.

  Middle-aged and dumpy, he moved in their direction with uncommon speed and grace. He had his hand extended the whole time. “Irving Jaynes,” he said as he approached. Energy seemed to ooze from his pores. He gave off the feeling he could sell iceboxes to Eskimos.

  Baffled, Helen took his hand in hers. His hand was hard. His grip suggested strength. “Helen Willis,” she said. She used her free hand to gesture toward Ken. “This is my friend Ken Suzuki.” Ken favored the stranger with the smallest of nods.

  “Just bought the house across the street,” he said, pointing at the seedy Tudor mansion which had been for sale for the past six months or so. “Just wanted to introduce myself to the neighbors.”

  Helen’s breeding took over. She went all gracious and nice, welcoming him to the neighborhood, getting in her pitch for Harmony House. After exchanging pleasantries, she gave him several verbal cues to suggest the conversation was coming to an end. He didn’t, however, get the message. He kept talking. How much he loved the city and the weather, his renovation plans for the new house.

  It went on and on until Ken began to tighten his grip on her arm. She extended her hand again, intending to shake her way out of the conversation. With a mischievous look in his eye, Jaynes bent at the waist and kissed the back of her hand.

  “My great pleasure,” he said.

  They stood rooted on the spot, watching as their new neighbor hurried across Arbor Street and disappeared into the house.

  “What kind of crap was that?” Ken asked when he was gone.

  “What crap?”

  “That hand-kissing stuff?”

  “I thought it was elegant,” she said.

  Ken’s face looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth.

  Helen stifled a grin. He was jealous. No doubt about it. She had the urge to giggle but suppressed that, too.

  33

  Took forty minutes before the Pakistani doctor shuffled out from behind closed doors. The nurse at the desk pointed him toward Randy, who was sitting on the only bench inside the Trauma center. Randy would have met him halfway except he was handcuffed to the bench.

  The doctor sat down next to him. He ran his liquid brown eyes over Randy’s face, but remained silent. If he noticed the blood all over the front of Randy’s shirt, he didn’t let on. He put a hand on Randy’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing we could do.”

  Randy turned away. He rested his throbbing head on his cuffed wrist. The doctor started to speak, but Randy waved him off with his free hand. A minute passed before Randy heard the sound of the man’s shuffling feet fading in the distance. A deep sob escaped Randy’s chest. And then another, as they came more frequently, until he could hardly breathe. Took another few minutes to gain some measure of control over himself. He wiped his face with his free arm.

  The cop wandered over. “I called for a unit to take you downtown,” he said. He waited, but Randy stared off into space. “I don’t know what’s going on here, mister, but I’m sorry for your loss,” he added. “A boy that age…it’s just not right.”

  Randy broke out crying again, this time letting himself go; his shoulders shook as sorrow took charge of him, racking his body with spasms of grief. His head felt as if someone were pounding nails into his forehead. His stomach rolled once and then again.

  “I need to use the john,” Randy said.

  “We’ll have a car here in an—”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said. Dropping his head down onto his manacled hand. Shielding the cop’s view with his body, he stuck a finger down his throat. He dry-heaved several times. Did it again until he felt bile in his throat.

  The desk nurse looked up from the pile of charts in front of her. She wagged a finger his way, opened her mouth to speak, but it was too late. The contents of Randy’s stomach landed on the floor between his feet.

  “No…no…no,” the nurse chanted. “We can’t be having that in here.”

  She was on her f
eet now, moving out from behind the desk with the speed and grace of a woman half her age and a third her size. An orderly poked his head into the nurses’ station. She pinned him in place with a thick brown finger. “Get a mop and a bucket,” she commanded.

  “I was just—” the guy stammered.

  “I don’t care what you was ‘justing’…you find a mop and a bucket and you get yourself back here and get this cleaned up.”

  She used the same finger on the cop. “Take him in there,” she said pointing to a door labeled STAFF ONLY.

  The cop approached Randy from the side, careful to keep his well-shined shoes away from the puddle of puke shimmering on the floor. First he unlocked the cuff from the arm of the bench, then changed his mind and decided he didn’t want his cuffs puked on either, removing them from Randy’s wrist and stuffing them into the black leather case attached to the back of his belt.

  He helped Randy maneuver around the mess and escorted him over to the restroom. He followed Randy in the door and stood with his arms folded across his chest, standing sentry as Randy braced himself, bent low over the sink, and puked again.

  His dedication to duty lasted until Randy splashed water over his face, dried himself with a paper towel, and then began to undo his trousers.

  “Sorry,” Randy said sheepishly. “But I gotta…”

  The cop winced. He crossed the room and tried the other door. Satisfied it was locked from the other side, he headed for the hall. “I’ll be right outside,” he said, stepping out and closing the door firmly behind himself. Randy waited a beat, then holding his pants up with one hand, he used the other to push the “lock” button in the center of the handle.

  He rebuttoned his pants and looked around. A rubber glove dispenser was attached to the wall. Three holes: small, medium, and large. A disposal container for needles and other sharp objects. Directions for how to properly wash one’s hands. The cabinet along the far wall was filled with supplies: gauze, syringes, a blood-pressure cuff, tongue depressors, more gloves, a pair of scissors, several pairs of green scrubs, little green slippers, a stethoscope.