by Ed Gorman
I lifted up at least two inches in my seat. My impulse was to race over to him and see who the hell he really was. He spoke in a code that both candidates and I understood. Maybe two or three others in the building knew what he hinted at as well. Then the name came to me and a millisecond later, as Kathy clutched my arm, his identity was confirmed. ‘It’s David; David Nolan.’
This time I did leave my seat. People on both sides gawked at me. Leaving a political debate for any reason was apparently as unthinkable as leaving a Mass the Pope was saying.
The two security men in their blue uniforms leaned against the front doors. One of them worked a BlackBerry; the other stopped scratching his balls when I came through the interior door.
‘Help you with something?’ the ball-scratcher said when it was obvious I wasn’t going to the john or walking out through the front door.
‘I’m just waiting for somebody.’
He shrugged.
Burkhart was responding to Nolan’s question. ‘This is exactly the kind of behavior I’m going to change when I get to Washington. This country was founded on the principle of family comes first. The Founding Fathers were examples of how we were supposed to live our lives. Look at Washington and cutting down that cherry tree.’
I wondered if he’d ever been abducted by aliens. Or maybe Santa Claus. Could he possibly believe that hokey false tale about Washington and chopping down that tree?
Ward was much better. ‘I don’t want to comment on anybody else’s morality – we’ve got too many so-called “moralists” judging people today – but I do think that as a matter of professional ethics, it’s dangerous for a politician to put himself in a position where somebody can take advantage of him. I’ve spent my two terms in Washington working for the greater good – for the decent men and women who are suffering today because of the excesses of the super-rich and their foot soldiers – and that’s a full-time job, believe me.’
God alone knew what any of that bullshit meant but it sure sounded good. Burkhart’s face was squinched in displeasure. He knew a good pitcher had just thrown some of his best stuff of the night. But both men probably needed an EKG. They knew that somebody was on to them. If Kathy and likely Lucy had recognized Nolan, Ward probably had, too.
A questioner from Burkhart’s side had now positioned herself in front of the microphone. My assumption was that Nolan would leave the auditorium after he’d shaken up the two candidates. I watched him leave the microphone but instead of coming up the aisle he turned to a curtained area on the wall and disappeared inside.
‘Is there an exit on the right side down by the stage?’ I asked the BlackBerry man.
‘Yeah. And we’ve got a man posted outside there.’
By the time I reached the front doors I was running. Cold air, smells of exhaust fumes, nearby burning leaves, soggy earth from recent rain.
The stretch between the front of the building and the side door was a lot longer than it appeared. Or at least it seemed to be as I ran it. A portly blue-uniformed man stood there watching me come closer, closer. He went for his walkie-talkie.
When I reached him he took two giant steps backward. I’d always wanted to be a pariah.
‘Did an old man just come through that door?’
‘What’s it to ya if he did?’
‘He’s my father. He’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. He wanders off sometimes. He just got up and left the auditorium before I could stop him. This could be really serious.’
‘That stuff’s bad. I’m sorry.’
‘Did he come through here?’
‘Yeah. I think he was headed toward that parking lot over there.’
‘Thanks.’ I started running again. The lot he’d mentioned was across the street. Most people attending the debate parked here. In the pale purple glow of the security lights the flanks of cars formed an impenetrable barrier. No sign of Nolan. Maybe he’d already left the area. Maybe he’d never entered the parking lot. Maybe he’d seen me talking to the security man and was crouched between two cars, watching me.
I had to enter the lot. Nowhere else to look now. As I crossed the street I saw the headlights of a van come alive with alien starkness. Easy to imagine Nolan behind the wheel. Backing out.
The van was five rows deep and on the edge of a lane. I stumbled and slammed into the side of a new Buick trying to get to it. I shouted at it. I heard the whine of the reverse just as I reached the fourth lane. He completed his backing and pointed the green van in the direction of the closest exit. I didn’t have any choice. I ran for the lane he was in and just as he started pulling away I reached his vehicle and pounded on his window. Or rather, her window. A very comely blonde in an IHOP uniform. She gave me the finger and then sped away.
Have you seen this man? I’d be the police sketch of the day tomorrow. I hoped they’d be kind enough to make me look both handsome and erudite.
Making an ass of yourself saps your confidence. I didn’t resume running. Or even searching. I just stood there boiling in my shame.
I didn’t trust Mrs Burkhart; too crazy. But Nolan could bring it all together for me. Maybe he could even tell me who’d killed Jim Waters. Or maybe he’d admit to killing Waters. I had to find Nolan, shame or not.
I walked the lines of cars. The light created shadows and the shadows deceived the eyes. Too easy to imagine sounds and the things that could lurk in those shadows. The one thing that most of the cars and SUVs and vans had in common was their age. Few of them were more than two or three years old.
It was then I saw him. He still wore the dopey wig and the cape-like topcoat. He had misjudged how well he was hiding. He was two lanes away hunched down and hurrying toward the rear of the lot. It might have worked if his head hadn’t popped up for a second. He, too, was imagining sights and sounds and he’d paid the price for his misjudgments. After a time all the parked cars became a maze.
I went after him. ‘Nolan! Stop!’
He wasn’t foolish enough to slow down and look back at me. He was a heat-seeking missile now. I was running again but he reached the street before I did. Traffic was heavy and fast. He chanced the kind of dash that should have ended with an ambulance and half a dozen flaring squad cars. But he made it. When he reached a grassy empty lot he didn’t slow down. I was stranded on the edge of the curb watching him disappear into the shadows of an alley that might as well have been in Cleveland. At that moment it seemed that distant.
I had to make my own chancy dash, the problem being I didn’t have the same luck Nolan had. I cleared the lane closest to me but when I was two steps into the far lane a small panel truck materialized like something from those old Star Trek episodes. It was all furious lights and furious horn. If this had been a cartoon the truck would have been standing on its hood, upright.
No way to tell if he was flipping me off. I waved in apology and kept on grinding. Close up the grassy lot was pocked with numerous holes that could do damage to a walker, let alone a runner. It was also a litter box for various animals. Fresh shit tainted the cool, fresh air. The alley probably dated back to the early part of the last century. The garages were all one-car and all the wooden fencing dragged the earth. There were no lights in any of the houses I could see only from the back. This might well be a condemned block. Ghosts from long-forgotten decades crept inside the garages for respite from the wind. If you listened closely you could hear Benny Goodman.
Had Nolan kept running or was he hiding in one of these small crumbling structures? I slowed to a jog, snapping my head right to left as I moved. No cars. No suggestion of people.
Then two garages ahead of me a sharp clap of wood on wood.
When I got in the garage myself, I was able to see what had made the noise. He’d been hiding in the shadows near a door that led to the backyard of the house. Trouble was he slapped the door shut when he made his break and it was that noise that alerted me.
I dove into the darkness, tripping on tire ruts in the dirt floor that had been dug by
time and water. Moonlight outlined the sagging door for me. I didn’t make the mistake he did. I closed it quietly. Rusted clotheslines, brown dead grass, a storm cellar door. No sign of him.
The first thing I checked was that cellar door. The padlock made it certain that he hadn’t used it. Then I was on the street gaping both ways as I had in the alley. Far down the long block I saw the silhouette of a creature racing away.
I raced right after him. After a time the staved-in sidewalk started yielding treasures. Here a gray wig, there a dusty topcoat and finally a greasy, dark-green fedora. I left these gifts to the dogs and cats and squirrels of the neighborhood.
Traffic in this dead area was slight so the sounds of my pounding footsteps were loud enough to bounce off the ramshackle houses as I passed them. Was he aware of me by now?
Three blocks down, this street fed into a major avenue. I was getting close when I watched him turn to the right and disappear into a blaze of light that leapt from buildings into the night sky. Some kind of neighborhood business strip.
I turned the same corner in time to see him cross the street and rush down past two taverns and a video store. This was a block of small businesses destined for urban renewal. Half the front windows were dark. The people on the street were shuffling silhouettes emptying from the taverns, heads down, shoulders slumped. Not even alcohol had cheered them.
A cracked and taped window promising ‘Pizza’ turned out to be Nolan’s destination. As he reached for the door his head turned and our eyes met. Even from this distance I could see his panic. After shedding his old-man clothes, his gray V-neck sweater, white shirt and black trousers marked him as a middle-aged professional who was out of place on a street like this.
The traffic was dense here, too. Two signs indicated that the interstate could be picked up just one block from here. It wasn’t quite nine o’clock yet. The cars drove fast as if they wanted badly to be out of this neighborhood.
By the time I managed to reach the other side of the street he’d been inside ‘Pizza’ for three or four minutes. If he was still inside.
The smell of pizza was the only appealing thing about the long, narrow, and swollen-walled place. Tiny tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths made not of cloth but oilcloth lined both walls. The pizza ovens were in back, fronted by a counter where two men in white T-shirts stood talking in an agitated way next to the cash register. When they saw me their eyes narrowed with suspicion. He must have warned them I’d be coming.
None of the customers showed more than momentary interest in me as I hurried to the counter. Even before I quite reached it the bald one said, ‘We don’t have anything to do with it. You want him – he went out the back door.’
‘You’re not a cop, are you?’ the other one said.
I didn’t answer. I was too busy rushing to the Exit sign. Outside again. A long alley. And there, in the distance, he ran. As I started after him I wondered how long we could keep going. We were obviously both in decent shape but we weren’t exactly athletes. Was one of us just going to flame out, fall face first on to whatever texture of ground we were running on, and lie unmoving until the cold night air began to plug our sinuses and rasp our throats?
He turned left at the head of the alley. I was grinding through space, blind animal pursuing blind animal. In my imagination at least he had begun to slow some. Or I was finding a remarkable second wind?
This time he resorted to what he must have thought was a very tricky trick. As I reached the street he went left again. He had assumed I wouldn’t get to the street in time to see where he was going. He had also assumed that I would assume he’d turned right into a street filled with condemned houses ripe with winos, rats, and hiding places.
What he’d done was lead us right back to the dreary street of the taverns and ‘Pizza.’ Except this time he was running in the opposite direction. When I hit the street I saw that I hadn’t imagined his lagging strength. He was no more than half a block away. If this had been even ten minutes ago he would have been at least a block or more from me. He had one advantage, though. He knew where he was going.
And soon enough I knew where he was going, too: the interstate. When he reached the end of the street he took a sharp right and started climbing a small hill that led to the entrance. As he scrambled up toward the green-and-white sign he glanced back at me. He seemed to give a small jerk as he realized how close I was. Then he was up and over and I couldn’t see him for the moment.
The hill was more imposing than it appeared. Twice I had to dig my fingers into the dirt to keep my footing. And once I stumbled and gashed my knee on an unseen rock. Or maybe it was a piece of glass.
The interstate. Rush and roar. Music flung from cars. Tiny cars living at the mercy of the behemoth eighteen-wheelers. Video games with American and Japanese and Korean vehicles. Gleaming colors against the rolling Midwestern darkness.
I got to the top in time to see it. His idea was to find an opening in the rush of traffic and make his way across the two lanes here, stop and wait for a break in the lanes on the other side and then leave my sorry ass far, far behind.
He came breathtakingly close to losing his life trying to cross the southbound lanes. He miscalculated the speed of two oncoming cars. One of them had to swerve to avoid him. If car horns could curse, that horn spat out every dirty word ever concocted.
The choice was to let him go or try my own suicide run. Vehicles blasted past me fast enough to make me lean away from their force. Several good citizens, seeing me standing on the edge of the concrete lanes, flipped me off. One teenager was creative enough to flip me off with both middle fingers. A Rhodes scholar in the making. I of course had never done anything that asinine in my own perfect teen years.
The dumb bastard was going to try it. Nolan teetered on the edge of the grass between south and north lanes ready to jump as soon as he saw what he took to be a reasonable chance of making it.
I’d come too far to let him disappear again. Now I started looking for my own reasonable chance. If I got very lucky I could catch him on the grass before he had the opportunity to race across the lanes closest to the woods on the other side.
I had two false starts, both attributable to this vision I had of becoming instant roadkill. When I finally got to it I put my head down and plunged on to the huge roadway. Horns were already blasting me when I was only halfway across.
Because I had my head down and was concentrating exclusively on surviving, I didn’t see the accident. More horns, these from the far lanes. And a scream that must have made the stars tremble. And then a sound of collision. Car and body.
By the time I stood where Nolan had just been I saw the nearest of the two lanes clogged with stopped cars. A man was running from his car, his arms flailing in the air. I could see what he was about to find. Later the driver told the press that Nolan had been knocked maybe seven or eight feet in the air before smashing to the roadway. Right now the man knelt over the bloody rags that had been Nolan’s clothes and shouted at him as if trying to resurrect the dead.
I walked over to him, joining a dozen or so other drivers and passengers who’d come to see what had happened. Through his torn trousers a white bone poked; his right ear had been half ripped away. His chest heaved and blood bubbled in the corners of his mouth. I thought he was trying to say something.
I didn’t bother to introduce myself; I just knelt down next to him, dislodging the man who’d struck him.
‘Nolan.’
The eyelids fluttered but never lifted.
‘Nolan.’
‘You know him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you see it, the accident, I mean?’
‘Yeah. You couldn’t help it. I’ll testify to that.’ Well, I didn’t actually see it but I still knew this man wasn’t at fault.
‘My wife’s already called 911.’
‘Good. Now leave me alone here, will you?’
‘Sure.’
He got up, middle-ag
ed knees cracking, and was immediately surrounded by the others.
‘Nolan.’
Again the eyelids fluttered; again they refused to open.
Before he left he spoke only one word I could understand: ‘Ward.’
TWENTY-THREE
I saw a woman on TV once who claimed that she could see the souls of the newly dead leaving their bodies and seeking the light only they could see. She said she saw this most often when she visited hospitals, something she didn’t do unless a loved one was sick, because watching the souls flee the dead frightened her. This came to mind as I stepped off the elevator on the third floor of St Francis Hospital, where surgery was being performed on David Nolan.
Mrs Nolan was in the waiting room. She glared at me as I started to enter. I did us both a favor and joined Kathy and Lucy in a small grotto-like cove down the hall. This was an older section of the hospital. I wondered how many hundreds of people had waited here for the appearance of a doctor to bring them his or her verdict. I could almost tap into all the relieved smiles as well as the shock and disbelief and horror of those who wouldn’t be smiling for a long time.
There is no silence like hospital silence. It is easy to imagine the classic Grim Reaper in his hooded attire slipping into rooms at random and smiting sleeping patients with his scythe and dispatching their souls to the next realm. The three of us sat on a small tufted gray couch between framed paintings of a maternal Virgin and a weary Jesus. I sat between the women. Kathy touched my hand and said, ‘It should have been Jeff, not David.’
Her bitter words preceded by seconds a fleeting sob of Lucy’s. She hadn’t acknowledged me as yet. She stared off at something only she could see. And she kept fingering a small gold cross.
One of the police officers at the accident scene had let me ride with him to the hospital. I was there half an hour before Bryn Nolan slammed into the small office where I was talking to the surgeon who’d operate on Nolan. Without hesitating, she pointed to me and snapped, ‘I want him out of here. This is my husband we’re talking about. And this man is no friend of mine or my husband’s. I wanted to call the police about David being missing but he wouldn’t let me.’