by Tim Green
“I know how you can make it up to me,” Jack said.
“How’s that?”
“How about having dinner?”
There was silence for quite some time. Jack felt a jet of humiliation beginning to flood the cavity in his chest. She was obviously fumbling for a comforting way to reject him.
Finally, she spoke.
In almost a whisper she said, “I’d like that.”
CHAPTER 18
Amanda shaded her eyes from the white afternoon sun and watched Teddy run to first base through a flurry of insects in the golden haze. The cluster of other parents beside the bench sitting on lawn chairs erupted in cheers. Amanda clapped as well. She didn’t cry out her son’s name even though she had swelled at the sight of him running like a colt breaking into his first gallop.
As a former athlete herself, Amanda despised the overdone enthusiasm that she felt spoiled so many children’s sports contests. Little League was supposed to be for fun, a replacement for the days of a safer world when kids simply chose up sides for a game in someone’s backyard. Unfortunately, most youth league sports had turned into farm systems for high school sports teams. It was ludicrous.
Still, Amanda was thankful that Teddy was a capable player. She had no delusions of grandeur, but she did harbor that common maternal hope that Teddy would always find acceptance among his peers. She knew from her own childhood that sports was the great leveler. Her own red hair—carrotlike as a girl—buckteeth, and glasses were cause for crucifixion as a young teen. But on the soccer field she was a force, a boiling tyrant who kicked, scored, and defended her team’s way to many wins. And when she walked down the halls with her awkward smile and her haphazard pile of books, even the boys who smoked cigarettes and pierced their ears began to make way.
Amanda frowned at the thought of what she had once looked like. The ghost of that image was always there, looking back at her from the mirror no matter what she did. Sometimes she allowed herself a small consolation when other men’s eyes wandered toward her the way children will gravitate toward a puppy. She would of course frown them off. She didn’t want the attention of other men. Still, the attention gave her hope, hope that she had distanced herself forever from the homely little girl with carrot hair and glasses.
She looked at her watch and wondered where Parker and Glenda had gotten to. Glenda’s softball games were scheduled at the same time as Teddy’s baseball games, but usually she finished first. Maybe Parker had taken her for ice cream. Amanda thought about Parker’s enthusiasm when she told him she’d been offered Marco’s position at the Bureau. There were only a dozen assistant special agents in charge in the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. NCAVC had absorbed the former child abduction unit, the serial killer unit, and the profiling unit into one entity, but each former unit had four ASAICs—and now Amanda was being offered one of those laudable positions.
Of course, there was no way she could take it. She appreciated the honor of being chosen, but Marco’s death still bothered her immensely. She had seen a therapist about what happened. She knew she shouldn’t blame herself. Still . . .
She was at the end of her allowed sabbatical, but she wondered if she could delay going back to her old position even longer. Even dealing with the guilt and the mourning over Marco, there had been a pleasant element to the summer that she couldn’t explain. She felt like she had been the best mother she’d ever been. They’d taken a trip to the Outer Banks and spent another week at her brother-in-law’s cabin near the Shenandoah National Forest. It wasn’t far, but a turbulent waterfall nearby cooled the woods around the cabin and provided them with rock pools and slides to swim in. She worked with Glenda for hours on end, trying to get her ready to swim without a life jacket.
Every night before bed, vacation or otherwise, Amanda read to them from the Harry Potter series. Besides taking care of the house, she was always ready to throw the baseball with Teddy and kick the soccer ball back and forth with Glenda. More important, it seemed that lately a day didn’t go by without Teddy giving her an unsolicited hug. Maybe she could keep that going, even if she did return to the Bureau. Maybe she could only take assignments that were close to home. Amanda took a deep breath.
As the game played on, the tree line on the edge of the park finally extinguished the sun’s sweltering orange rays and brought the first relief all day from the early-summer heat. Amanda reached down and picked up a bottle of water lying in the dry grass beneath her chair. She took a long cool drink, then rested the sweaty plastic against her cheek and then her bare thigh. Teddy scored and his team took the lead going into the final inning. As her son’s team took the field, a loud low rumble prompted her and the rest of the parents to turn their attention to the parking lot behind them.
A shiny black vehicle, its armor glistening like a beetle, rumbled right up behind the backstop and shut down. The monstrous machine had the heartless countenance of a big truck combined with the awkwardness of a tank. It was a Humvee, a troop carrier for the army that had been converted into a road vehicle. They were rare sights in suburbia, freakish machines that cost as much as a Mercedes sedan. Like everyone else, Amanda peered intently to see who on earth would be driving such a thing in a quiet middle-class town like Manassas. Amanda was shocked to see her own grinning husband and just the top of what must be Glenda’s green softball cap in the passenger seat.
“Come on! Let’s play ball!” the umpire shouted.
Amanda felt her cheeks flush when she realized that the entire game had stopped to view the spectacle of Parker climbing down from the gleaming paramilitary vehicle. As he strode her way across the grass, his giant smile was betrayed by the shifty eyes of a little boy who had been caught stealing. He knew buying a machine like that was irresponsible, but Amanda had serious doubts as to whether he would ever admit it.
“Hi, honey,” she said, giving Glenda a kiss and a smile as if nothing was wrong.
Then, hissing under her breath to Parker, she said, “What is that thing?”
Without waiting for his response, she turned back toward the action on the field.
The game was under way again and the evening came to life with the shrill cries of “No batter, no batter, no batter!”
“What?” Parker said in a low tone. She knew he’d taken offense. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? You know what it is. It’s a Humvee. It’s what I’ve been talking about getting for, like, forever. Only now with our extra income, I figured, Hey, this is the safest vehicle on the road. Do you know driving our kids around town is statistically the most dangerous thing we do? Because it is, you know.”
“You bought that thing?”
His silence answered her question.
“Parker,” she said, shooting a glare his way and holding up her hand to try and cut him off, “don’t even try that with me. This isn’t a Volvo, Parker. You bought a troop carrier, a troop carrier that we can’t afford.”
“Not so goddamn loud, Amanda,” Parker said.
“Damnit,” he said, kicking the dusty grass beneath them. People turned to look. Parker’s round red face and twinkling eyes had gone sour. “Can you come over here so we can talk?”
“Honey, you sit right here and watch your brother,” Amanda said to Glenda. “We’ll be right back.”
She got up and followed Parker into the parking lot, out of earshot from the rest of the parents.
“You’re getting a big raise, Amanda,” Parker said. “And I got promoted. We can afford it, and you know I’ve been wanting this. You’re the one who gave me the idea.”
“I gave you the idea?”
“Yes, you,” he said. “You were the one who started going on about how the money would let us do some things we’d always wanted to do. Damn, I thought that’s what you were getting at. This is perfect for us. It fits us all, and I can take it off road for hunting, and look at it. No one’s got a truck like this, Amanda.”
“Parker,” she said, “we talked about settin
g up college funds. That’s what we talked about. Besides, I’m not taking the new job.”
“What?”
“I said I’m not taking the job, Parker.”
“Well, you got to go back to work,” he said.
“Not as the ASAIC, I don’t.”
“Why not?” he said in bewilderment.
“Don’t you ever listen? I’ve been in therapy for months to get over watching my partner die and now I’ll take his job? Does that do anything for you?
“And I’m not staying away from the kids anymore,” she said, “just so you can parade around town like some suburban Arnold Schwarzenegger. If I took that job, I’d be gone way too much.’’
Parker wore a frown that didn’t suit him at all. He was a cheerful man who liked to hunt and fish and play with his kids. Everyone liked Parker because he was always that way. To see him otherwise made Amanda feel like she’d run a traffic light with the kids in the backseat.
“Amanda,” Parker said, “I didn’t honestly think there was a job on this earth that could take you away more than you already are . . .”
He spoke without rancor. Instead his words were heavy with unhappy acceptance. He looked like an old dog that knew it was going to be put down, sad, but all the same full of that faithful love. A thousand bitter retorts sprang to life in Amanda’s mind, but her heart sank, failing her and leaving her with nothing but a helpless shrug and a small stream of silent tears.
Something in her life had to change.
CHAPTER 19
Sergeant Emerson Tidwell was used to his subjects skipping town. Two out of ten usually did. And when they either never showed up from the beginning of their release from jail or simply got tired of reporting in to him on a regular basis as time went on, the resulting warrant was flat-out useless. Nevertheless, Tidwell always filled out the appropriate paperwork. Diligence was something his grandmother had taught him at an early age.
So when Gilbert Drake failed to appear on July 17 at his eleven A.M. appointment, Tidwell left a message on Drake’s answering machine as a reminder. After hearing nothing for a week Tidwell began to fill out the warrant at promptly eleven A.M. As always, it was neat and precise, despite the fact that it was a meaningless exercise. The system had created Tidwell’s job when Pennsylvania adopted its own version of Meghan’s Law, named for a girl abducted and killed by a prior sex offender who had moved into her New Jersey neighborhood next to Meghan’s parents. After Meghan’s murder, her parents lobbied successfully to help protect other families from the dangerous molesters turned loose in their midst.
Sex offenders were divided into three levels and monitored accordingly when they were released from jail. If they came to Pittsburgh, they had to report to Tidwell. He put them in his file and explained the process to them—appearances every three months for level threes and immediate notification upon any change of address for all offenders.
Tidwell pursed his lips as he looked at Drake’s record. The sag in his big drooping eyes seemed even more pronounced. His cheeks puffed out and a long thin hissing sound escaped him. Drake had a history of abducting and violating young women. He had been living in a tough area over near the V.A. hospital, rife with cheap apartments and dilapidated crack houses. It was one of the neighborhoods typical to Tidwell’s charges. Of the 207 level-three offenders floating around his city, two-thirds of them could be found in three or four neighborhoods.
In truth, Tidwell didn’t put much stock in the subdirectory. Because most of the offenders were living in a few small geographic areas, the chief of police had restricted notification to the public at large. Tidwell was all for giving out the information in his files to the media, neighborhood groups, and schools. The chief, however, in conjunction with the mayor’s office, didn’t want to incite panic or riots. Despite the law making the information public knowledge, most times what people didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Tidwell knew differently, but still his request had been denied.
With his work complete, he placed his pen in its spot on the desk, went downstairs, and crossed the street to the courthouse, where he processed his warrant. Not one of the hundred or more warrants he had filed over the last seven years had ever been served. On the rare occasions one of his subjects was picked up on some other charge, the penalty for failing to appear before Tidwell was treated as a joke. Never had he seen or even heard of a judge who would mete out anything more serious than a conditional discharge. There was a fear from above that if someone was arrested for failing to comply with the reporting laws, the charges very well might fail a constitutional challenge. Sometimes Tidwell wanted to put a copy of the Constitution in the outhouse behind his hunting camp.
He jogged down the stone steps of the courthouse, his massive belly jiggling beneath his sweat-stained uniform, and out onto the sidewalk. Heat waffled up off the pavement, giving everything up and down the street a liquid quality. Around the corner was a deli whose specialty sandwich was called a Hog Hoagie. Tidwell was good for two of them, washing down any remains with a pint of AriZona tea, and always leaving one small heel from one bun on his plate as an homage to the low-carbohydrate diet he knew he should be on. But he was a man who enjoyed his food, and he cheerfully reminded himself of that as he dug in. A dusty fan blew warm air down on the patrons from the corner of the deli. After his meal Tidwell dabbed the thick folds of his dark brow with a handful of napkins before rising to go. It was so hot it made him think about the cool stream that he used to splash in as a kid.
It was late in the afternoon before he received a call from homicide.
“Tidwell.”
The voice on the other end was sharp and nasal.
“This is Zuckerman. You just filed a warrant on a body I got over near the V.A. hospital. One of your pervs got shot up pretty good. You know anything about it?”
Zuckerman was a homicide detective—not a sergeant or a lieutenant, but a beat detective. Granted, he was in homicide, and that was a prestigious thing. But at the age of fifty-four, he wasn’t unlike the eleventh man on a basketball team. He got in the game when it was junk time. Maybe that was why he had a bad attitude.
“Gilbert Drake?” Tidwell heard himself say. The black-and-white mug shot of the forty-year-old man was still fresh in his mind—the nappy head, the creamy brown skin, the broad flat nose, and those small dark empty eyes.
“That’s him,” Zuckerman shot back. “I bet you got an encyclopedia on who’d want to take this shit bird out.”
Tidwell felt a jumble of words escape from his mouth, an unintelligible stammering. There were plenty of people he imagined would want to kill Gilbert Drake. How about the families of the victims whose lives he’d destroyed? How about some father or husband who discovered that he was up to his old tricks near the V.A. hospital? And then this was the second such call he’d received in the last two months.
“What’s that?” Zuckerman asked.
“Nothing,” Tidwell said, fixed now on his answer. “I don’t know anything about anyone who’d want to kill him.”
It was a stupid response, but one that Zuckerman accepted without any qualms. He was a man who went through the motions of his job as if they were nothing more than sweeping the same patch of floor he’d gone over every day for twenty years. “Well,” he said, “just send me over his family information and his prison record. I guess I’ll have to try and get a hold of them . . .”
Tidwell didn’t know how he was supposed to respond to that. It was almost as if Zuckerman wanted his opinion, but Tidwell’s experience with homicide detectives told him that they didn’t want advice from anyone. That was part of the reason why he didn’t say anything to Zuckerman about Gilbert Drake being the second sex offender on his list in the last two months to get whacked.
“How was he killed?” he asked, his words dropping from his thoughts like ripe fruit.
“What?” Zuckerman sounded slightly confused as well as mildly offended.
Tidwell wasn’t surprised. That wasn’t his
business, but he felt Zuckerman had somehow left the door open with his loose banter.
“How was he killed?” he said again.
“Swiss cheese,” Zuckerman said.
“Swiss cheese?”
“Filled him full of holes,” Zuckerman replied with delight. “Someone shot him about twelve times. Made a hell of a mess out of his apartment. No one heard anything, either, or they say they didn’t. He’s been dead about a week, so we’re not sure exactly when. Come to think about it, he smelled like old cheese, too.”
Tidwell was silent for a time.
Finally Zuckerman said, “So, you’ll send that stuff over, right?”
“Yes.”
Tidwell hung up and gathered the information the detective had asked for. Then he looked at his watch and cleaned up his desk. It was early to leave, but he was leaving anyway. He needed to think.
CHAPTER 20
At home Tidwell found his wife and two kids out back at the pool. He watched them through the window of the house, their shrieks of delight muted by the glass. They lived in a cramped middle-class neighborhood and had stuffed their little backyard with an inexpensive aboveground pool. His wife, as small as Tidwell was big, was sitting in a plastic chair reading a magazine while his son and daughter splashed around, whacking each other with brightly colored foam noodles.
Tidwell felt a smile curling the corners of his mouth as he removed his shirt and tie and pulled on an enormous pair of flowery blue trunks. Downstairs, he took a can of Budweiser from the fridge and slid open the screen door. The grass was dry and brown and tickled his bare feet. Tidwell noted with satisfaction that because of the heat, he hadn’t had the lawn mower out of the shed in two weeks. As he mounted the pressure-treated steps to the pool, his kids erupted in cries of joy.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy’s home!”
Tidwell burst into a grin and bent down like a giant over his wife for a kiss.