Eran and Bheru leaned closer to the monitors, although they were seeing about as much as they were going to. “You said it was about three-thirty, right?” Dave asked. “Blue-collar go-home time?”
“Yeah,” Eran said. “The time’s estimated but that’s pretty close.”
“It’ll be easy to find,” Dave said. “I’ll do a fast-forward through the platform tape and just look for the glob of uniforms that shows the medics. Then we can go back and take a closer look until we find your rescue guy. I can get it within three or four minutes right off the bat because of the conductor’s emergency call-in.”
Dave was as good as his word, and in no time at all the three men were watching a grainy but fairly wide-ranging view of the subway platform in question. There were a number of factories in the area and it was crowded, filled with workers headed home after the day shift. Even though it was underground, it was hot, too—Eran could see that by the looks on the faces of the people waiting for the next train. Being a cop for so many years had made him very attuned to facial expression and body language, and there was a certain way that people held themselves and behaved when the temperature was jacked into the uncomfortable range. Like these folks, they stood apart from each other as much as possible, trying for breathing room; jackets and sweaters that had been worn in air-conditioned workplaces were held with only one or two fingers and Eran could see a lot of the men wiping at their foreheads.
“Right about here,” Dave said suddenly. He paused the image on the screen, then rolled it backward a couple of times until he got what he wanted, matching the date and time display on the lower left of the screen to a report that was open next to his keyboard. “That’s Klinger.” He tapped the screen to bring their gazes to a gangly-looking man in a work uniform. The guy had crazy hair that was sticking up in every possible direction. “Okay, here we go,” he said.
Another few seconds and they saw it all—Klinger holding his head then pitching forward onto the tracks, the surging movement of the bystanders as they instinctively crowded toward the spot where he’d gone over, the sudden blur from the left as a man ran forward and leaped down after Klinger, disappearing from view. After that Dave began taking the video forward incrementally, showing the train as it rolled over the spot where the two men had gone onto the tracks, people rushing back and forth, the white-faced conductor coming out of the stopped train as its passengers were told to disembark. Another few minutes and the cops were there and clearing the platform, the conductor went back onto the train, and the train slowly backed up.
Then, of course, the moment of supreme surprise—although it was like watching a silent film, they could still almost feel it—when the tracks were finally exposed and the rescuer’s head appeared over the edge of the platform as he hoisted a sick and shaken Klinger into view.
“Stop,” Eran said. “Go back a bit. I think we can get a decent view of the guy’s face.”
Dave did as he was told, frame by frame, until—
“Oh, yes,” Bheru said as the three of them stared at the screen. On it, fully facing the camera, was a tall, light-haired young man. He was filthy from head to toe, but even through the black streaks on his face and the muck caked in his hair, they could all see that without a doubt it was the same guy who had rescued Jack Gaynor yesterday morning. “You were right.”
“Great,” Eran said as he straightened. “But how in the hell are we going to find him?”
Eleven
The visions had driven her mother insane.
They absolutely had. This was real life, not a mystery movie where some poor schmuck or pitiful woman was wrongly locked away so a conniving relative could get his or her hands on a sizable trust fund or become heir to a wealthy and magnificent throne. There was no money or power to be had. There was just her cold, hard father and the complete and utter loathing with which he had been filled when the doors at Lakeshore Hospital had closed behind his wife for the first and last time. She was still there now, diagnosed as an advanced schizophrenic as she rambled nonstop about the things she saw on a daily basis. The problem was that no one else could see them and nothing—no amount of therapy or drugs or anything else the doctors used as treatment—could make her mother stop talking about them.
She went to the window and stared outside again. This seemed to be the spot for her lately, although from one moment to the next she couldn’t have said what transpired on the street below. She stood here, she thought about . . . things, and she waited.
Perhaps this was her punishment. Because what had she done for all these years but lie? To her friends, to her employers, to herself.
My mother passed away.
That had been the first lie, the one she’d started using when she was only ten years old, not long after her mother was institutionalized and her father had packed up her and the house and moved away from everyone who’d known them. He stayed at the same job and now, as an adult, she knew that it was because of the medical insurance. He was trapped there until his wife died or the coverage ran out. Well, her mother didn’t die, and by the time the insurance maxed out and the state had to step in, fifteen years later, he was too close to a pension to leave and as set in his ways as old concrete anyway.
That lie had continued into adulthood, long past the point where she should have been able to face her genetics and think things through, decide for herself if she was going to empower herself over her own life or if that control would be relinquished to some elusive DNA coding. But she hadn’t taken control. She was a coward, a weakling, and she lied to everyone, friends—although she had damned few of those—coworkers, even Vance.
Yes, even him.
How is it right, she wondered now, to lie to the same man you say you will love for eternity? To look him in the eye when he asks and say, without blinking or worrying about it or hesitating—
“My mother’s dead.”
If you lied about the one thing, could you truly be trusted to have told the truth about the other? He might have been a coward in his own way, but even her father hadn’t done that. He’d just run.
And one lie apparently begot another, somehow propagating and spreading, popping up all over her life like the ugly, unwanted weed that you couldn’t get out of your garden, the one that sent out runners of itself just below the surface of the soil. Even at her job, where a coworker, one of the few people she could perhaps consider a friend of her own rather than Vance’s, had asked “So where are you going on vacation?”
“Oh, just to Phoenix to spend time with some friends.”
How easily and quickly even that lie had come out of her mouth, yet in retrospect it was almost as if it had been carefully orchestrated to cover everything—the length of her absence from work, a far enough distance to become unreachable, even explain any sunburn or tan she might get from being not in Arizona, but in Las Vegas, where she and Vance had gone specifically to elope. But the difference between her and her new husband was fundamental: he had told everyone at work, put her on his benefit plans, and even put a picture on his desk of them after their Chapel of the Bells wedding. More important, he had called his parents on the East Coast and told them the grand news, accepted his mother’s tearful congratulations, and told her that the two of them would come out for Thanksgiving.
She, on the other hand, had told no one. Not the people at work, not the few people she counted as vague friends, and most certainly not her father.
She’d done enough self-analysis to know that part of e reason she was so secretive was because she was ashamed. Not because her mother had visions—after all, her own visions had started the day she’d gotten her first menstrual period. She’d finally understood how her mother must’ve felt, as though self-control had been wrenched away and her own body had somehow betrayed her.
The problem, as far as she could figure, was that her mother had gotten caught. Her mother had confessed the pictures in her head and been condemned outright for it, exposed like a shoplifter or a naughty s
choolboy rummaging through the girls’ gym lockers or the disgusting pedophile with his rumpled stash of dirty pictures. Her punishment had been the worst thing that could happen, not only to her but to her family—what ten-year-old child could tell anyone that her mother was locked away in a mental institution?
And her father . . . God. She could just imagine his reaction when he found out she’d gotten married. He would eventually, of course. She wasn’t foolish enough to think she could hide this forever. His expression would twist in disgust when he looked at her until it became actually frightening—she knew this because she’d seen it happen before. Too many years of bitterness and hatred had destroyed whatever good looks he’d had when he’d been younger; now he was hard and sallow-cheeked, thin to the point of emaciation simply because he didn’t enjoy eating—he didn’t enjoy anything. He would push his face close to hers and remind her the same way he’d done many times, his anger so deep-seated that he would literally speak between clenched teeth—
Don’t you dare have children! If you do, you’ll pass your mother’s crazy genes on to them and they’ll end up just like her—locked away in a state asylum and drugged out of their demented little minds. Bad shit like that always jumps a generation, you know. It’ll skip you but go from a grandmother to a granddaughter.
And who was to say he was wrong? Her mother was an only child and she remembered being told by her mother early on that her maternal grandparents had been killed in an auto accident before she herself had been born. There was a sizable age difference between her mother and her father, a dozen years, and his parents had passed away before she’d even been born. Her father had a younger brother who was married and had a couple of kids her age, but she barely knew her cousins. For the last half decade she’d been making excuses not to be included in the yearly holiday dinners. The last thing in the world she found Christmasy was sitting across a table from her father while he scowled at her and everyone else struggled to keep him, and her, from destroying their holiday spirit. No thanks—she’d rather go to a restaurant or stay at home, even if it meant eating a damned microwave dinner. And really, was that much different than what her mother did every holiday?
She blinked, realizing that she was seein the street below through a wavering layer of tears. What was it like for her, the woman who had given birth to her then been essentially abandoned by everyone? Holidays that passed without visitors, underpaid staff people, harried nurses, uncaring doctors. An almost barren room and clothes from the general “pile” because hers had long ago been assimilated by the facility’s laundry.
Her father made two obligatory trips per year to the hospital, one on his wife’s birthday, and one on their wedding anniversary. She could swear the first was just to look at his insane wife and wonder why she was still alive after yet another year, and the second to infer See, I’ve stuck it out with you all these years, and what has it gotten me? Mr. Martyr himself, but if that was true, what was she herself? The absent daughter, consumed by guilt but unwilling to do anything about it.
Somehow she wasn’t a bit surprised when the telephone rang.
Twelve
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Casey said. “Not like this.”
His reflection stared back at him through a layer of steam but didn’t answer, so he sighed and wiped at the mirror with a towel. What he saw there was clearer, but any responses to the questions ricocheting inside his brain were just as muddled as before. Now would be a good time to have a brother, he thought, or that elusive father figure who had disappeared from his mother’s life long before Casey himself had been born. Difficult things like the ones weighing on him this morning—like right and wrong—were, he imagined, what fathers and sons talked about. And sports and fishing and school and girls, and probably a couple thousand others about which Casey had no idea. Because, as was common knowledge in his family, his father had been a no-show from just about the minute his mother had stupidly given the guy the go-ahead twenty-five years ago.
But today’s problem wasn’t about his father, or his mother being too easy a target for some good-looking guy with a wandering eye, or even about Casey at all. It was about something he had done one week ago today, give or take a few hours.
He had saved Glenn Klinger’s life.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Casey repeated, but saying it a second time didn’t make him feel any better. It was like this, and, in fact, it was fucked up in so many ways that he was having a hard time sorting out the whys and why-nots of it in his mind.
Why had he saved Glenn Klinger’s life?
Because Gina had told him the guy was going to fall on the subway tracks and die horribly, cut into a number of not-so-neat pieces that the Chicago Fire Department would then have to scrape up.
Why had Klinger taken his second chance and turned it into one of the worst cases of workplace violence that Chicago had ever seen?
Because . . . well, he didn’t have an answer for that.
“Damn it,” Casey muttered. People weren’t supposed to do that. They were supposed to appreciate a second chance, use it to the fullest by going home to their wife or sweetheart and at least trying to change a whole bunch of mostly useless details about themselves. There was even a country song about it called “Live Like You Were Dying” by Tim McGraw, and Casey thought that really said a lot about a situation where someone went through a “just-missed” situation. People who were pulled from death’s threshold backed away from the door—they didn’t fling themselves through anyway and yank a whole bunch of other people with them. If you really despised someone, as Klinger had apparently loathed everyone at his job, did you really want to take them with you? Apparently so.
Casey washed and dried his hands, then headed back to his cubicle. His space was at the end of a long, bland-looking aisle. They weren’t allowed to hang anything on the outside walls of the cubicles so his gaze couldn’t help being drawn inside some of the work areas as he passed. It was all pretty normal—family photographs, pictures of dogs, the geeky little statues of robots and spaceships that computer programmers, many of whom were gamers, loved so much.
One, however, made him pause. The guy who occupied it, Tom Coulson, was a family man who was openly religious. Although his mother had raised him as a Christian, Casey had become an atheist when he’d become old enough to make up his own mind. Even so, he was still a firm believer that freedom of religion meant those who believed should be allowed to believe just as he should be allowed not to believe. As his gaze skimmed the small brass cross hanging on Tom’s cubicle wall and a decorative desk plaque engraved with a biblical passage, Casey couldn’t help wondering if Glenn Klinger had believed in God. Probably not, if you ack to considering you might see everyone again in some kind of afterlife.
The phone on his desk started ringing as soon as he settled onto his chair, but the number on the ID screen wasn’t familiar. Out of habit, Casey snatched up a pen and jotted it down as he answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Casey, it’s Gina.”
For a moment he was so surprised he couldn’t say anything. He’d never really expected her to call because she really seemed like she was perfectly content with their almost daily lunches. He had even started turning over the idea of not showing up for a couple of days, just to see if that would make her miss him or something. Ultimately he didn’t want to chance it—what if it made no difference to her whether she saw him or not? Or worse, if him not being around made her stop looking for him . . . to ultimately disappear into the mass of humanity that was this huge city.
But here she was, on the other end of the phone line.
“Gina—hi. How are you?” Only a small pause, hopefully not noticeable. He might not have a lot of experience with girls, but he was good on the phone with customers; he could use that skill and at least make this appear to be an effortless conversation.
“Good. I just wanted to make sure you were available for lunch today.”
>
Casey inhaled, taken aback for the second time. He stopped himself before saying Of course, instinct kicking in to make him realize that was giving her the upper hand in a really big way. “Let me check my schedule,” he told her instead. He tapped a few random letters on the keyboard, making sure the movements were loud enough to give out a few business-sounding clicks. “Sure, I can make it. The usual?”
“Let’s go someplace other than a jam-packed fast-food place. There’s a restaurant on LaSalle a little north of Adams, a place called the Potbelly Sandwich Works. If we’re lucky we can get a booth inside, or even one of the outside tables. Why don’t we meet there at twelve-thirty?”
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