Bad Radio tee-1

by Michael Langlois

  Mike hugged her hard, which I don’t think is standard police procedure.

  “You want to stay with us tonight? April can make up the guest room. She’d love to see you.”

  Anne shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m okay. Really.”

  He looked at her, clearly unhappy, then at me. I shrugged.

  “Alright, but call me if you need anything, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  We spent the better part of an hour giving our statements while the small room filled up with uniforms of all kinds. Local cops, state troopers, medical examiner’s office, paramedics, photographers, the whole circus had come to see Patty “Cake” Wolinsky, lying on the floor in his hospital pajamas. It was a lesson that I had already learned when Maggie died. There is no dignity in death.

  They let us go, even though I raised a couple of eyebrows with my lack of a telephone number, cellular or otherwise. If not for Anne’s roots in town, I would have spent the night in jail, at least.

  The parking lot was a nightmare of rotating and flashing lights of every color, painting the busy, serious folks rushing around in lurid, disco colors. I walked over to the remains of my faithful truck, now surrounded by photographers and automotive forensics guys like ants on a grasshopper.

  “This your truck?” asked an unsmiling man holding a camera the size of his head.

  “It was.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, but you’re not getting it back for a while. We’re going to impound it for the investigation. But we’ll contact you when you can pick it up.”

  “Sure. You mind if I get my bag out of it before I go?”

  “Sorry, man. No can do.”

  I nodded, unsurprised.

  “I’m so sorry about your truck, Abe,” said Anne from right behind me.

  I turned to face her. “Not your fault.”

  “Let me drive you home. You’re stranded out here, without even a change of clothes. It’s the least I can do.”

  “That’s kind of you, really. But you’ve been through a lot tonight and it’s a long drive. You wouldn’t make it back until tomorrow morning at the earliest. I think you should go home and get some rest. Don’t worry about me, I’ll get home fine.”

  “Please? I really don’t want to go and sit at home by myself right now, okay? Since your truck is all smashed up, I’ll drive you home. I want to.”

  The entanglement of obligation. The sticky, unbreakable bonds of helping or being helped. These are exactly the things I didn’t want.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  5

  Anne drove us away from the frenzied lights and swarming officials and towards the relative quiet of the highway. Barely half a mile away, all traces of the commotion were lost behind us. People don’t realize how secretive the world really is, easily swallowing up wonders and atrocities alike, aided only by a few yards of distance and people’s unwillingness to look.

  Anne was discovering the truth of this now, having spent her entire life with her grandfather, and only tonight getting her first glimpse of his world.

  I watched her drive in silence for a few minutes. Her face was stiff and her knuckles were white on the wheel. I’m not good at comforting people, but I gave it a try. “Hey,” I said. “You want to stop somewhere and grab a bite to eat? It’s a long drive and I missed supper. I bet you did, too.”

  She inhaled, like she was remembering to breathe. “Yeah. Some coffee probably wouldn’t hurt, either.”

  We pulled into a greasy spoon called Ginger’s, drawn in by a billboard boasting “All night breakfast and burgers! Never closed since 1961!”

  The night was still young, so the place was noisy and crowded. We stood in front of the battered hostess podium until an unsmiling woman swooped in and acknowledged us with a terse nod, grabbed a couple of greasy plastic menus, and towed us into the fray.

  “Can we have that booth by the window?” I asked. She changed course in mid-stride, slapped the menus down hard on the table, and left without a word.

  “I think she likes me,” I said, sliding into the orange vinyl splendor of our booth. A tiny laugh escaped Anne’s lips with a sound that could almost have been a sob. She settled back into the booth and some of the tension left her face.

  The coffee started coming as soon as we sat down, which was the second sign of a truly great diner, the first being surly-but-efficient service and the third having to do with heavenly pie coming out of a pit of a kitchen whose grease accumulation was now a structural feature. The coffee tasted surprisingly good to me, but that might only be because I’ve been drinking nothing but my own for the last couple of years.

  I ordered a cheeseburger with a side of hash browns — you never eat at a roadside diner without getting the hash browns — and Anne got some kind of egg white omelet with broccoli in it called the Guiltless Pleasure. I’m sure the name was half right.

  While we waited for our food, I kept an eye on our car, which was easy from the booth by the window. I didn’t expect any trouble, but I’d look pretty stupid falling for the same trick twice in one night.

  Anne excused herself to go to the restroom, so I spent my time alternating between watching the car and the bathroom door at the rear of the restaurant.

  All around me people were sharing meals at crowded tables. The sudden sound of laughter would occasionally ring out clearly over the general din, granting the shabby diner a more festive air than I would have expected from a roadside hash house. I guess life hadn’t stopped while I was hiding out on my farm after all.

  Guilt nudged me because I felt good sitting here about to share a meal with another human being, surrounded by happy, energetic people. This feeling of guilt was born of … what? Penance for feeling anything but grief? Loyalty to the past? Cowardice? I honestly didn’t know. Withdrawing from the world hadn’t been a choice, it had been a straight, inevitable path. For the first time in five years, I felt the tiniest twinge of regret about my decision to end my time in the world.

  Anne and the food arrived at the same time, and for a few minutes there was only eating and nodding at each other with full mouths and raised eyebrows. As I expected, the hash browns were outstanding. The cheeseburger was good, too, especially since it had more bacon on it than any of the breakfasts I could see.

  “I can’t believe you’re eating that,” said Anne.

  I shook the softball-sized burger at her, making the greasy bun flop. “This is what we used to call food. That stuff you’re eating would make a monk cry.”

  She rolled her eyes at me, which I took as a sign that she was feeling a little better.

  We made small talk while we ate. I figured that when she was ready to talk about more serious things, she’d bring it up on her own. We were waiting for a couple of slices of pie when the dam broke.

  “I’ve been going over what happened tonight in my head, over and over again. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’m sure it would have sounded good to tell her that it would be okay, and that eventually she would stop thinking about it, but that’s never been true for me. If anything, some scenes carve themselves a permanent place in your mind the same way that the unceasing flow of a river creates a canyon.

  “You and my grandfather only spoke for a minute before … before everything happened, but I can’t make any sense of it. How did you know his old army nickname was Cake? Even I didn’t know that until last year, and that was from reading his old letters from the war when I was helping to move his things into the home.”

  I shrugged. “I told you I was Abe Griffin.”

  “I’m serious. Also, he said a word I don’t know. Baitbag? And then you said it was like Warsaw, and he agreed. What was that about? Did you know that my grandfather was wounded in Poland in the war?” She looked at me for a long second, her eyes going hard. “Did you set this up? He seemed to recognize you as soon as you walked in. Have you been visiting him? To convince him that you were his old army buddy? Is that why he sent
me to get you?”

  I nearly choked on my burger. “Are you asking me if I secretly set up this whole meeting so that I could shoot my own accomplices and then wait around to get questioned by the police afterwards? After I arranged to make sure you knew where I lived? I don’t know what you do for a living, Anne, but I’m going to bet that your day job isn’t police detective.”

  She put up her hands. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. Nothing makes any sense, and I don’t know what to think. Just, please, help me understand what’s happening.”

  It seems like my entire life has, in one way or another, revolved around keeping this secret. Those of us who survived Warsaw never told Command the whole story. Of everyone in the world, at least they would have believed it. But my men were willing to lie for me, so that I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life in a basement lab somewhere as a permanent specimen.

  I started dying my hair when Maggie turned fifty in order to lie to our friends. There wasn’t much I could do for my face, but you’d be surprised how far a little gray will get you. I had to stop going to veteran’s functions a few years later, when the gray wasn’t enough.

  In my own town, I had to avoid even my closest friends, becoming more isolated by the year. Eventually that became less of a problem as they passed away from age or accident or disease.

  I let my youth force me into hiding, shrinking my world down to just Maggie and me, and that was just fine. Until she died. Now, sitting across from Patrick’s granddaughter, I found that I no longer cared. I realized that I was carrying the shield long after the battle was lost.

  “The answer is that I really am Abe Griffin. Your grandfather knew me because we served together in the war.”

  “Oh my God.” She looked at me closely to see if I was kidding. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “If I’m crazy, then so are you. Did you see me shoot your grandfather’s killer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did I hit him? In the chest?” Remembering brought pain to her eyes, but she nodded. “I hit that guy center mass with a.45 caliber slug. Right in the heart. He didn’t even fall down, much less die. Maybe you don’t know much about guns or hearts, but that’s not normal.”

  “Maybe he was wearing a bulletproof vest or something.”

  “Okay, let me ask you another one. You asked me about a smell before I ran out to the parking lot. You said it was a horrible smell. Have you smelled it before?”

  “Off and on for the last couple of days.”

  “Usually when your grandfather was having one of his episodes, right? And did you complain to the people who run the home?”

  “Of course I did, it was awful.”

  “And they couldn’t smell it, could they?”

  “They said they couldn’t, but I think they were lying so they wouldn’t get into trouble, or have to clean it up. How did you know?”

  “Here’s another one. I heard you scream from the parking lot before I heard the glass breaking on the patio. You knew they were out there before they broke in, didn’t you? I bet you looked right at the doors before they even got there.”

  She put one hand to her mouth. “I don’t remember, exactly. But that can’t be right. It’s impossible.”

  “What are you, twenty-five? Forgive me if I don’t trust your vast experience on what’s possible. Patrick had the same gift, our whole squad was built around it. My job in the war was to protect your grandfather with my life. Your grandfather and one other guy.”

  “Did this other guy, you know, could he smell things, too?”

  “No, he was the smart guy. Cake would lead us to things, and the Professor would make sense of it.”

  “Lead you to what things?”

  I smiled at her. “Crazy stuff. The world is so much more, I don’t know, unstructured than you think.”

  I drank the last of my coffee and took a stab at explaining it. “This is how Henry, the Professor, explained it to me. He said that people change the world by looking at it, “Pressure of Observation” he called it. We’re hardwired to expect certain things, like cause and effect and the steady passage of time for example.

  “No matter what beliefs you may or may not have, we share a primal, unchanging expectation of the world based on how we perceive it. That being the case, as a species we dampen the world’s natural tendency toward unpredictability and a general disregard for what we think of as natural laws.

  “And the more of us there are, the more we enforce our world view, and the more stable and predictable things become. So, fast forward to the last couple of centuries where we’ve multiplied and smothered the globe in our worldview, and things are pretty human friendly. Not completely, but close enough. This effect is tied to people, so in places that don’t have very many people, or places that are far away, even underground, that Pressure of Observation is pretty weak and things get a bit wild. You with me so far?”

  “I think so, but for the record, this isn’t making you sound less crazy.”

  “Fair enough. Now picture the world like a pond, frozen over in the winter. We’re on top making ice and thinking the surface is the whole world, when most of it is really underneath us, and it’s not frozen at all. We walk around right on the top edge of the world, confined to the smallest part, and we think we see it all.

  “But, of course, sometimes there are cracks in the ice and things get out. Sometimes those cracks are natural, and sometimes people make them trying to fish for particular things. The world is bigger and stranger than you can imagine.”

  “There are more things in heaven and Earth?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And you and my grandfather used to find those things in the war.”

  “Yep. Or at least the ones that the bad guys were involved with.”

  “For the government.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t get old, and my grandfather could smell supernatural stuff, and it was all top secret. You are so full of shit.”

  I shrugged into the uncomfortable silence.

  Anne toyed with her fork, her eyes far away. “I hated him, you know. I mean, not now, but when I was growing up. I used to think he was deliberately sabotaging any chance of happiness that came my way. It was hard enough not having a dad and watching my mom work two jobs just to buy me clothes I was embarrassed to wear to school. But on the off chance that I did make friends, I could never do anything with them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was always making me go to the range after school or to shooting competitions on the weekends. Sometimes we’d leave on Friday night, drive for hours to some tiny match in another state, and then get back just in time for school on Monday. He was completely obsessed.

  “At first it was fun. I didn’t have a dad, but my grandfather was always there. He started teaching me to shoot when I was ten. It was our special time together, just him and me. After a while he got me coaches and started entering me in competitions, always talking about scholarships and going to the Olympics. After that, every time I wanted to go to the mall or have a sleepover or even go on a date, suddenly I was sacrificing my future.”

  “Did it work? Get any scholarships?”

  She looked away. “Of course not. I could have, I really was that good. Amazing, in fact. But after I finished high school I just snapped. I moved out, refused to go to college, dropped out of the circuit, pretty much the whole teen rebellion cliche. I even stopped speaking to my family. That really broke my mom’s heart. And Patrick’s.”

  Plates bearing wedges of pie slapped down on the table between us, breaking the moment. Anne stopped talking and poked at her pie to give herself something to do. Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth, the green and white layers of key lime quivering in midair. She wrinkled her nose and gave the piece a sniff.

  “Ugh. I think mine is bad.” Then her eyes jumped to the window and beyond. Her fork sank back to plate forgotten, while she stared intently at a white minivan
as it powered past the diner on the highway. “It’s not the pie, is it?”

  My stomach tightened. It had come from the east, the same direction as my farm.

  6

  I threw money at the table and pulled Anne out of her seat before it landed. We threaded through the tables too fast, and I ended up bumping into our hostess as we neared the door, knocking a stack of menus out of her hand. I yelled an apology over my shoulder, and she yelled something back at me, but I didn’t catch it. I’m sure it was nice, though.

  Two seconds later I was standing by Anne’s passenger door trying hard not to yank at the handle as Anne fumbled with the keys. I was in the seat before the car’s unlock chirp faded from the night air, and moments later we were jerking backwards out of the parking space.

  “What are we doing?” she asked, eyes darting between her windows and mirrors.

  “Going back to my farm. Fast as you can.”

  She threw the car onto the road before she started asking more questions. Anne would have made a great soldier. No hesitation and no arguing when taking action. Of course, if I knew anything about good soldiers, the latter would change at the first opportunity. We merged smoothly onto the long, empty highway before she spoke.

  “It was the same men, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so. I think that van was coming from my farm, and the men who killed your grandfather wouldn’t have had time to get there and back since we saw them. Was the smell the same?”

  “Will you stop with that? I couldn’t have smelled anyone on the highway from inside the diner.”

  “You smelled them right before you picked out the van. We both know it wasn’t the pie. It’s not even a smell, according to your grandfather, it’s just your brain trying to interpret information from a sense you don’t have an organ for. Now, was it the same?”

  She paused to think. “I don’t think so. It was the same kind of smell, like garbage and swamp gas or something, but it was different than back at the home. Like bad fish and bad steak both smell like rotten food, but not like each other. Why?”