The Drop Zone

by Bob Kroll

  Again Sylvester denied it, claiming he’d been drunk and doped up for three days.

  “Yeah, but we got an eyewitness,” Peterson insisted. He pulled a photograph from his jacket pocket, a photograph of the girl in the Broken Promise. He showed it to the skinhead.

  “Ever seen her before?”

  Sylvester studied the photo. “What the fuck? That bitch is Looney Tunes.”

  “You know her?”

  “Fucking right I know her! She’s one crazy whore bitch.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “I drove her around.”

  “Drove her where?”

  “Appointments.”

  “Appointments with who?”

  The light suddenly went on behind Sylvester’s bleary eyes. He started sobering up in a hurry.

  “What is this? What the fuck you pulling?”

  “I’m pulling nothing,” Peterson said. “I got a hit and run and —”

  “There’s no hit and run! I want a lawyer and I want him now!”

  “You’re probably going to need one, because the old woman you hit is dead.”

  “Nah, Nah! There was no hit and run.”

  “I got a hit and run, negligent homicide,” Peterson said. “I got to pin it somewhere, and your name came up.”

  “Fuck you talking about? My name come up? How did my name come up?”

  “A guy told us to throw the book at you.”

  “Who?”

  “You tell me!”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking …” Sylvester turned his head to look at Peterson. “You’re jerking me around. There’s no fucking hit and run. You’re juicing me, motherfucker!”

  “Tell me about the girl.” Peterson again held up the photograph for Sylvester to see. This time the skinhead didn’t look at it.

  Peterson wrenched Sylvester’s arm again and made him squeal. “Try again,” Peterson said.

  “No way!”

  “Yeah, way!” Peterson lifted the arm higher. “Another inch and it breaks.”

  Through clenched teeth Sylvester said, “They’ll waste my ass for doing this!”

  “They’ll only get bones if you don’t.”

  “You’re a fucking cop!”

  “Yeah, but not the good kind like you see on television. Tell me about the girl!”

  Sylvester looked scared. His voice sounded it. “A dancer. On her back. On her knees.”

  “Where?”

  “Where do you think? But not on stage. Strictly private. I taxied her after hours. Private party.”

  “Where?”

  “Where they like them young and fucked-up.”

  Peterson raised the arm, and Sylvester squealed.

  “Try again! Where?”

  “I drop her on a corner and drive off.”

  “What corner?”

  “Different corners. Different nights.”

  “How often?”

  “How often does a guy get horny?”

  Sylvester’s face emptied. His eyes went glassy. Peterson could feel him shaking.

  “What about the last time you dropped her off?”

  Sylvester didn’t answer.

  “What corner?” Peterson insisted.

  “At that fire station.”

  “What fire station?”

  “Where the hospitals are.”

  That caught Peterson by surprise. “The hospital district?”

  The skinhead nodded.

  “Which way did she walk?”

  “She doesn’t move until I drive off.”

  “Careful,” Peterson said.

  “Oh yeah. Very.”

  “You pick her up?”

  “Yeah. I get a call. Same corner.”

  “And she doesn’t run away?”

  “Fuck no. Drugged up. Scared. I wouldn’t run, not from them.”

  “The Posse?”

  Sylvester didn’t answer.

  “But she finally ran,” Peterson said.

  Sylvester shrugged. “Ran. Let her go. She was squirrelly as hell. Fucked up, more fucked up than the others. They’re all fucked up. I heard that’s what these johns like. The crazy ones are the money-makers. Knock on any hole and they let you in. But what the fuck do I know?”

  “Her name?”

  “None of them have names.”

  Peterson remembered the tattoo on the girl’s labia. “What about a number?”

  “Yeah, they had numbers. I don’t know hers. Didn’t need to.”

  Peterson thought for a moment. “Tell me about the johns.”

  Peterson loosened his grip as much as to say, This is it. Give me this and we’re done. But Sylvester had nothing to give. He had never gotten close enough to see anyone.

  “But they got to be somebody,” he said. “Very special. Very private. They got to be somebody to get room service like that.”

  Chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was a rainy Sunday morning, and she invited him into the front hall of her two-storey house in the west end of the city. A dark-stained Douglas fir staircase, gleaming with polish and reflected in an ornate mirror, dominated the narrow space.

  “Anna visits her mother at the nursing home on Sunday mornings,” Peggy Demming told Peterson. She was still in her pyjamas and housecoat, no makeup but still attractive in the way she set her back against the newel post and smiled. “She takes the bus out there. And after, she sits in St. Joseph’s church around the corner and listens to a group of musicians practise. Classical stuff.”

  She had an easy way of smiling and a confident way of angling her body so her daily workouts would show. The time he saw her at the Birthright Centre she had been wearing heavy makeup. He now saw it had betrayed her natural features. Eye shadow and liner had dulled the sparkle in her hazel eyes. And her full lips needed nothing to make them more kissable.

  “Not my kind of music,” Peterson said.

  “What kind do you like?”

  Peterson hedged. “I don’t listen to much of it.”

  “No time?”

  “Not much interest.”

  “What does interest you?”

  There was a lot of suggestion in that last question, especially with the sneaky smile that went with it and the quiet shift of weight that caught his eyes.

  “Work interests me,” Peterson said. “I work a lot.”

  “Maybe too much.”

  “Maybe.”

  He thanked her for telling him about Anna and reluctantly turned to go.

  Peggy forced a smile that suggested she gave a man only one chance to high jump the crossbar. Peterson had missed the jump.

  He found the church easily enough, and as he entered he thought about the fact that he had been in a church more times in the last two weeks than he had in the last thirty years.

  A dozen or so people were scattered throughout the nave. An older woman was lighting a vigil candle to the patron saint whose statue stood beneath a stained-glass window. At the transept, musicians were sitting in a pool of sunlight. A white-haired man was conducting.

  Peterson spotted Anna sitting on the right side of the centre aisle, midway from the altar. In a pause in the music, he went over, surprising her.

  “I don’t often say I’m sorry,” he said.

  She lifted her head a bit, then scooted over to make room for him to sit.

  “Some things just don’t come easy,” he added.

  The music started again, and she put a finger to her lips.

  The organ peeled back the silence and slowly drew sadness from the shadows with a melody that was terribly beautiful, gloriously penitent. Peterson looked at the crucifix behind the altar and at the stained-glass window of the Holy Family above it. The strings took u
p the theme, giving voice to a great loneliness that ached to be filled.

  Peterson saw that Anna had given herself over to the music. He could almost see the wheel of her mind turn slower and slower until it was entirely thoughtless and ready for inscription. He closed his eyes to follow her.

  To him, the music seemed to trudge a mountain road. Stony and slow with sad men and even sadder women bent and burdened, their clothes in scraps, moving with heavy feet. A rumble of carts with broken wheels and hungry children too tired to cry. Music imitating life. Note by note, moment by moment. There was a circling of sounds and images. The strings were unashamed of their tears. The organ sobbed.

  Then for a moment, all was still.

  “Albinoni,” Anna whispered, and Peterson opened his eyes. “His Adagio. It’s beautiful isn’t it?”

  “It makes you think,” Peterson said.

  “And feel.”

  Peterson nodded. He was feeling something more than his usual stress and discontent. He was feeling lighter.

  “Music like this in a church makes me feel something more than just myself,” Anna said.

  Peterson followed her gaze through the slants of sunlight and into the rafters, but he was unable to doubt his own senses the way Anna could, unable to slip outside his own religious disbelief to experience something pure and full of awe. He suddenly wondered if his daughter had ever experienced something so beautiful that she drifted outside of herself. Did she ever suspend her sulk and anger long enough to walk through a park alone or watch the waves splash ashore? He wished she would call right then so he could ask her, even though he knew he’d get no response, just a strained silence.

  Then he thought about the girl in the Broken Promise and whether her life had been nothing more than a scab of discontent and disillusion. And that had him wondering all over again who the girl was.

  Anna must have seen his face tighten, because she took his hand. Her slender fingers curled over his. He felt her heart beating in her fingertips.

  “The music is searching, isn’t it?” Anna said. “Deeper and deeper. Like an onion: You peel away layer after layer until all that’s left in your hand is a tiny bulb, and even that peels away to nothing. An invisible truth.”

  She took back her hand.

  “You can’t base your life on nothing,” he said. “Nothing equals nothing, and nothing is not worth a lifetime of onion peeling.”

  Anna searched his eyes. “Did you ever just know something was true without knowing why?”

  Peterson returned her look without responding.

  “Something beautiful,” she said, “and terrifying. Something that leaves you full and empty at the same time. Something you can’t explain but you just know is true.”

  Peterson wished that he could lose himself in thoughts of something other than the ugliness of the streets and the hardened doubt in his mind. His gaze drifted to the stained-glass window above the statue of St. Joseph. The musicians were packing away their instruments.

  “An expert, a linguistics professor, thinks the girl may have come from Newfoundland,” he said.

  Anna stared straight ahead, composed, her jaw set.

  “I have someone working on it,” he added. “With a little luck, I think we’ll have a name soon.”

  “What else aren’t you telling me?” she asked.

  “Not here.”

  The rain had stopped. They strolled along a gravel tree-lined pathway that circled the church. Anna carried a yellow slicker over an arm, careful around the puddles so as not to muddy her white sneakers.

  “We think the girl was a runaway, picked up on the streets and forced into a life she didn’t want to live.”

  “You don’t have to walk on eggshells, Peterson,” Anna said. “I see runaways all the time. Most of them get forced into miserable lives by pimps and by circumstances. She wasn’t pregnant was she?”

  Peterson shook his head. “Not according to the medical examiner.”

  They walked a short ways in silence then Anna said, “We get outside the church and it all gets ugly and sad. I suppose I go there for the quiet and the little bit of peace it offers.”

  “Peggy said you take the bus out here every Sunday.”

  “After visiting my mother in the nursing home. I need the comfort.”

  He took a chance reaching down for her hand. She took a bigger one by letting him hold it. They circled the church again, this time without saying a word, each enjoying something they had not enjoyed in years. Then Anna broke the spell by saying that after the rehearsal she had intended to visit a mother-to-be, the girl named Sally Toomey, the girl she had gone to the Broken Promise to talk to about her pregnancy. Peterson offered to drive her there.

  Peterson sat in the car and watched Anna enter the rundown apartment building in a seedy part of the city across the harbour. He waited less than a minute then followed her into the building and up two flights of a garbage-strewn stairwell. He heard her voice from an open door, glanced in, then hung outside the door and listened.

  At the end of a narrow hall was a small kitchen where Anna was standing and a young woman was sitting. He recognized the young woman as the waitress from the Broken Promise.

  “Why make it harder than it is?” Sally said.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Anna replied.

  “I wasn’t clean, you understand. I’m fucking around and I’m not clean. Who wants a baby like that?”

  “There are good people who would take the baby no matter —”

  “I wouldn’t give it up!” Sally cut her off. “Once it was born, I wouldn’t give it up. Would you?”

  The question seemed to tear a strip off whatever resolve Anna had possessed when she had entered. Now her voice was hesitant, almost unsure. “What’s growing inside you is life —”

  “What about my life!” Sally shouted. “I’m a party girl and not some baby’s mother.”

  “Sally.”

  “You know what your problem is? You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman. You skipped that part. Sure I’d keep it. I couldn’t help but keep it. But I don’t want it. I don’t want a kid getting in the way of what I do. I fuck and I like fucking. Now get out! Take your holy goddamn self and get out!”

  Peterson caught Anna in his arms as she cleared the door. He held her close and felt her tears on the side of his face. Not a word was said. Then he guided her back along the hallway and down the stairs. Still not a word, not until they were back in the car.

  “She’s right,” Anna said.

  Peterson listened.

  “I have no idea what she’s feeling. I hid myself until it was too late.”

  He wanted to pull her close, but he didn’t dare.

  “I go to bed feeling cracked down the middle,” she said. “Humpty Dumpy. Half of me desperate to hold on to who I am, the other half prying my fingers loose.”

  “And you’re afraid to fall.”

  Anna locked her hands together on her lap. “I’m trying to untie a knot with no ends. There’s nothing to grab. Would you take me home?”

  He drove her to her flat in Peggy Demming’s house and walked her to the door.

  “I’d like to see you again,” he said.

  Anna found a smile to give him. “Thank you for being there. For listening.”

  She turned to go inside, but Peterson just couldn’t let her go, not just then.

  “I don’t have any friends,” he whispered.

  Anna left the door open for him to follow her in. She offered tea and he accepted. Neither said a word while the kettle came to the boil. Peterson sat at the kitchen table, playing his hands along the edge. As she was pouring she said, “We’re not very alike, you know. I doubt we have much in common.”

  “I know.”

  She passed him a cup and let him touch her hand as he took it. “I
keep busy,” she said. “I try not to think about that night.”

  Peterson lifted the cup and watched her through the steam. “I have a runaway daughter in Vancouver. My wife died in a car accident. She was with another man. That was two years ago, and I’m still carrying it around. I lied when I said I don’t have any friends. I have one, and maybe another. I’m moody, and there isn’t any part of this job that doesn’t eat the hell out of me. But I love doing it. And like you, I think about that girl day and night. I think about who she was. I can’t help it. And I worry about her parents, about them not knowing what happened to their daughter. About her mother worrying.”

  Anna suddenly straightened, struck by a thought. “That’s who should get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Her jacket. It was in the bar, on the floor. I picked it up.”

  Peterson was surprised. “You should have said something. You should have told me.”

  “I know.” Anna looked nervous. “It was hers, and I wanted it. I just wanted … I needed it. I needed something to hold on to.”

  Chapter

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The elevator opened. All of a sudden the air filled with the smell of ammonia and formaldehyde. Stencilled red letters on a concrete wall pointed the way to the morgue.

  Janet Crouse was sprawled in a chair at a cream-coloured metal desk, eating take-out, too tired to care how she looked. The autopsy of an elderly man bludgeoned in a suburban housing development had made for a long Sunday.

  “This better be good, Peterson,” she warned.

  “You don’t like surprises?”

  “Not when I should be home with my family.”

  Peterson held up a white plastic bag. “This belonged to the girl from the Broken Promise, her jacket.”

  “Too small was it?”

  Peterson let that one sail by. “The woman who was helping me in the Broken Promise picked it up and took it home.”

  “She did what?”

  “There’s something in the pocket. Where can I dump it?”

  “Here.” Crouse wiped her hands on her green scrubs, pulled on latex gloves, and grabbed the plastic bag from Peterson. She pushed through double doors that bore an amateurish sign in a devilish script: The Cutting Room. Peterson followed her in and saw an uncovered body on a stainless steel table. Old, naked, scrubbed clean, bony. The room smelled of chemicals and something else. Something sickening.