Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  Lydia was at the hospital, and she knows medicine better than anyone else in DORLA that I know, so I approach her and show her the notes.

  “It was a jar of Oromorph,” I say. “You familiar with that?”

  She shrugs a little as she thinks about how to answer, and I realize it’s not the right question. Lydia studies, studies, reads every trade magazine, spends her wages on new textbooks. No one will ever call her “Doctor,” probably no one will ever come to her with more than a bite wound or a silver bullet lodged in their flesh or a tranquilizer overdose, yet still, for some reason, she carries on, trying to feel like a doctor in herself.

  “I mean, is it a good choice? What kind of person would choose it?”

  Lydia shrugs, folds her hands. “It was taken off a patient’s bedside table in the orthopedics ward. The patient was sleeping; he asked where his pills were when he woke up. Someone damn alert, I think.”

  A bedside. “Probably not someone with access to the store cupboards, then? I mean, to take such a risk?”

  Lydia shrugs again, and as she does, I can think of answers to my own question, none of which are cheering. It sounds like a risky way, but, like taking a discarded sharps box off a cart, it’s an opportunity seized. Someone with regular access to the store cupboard would be the first suspect if something went missing from it. And this was Day One. A and E would have been full of people, all the injured people we brought in from the shelters, patched up as well as we could manage and healed up a little in the ricking process, but still, Day One is worse than a Saturday night. Everyone in the hospital would be tired themselves from the night’s luning, stressed, a little overwhelmed at the new influx. People would get careless. A good day to steal something.

  “It’s a good place to do it,” Lydia says. “They label the pills with the patients’ names rather than with what they do. If you were looking for a painkiller in any old ward, you’d likely find you’d picked up an antibiotic or a diuretic.” She grins, and both of us laugh a little at the idea. It’s not funny, not really, a man with a rotted limb fed a diuretic, conscious all the way through as they pulled a bullet out of him, but we need to laugh about something. “Orthopedics, I mean,” she says when we stop. “You’re looking for a painkiller, you have to choose from a range of unlabeled bottles—unless you want to take the time to look at a patient’s chart, which is gonna slow you down—then orthopedics is the place to go. You pick up a bottle in there, it’s a good chance it’ll be a painkiller of some kind.”

  She really does know a lot. She really would have made a good doctor.

  “So we want someone who knows about medication?”

  Lydia shrugs a third time. It’s a frustrating thing to see, a smart person helpless in the face of too many variables. “Someone with some knowledge of the hospital, anyway.”

  “Tell me about Oromorph,” I say.

  “Well…” She touches her forehead, pats her hair. The braids are tight and flawless; they aren’t coming down. “They are pills. Oromorph’s an opiate, it’s a pretty common painkiller.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s analgesic, dulls pain. Quite powerful. It’s a narcotic.”

  “Wouldn’t a local anesthetic make more sense, if you were going to take a bullet out of someone?”

  “Harder to administer, though. You need to know where to inject.”

  And harder to steal, too, on the spur of the moment. You’d need a syringe, for one thing, and even a half-sane man wouldn’t use someone else’s syringe, surely—

  “So we’re looking for someone who wouldn’t know how to administer a local?”

  “Maybe.”

  Or someone who just couldn’t get hold of any. The more I think about this, the more the anesthetic seems like a chance snatched up, less essential to the plan. You can take a bullet out of a man without drugs, if you’ve got someone strong to hold him down.

  I exhale, press my hands to my head. “So we want someone with some know-how who’s prepared to take a risk, who doesn’t plan in detail, who stole some Oromorph because it was better than nothing.”

  “I suppose. Listen, I have to get going.” Lydia stands, walks out of the lounge where we’ve been sitting. On the way, she throws in the trash the paper cup that held the coffee I bought her. I have the feeling that’s about all she can tell me, but it’s better than nothing.

  My mind is running well: the gears mesh smoothly and I’m having good ideas. I’m still making notes on the pad when the telephone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, this is a call for Miss Lola Galley regarding an inquiry she made.”

  “I’m Lola Galley.” It’s a young, female voice, sing-song, automatic.

  “Hello, Miss Galley. You made an inquiry last month regarding a telephone call that was made to an unknown number.”

  I sit up. This is the call Ellaway made from the shelter, that first day. He made a call from his cell phone, to someone, we don’t know who. A tall, dark-haired man came and picked him up. This could be a piece in the sequence, what happened that morning. “Yes. Yes, that’s right. You’ve found out where he called?”

  “That’s right, Miss Galley, do you have a pen?”

  I take down the number. I take down the address. I thank the little switchboard girl, replace the receiver without looking at it, and sit, pen in hand, reading what I’ve written. For a moment, there’s just a nagging sensation, a sense of something tugging inside my head. Then I look it up, and it’s there for me to see.

  It’s an address I recognize. Just east of Five Wounds park, it’s a house, a red brick house with a fenced-in garden. I’ve been there before. With Nate waiting, I climbed onto the roof of our van and stared over the fence, and saw half a dozen people luning in the open air.

  “What was that about?” Nate said, and I didn’t know what to tell him. He died with the question unanswered.

  Ellaway called the house where people were running loose in the open air. They howled at the sky, and I saw them. I watched them in the cold, bright moonlight.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “I’m here to request official support on an investigation I’d like to make,” I say.

  Hugo’s eyebrows move ever so slightly. “An investigation? Is this in regard to one of your own cases?”

  “Yes, it is.” I’m not going off my route on this one; this isn’t whim or error. This is what I saw with my own eyes. “Some evidence has come to light concerning my client, Richard Ellaway, which I consider to be suspicious. I believe it needs to be investigated, and I’ll need official support.”

  Hugo sits in his chair and regards me. His face is neutral, and I take this as encouragement. He hasn’t stopped me.

  “You know, I’m sure, that Ellaway’s called his own lawyer into this, Adnan Franklin.” This needs to be explained. It’s not my fault, and it’s an important factor. “Mr. Franklin is a famously successful lawyer, and he’s very concerned with protecting his client’s rights. If I’m to look into these circumstances, I’ll need DORLA behind me, or Franklin’s liable to interfere. Or at least, he may. If I have to defend my position against him, I’ll need more than my personal opinion to justify myself.”

  “I see.” Hugo sits forward, the chair creaks under his weight. “And your opinion is what?”

  There’s something steadying about Hugo’s inscrutability. I look up at him, and he’s massive, a foot taller than me, broad as a door frame; he could probably pick me up in one hand. It doesn’t have to matter. This is the size I am, and I’m sitting up straight with something to say.

  “I think I mentioned,” I begin, “that the last dogcatch I went on, I noticed an incident that I wanted to look into. Nate Jensen was with me. At the time, I merely thought it was—unusual. What I saw was a group of lunes, all together in the open air.” Hugo’s eyes flick toward me. “I don’t mean prowlers, not in the usual sense. They were all on private property, inside a garden. It had a high wall, I had to climb onto the roo
f of the van to see over it. A lune could jump it, but still, it was clearly put there for privacy. And inside, there was…well, it was a pack. That’s the best way I can describe it. Perhaps half a dozen lunes, it was too dark to count them properly, all seeming—very harmonious.”

  “A family group?” Hugo’s hands lie heavy on the table, he’s quite still, but his eyes are intent.

  “I don’t think so. There were no children, at least. They were all adults. And I walked back there a little later; there was no sign of a window having been broken or a door damaged.” This is true. A swift, hurried stroll I took, telling no one where I was going. The house was still there, handsome and intact. “There was no way that was accidental.”

  “Hmn.” Hugo drums his fingers on the tabletop, once. “Would you say that was illegal activity?”

  “Technically? Probably yes. A lawyer could make a case defending them, perhaps, because they were on private property, with a wall keeping them in. But like I said, no lune would have a problem jumping it if they wanted to. And just because they weren’t making any attempts to when I saw them, it doesn’t mean they haven’t at other times. A lyco lawyer would say it was a gray area, but I say yes, it was criminal. It would rest on whether the garden was completely secure, and I say it wasn’t.”

  Hugo lets this sit for a moment, then gives me a little nod. “Go on.”

  I sit back against the chair, make myself relax, and change the subject. “When Dick Ellaway was arrested, he claimed that he’d been trying to get to a shelter when he started furring up. Rather a thin story. And I got someone to look at his car. He claimed it broke down just before curfew, but the garage that has it had a responsible owner who didn’t fix it, so we got a chance to look at it, and the engine looks like it may have been tampered with. And Ellaway left it in this out-of-the-way garage and didn’t mention it to me, like he was hoping I wouldn’t think to check it out. I didn’t trust his story, so I spoke to the person who’d been on shelter duty the night he was brought in. Alan Gregory. Now, there was an underage girl there who took up most of the attendants’ attention, so Ellaway wasn’t monitored that closely, but he made a call on his cell phone. Later, someone came and picked him up, but Ally couldn’t describe him very well. But he made a call, and I had the phone company investigate the number he’d called. And it just turned out, I just heard today, that the number he called was the house where I saw the pack.”

  Hugo regards me. His face is as still as a mountain.

  “I want to investigate this,” I say. “When a client gives an implausible excuse for being out, and makes calls to a house where I’ve seen people lune in nonsecure confines, I think it’s altogether time to question his story.”

  “I understand you’re defending him?” says Hugo with a bland trace of irony.

  “If I’m defending him, I want the real story. And times aren’t good right now. I’d say it’s time to be careful of any suggestion of prowling in groups.”

  I say this without bitterness. It’s a fact. That I manage to say it plain and straight is a small triumph that I hold cupped in my palm, keep quietly to myself.

  Hugo sits up. “I agree with you,” he says. “Under the circumstances, we should treat this as highly suspicious. What do you need to take this further?”

  The triumph glows, swells, filling my hands. “Official approval, mostly,” I say, keeping my voice level. “A partner to go and question this Ms. Sanderson with, but I can organize that myself.”

  “Ms. Sanderson?”

  “Yes, that’s the name of the house’s owner. I looked her up. Sarah Sanderson, she’s a theater producer. A successful one, I’d think, if she can afford a house in Five Wounds so near the park. I checked her record. One arrest when she was eighteen, but she was never charged for it. It seems she was trapped in an office building whose security system had gone haywire and locked everyone in; it was only when the city power got shut down that night that the doors opened.”

  “I remember that night,” Hugo says, quietly. He looks at me. “A couple of years before your time, I think, Lola. You would have been—well, about sixteen, I suppose.”

  Sixteen. Another night in a creche. I close my eyes a moment, and look back at Hugo. “A well-known night?”

  “Oh, yes.” His tone is almost expressionless. “Everyone who was operating in the city then remembers it.”

  “Did everyone in the building get arrested?” I say.

  “More or less.” Hugo studies his hands. “Though certain areas were overrun. It wasn’t possible to arrest them all.”

  “It sounds like a disaster,” I say. The word overrun brings images to my mind that I don’t want to think about.

  “It was.” Hugo sighs. “Mass tranquilization, packed cells, major property damage…and the days afterward. We had to arrange negotiations with the city council and a government inquiry, in the end. A complete amnesty for all those caught in the building, in exchange for an amnesty for all methods used by all DORLA agents making the arrests. The hospital was awarded a national commendation, and the company responsible for the security system was sued by—I don’t know, maybe a thousand people, enough to ruin them anyway. I don’t suppose you would have been told too much about it. It was decided not to dwell on it in front of new recruits. It was considered too discouraging.”

  “Discouraging?” I almost laugh, the word said with no sense of bathos, no derision, but I collect myself. “So, our Ms. Sanderson was in that. Interesting.”

  “Yes,” Hugo says. “As I remember it, the mood the morning after it happened was…quite stricken. I understand that most who were involved in it became rather reclusive, at least for a while.”

  The image of it, packed cages, dozens ricking together, is a terrible one. Stricken. I don’t want even to imagine the sound of that much weeping. “Most of them,” I say. “But I wonder if Ms. Sanderson found she had a bit of a taste for it.”

  In ten years, I’ve seen dozens of people caught out in the moonlight. Accident, carelessness. Always, I’ve been bitter, outraged, blind angry at the thought that people could be careless with something so dangerous. But the word prowler conjures up something different. Not the average citizen, milky with absentmindedness, sated with their rights, satisfied as babies in the knowledge that the world is theirs.

  I’ve been imagining it in Ellaway, the man who damages his own car and waits for the moon to rise. I saw it in Seligmann. Prowler is a word that makes all of us close our fists and set our mouths, turn our heads aside. Prowler is in every scar that traces a cage over my body, every frightened glance over my shoulder, every locked door and gloved hand and every piece missing from my flesh. When I cradled Leo in my arms, I stroked his soap-soft skin, sang him songs and promised him fishies, I told him that this was a good world. I told him that there were treats and games, and that I loved him, that I wanted him happy, that no one could hurt him. But even when I did it, even with his loose, downy head pressed against my shoulder, I knew that I was telling him stories. There’s never been a time when the world was not at war, there’s never been a day that went by when some man did not kill another, when some people didn’t starve because others didn’t care enough to feed them, there’s never been a day when the world was one I could give to him. I tell myself that even the average citizen wants the world safe and kindly, that no one really wants the prisons full and the soldiers busy and the world full of cutthroats. But as long as there are prowlers, I know this can never be so.

  It’s a cancer inside you, a hunger that doesn’t go away. The prowler makes his decision, and his decision is this: I will not be kept out of the moonlight. If I meet someone there, I’ll fight, I’ll kill, I’ll rip open living flesh. I have seen barebacks on the streets, scarred faces and too few fingers, people on crutches, people in wheelchairs, people with dead eyes, people with missing eyes, people with missing friends. I know this, and still, I will not be kept out of the moonlight.

  It may be different inside their own
minds, the images may be different, the words. But this is what it comes down to. And I wonder more about it still, because haven’t I myself beaten a man bloody? We all of us have our own impulse to prowl. A prowler is the insects in your mind, the whispering demon that makes your own little wishes gigantic and imperative, worth hurting for. Every thief, every killer, every father with a leather belt and assassin with a loaded gun. This is why I can’t give him the world. A prowler, silver-gray and white-toothed and beautiful, is the simplest, purest image of this. The evil of the world, down on all its four feet.

  Ally doesn’t much want to leave his test range, but I stand there until he gives up and comes with me. We go in one of the patrol vans. On the way, I explain. Ally listens in silence, trying to fix the catch on his seat belt. I tell him that I think Sarah Sanderson is a prowler and may give me some information about the Ellaway case. The only comment he makes is when we drive up to her house itself.

  “They were luning in there?” he says, pointing to the garden wall.

  “Mm-hm.” I put the brakes on.

  Ally shakes his head. “That’d never keep a lune in.”

  And when Sarah Sanderson opens her door, I lose every thought I’ve had before now, because I recognize her. Months ago now, but I know this woman. Floaty clothes, good skin, dancer’s posture. She opens the door, and her eyes flicker over me before she says, “Can I help you?” in a vibrant voice that’s only a little tense.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Sanderson,” I say. “We’ve met before, if you remember.” I wait to see how she’ll answer, but she says nothing, looks at me, holding on to the door. “I came to your friend Lewis Albin’s house some months ago, to make some inquiries about my client, Dick Ellaway. You remember, don’t you?”