by Bob Kroll
Peterson eased his way to the bar. He saw the young girl from the highway standing statue-like beside the dance floor. Then he saw the middle-aged woman from the coffee shop sitting alone and out of place at a table beneath a large print of Custer’s Last Stand. She was trying not to be so obvious, not to look around, not to make eye contact, but she could not help sneaking peeks at the young couple dancing dirty on the two-by-twice dance floor. They writhed slowly, bathed in red and orange flares that pulsed from the terminals and the wall of monitors.
A waitress, early twenties, blue jeans and red plaid shirt, cruised among the tables with a tray of beer. She wore her long brown hair stuffed into a white cowboy hat and disguised her pretty face with a frown. Hearing the music but not feeling it. She emptied her tray on a table of four milk-faced guys, one of whom craned his neck to look down her shirt.
A raw, raunchy guitar twang seemed to accompany the deliberate way the waitress turned from the table of four to face the middle-aged woman. They had an exchange of seemingly unpleasant words. Then the waitress stormed to the bar for another tray of beers. She was sobbing.
Peterson watched the middle-aged woman fuss with a square coaster, lining it up with the table edge. Disappointment had incised deep lines in her face. She stared straight ahead to avoid the glare of curious regulars at nearby tables.
The music swelled and the couple on the dance floor danced as one, their legs twined. The flashing lights were hellishly orange.
The girl from the highway weaved among the tables and stood in the flashing light at the centre of the dance floor. She looked in turn at the lottery terminals and the changing images on the monitors. Her face tightened. Her body trembled. She dropped her jean jacket on the floor. Then her eyes widened and her fists clenched and unclenched. Peterson noticed that her jeans were drenched in blood around the zipper.
One of the guys who had followed her in said something to the girl and did not wait for her to answer. He grabbed for her hand. She snapped it back and turned on him. Eyes stabbing. Lips curled and snarling. Spitting.
The guy laughed to his friend and reached for the girl’s hand again. This time the girl stepped back and screamed. A scream louder than the blaring music. She sidestepped the guy’s effort to calm her, grabbed a bar stool, and started swinging it around her head.
The guy fell on the floor and scrambled to get clear of the girl. She strode across the dance floor, still brandishing the chair. The dancers fled, and customers sitting at nearby tables fell over themselves and over chairs and tables to get out of the way. The girl ran back and forth from one group to another. Threatening them with the chair. Shrieking. She chased the couple from the shadows and slammed the chair down on one of the lottery terminals, smashing the screen.
Peterson slid from his bar stool and along a wall to get behind the girl. He pulled his cell phone and called for an ambulance and police backup.
The middle-aged woman sat frozen with her back against the wall. Terrified.
A few customers had already cleared the place, and several more were not far behind, pushing past Peterson for the exit at the back of the bar.
The bartender bolted from behind the bar through a swirl of fiery lights. He looked for an opening to grab the girl, staying out of range. When she had her back to him, he lunged and threw his arms around her in a bear hug. Her scream was loud and piercing and full of fear. She went wild, broke free, then shoved the bartender with such force that he landed several feet away, between the barstools and the bar. He stayed there with his head down.
She grabbed a stool and swung it at the stained-glass canopy over the bar. The shattered glass rained on the bar and on the bartender, who flattened himself on the floor. He was shaking.
The girl flung herself against the video wall and punched and elbowed the screens, shouting at the flashing images, “Izi! Arigarizko! Izi. Izi.”
Peterson had moved fast to get behind her but not fast enough to stop her from driving her fists through the screens and snatching at the electronics inside, as though trying to grab hold of the images that had been driving her crazy. Glass shards sliced her arms.
He grabbed her shoulders. She shook him off, ducked down, and came up with a long jagged piece of glass that cut viciously into the palm of her hand.
Peterson coiled down, ready to spring at her. Holding her stare, seeing her nerves on fire and hearing her snarl like a wild animal. Her black sweaty hair hanging below her shoulders. Her eyes unblinking, distant. Her blouse and jeans drenched in sweat and blood.
Blood ran freely from cuts on her hands and arms. One gash was a nasty zigzag the length of her forearm. It was spurting.
The two guys from outside had pressed themselves into a corner, one of them recording the action on his cell phone. He now stepped forward to get a better shot of the girl covered in blood.
The girl suddenly turned, shrieked, and threatened him with her glass knife. Then she swung to face Peterson, nostrils flared, holding up one hand like a bloody claw, the other cocked to stab him. Their eyes locked.
“Put it down,” Peterson ordered, his voice lost in the blasting music. Drums like gunfire, the steel guitars whining.
The girl’s face tightened with terror. She shouted something that was drowned by the music. Slowly she extended her arm toward Peterson, staring into his eyes, and just as slowly sliced deeply and diagonally along her forearm.
Peterson gasped. His senses were riven by the gushing blood and the girl crumpling like a rag doll at his feet. Time slowed to a moment that seemed to go on forever. Not a second to waste and yet all the time to see the guy with the cell phone stretched across a table, recording the bloody scene. Time enough to see the middle-aged woman peeking from behind an overturned table. Her face thin and long, with tears running from the corners of eyes that were dark and popping with fear.
Peterson dropped to the girl’s side, kneeling in the blood that was spurting from the zigzag cuts in one arm and the severed artery in the other. So many cuts. So much blood. He pulled off his coat and pressed it against the cut that was spurting.
“Help! Help me! I can’t stop it!” he shouted to the middle-aged woman who was shaking and crying and dragging her hands down her face. “Help!” he shouted to the guy still stretched across the table with his cell phone aimed at the girl bleeding to death in Peterson’s arms.
Shock had gripped the middle-aged woman so tight that she could not move. She watched Peterson. Saw his desperation, his compassion. Saw the pain in his face, almost saintly in the coloured lights glittering off the broken glass. Saw something in him that made her tremble and roll to her knees. She hugged herself and closed her eyes. Her lips moved in prayer. Then she crawled forward, heedless of the broken glass.
“You’ll be all right,” Peterson said to the girl, leaning close so she would hear. Then to himself, “Jesus, God please!”
The girl’s response was slow and laboured. Her words soft and rhythmic; more prayer than torment. “Albulla guberoa. Dead. Elbae dar albulla. Niandalaba nescato. Eba ska akelade.”
Peterson heard the sirens. He continued to press her right arm as he gathered the girl into his arms. “Hang on. Please.”
The girl reached her free hand for the woman’s and guided it to draw something in the blood on the floor.
“Gone. Nothing. Elbae dar albulla,” the girl said, her low voice slipping under the soft guitar chords of a slow song. “Elbae dar albulla. Niandalba nescato.”
The girl slumped in Peterson’s arms just as the paramedics came through the door. The woman’s hand slipped from the girl’s. She looked at the blood on her fingertips, at what the girl had drawn with her finger on the floor. The woman lifted her eyes and met Peterson’s. He was crying.
Chapter
TEN
The hard light raked the emergency room revealing long and worn faces. Red and swollen faces. A few wrin
kled and thin and smiling submissively. One ripe with bruises, another stupefied with pain. Most turned to follow the gurney as it was rushed past the admissions desk and curtained cubicles. Paramedics lifted the blood-covered girl from the gurney to a bed. A doctor called for a blood match. A nurse inserted an IV line into each leg and started saline drips, while another laid out an intubation tube. A doctor cut open the girl’s blue blouse and pressed life paddles onto her chest.
A uniform cop guided the middle-aged, blood-covered woman through the waiting room, through air stubborn with the smell of illness and disinfectant. A triage nurse came out from her glassed-in booth. The cop explained something to her, and the nurse took the woman by the arm and led her to a cubicle where the curtains were pulled but not closed. She could see across to where the girl lay limp and rigged up to monitors and IVs.
Machines blipped the faint vital signs and then flattened, setting off an alarm that had the doctor and nurses thumping and pumping and checking the girl’s eyes for life. The moment swelled with urgency as they tried to restart the girl’s heart. Voices encouraged it. “Come on! Come on!” Calling her back. Demanding the return of something that had gone.
The woman gathered the curtain in her hands and pressed it against her face as though to hide from the brutality of dying. The nurse drew her away. The woman lowered the curtain, bewildered, grief trembling at the corners of her mouth. She looked into the cubicle at the girl’s dead eyes. Filmy. Dry.
Danny barrelled through the emergency room and found Peterson standing near the triage booth, his clothes covered in blood, his hands bandaged. He was staring at the action in the emergency room and he was seeing nothing.
“I hear you had a rough night,” Danny said.
Peterson blinked. He didn’t answer.
Chapter
ELEVEN
A square of morning sunlight crept slowly over the few smashed dishes on the kitchen floor and over the table and the chairs lying on their sides and backs, unbroken. The fridge door had a big dent in it. A trail of family photos, some shredded, led from the kitchen into the dining room, where a blue porcelain lamp had been knocked from an oak side table and broken on the hardwood floor. In the living room a wall mirror had been smashed. There was glass in the carpet.
Peterson was slumped on a love seat, naked, staring into space, his eyes bloodshot, distant, his cheeks puffy and red, his hair matted with sweat. He looked like a man hanging on by his fingertips as the world spun to shake him off. He seemed small, his chest and arms sunken and weak. Tattooed over his left breast was a cupid with an empty quiver, and running diagonally across his stomach was a surgical scar. His cock and balls hung over the seat cushion. The soles of his feet were cut and bleeding. On the floor between his legs was a blue suitcase stuffed with his wife’s dresses.
Bernie honked the horn and waited for Peterson in the driveway of his older two-storey in the north end. Two minutes later, Peterson was riding shotgun, wearing a grey windbreaker and carrying a plastic grocery bag.
“Lunch?” Bernie asked.
“Laundry,” Peterson said. “Blood stains on my jacket.”
“Danny said it was bad. He thought you needed a chauffeur.”
Peterson made a face. “I’ve seen worse.”
“That’s nothing to brag about.” She backed from the driveway and shifted into drive. “So you do have a home after all.”
“You should become a detective.”
“I’m working on it,” she said, “but I’m having trouble mastering the pain in the ass part.”
Peterson smiled. “Stop at the dry cleaners up ahead.” They drove half a block, and Peterson said, “Rookie detective or not, you didn’t have to pick me up. You have your own cases to worry about.”
“Cold cases,” Bernie said.
“They all have to be solved. Like what?” He’d welcome a diversion from his thoughts and feelings.
Bernie swung the car around a trash truck. “Convenience store hit two years ago. Closed-circuit video has a guy in a skull mask enter the store with a double-barrel twelve-gauge. Sawed off and fitted with a pistol grip.”
“Heavy artillery for a stick-up.”
“This was no stick-up,” Bernie said, taking a corner. “Both barrels to the customer, an accountant with the city. Married. Two kids. The guy takes aim. No hot-dogging with shooting from the hip. All on video. Then he pockets the casing and chases down the wadding.”
“A mercenary,” Peterson said. “Knows forensics are useless for a shotgun without casing and wad. Connection to the victim?”
“None was ever established.”
“Got to be,” Peterson said. “No robbery, and it sure as hell wasn’t random. Who had the case?”
“Andy Miles.”
Peterson blew out a sigh. “You want the truth on that case, follow the dirt.”
“I’m following it.”
“You need help, you know where I sit.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
Peterson turned to look at the pink-coloured radio station they were passing. Before leaving the house, he had been listening to a female announcer on that station excitedly report an inaccurate account of what had happened at the Broken Promise. He had wanted to reach into the radio and wrench the drama from her voice.
Peterson followed Danny Little through the maze of open offices in Police Headquarters, past a waiting area, the lunchroom, and down a hallway that led to the Communications Unit in a new addition to the building.
“You left the channel open and Dispatch recorded everything,” Danny explained. “Then the nerds in Communications pulled down the music and boosted her voice. They synced the audio off the dispatch tape with video off that kid’s cell phone and the security camera in the bar. I don’t know how the hell they do it.”
From down the hall, they heard screams and loud grating music and then the girl’s voice, her words thickly veiled behind guitar chords and a driving rhythm.
“Are you sure you want to look at this?” Danny asked.
Peterson nodded.
They entered a small video-editing room that was crowded with computers, monitors, and speakers, some mounted on the ceiling. The editor, Billy Bagnall, sat at a kidney-shaped table and played his fingers over a keyboard. He was in his midtwenties and had close-cropped black hair and a bullshit smile that tagged him as something of a hotshot within the Communications Unit.
“Is it ready?” Danny asked.
“Yeah!” Billy answered. “The cell phone video was all over the place, but cut against the wide shots from the security camera, I think you can tell what’s going on. I tweaked the girl’s voice too, made it clearer.”
“It didn’t sound like anything to me,” Danny said to Peterson. “Her words are all screwed up.”
Peterson positioned himself to watch the large monitor on a shelf above the editor’s table. Billy started the video.
Peterson saw grainy, black-and-white video from the security camera in the Broken Promise. He saw the entire barroom: the couple dancing dirty, the customers at tables, at lottery terminals, and at the bar. He saw the waitress stop at the woman’s table. By their body language, he could see their discussion was intense, if not an argument. He saw the girl enter the bar and the two guys follow her in. He saw one of them confront the girl on the dance floor and the girl swinging the barstool. He heard his call for backup and an ambulance. Then the image cut to video from the cell phone camera with the girl flinging the bartender aside and smashing her fists and arms into the monitors, screaming.
He saw that horrifying night caught and captured in images that were unlike his memory of the young girl dying. He wondered what was true, what was real, what he could believe. Table legs and chairs. Flashing lights and noise. Broken glass and blood pooling around his knees. The flap of her flesh that he folded back to stop the bleeding. I
t seemed unrelated to this two-dimensional world squeezed into a narrow frame without regret, without shame, without the cringing pain that makes some days unbearable.
He watched the girl dying in his arms. Heard his voice begging for help. Saw the woman crawl over the broken glass to his side, fraught with helplessness and flooded with fear. He watched with such intensity that his legs went wobbly, and he grabbed the edge of the editing table.
“Her face bloody. Nothing inside,” the girl was saying. Her voice coming through the ceiling speakers, electronically separated from the blasting music, sounded almost ethereal. “Dead. Albulla guberoa. Elbae dar albulla. Niandalba nescato. Eba ska akelade.”
“Stop it there!” Peterson said.
Billy hit pause and caught the girl using the woman’s hand to draw something in the blood on the floor.
“See that?” Peterson said. “Can you blow that up?”
The editor played the keyboard and the image grew to reveal what appeared to be a stylized cross.
The girl continued drawing with the woman’s hand. This time the motion was a downward stroke that trailed off as her hand lost its grip.
“Her initials, maybe,” Danny offered.