by Josh Cook
Trike kicked The Old-Timer’s door as a knock.
“Go fuck yourself,” The Old-Timer shouted.
“It’s Trike.”
“I know. Any booze in those grocery bags?” The Old-Timer shouted, no closer to the door.
“I’ve got a fifth and an afternoon.”
The Old-Timer let Trike in, then sat down in an ancient recliner. Trike put the groceries away. Poured two fingers of whiskey apiece into two glasses and brought them to the living room. He handed The Old-Timer a glass and sat down in an old director’s chair.
They finished their first whiskeys over three minutes of silence. Trike refilled their glasses. Then the tire fire started burning.
“The worst thing about the batshit-crazy cases, is how much you come to need them. After a few years of walking into a scene where a guy’s brains are all over the living room and knowing before you take your hat off, his wife told him to fuck himself with a shotgun, you start looking forward to the cases you get to scratch your head about. Don’t ever underestimate your ability to be bored. I knew it was time to hang ’em up when I found myself picking the starting quarterback on my fantasy team while some mob thug taught me how to smell the back of my neck. I don’t care how hot your wife is, you pound her pussy long enough, she’ll end up looking like an overweight high school gym teacher to you. Near the end I busted open this huge case, dogfighting, puppy mill, money-laundering thing. The organization was all over the place and I brought those bastards down pretty much all on my lonesome. And do you know what it felt like when I saw the cops cuff the ringleader? Entering focus group results into an advertising database. And I just saved puppies. Hundreds of fucking puppies. Even when I saw the feel-good report on the local news of those puppies getting adopted by loving families. Not a fucking thing. Just another fucking day draining the fucking water cooler at the fucking office. And it gets worse. The better you are, the faster boredom gets to you and the harder it hits when it does. And then the boring shit needs to be even more boring for court, so when that door finally gets the battering ram and the fucker you’ve chased halfway around the world finally gets his face slammed on the coke-bought mahogany desk, you don’t think about the thrill of the chase, or the justice, or the reward; you think about convincing a bunch of dangling dingleberry jurors that you’re an expert witness while smelling like whiskey in a suit that hasn’t been cleaned in a year. You don’t even give a shit about the truth anymore because it’s just too damn easy. It don’t matter how great her tits are if you can see ’em whenever you want. Fuck it. See if you can con yourself into disability payments. That’s where it’s at, I’m told.”
Trike refilled both glasses.
“You ever have a case misbehave?” he asked.
The Old-Timer smirked. He slammed his whiskey and wiggled his glass at Trike for a refill. Trike refilled it.
“Yeah, I had a couple misbehave. Cops in Baltimore called me in on a serial killer case, and you could just hear it in their voices that it was a shit-blower stuck in reverse. This fucker had an agenda, but he was smart enough to cut up a random corpse every now and again to throw us off-track. And he’d cool it right after some arrest made the papers, give the DA a chance to believe they had something on somebody already in custody, and then, bam, another body with too wide a smile. Another was this kidnapping, and let me tell you, when they call with a kidnapping, they want a janitor, not a detective, because they’ve already given up on whoever the fuck went wherever the fuck. Everything was wrong. The scene. The parents. The kid. Whole fucking thing. Turned out the kid fell down the stairs roughhousing with his older brother, high school, good grades, baseball scholarship, just horsing around with his kid brother, and the parents figured, spitting this one into the maw of American Justice ain’t gonna bring baby boy back, so let’s cover it up and move on. Losing one son or maybe losing two sons. Let me tell you this, you arrogant twat-dripping, justice is a transvestite, so never pay full price up front. But you didn’t say ‘Hey old man, this shit happen to you?’ just to stroll down memory lane in my skid row, you want to know what old fuckers like me and your pops did when cases misbehaved. You treat a misbehaving case like you treat a misbehaving child: smack it across the face just hard enough to get it to stop. If it keeps up with the bullshit, smack it a little harder. With the serial killer, I followed a prime suspect day and night until he pulled a blade. Then I did what the cops had practically begged me to do: shot the bastard through his sick-ass heart and planted a gun on him. The papers pinned the murders on him better than any court could. The kidnapping. Well. The real ball-render with misbehaving cases is it’s real easy to knock the brat’s teeth out. And if you’re angry when you swing. Fuck. You can take the poor kid’s head off.
“The kidnapping. They hired me to find the kid. So, I found the kid. I convinced the husband the wife was going to pin it on him so she could divorce him, get away scot-free and keep the house. I wasn’t there when he barged into the police station to tell everyone and their diddling uncle where the body was buried. Yeah. The truth was a good lay back then. Now, I’d’a helped them build a concrete patio over the body. What am I telling you? You get what you get. Now get the fuck out with your fucking fuck, so I can make myself dinner and watch the game without you mumbling statistics in my ear. You’d be the worst coach on the planet. Always knowing which play had the highest statistical likelihood of getting the first down.”
“I could keep it to myself.”
“Yeah. That’d make it better.”
ATTACKER FAILS, KNIFE VIBRATES, AND LOLA DOES NOT DRAW A TREE
Sharp glare of early sun off moist asphalt. There was plenty of asphalt in the parking lot of the Breeckow Administrative Complex where the city’s Hall of Records was located. Even on a Monday morning when the building was open. As Lola suspected, there were no pictures of the city’s sewer maps online. She’d found references, descriptions, and files that had been removed, but nothing that would contribute to the investigation.
Which was fine by Lola. Opening an ancient ledger had emotional content that downloading a file did not. And Lola didn’t care why.
“Good morning, Lola,” the clerk at the Hall of Records droned. He didn’t turn to greet her. It was 9:02 a.m.
“Good morning, Arthur. How did you know it was me?”
Arthur Neil sighed. Like he’d been exhausted forever.
“You’re the only person who has ever, ever come here this early in the morning. In fact,” Arthur sighed so hard that a thirteen-year-old in Omaha discovered The Smiths, “most of the time you’re the only one who ever comes here. Usually to send me scampering around the entire hall.” He put on a tight faux smile. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“I need current maps of the sewer systems.”
“Yes. Of course,” Arthur stopped completely. “You do.”
“And if for some reason, a full map is unavailable, I could make do with a map of the sewers around this address.”
Lola handed the clerk a slip of paper. He took it. Eventually. As if it were an asp.
“Ah, the Joyce House. I should have known. In my vocational capacity as gatekeeper of the city’s records, it is my duty to ask you: Why would you come here for this information, when it would be readily available and far more complete at the Water Department?”
Trike drew conclusions like six-shooters. Took shots so precisely cruel that whoever stood in his way answered whatever he asked, just to make sure he never said anything about them again. But Trike would know something important and truthful about Arthur from the prescription and style of his glasses. Without that arsenal, Lola just told Arthur the truth.
“I can walk here. I have to drive to the Water Department.”
“But you have a car, have gas or the ability to get it, and live in a nation devoted to the automobile. I must say, I fail to see why that is a compelling reason.”
“And I fail to see why you’re such a dick. You’re a clerk at the hall of public
records. It is your job to bring the public its records.”
Arthur stormed off into the stacks.
“And that attitude is killing the planet,” Lola shouted after him. “And I don’t really have gas money,” she thought.
Feet shuffled in the hallway, up to, but not past, the door to the Hall of Records office. Someone muffled a cough. There was a plastic pop. A cap coming off a bottle of mace. Someone lurked in the hallway.
Jumping her in a public place made no sense. But with the FBI connection and the missing information, it never hurt to have a strategy.
Step into the hallway crouching low with hands over face while stepping away from the attacker. Set weight, kick attacker’s left knee. Come in low, wrap the attacker around the waist forcing weight on kicked knee. Hip toss and roll to land on top with knees on shoulders. Chop whichever wrist holds the mace. Have a very awkward conversation. Planning took two seconds.
Lola listened as the lurker shuffled and fidgeted, intending to alter her strategy in response to any change in location. Whoever it was didn’t seem to have the sense to press him- or herself against the wall. Or stand far enough away from the opening door to ensure the efficacy of the mace.
Arthur stomped back to the counter and slammed a massive ledger on it. It boomed like a shotgun.
Whoever was in the hallway screamed. The scream was followed by a hissing sound. The hissing by a receding series of screams.
Lola relaxed. Whoever was in the hallway had somehow maced themself and run away. She reached for the ledger. Arthur pulled it away.
“Alas, this is not for you. The sewer maps are gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes. Gone.”
“Were they checked out?”
“Lola, as I’ve told you, oh, let’s say hundreds of times, this is the Hall of Records, not a lending library. Our materials are not ‘checked out.’ ” The clerk added contemptuous air quotes.
“Then where are the sewer maps?”
“This may also come as a shock to you, but I am not a detective. I am a clerk in the Hall of Records. Perhaps you could hire an astonishingly arrogant, compulsively cruel, blond Satan to find them for you. Or are you so broke the one you work for won’t even take the case for you?”
A knife suddenly stuck in the wall to Lola’s right. It vibrated from the speed of its impact. Arthur jumped back at the sudden motion.
Lola said in a clear, quiet tone, “The knife is not a threat. Just a reminder. Something to think about. Life is strange. You assume you never need the help of someone who can draw a knife so quickly and throw it so accurately that it fixes a comma splice, and, in general, you would be right. But things happen. Coincidences. Mistaken identities. Wrong place at the wrong time. So, if you end up somehow, somewhere in your life needing someone who can draw a knife that quickly and throw it that accurately, you’ll have to count me out of your pool of potential saviors.”
Arthur blinked. The knife was out of the wall and Lola was stepping back to the counter. “Now,” she said, “doesn’t the absence of the maps concern you at all?”
Arthur cleared his throat. Regained his composure. “It concerns me greatly. But I am going to go through the proper authorities.” He picked up the phone. “Right now.” He dialed. While it rang he said, “Looks like you’ll have to drive out to the Water Department anyway. Not so green after all, eh?” He turned his back on Lola and talked into the phone.
Still waiting for that Constitutional amendment about assholes.
Lola considered her options. She could walk home, pick up her car, and drive to the Water Department. And make Arthur right. A bus could get her a half-mile from the Water Department, but that route was two connections away. The department was a little less than five miles from her apartment. She could jog there without killing herself in about thirty-eight minutes, but she’d be a sweaty mess when she got there. It was only 9:12 a.m. She couldn’t afford organic but she bought it anyway. This was not a time to give in. Jog.
Lola went home, put on jogging clothes, and packed her bag with a towel, deodorant, a more professional outfit, her phone, a sandwich of hummus and sprouts, a manila folder, and her small sketchbook. She jogged to the Water Department.
I’d give you a dollar for every head that didn’t turn when Lola ran by. You’d owe me fifty cents.
Lola approached the receptionist at the department, dried, changed, and deodorized as much as possible in a public restroom. It was 11:45 a.m. The receptionist was putting out a sign with a clock indicating 1:00 p.m. and the phrase, “Gone Until.”
“Sir, just one thing before—”
“I’m sorry, Miss,” he said, “but I’m already late and this is an all-staff meeting, so there’s no one else to help you.”
“I know, but I just—”
“There’s a nice little sandwich shop just around the corner if you want to grab some lunch. I’ll be back at one to help. Sorry.” He left through the back of the office.
Lola didn’t have enough money for a sandwich or anything else from the nice little sandwich shop just around the corner. She didn’t have enough money for an energy drink from the convenience store she’d jogged by. Since it was before seven p.m., she didn’t have enough money to get the weekly call to her mom out of the way.
Lola strolled out to the front lawn. There was a bench facing the street. With limited options, Lola sat there. She took out her sketchbook. Scanned the world for something to draw while she killed an hour.
She saw a one-story battleship-gray building with two short wings. A rectangle with a side missing. Barely featured. An HVAC cylinder and an HVAC box on the roof. A driveway led visitors to a central glassed-in lobby. The sign above that entrance was too small for Lola to read. A line of hedges ran along the street the length of the outside wall.
The interposition of the driveway in the open square created by the wings enclosed two essentially useless spaces. To mitigate or obscure the company’s unwillingness to pay for gardens to fill those spaces, two benches were installed. They were empty, though it was lunchtime.
The building could have housed a biotech, or a telemarketer, or a regional headquarters of a national retailer, or a credit-card company’s call center, or any business that required little space per employee. It might have held interest to an architect or someone willing to provide the intensity of attention that always reveals substance, but Lola wasn’t an architect and she didn’t have the resources for that attention.
A lawn landscaped into monotony stretched along the street stage left. A monotony monotonously broken by a landscaped-into-the-scenery old leafless tree. A fine subject for a pencil or charcoal drawing. Its essence was expressible both in bold abstract strokes and through thousands of short, light, precise lines. Lola had drawn, sketched, and painted hundreds of trees. For as many reasons. Some of which art. She did not want to spend time on another.
Behind the tree, a hill dropped off. The horizon was drawn by the tops of deciduous trees. The corporate lawn stretched to the curve in the street that was the border of Lola’s vision.
She closed her eyes, hoping to induce a sketchable image in her visual consciousness. Sometimes it was like fog receding from a landscape. Portions solidified. Vagueness dissipated. Certainty grew until she knew what she looked at.
Sometimes the fully formed image just popped into her mind. There would be when she could not see it and there would be when she could. A Planck-scale border of consciousness.
Sometimes it felt like an archaeological action sequence: solving puzzles, eluding traps, and braving dangers to arrive at something she knew existed, yet was unseen.
But none of those things happened. Just a sudden certainty that she would see nothing on the inside that needed to be brought outside. Her eyes snapped open.
“Think about the case, then.”
Lola thought about a case in two different ways. The first was common: verbal reasoning in notes on paper.
She set the sketchbo
ok down in her lap and let her eyes and mind wander over the few notes she’d made. Phrases seemed about to assemble only to unify first with their own impossibility. Three times Lola put her pencil on the page, but before depositing graphite, the fundamental flaw in whatever she intended to jot revealed itself.
The process halted.
“Wish the universe had told me about this hour of free time,” she thought. “Would’ve shoved some other research in my bag.”
Lola endeavored her other way of thinking about a case.
When a problem was particularly abstract, she created, in her mind, a visual equivalent for each component of the problem and assigned it a role in the process of painting. One component was the line, another the color, another the brushstrokes, another the blocking. If the resulting image made compositional sense, she assessed it to better understand the elements of the problem itself. If the first assignment of visual metaphors did not make compositional sense, she rearranged the assignments. The background color became the frame. The line became the color. Combination after combination until something made visual sense.
Though this process rarely produced a definitive answer—at least before Trike produced a definitive answer—it often produced productive questions. “Why would they use a hatchback instead of a small pickup truck?” “Why would she wear an old dress to an anniversary dinner with her husband?” “Why would they use Christmas wrapping paper?” “Why did they carry the suitcase, when they could have rolled it?”
Trike would pause when she asked the right question. His eyes flashed. Then he would rush off to whatever action the answer demanded. Occasionally, he bothered to thank her.