Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m really tired and I haven’t been able to study for my first final on Thursday. I’m not so worried about dealing with Dr. Cogan. Him I can handle. But Watkins has really been getting on my nerves. For the record, he nearly choked me to death the other day. And he’s been harassing me ever since. It’s really the psychological torture that’s getting to me. I don’t think he understands that I need to study. I don’t care what he does to me, but I cannot fail those exams. I cannot fail.

  As such, I have a bad feeling about today. I hope it goes all right, but there’s clearly some reason not to be optimistic. So if something bad should happen, please look in the folder marked Simpsons Episodes. In the Season Three folder you’ll find a folder called Bart’s Journal. It’s really mine. And while it may not answer everything, it will hopefully show you how sorry I am that this all happened and how much I really cared for Kristen even though my stupid ego helped kill her.

  Sincerely,

  Jim Pinklow

  42/ TAKING ONE FOR THE TEAM

  May 15, 2007—9:40 a.m.

  WELLS FARGO BANK PARKING LOT, SHARON HEIGHTS SHOPPING Center, Tuesday morning. Inside a white van, a technician is doing the first of several sound checks he’ll do that morning.

  “It’s sunny,” Madden says as they await the technician’s verdict. “So we’re going with the sunglasses. The microphone’s in the frame.”

  Madden points to a spot near the left hinge of a pair of thick-framed Ray-Bans, which are sitting on top of a little ledge next to half-empty cup of coffee. The sunglasses have a neoprene eyewear restraint, a Crokie, attached to the ends of each arm.

  “They’re not the most stylish model, but with the Crokie on it, you can just leave them dangling from your neck. If the sun’s in your eyes, feel free put them on. They’re real, working sunglasses.”

  He goes on to explain that their receiver will be able to pick up the audio from the transmitter at a distance up to fifteen hundred feet, but they would park the van closer than that. They also have a second, more powerful transmitter attached to the bench, so if he’s able to remain in its vicinity, they’ll be very well covered. Another factor in their favor: there’s little wind today.

  “You’ve been on the flip side of this,” the detective says un-apologetically, “so you know the deal. You’ve got a limited amount of time before the surprise factor wears off. Those first thirty seconds are crucial.”

  He nods, remembering all too well his bungled conversation with Carrie.

  “You want to go over the script one more time or are you OK?”

  “I’m good,” he says.

  “OK. Well, as I mentioned, Mr. Burns, whom you’ve met, will be walking his dog toward the southwest corner, over by the drinking fountain.”

  He shows him a crude diagram of the park that he’d drawn himself on a piece of paper. At the center he put three X’s next to each other to mark the central bench. A single X with a circle around it marked Burns’s position next to the drinking fountain, which is depicted as a small square. The two benches on the perimeter of the park are also marked by three X’s. And finally, his position, just outside the park, on the south side, is marked by an X with a circle around it. Technically, both his position and Burns’s are equidistant from the central bench, but Burns will be out in the open while the van will be parked on the road behind some trees and bushes, semi-concealed.

  “He’s not going to be that close because we don’t want him that close,” he continues. “But you’ll be able to see him. And if everything’s good, he won’t do anything.”

  “And if it’s bad, if you’re not getting audio, he picks up the dog and holds him up?” Cogan asks.

  “Correct.”

  “What kind of dog is it?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but it’s little,” Madden says. “And it’s white.”

  “Is it a police dog?”

  “No, it’s a lap dog. It’s his girlfriend’s.”

  “So he isn’t doing anybody much good.”

  “No, but he’s well trained.”

  “OK,” the technician says, picking up the sunglasses and handing them to him. “We’re all set for now. They’re all yours. We’ll do another test when you get closer.”

  He slips the Crokie over the back of his neck and lets the glasses fall to his chest.

  “How do I look?” he asks

  “You look like you,” Madden says. “Which is how you want to look.”

  With fifteen minutes to kill before they set off for the park, he sits in his car with Carolyn, talking more about the future than the present.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  “Just wondering what the hospital’s going to do. They could still force me out. If I leave, I’d like to leave on my own terms.”

  “I don’t think now’s the time to be worrying about that.”

  “What do you think she’ll do when it comes out?”

  “Who?”

  “Carrie.”

  “You mean, do I think she’ll recant? I suppose it depends on how sure she is that she saw what she says she did. She’ll be offered plenty of therapy and counseling, I’m sure.”

  “What if she continues to insist she saw me?”

  “She can insist all she want,” she says. “They still won’t have a case.”

  “How would you react?”

  “If what?”

  “If you found out you had sex with somebody you didn’t think you did?”

  “I don’t think you should assume Kristen didn’t know. Ultimately, that may have been why she killed herself.”

  “But let’s just say you had no idea. It happens.”

  “I suppose going forward I’d have a very hard time trusting people, guys in particular. I have a hard enough time already, but it would be magnified tenfold.”

  He nods.

  “What’s up, Ted?” she asks when he doesn’t respond verbally. “What’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing. I was just so focused on getting a result, I hadn’t spent much time thinking how this would all pan out if I got the result I wanted.”

  “Well, get it first, then you can think all you want.”

  “You’re not mad at me, then?”

  “We were on different timetables. I think we always have been. When you want to go faster, I want to go slower. When I want to go faster, you want to stop. That’s just the way it is.”

  He smiles. “Damn shame, isn’t it?”

  “I would have gotten you off. I said I would.”

  “I needed more than to get off.”

  She laughs.

  “What?”

  “Listen to us,” she said. “How silly would that sound if someone heard that out of context? Me promising to get you off, you needing more than to get off.”

  She laughs again, and this time he laughs with her. They have a good chuckle, then suddenly, he remembers the sunglasses.

  “Shit, is this on?”

  She looks at him, mortified. A moment later they hear the van’s side door slide open and watch Madden step out and knock on the driver’s side window. He rolls it down for him.

  “Yes, it’s on,” he says. “And we’re on. If you could come with me, please, Ms. Dupuy, we’ll be on our way.”

  Right from the beginning, things don’t go according to plan. The audio is fine, but the problem is Jim doesn’t enter the park from either of the two entrances they thought he would. The park is almost a perfect circle, predominantly covered by neatly-trimmed grass, with an asphalt bike/walking path following its perimeter and a circular cement area in the middle that from the air would like a bull’s-eye. You can enter the park from all sides, but the majority of people enter from the south and west entrances because they abut the access road, where you’re allowed to park. The other option is the north entrance because it connects to Sand Hill—four lanes wide here—the road that takes you up to the 280 freeway and into the hills and is a popular route fo
r bikers. As it happens, Jim comes in through the east entrance, which is really the start of a separate bike path for recreational riders and pedestrians that runs parallel to Sand Hill. That area, right outside the east entrance, is more of a naturalist’s spot, a wooded area that appeals to dog walkers.

  When Cogan sees Jim standing by the entrance, he waves him over. But the kid won’t move; he motions for him to come to him. It goes back and forth like that for a couple of turns until he reluctantly gives in and hesitantly leaves his position at the center bench and starts walking toward him.

  To his left, about sixty yards off, he sees Burns and the dog, which is on the ground, sniffing a shrub. He’s half-expecting him to give him some sort of signal to stop, but when none comes, he assumes everything is all right. They won’t have the bench transmitter but the body-worn one must be working fine. Picking up his gait, he forces himself to walk more confidently.

  “Hey,” he says when he’s close enough.

  “Hey,” Jim says.

  He gestures toward the bench. “You don’t want to sit down?”

  “Nah. I’ve been sitting a lot lately. Let’s get this over with. What do you want to show me?”

  “Some documents I think you’ll find interesting.”

  He hands him an envelope that contains copies of the copies he’d given Madden.

  “The first person is actually Kristen,” he says, watching Jim’s expression grow more disturbed the longer he scans the pages. “The second one, as you can see, is you. And for some reason, you appear to have both contracted Chlamydia at exactly the same time.”

  Jim looks up and scouts the area, and sees Billings off to the right.

  “Who gave these to you?” he asks in a low voice.

  “Someone who doesn’t like you,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “I know what happened, Jim. You had sex with Kristen that night at the party. She was passed out, and you had sex with her.”

  “She was not passed out.”

  “We have a witness. A witness has come forward.”

  “Who?”

  He’s supposed to say “one of your fraternity brothers,” but before he can, something hits him on the back right side of his head and pitches him forward. He’s out before he hits the ground.

  Both Madden and Carolyn hear the thud in the van.

  “What was that?” he says, speaking into his walkie-talkie.

  “What was what?” Burns asks.

  A moment of silence, then they hear Jim’s voice again.

  “What are you doing? Are you out of your mind?”

  All kinds of noise on the line: Sounds of rustling, the microphone getting bumped and jostled.

  “I don’t have a visual,” Burns says.

  Through the rustling, heavy breathing, then another voice: “You dimwit. He could be wired.”

  “Is he?” Jim asks.

  Madden says, “Burns, I need a visual now.”

  The other voice: “You’re a lucky bastard.”

  Burns replies, “Come again, Hank?”

  “Get him out of there,” says Carolyn.

  “Fuck, dude, not with the gun again,” comes Jim’s voice.

  “Burns, he has a weapon,” says Madden.

  The other voice: “I told you I’m not going down for this, Mr. P. And I meant it.”

  “Please repeat,” Burns says.

  All the voices were overlapping, confusing Madden. “Get him out,” he shouts and just then he hears Jim say, “Go fuck yourself.”

  Madden doesn’t wait to hear what C. J. Watkins says next. Nor does he wait for Jim to pull a boxcutter from his pocket and say, “I’ve had enough of this shit,” or for Watkins’s gun to go off. No, by then he’s already flung the van door open, jumped out, and is running.

  The sound of the shot, though muffled by the silencer, brings Cogan back to consciousness. Lying on his side, he can’t move at first and his vision is blurred. The first words that come into his head are probable concussion, and opening and closing his eyes groggily, he sees, at a strange angle, flashes of the bottom half of someone, and down on the ground, the backside of a body. He hears groans and forces himself to roll over a little to the right and get up on his knees.

  “Ah, just in time,” he hears a familiar voice say, and looks up to the see C. J. Watkins standing over him, holding a gun by his side. That seems odd, but what seems odder is that he has surgical gloves on his hands.

  “Do you mind holding this for a second?”

  Before he can respond, Watkins takes his right wrist and jerks it upward, causing him to fall on his side again. He presses the gun to his palm, holding his hand over his fingers.

  “Sorry, dude,” he says. “But sometimes you gotta take one for the team.”

  Madden is a terrible sight coming out of the bushes, propelled forward wildly. His platform shoe tosses out in front of him like an anchor attached to a Bungee chord that yanks him ahead in short, awkward bursts. When Burns, looking a little bewildered, sees him, he drops the dog leash and starts running, too. He may have had better form, but Madden, aided by a downhill incline and a twenty-yard head start, manages to reach the east entrance first. There, in the shadows, he sees a figure aiming a gun at a figure lying on the ground.

  “No!” someone cries out and almost simultaneously Madden aims his gun with both hands and shouts, “Freeze!”

  But instead of freezing, the figure turns toward him. At that second, he only sees the gun swinging toward him at an angle perpendicular to the ground. And just as he’s about to come into its line of fire, Madden squeezes his trigger.

  Later, he’ll wonder whether C. J. Watkins intended to shoot him.

  The figure that Watkins was aiming his gun at was not Cogan, but Jim, who’d been shot once in the neck. After the shot rings out, Cogan gets to his knees again. From that position, he watches Burns kick the gun away from Watkins, who’s sprawled out on the ground. Burns, his gun trained on the kid, says, “Jesus, Hank. You nailed him.”

  Cogan manages to stand up. He checks his own wound first: the back of his head is throbbing and bleeding from where Watkins hit him with the butt of his gun.

  “Are you hit?” Burns asks.

  “No.”

  He takes one look at Watkins and thinks the guy’s going to box, if he hasn’t already. His eyes are closed and his face is ashen. He has on his familiar double T-shirt, and even though the outer, short-sleeve shirt is a dark, olive color, he can see that Madden’s bullet struck him a few inches north of the solar plexus and had probably hit his heart. He turns his attention to Jim, who’s on the ground a little off to the right. He’d been hit in the left side of the neck and is bleeding profusely. There’re already a large puddle welling up on the ground next to him, but he’s still alive—his eyes are open, looking up at him beseechingly. Cogan puts his hand over the wound and holds it there as tightly as he can. Jim’s trying to say something, but he can’t. A sound comes out but it’s more of a cough.

  “We’ve got to get him out of here,” he says.

  “Hank, you all right?” Burns asks Madden, who’s standing there with his gun by his side, in a state of shock. “Hank?”

  “Madden, get over here,” Cogan shouts. “Gimme a hand.”

  Just then Carolyn shows up, looking decidedly out of place in her business suit. “Oh my God,” she says.

  “Get over here, Madden,” he repeats.

  Finally, the detective comes out his stupor. He puts his gun back in its holster and comes over.

  “Jesus,” he says, staring down at the boy.

  “We need toget him out of here right now. He’s lost a lot of blood. If we take the freeway, we can get him to Parkview in five or six minutes. With the traffic on Sand Hill it’ll be faster than taking him to the university’s medical center.”

  Whether it’d be faster or not was debatable, but in a crisis you go with what’s familiar, and while Parkview’s a couple miles further in distance, he knows just where
to go and who to call.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the paramedics?” Madden asks.

  Instantly, Burns is on his police radio, asking for two ambulances for two shooting victims.

  “Not if you want him to die. Get his legs and let’s go. Carolyn, help us.”

  With him having to hold his neck tightly from front to back (he thought he felt an exit wound), they have a little trouble with their positioning at first. But after a few awkward steps they begin to master the art of the six-legged race and get him moving at a pretty good clip toward the van.

  “What should I do with him?” Burns calls after them.

  “Stay there,” Madden tells him. “Just stay there.”

  When they get up to the van, the technician is standing outside it, the expression on his face that of someone who’s gotten a little more than he bargained for. He already has the side door open wide and the engine running.

  “I heard everything,” he says. “It’s all recorded.”

  “Do you know how to get Parkview Hospital?” he asks.

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll drive,” Madden volunteers.

  As carefully as they can, they load Jim into the van and lay him out on the carpeted floor. He tries to keep his head stable and applies pressure to both sides of the wound the whole time, but every once in a while, his hand slips a little, and blood seeps between his fingers. If it’s a complete dissection of either the jugular or the carotid, the kid is fucked—he’ll either box or be permanently brain damaged. The wound is a little in on the neck, more toward the trachea, so it very well could be the artery, but there are so many vessels in that area, he wouldn’t be able to tell unless he opened him up.

  He asks Carolyn to dial a number for him. When she’s through dialing she holds the phone up to his ear, though she has some difficulty keeping it there as the van careens onto the freeway’s onramp.