18 Seconds

by George D. Shuman

  She had to admit that in the early days she had been more than just curious about him—curious in a female sort of way. He was a detective, after all, which was exciting enough when you’re twenty-five. She remembered her disappointment upon discovering he was married. A silly thing, she’d thought later; what detective would have wanted a blind girlfriend to take around?

  To be honest, the doctor she’d met in Denver reminded her of John Payne. Neither man was given to alarm; everything about them spoke of calm and order. There seemed nothing they couldn’t fix, no problem that couldn’t be solved. Both men were most capable yet exhibited a quiet modesty. They were men given to action rather than words, she thought.

  Payne had introduced Sherry to his wife, Angie, soon after the Teamsters incident. The three of them socialized on a number of occasions, but then Angie stopped going out and Payne explained that she preferred to stay at home. Sherry accepted the excuse, but instinct told her something more was wrong.

  Nine years later, Payne was still her best friend. She knew that he cared more for her than he would like to admit; there was always something else with Payne, something he held back and something she didn’t encourage. She decided it was chemistry, the not uncommon sexual tension between two people who enjoy each other’s company. God knew, if she’d had the chance to become Mrs. Payne years ago, she would have jumped on it, but it wasn’t like that and it never would be. Payne had never expressed that his marriage was anything but good, and Sherry didn’t pry when it came to Payne’s home life. As for sexual tensions, people certainly didn’t respond to every feeling they encountered.

  Besides, Sherry knew what it was like to feel loss; she had lost her entire past and everyone in it. The last thing she was ever going to do was interfere with a relationship. She would never wish the kind of loneliness she felt on anyone. So Sherry had become an expert at hiding her emotions from Payne.

  “You want Chinese?”

  “Do you want Scotch?”

  “Only if you want Chinese.”

  “Then I’ll have the shrimp with lobster sauce.”

  “Be there in thirty minutes.” He hung up the phone.

  Payne mixed their cocktails in the kitchen and carried them to the yard with the bottle, food, and chopsticks. He even managed to get it all to the picnic table without spilling the drinks.

  “Are you starved?” he asked. He let the bag drop to the table and brought her Scotch to the side of her chair.

  “Nah.” She sighed. “Maybe in a couple minutes.” She took a sip, hearing the wake of a boat slapping the shoreline. “Just sit and relax.”

  He watched her face in the waning light. “You should take a vacation this year,” he told her. “Book a cruise. Visit Europe. Hit the beach.”

  She smiled. “Not that again.” She heard the ice tinkle as he took a drink and sensed that he was looking at her. “It’s almost spring, John. It’s getting warm again. I like it by the river. Can’t you hear the water?”

  “Oh, come on, Sherry. You’ve been hiding in this house ever since Norwich.”

  “I went to Pittsburgh,” she retorted. “You said you were proud of me for going to Pittsburgh.”

  “I would have been proud of you for getting a root canal if it got you out of the house.”

  Sherry nodded. Payne knew how hard the Norwich case had been on her. How long it had taken for her to get the images out of her mind. And he knew, no doubt, though he’d never let on, that Sherry called the Connecticut State Police every few weeks to see if a suspect had been identified. One hadn’t.

  If he’d known about the recent nightmares and migraines, he’d have insisted she see the doctor, but then some things weren’t even for Payne. Some things were best kept to herself.

  “What about you guys? When was the last time you and Angie went anywhere? I haven’t heard a single vacation story from you since I’ve known you, John. Oh—wait—yes, two years ago you painted the bedrooms.” She snorted.

  Payne threw up his hands. “We’re talking about two entirely different things, Sherry. Angie and I don’t have to sit around the house by ourselves every night, either. Besides, we never agree on where to go. I like to relax and she likes sightseeing and shopping. Usually she ends up going with her girlfriends and I stay home and putter around the house.”

  Sherry started to say something but nixed it. She raised her glass to salute instead. “To the river,” she said.

  “The river,” he agreed.

  They sat in silence until the sun gave in and the temperature began to fall.

  “We’ll have to microwave the food,” she said, knees to chest and hugging herself against the chill.

  “I’d forgotten about the food, actually. What say we have another Scotch, then go in?”

  “You’re the detective.” She smiled, squirming to get her feet under her behind.

  5

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 4

  WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  Sykes reentered Wildwood with none of the fanfare he’d received going out. Not even a byline in the Patriot, though he’d been front-page news for five weeks running in the fall of 1976.

  Few would remember his name and even fewer would recognize his face; he didn’t at all resemble the wild-looking youth he’d been at twenty-five. Now he was scarred, older than his years, with patchy gray hair and a tumor growing on the side of his neck. Most people avoided eye contact with him. They tended to stare down or look away when he came around, like the woman in her bed in Elmwood Nursing Home, who saw him mopping the green linoleum floor of Andrew Markey’s corridor.

  But Andrew Markey would have remembered him. That was what had mattered. Maybe not his face after all these years, but Susan had seen to it that he would remember his name. She had wanted her father to know who she’d ended up with after he went to prison. She wanted him to imagine his daughter fucking that same kind of trailer park trash he’d spent a lifetime trying to protect her from. Hypocrite.

  So when Andrew’s daughter was found murdered, people would come around to see him. And he couldn’t allow Andrew to answer their questions.

  The only condition of Sykes’s release was employment. There were no drug or alcohol screens to contend with, so he reported to a harried parole officer in Trenton who accepted phone calls rather than personal visits to lighten his workload.

  His prison earnings in Oklahoma, which mandated that prisoners be paid something for their work, amounted to three decades of labor at forty-six cents an hour, monies from which Sykes bought a used house trailer in Paradise and a Jeep.

  He looked out at the rutted dirt road and the tops of dead trees over his neighbor’s battered trailer. Junk cars and old tires were scattered around along with discarded appliances and mattresses and box springs; garbage bags were picked apart by crows and litter was dragged through the trees by homeless dogs.

  His own trailer was royal blue and perched on stacks of gray cinder blocks. Three television antennae jutted from the roof above heaps of rusting tin cans. The small creek behind the trailer smelled of raw sewage, which was bearable in the winter but stunk to high heaven in August.

  Wind coming through a broken window that had been mended with cardboard and duct tape disturbed a tattered curtain. Sykes fished a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and thumped one out on the heel of his hand. He dug at the bleeding sore on the back of his neck with his fingernails and tossed the pack on the counter, scattering roaches.

  Sykes had been raised only a few hundred feet from here. His father, Oberlein, had brought his mother to the Pine Barrens just after World War II when young men debarking ships from France were fleeing the cities for suburban life. Oberlin hadn’t been a soldier returning from war, however. Oberlin was getting out of Newark’s medium-security prison and thinking there were fewer policemen to deal with in the suburbs than in the city.

  But rural life hadn’t been any kinder to his father than city life had been. Tempting fate once too often, he had been shot and killed trying t
o rob a gas station on the outskirts of Avalon.

  There was an open phone book on the kitchen table with “J. Lynch” circled in black. The former chief’s name was Jim. When Sykes drove by the condo at 26 Atlantic Avenue and checked it out, however, he found that the name Lynch had been replaced by O’Shaughnessy.

  Likewise there were no Markeys in the book, which meant that Sue had either died, married, requested her number be unlisted, or moved away. Finding out where the former police chief and the ex-girlfriend were living was going to require help.

  Sykes lit his cigarette and pulled the faded drapes wide open. His neighbor’s trailer sat only thirty yards away. He could see the magazine pinups stapled to her living room wall. Eighties rock stars, NASCAR drivers, and centerfolds from Playgirl.

  He let the curtain go and emptied the bag on the counter, then put the beer, mustard, bread, and bologna into the refrigerator. Lottery tickets and Twinkies, he tucked in his pockets.

  The furniture, like the Jeep, was easy to obtain. No cosigners, no collateral. He didn’t even have to make payments on it for a year. A year, he’d laughed at the saleslady. A whole fucking year! If only they knew.

  He’d been thinking about Jenson Reed lately and remembered meeting with the woman shrink that first day. Sykes had been doing time in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, when the government started leasing private prisons as part of a federally funded reform program. As a nonviolent offender under a lifetime sentence, Sykes qualified for rehabilitation. They transferred him to Texhoma with the first seven hundred and fifty cons to live in Jenson Reed.

  Private prisons were like nothing Sykes had ever seen before—they had art in the administration corridors and carpeting in the common rooms. Music was pumped through recessed speakers in the mess halls, and the recreation rooms looked like spa-quality health clubs.

  “It’s nice to have you with us, Mr. Sykes,” the doctor said, offering her small, dry hand to shake. “I trust you’ll find us more accommodating than the folks in Lewisburg.”

  Under stylishly short blond hair, she wore red teardrop earrings that looked to Sykes like long drops of blood. She leaned close and crossed her legs with a whispering graze of nylon. He could smell the expensive powder on her body. It was a pleasant fragrance, expensive, not the stuff his mother used to slap on the folds in her flabby neck until she looked like she’d been hit with a sack of flour.

  “Would you like some water, Mr. Sykes?” She’d poured it from a stainless-steel pitcher. Ice tumbled in the glass with a melodious tinkle.

  Frost formed on the edges of the bulletproof panes and fragile spits of snow danced in the air. He stared at where her blouse had puffed between buttons, exposing a flat, white belly.

  “Do you like it?” she asked after a few seconds.

  Sykes looked up at her face but didn’t answer. He had never seen anything like her before.

  “I will afford you every opportunity to express yourself, Mr. Sykes. There are rules in Jenson Reed, but never against speaking your mind.”

  Her words came out slowly, in measured portions like the individual cubes that tumbled into his glass. She extended her arm toward the window, palm up, directing her bloodred talons at the world. “Do you want to go back?”

  He only looked at her.

  “Reflect on the educational experiences of your youth. You had no opportunity to succeed. There was no mechanism in place to save you. Your family and teachers and policemen sculpted you into what they thought you would be and you did not disappoint them.”

  She recrossed her legs.

  “You must learn to contain your emotions, Mr. Sykes. You must learn to safely vent your rage. You must maintain a constant vigil on your anger. You must find a safe place to dump it all, Mr. Sykes, for those are the rules of society and the key to your return.”

  Return. Could he really return?

  Sykes worked in the metal shops and dairy barns at Jenson Reed. He studied small engine repair and received a GED, last in a class that no one ever failed.

  They would need to learn skills, the men were told. Those who might be paroled would be provided jobs—nothing fancy; they would become mechanics and repairmen, starting out cold at minimum wage; forty and fifty and sixty years old.

  Each day the sun rose and set, months blew by, then years; the seventies became the eighties, which became the nineties, and soon another century arrived. Once a week the shrink scheduled fifteen minutes in which to change his life, and in all the years he had been at Jenson Reed, only one thing had ever changed.

  She had.

  Sykes grabbed his cigarettes and clamored down the steps to his Jeep, startling a scavenging tomcat. He drove under the garish wrought-iron arches of wheat and cherubs—a monument to the founder of the park who envisioned post–World War II families gathered around the community swimming pool, barbecuing, playing badminton under spotlights in Jersey pines—and onto State Road. Though Paradise had never become a summer campground or a vacation spot for tourists. Paradise was best known as a haven for bikers, addicts, and prostitutes.

  The state road took him to Grassy Sound, where he turned to follow the irrational course of Nescmhague Creek. This section used to be a freight road, a marvel of forties’ civil engineering. Now it was only a place for gulls to crack their oysters and for odd-looking snakes and turtles to sun.

  The older people remembered its origin—a blistering summer in 1942 when a battalion of loggers bludgeoned their way into a woodland marsh full of elegant cranes and water moccasins. The scholarly effort was a rung up on the ladder of technology at the time, a solution to the northeast’s escalating waste problems. It called for using the New Jersey swamps to dispose of hazardous waste from the laboratories, chemical research facilities, hospitals, and clinics in New York City and northern New Jersey, where it would bring the state new revenues and do the oceans no more harm.

  They hired locals at eight dollars a day to drain the swamp back into Nescmhague Creek. The old-timers remembered the summers of sun poisoning and spider bites, endless bouts with poison ivy—sickness from the heat, infections from scratching the insect welts, diarrhea from the water, and the agonizing venom of wolf spiders and water moccasins. They also recalled the constant sound of derricks pounding day and night under the stench of mosquito torches, digging into the wet sand—not for water or oil or gas, but just to make more holes.

  In 1944, when they finally finished draining and perforating the marsh, they let the trucks roll in, dumping drums and barrels and bags into hundred-foot silos.

  No one thought much about it for decades, not until revelations about carcinogens and biohazards came to light. Not until the marsh was filled with drugs and body parts, human organs, diseased tissues, serums, X-rays, carcinogenic waste…

  Not until the swamp had turned black and oozed into the creek, polluting Nescmhague halfway back to the coast—and by then it was most commonly known as Blackswamp.

  The government halted the work in the early sixties; the trucks ceased to run. They sent steelworkers to cap the holes and highway crews to erect security fencing to contain the perimeter. One final initiative served to cover the area with the glut of junk the state had been storing outside Newark: old service fleets of police cars, buses, safes, filing cabinets, stanchions, highway signs. All the steel a bureaucracy outlives.

  In time the forerunners of modern environmentalists came to understand the seriousness of what had been done and issued health warnings to the residents around the swamp. They even bought up land and helped relocate families to other parts of the county.

  Legends developed of eyeless rats and two-headed snakes, shell-less turtles and hairless raccoons. It was said that birds in flight over the swamp might suddenly be overcome by poisonous updrafts and die in midair. There were reports of spiders the size of saucers and worms with fangs. For years, not even fearless teenagers would venture near the fence with the signs showing a green skull and crossbones.

  To Sykes, it was a perso
nal playground. A boy’s dream come true—plenty of things to shoot at and break and no one around to tell him what to do. When he became a teenager, it was a place to hide his contraband. When he became an adult, it was a place to bring and hide his victims.

  He passed the fence, still placarded with signs, but instead of the old skull and crossbones, he saw futuristic-looking rings of the modern BIOHAZ symbol. He hid his Jeep in the tangles of ivy alongside the fence and approached a section of wire that had been snipped out like a door; he pushed through it, and closed it behind him.

  The ground was glazed with a crystal frost. He could see the footprints he was leaving as he walked between the towering stacks of cars and trucks, could smell the stench of the infected earth, even in the cool spring air.

  In the maze of a thousand vehicles he came to a row of early-twentieth-century buses, some on their rooftops and some on their sides. One with a FLATBUSH AVE placard was rusting away on its bottom without axles or wheels. He tapped a Marlboro on the face of his watch and brought it to his lips, lighting it with a match. Then he walked to the open door.

  Sunlight glinted from a broken mirror. A pale rat scampered over the hood of an overturned vehicle. He took a long pull on the cigarette and tossed it, then climbed the steps. The seats had been removed from the rear of the bus and replaced with a mattress and a kerosene lantern. A sheet of plywood covered a section of the floor midway back; he made his way between the front seats and knelt before it. And lifted it away.

  Fumes seared his throat and burned his eyes as he stared into the black abyss. It had once been capped with an iron plate that had split in two when the crane dropped the bus on it in the sixties. One of the halves of the cap had fallen inside and in time the acidic vapors had rusted a hole through the bottom of the bus. That was how he’d found it as a boy.

  There was no way to know what was really down there; cesium 137, radium, mercury—certainly those and more; radionuclides and isotopes that doctors had found in the marrow of his bones and some with a half-life of four million years.