A Knife Edge

by David Rollins

  Boris smiled. He was enjoying himself; perhaps for the first time in a long time he was getting a little serious job satisfaction. Perhaps he was also thinking about how his boss would call him a hero for subduing this here abusive noncustomer as per company policy. He raised the bat high over his head and rushed forward. Instead of retreating and giving him room for the downward swing, like he expected, I stepped toward him. The bat was still behind his head, pointing down toward his ankles, when I grabbed it and pulled it all the way down behind his back. I wrenched it from his hands as his knees buckled and he fell backward. He lay on the floor, hands in front of his face, waiting for me to teach him those manners.

  “Get up,” I demanded.

  He rolled onto his side, got to his knees, and then staggered to his feet. The sneer on his face was gone, replaced by a quivering chin.

  I propped the bat against a triceps machine. “Boris, it's no wonder the folks around here are choosing to shop somewhere else. Now, ask me again and this time use the magic word.”

  “I-I forgot the question,” he said.

  “You asked me who I was and what did I want.”

  “ Who-who are you and what do you want?”

  “Please.”

  “P-please.”

  “Now, was that so hard?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I pulled my badge and held the shield where he could see it. “Vin Cooper, special agent with the United States Air Force, and I already told you what I wanted.”

  “McDonough called in sick. I'm only supposed to be on a half day and she called in sick.”

  I actually felt sorry for the slob. He'd be replaying this little scene with me in his mind for the rest of his life, replaying it and no doubt playing it forward differently.

  “Is that a reason to try improving your batting average on potential customers?” I asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Special Agent.”

  “What?”

  “You don't have to call me sir. Is that who you were on the phone with?”

  “Yeah. McDonough said she had to go to the doctor's.”

  “I don't suppose you know who that doctor is?”

  “Nah. She said she might not be back till tomorrow. But, like, fuck, you know… I've got things I need to do, too,” he said. The quivering chin had mutated into anger. His humiliation was Amy McDonough's fault, my fault, Elmer's fault, anyone's fault but his own.

  “This is my card.” I took one from my wallet and held it out to him. He reached for it with a long arm like it was going to bite him. Or maybe blow up. “She calls you back, you don't tell her I came to see her.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You find out where she is and you call me. Please.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where's Mr. Elmer?”

  “Died ten years ago.”

  “Who's the boss now?”

  “His nephew—never comes in.”

  There were still no customers in the store. The place was atrophying, heading for life support. Or maybe the nephew wanted it DNR, for tax reasons. “Don't you go losing that card, Boris.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Special Agent.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  I walked out into the parking lot. My cell rang. The screen told me it was a private number, which I usually don't answer. In a rare moment of cell generosity, I pressed the green button. “Special Agent Cooper,” I said as I watched three guys take their anger and frustration out on a wall with cans of orange spray paint.

  “Hello. My name's Erwin Griffiths. You left a message to call.”

  “Sorry, sir,” I said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Erwin Griffiths.”

  “Where you from, Mr. Griffiths? I've left a few messages around town lately.”

  “Sure. Ah, I'm from a company called Neural Paths.”

  Neural Paths—I remembered. “Yeah, Erwin,” I said. “I'm investigating the death of a man you called at the beginning of last week—before Christmas.” I leaned against the Explorer and watched one of the graffiti artists throw a rock at the one last unshattered pane of glass. He missed.

  “Oh, sorry to hear that. Dead? Can you tell me who it was that died? Don't mean to be rude here, but, like you, I call a lot of people.”

  “Ruben Wright.”

  “Ruben Wright, Ruben Wright, Ruben… Oh, yeah, got his file right here. Dead? Hmm… that's a shame.”

  He made it sound like it was a shame Ruben's file was on his desk rather than on someone else's.

  “Can you tell me what kind of company Neural Paths is, Erwin?” I asked.

  “Sure. We do, like, credit card fraud.”

  “Credit card fraud. You mind giving me an overview?”

  “OK… Well, let me tell you something about yourself you probably aren't aware of. You're predictable. Most people don't like being told this, but it's true.”

  He continued. “You… everyone, in fact, spends money in a manner that software can now predict. That's because you spend money in a pattern that's highly regular. As I said—you're predictable. If you deviate from that spending pattern, either in the type of things you buy or the amount you spend—sometimes both—the program pops your name up on screen and someone like me gives you a call to check that your erratic spending isn't the result of card fraud—that your card isn't being used by a person, or persons, unknown to you.” I heard him take a breath.

  I didn't know Erwin, but I sensed he was the kind who found the word “brief” beside the word “impossible.”

  “You called Ruben Wright because of his spending patterns?”

  “Yep, textbook. He'd suddenly gone from being a pain-in-the-ass customer who never used his plastic to the kind of customer the credit card company wanted on its gold rewards program. Like, if it was really Mr. Wright spending all that money, which I was calling to confirm, then the credit card company would have asked him if he wanted to increase his limit.”

  The Ruben I remembered kept a family of moths in his billfold. Spending bags of money? Not the Ruben I knew—and obviously not the one the credit card company was familiar with either.

  “So Wright's dead?” Erwin asked, the voyeur in him coming out for a look around, hoping to catch a glimpse of something truly nasty—the way drivers slow down for a traffic accident, eager for a glimpse of blood.

  I cut off his enthusiasm. “Yeah. So I doubt he'll want to take up that rewards program.”

  “Oh. Well, then … thank you,” he said, miffed, sounding like I'd short changed him.

  “Glad to be of service,” I said, hanging up. I was intrigued. There was something going on here—an erratic pattern that the software between my ears had picked up.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I like Pensacola. Not too big that you don't know anyone, and not so small that everyone knows you. Home to the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels, and also to Amy McDonough. I drove out to her house. It was off a busy road and it was small and mean. I stood in the driveway and looked around. The house across the street was black with mildew, one corner sinking into the soft earth. An old oak with a limp beard of Spanish moss threw a pale gray shadow across the veranda. The house was a twin to the one McDonough lived in, except that the oak in her yard was reduced to a gray stump, the rest of the tree having been sawn off three feet from the ground a long time ago, its ancient dry roots breaking through the concrete drive here and there.

  Amy's red Chevrolet Cavalier was not parked in the driveway. I went to the door and knocked. No answer. The place felt empty. I checked the fuse box. Something inside was drawing power, a low drain. Probably a clock, a radio turned down low, a computer on sleep. There were a couple of reasonably fresh oil drips on the driveway. The mailbox didn't hold the usual junk that might have indicated a long-term departure. Amy was just out. If I believed Boris, she was out paying her doctor a visit. I didn't have the resources at my disposal to ring the one hundred or more
doctors in town to find out which one was hers. This made me reflect, for an instant, on how different police work is from that shown on TV shows and how, in reality, some cases actually take longer than forty-four minutes plus commercials to resolve. I wondered when Agent Lyne would get impatient with me and demand to have his house back.

  I parked the SUV down the road a respectable distance and waited for Amy's return. Two hours later, she was still a no-show. I called Boris on my cell. He said she hadn't come back to work and hadn't called in again. It was time to move on. I had a doctor's appointment of my own I didn't want to miss.

  * * *

  Dr. Murray Mooney shared his waiting room with five other doctors in the medical center, a rambling, prefab fortress that reminded me of a pile of blocks stacked by a two-year-old. The doctor was behind schedule, but then so was I. As I ran the usual gauntlet of forms at reception, he came out to walk me into his office.

  Dr. Mooney's age was impossible to guess, anywhere between thirty and fifty. What was more certain, however, was that he was short and hairy—coarse black wire sprang from his ears, nostrils, and up and over the collar at the back of his neck. Alsatians had less hair than this guy. But in a joke played on him by his genes, his noggin was as smooth and brown as a polished walnut. He wore pants and a striped blue-and-white business shirt without a tie.

  I followed him into his office. I took the seat indicated with a sweep of his hand, along with a moment to get my bearings. Hung on one wall was the chart I'd seen in every doctor's office I've ever visited. It showed a man with a placid look on his face whose skin and musculature had been peeled back from his belly so that the correct position and size of his organs could be seen. When I was a kid, I wondered if doctors had this poster in case they needed reminding where everything went should someone walk in spilling their guts on the carpet. Mooney was a general practitioner, not a specialist, so there was an array of interesting models scattered about: a tower made from half a dozen vertebrae of the lower spine, the workings of the inner ear, a partial bust of a flayed head showing the muscles of the face, jaw, and eyes. In another corner of the room was an eye chart. Beside it, a human skeleton hung from a pole. His desk was littered with numerous items for the probing and prodding of human orifices, as well as items such as pads and pens and gimmicky bits of junk all carrying the logos of various branded drugs. The place looked like the aftermath of a medico's rummage sale.

  “So, Vin Cooper,” he said, glancing at the card I'd filled out at the front desk. “What can we do for you today?” He leaned toward me, his hands clasped together in the space between his knees, his face wearing its professional smile—affable without being friendly. “Special Agent,” I said.

  “Sorry?” He took another look at the card, confused.

  “Special Agent. Special Agent Vin Cooper.” I showed him my badge. “You were the doctor of a friend of mine who—”

  The smile vanished and he sat back in his chair. “I'm sorry, but I thought you needed medical attention. I cannot discuss—”

  “…A friend of mine who is now dead.”

  “Who…?”

  “United States Air Force Master Sergeant Ruben Wright.”

  “Sergeant Ruben Wright?” His larynx was working like a piston.

  I nodded. “Yeah, sergeant. You didn't know Ruben was in the Air Force?”

  “No. I… I would've handled it differently.”

  “Like, for instance, you'd have notified the Air Force that Sergeant Wright had MS?”

  Mooney stared at me. I watched the wheels turning behind his eyes. Do I come clean? Do I claim doctor-patient privilege? I gave him a nudge.

  “There're no liability issues here, Doc. He jumped out of a plane and hit the ground. I'm looking into why.”

  “He committed suicide?”

  “That's one possibility,” I said.

  Mooney shook his head, stood up. “I thought he was a fitness instructor.” He turned to his computer and pulled up the relevant file. “Yes, a personal trainer,” he said, reading the screen. “He was a very healthy man.”

  Was. Ruben must have known something was very wrong with him to have picked out a doctor fifty miles from the base. If the medical staff at Hurlburt Field had known of his condition, they'd have had him discharged as fast as the clerks could cut the paperwork.

  The doctor sat, breathed deeply, and expelled his next breath with a hiss. “Ruben Wright's MS came on fast. Do you know much about the disease, Mr…. er…” He checked my card a third time.

  “Special Agent will do,” I said. “And, no, not much. You prescribed him Tizanidine?”

  “I prescribed him a long list of medicines to control the disease and its symptoms. He had to take pills all day long. The Tizanidine was for the spasticity, yes.” He swung round in his chair, faced his computer again. “MS is a disease that attacks the myelin, a fatty tissue that helps nerves in the brain and spinal cord conduct electrical impulses. Ruben came to see me about three months ago with a range of symptoms. I sent him off to have an MRI and it came back conclusive. MS has a wide range of symptoms and not all sufferers run the gamut of them, because the attacks on the myelin range in severity and location from one sufferer to the next. Ruben's presentation, though, was classic. Let me see… the first time he saw me he complained of the spasticity, and the fact that the right-hand side of his face was numb, along with his right foot. Two weeks later he was back with the numb face, a numb hand, vertigo, and… er… yes, erectile dysfunction. That's when I sent him off to get the MRI. He had what's called the progressive-relapsing type of MS, the type that gets steadily and quickly worse.”

  “How did Ruben take it when you gave him the good news?”

  “He reacted the way most people do—he went into a kind of denial and shock spiral, followed by depression. Depression, incidentally, is another feature of the disease.”

  “Sounds like a barrel of laughs. Is the disease fatal?”

  “No, not usually. Not in the sense that it will kill you.”

  “What other sense is there?”

  Mooney massaged his chin. “In the sense that MS can put an end to your life the way you've always known it, especially if you're a physical person, the sort of person Ruben Wright obviously was. There's no known cure for the disease, either.”

  Yeah, Ruben was that kind of guy. He'd have taken the news of the steep slide into atrophy ahead of him hard. “Was he sui cidal, do you think?”

  “I hope not… but I can't say for sure. I'd prescribed an anti-depressant called Effexor to help him cope. I also gave him the name of a very good psychologist I know.”

  “Would her name be Judith Churcher?” I asked.

  “Yes, that's her. How did you know?”

  “Nokia,” I said. The doctor didn't seem to understand, but I was beginning to. “Well, thanks for your time, Doc.”

  “Seems Ruben wasn't so honest with me.”

  “I guess he thought he had a lot to lose,” I said, and left.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Judith Churcher, psychologist, had her office in a place called The Sunshine Clinic, which turned out to be a rambling old house surrounded by a garden that was part manicured, part jungle. Artfully hidden throughout the garden sat painted fairies and frogs cast from concrete. The front door was daubed in the colors of the rainbow. My nostrils detected incense on the air currents. If you weren't depressed when you arrived, The Sunshine Clinic would fix that.

  I pushed the rainbow aside on its squeaky hinges and walked into the reception area. It was unattended and no customers were waiting, patiently or otherwise. Judith Churcher shared the house with a kinesiologist, an expert in Reiki, and another psychologist, like herself, who specialized in anxieties. There was a rack of printed materials on one wall. Among an array of titles instructing on how to detect and repair your aura and how to release your inner life-force energy was a book titled Have a Nice Flight.

  “Is there anything I can help you with, sir?” said a voice
behind me.

  The guy who it belonged to was a painfully thin hippie type with stringy arms, wild, wiry gray hair, and a cracked and weathered face that called to mind old window putty. He wore a loose purple cheesecloth shirt, pants of a similar material tied around his scrawny waist, and sandals. A wave of patchouli enveloped me, causing me to fight for oxygen. “I'm here to see Dr. Churcher,” I said. As with Dr. Mooney, Churcher had every reason to believe she had an appointment with a new patient. In this way, I was reasonably sure that the people I drove fifty miles to interview would be in.

  “The doctor should be here any moment. Take a seat.”

  I nodded and took up his suggestion, one beside an open window.

  Almost immediately, a woman in her late forties bounced in the front door. She was wearing a beige linen skirt and matching jacket. Her hair was cut in a short bob and dyed strawberry blonde. The PTA mom type. She walked into one of the rooms and closed the door. Thirty seconds later, she opened it again, sans coat, ready to counsel. “Mr. Cooper?” she inquired.

  I stood and walked into her office. She closed the door behind me. “Sit, sit,” she insisted. “Obviously we don't know each other. So, why don't you tell me a little about yourself. Start wherever you like.” She knitted her eyebrows together in concentration, like she was determined to memorize Each And Every Word.

  “I'm an investigator with the OSI—an Air Force cop,” I said.

  She blinked a couple of times and tilted her head, a combination that communicated her deepest understanding and sympathy for this situation I found myself in. I wondered what was really going through her mind. White noise, most likely. “I'm looking into the death of someone you were counseling. His name was Ruben Wright.” She blinked again, this time with confusion.

  “But I thought… Do you mind if we start again?”

  “Sure, I'm Special Agent Vin Cooper.” I pulled my badge and gave her a good look so there was no mistaking what variety of Vin Cooper I was. “Sergeant Ruben Wright died a little over a week ago when his parachute failed. I'm looking into his death.”