The Drop Zone

by Bob Kroll

  Palmer stared through the windshield. “That’s not how it is.”

  “Then tell me what I’m not seeing.”

  Palmer turned to Peterson. “Why should I tell you anything? Who the hell are you?”

  “Think of me as pain relief,” Peterson said. “I’m the guy that keeps you from getting her ass in a sling and your chops on the floor.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No.”

  “She thought you were a cop.”

  “I’m a do-gooder. Sir Lancelot to damsels in distress. Now what are you playing at?”

  “I’m playing at nothing.”

  “You got her pregnant.”

  Palmer frowned, and Peterson read it as a favourable sign. Most would be off like a shot before the girl’s finished telling them, leaving mother and child in their dust.

  “I thought we could go away together,” Palmer said. “Not far. But far enough.” He glanced over the parking lot, searching for the right words. “I know what she is, but … She won’t go anyhow.”

  “Scared?”

  He nodded.

  “Smart girl.”

  Palmer looked straight at Peterson. “I can take care of her!”

  “Like you took care of me?”

  Palmer looked away.

  “You’re in over your head,” Peterson said. “You run with her and it’s non-stop hide and seek. And they’ll find you. You can bet your ass they’ll find you.”

  “I got a camp they won’t find!”

  “And you go there with your friends who wouldn’t say a word even if someone was breaking their legs.”

  Palmer frowned.

  “That’s the problem,” Peterson said. “So leave it alone.”

  “Then what?” Palmer thrust out his chin indignantly. “A few days, a week, and she won’t be here anymore.”

  “She tell you that?”

  Palmer nodded.

  Peterson remembered Overton telling him the Posse kept the girls on the move.

  “I won’t see her,” Palmer said. “She won’t be back. She said once she gets big, they’ll mess her up.”

  Worse than that, Peterson thought. They’ll force an abortion whether she’s past term or not. Risk her life. But what do they care?

  “So you’re making plans,” Peterson said.

  “She told me to see if the cop would do what he said. She fucking believed you would help.”

  “But you’re the jealous type. Mugging me in a parking lot was your way of asking. Then you’d go back and tell her I was nothing but bullshit and make-believe.”

  Palmer gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “You know how many guys —?”

  “Yeah, I know how many guys. But there’s no love if you keep count. Eats you from the inside out.”

  “It’s eating me now!”

  “It’ll get worse.” Peterson opened the passenger door. “There’s no half way. Forgive everything or forgive nothing. And the guy that can forgive everything is a better man than me. Are you ready for that?”

  Palmer said nothing.

  “Take heart, kid,” Peterson said. “None of us are. My advice? Walk away. Get on your father’s boat and go fishing.”

  Peterson climbed from the pickup and walked to his car.

  Palmer rolled down the window. “I’m asking,” he said. “How can you help?”

  Peterson walked back to the pickup. “You know her real name?”

  “Debbie.”

  Peterson pulled a pad and pencil from his jacket pocket and wrote a number. “Keep an eye on Debbie, day and night. You get a hint they’re moving out, call me. Otherwise, do nothing else. Leave it with me.”

  Chapter

  THIRTY-TWO

  Peterson sat in his parked car a half-block away from the corner in the hospital district that Sylvester had identified. For the umpteenth time, he tried to think of a place he could tuck Debbie and Darryl away for safe keeping. So far he had nothing, which was also what his stakeout had come up with. He had been warming his ass in the car for the past two nights, waiting for Sylvester or someone else to drop a girl off.

  Between eight and eleven, the traffic had been the usual comings and goings in the hospital complex and university campus. Most pedestrians were hospital staff and visitors, and after eleven they were university students stumbling back to residence after doing the bar scene downtown.

  He had long ago forgotten the boredom and back stiffening discomfort of a stakeout, drinking oily coffee and feasting on takeout. He left the pint untouched in the glove compartment. He completed half of the daily crossword before giving up on a three-letter word for mouth, starting with G. Then he read the newspaper for the second time and relieved himself in an empty coffee cup.

  Shortly after midnight, a brown sedan stopped at the intersection. A teenage girl got out, dressed in skintight jeans and a jean jacket, much like what Molly had been wearing. This girl offered no goodbye to the driver, not even a backward glance. She walked toward the university campus.

  Peterson waited for the driver to drive off, and in the harsh white of an LED streetlight got a good look at him. It was Sylvester, his skinhead hidden under a ball cap worn backward. Peterson looked for anyone else watching the girl. Seeing no one, he hopped from his car and followed her, sticking to the opposite side of the street.

  She turned left at the first side street and walked under tall maple and beech trees, past two- and three-storey flats rented to students. She turned left again and then made a quick right onto another side street, this one lined with upscale homes belonging to university faculty and the descendents of the city’s founding families. This was the elegant, understated section of the wealthy south end, where old money only whispered extravagance, unlike the loud opulence of the homes farther south. She stopped under a streetlight to check something written on a piece of paper — an address, Peterson surmised. In the glow, he could see the girl was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and that no attempt had been made to age her jailbait look.

  She shoved the paper in her coat pocket, looked at the address on the house beside her, and continued along the street. She reached the next corner and turned right.

  That move didn’t add up. Wrong address? Wrong street? Too stoned to know where the hell she was going or where she was? It was too hit-and-miss, too ragged an operation from what Overton had said about Tooka. No. Something was up.

  Peterson stopped to listen for footsteps coming up behind or on the other side of the street. He dialed in a distant siren and the groan and bang of rail cars being shunted across the harbour. He stretched his senses to reach beyond the noise of night for someone he couldn’t hear or see. There was nothing but an uncomfortable stillness.

  He walked on. At the corner he hugged the houses to keep out of the glow of streetlights. He picked her up half a block away, slipping in and out of shadows that seemed darker beneath the thick canopy of trees. She walked slower now. Then she jaywalked to his side of the street and started toward him. Twenty metres away she stopped and stared at him. He stopped and stared back. Then he sensed someone behind him.

  The first blow caught him across his shoulder blades. It sent him to his hands and knees. Stunned. The second one slammed into his ribs, and the third into the small of his back straight through to his kidneys. That one flattened him on the sidewalk. His stomach sickened and he coughed up a clot that caught in his throat and gagged him. The next blow landed across the back of his skull. His head went hollow, and his gaping mouth filled with concrete.

  Hours passed before his mind rolled over. He smelled jack pitch and diesel and heard an engine droning, the clink and grind of chains, and the lap of water against a pier. He fought for consciousness, losing his grip and falling into a dark gulf, falling, then fighting back to see a canopy of bright lights, and beyond that a bad luck moon. Its horne
d rim draped in gossamer. He remembered the brown sedan and Sylvester behind the wheel and following the girl up one side street and down another. He heard a voice, or thought he did, a voice garbled and croaky as if talking through crusty lips. Only now it wasn’t croaky, it was scared. It was Molly’s voice in the Broken Promise and Honey’s in the Rendezvous. And it was Katy’s voice too, all blended together in his mind. Then the canopy of lights snapped off, and Peterson drifted into a confusion of words and symbols scrawled on a warehouse wall, and then into darkness.

  He woke to a heavy hammering in his head and to sunlight scratching at his closed eyelids. He rolled to his side and the hammer pounded unmercifully. He remembered the side street and the girl jaywalking toward him and stopping and staring at him. A set up. Then the sudden shriek of pain across his shoulders and his ribs. He coiled at the memory, groaned loudly, and flung open his arms.

  He jerked his head away from the sharp light reflecting off the water and felt his head explode and his mind go dizzy. He closed his eyes and lay still for a time. He wondered where he was. A wharf. But where? And how had he gotten here?

  He lay there breathing in short gasps. Then his breathing quieted. He slowly opened his eyes and held them open despite the pain like a rasp across his eyeballs. He rolled away from the water and saw he was just outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the container terminal, lying on a jetty that poked into the harbour. After a while, he heard voices coming closer. And then a man and a woman were crouched beside him, the woman asking if he was all right, and the man calling 911.

  His pockets were turned out, and the woman was gathering up his things when she came to his badge. She told the man he was a policeman, and that seemed to make everything more hurried and even more confusing.

  They kept him most of that day in the emergency room, testing him for signs of concussion, and that’s when he made a vague, noncommittal statement to the young cop who had responded to the 911. Later, a nurse explained that the hospital would not discharge him until he had someone to take him home. And for some reason, he did not reach for his phone to call Danny. Instead, he asked the nurse to find him the number of the Birthright Centre, and he called Anna.

  Chapter

  THIRTY-THREE

  Peterson woke up with no idea where he was. The room was small, white, and, except for a framed woodcut of an old man with a pointed beard hanging on the wall beside the narrow single bed, it was undecorated. Monkish. A hermitage, he thought. There was a nightstand with a radio and a flexible desk lamp with a black metal shade. A small dresser stood in the corner near the door, and on it were a hairbrush and a hand mirror, along with his wallet, badge, change, and cell phone. Sunlight through a birch outside the window dappled the patchwork quilt on the bed and brightened this otherwise dull room.

  His brain was groggy from a drugged sleep, and somewhere between thought and memory, a distant ache reminded him of last night’s mugging. The shooting pain in his rib cage when he threw back the quilt and tried swinging his legs from the bed, and the stiffness and ache in his shoulders and back when he lifted himself to a sitting position, confirmed that someone experienced in taking a big man down had done a serious number on him. Then he remembered it wasn’t just one person that had pounded him, put his face into the sidewalk, and kicked in his ribs. There had been two of them: one sounding as croaky as a frog, the other with a hitch in his voice like a skip in a vinyl record.

  In a mirror hanging on the back of the door, he saw himself standing in his boxer shorts with bruises like oil stains over his ribs. There were also deep purple bruises across his shoulders and back. He stepped closer and saw his left cheek and jaw puffed and dark red. That was from his face hitting the sidewalk.

  Then it all started coming back, and he remembered Anna helping him into a taxi outside the emergency room and giving the driver her home address.

  His shirt and pants hung on a wooden chair in a corner. He gingerly pulled them on and combed his hair with his hands.

  Anna sat at the kitchen table, nursing a coffee. She was dressed in a tweed skirt and blue blouse, and on the back of her chair hung a matching jacket.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  Peterson nodded and slowly lowered himself into the chair opposite her.

  Anna brought the coffee pot and a mug to the table. “There’s cereal and toast for breakfast. I could boil you an egg if you want.”

  “Toast is good,” he said, “but not yet.”

  She sat and cradled her cup in both hands, an expectant but anxious look on her face.

  “You were confusing last night,” she said. “Doped up I suppose. What happened?”

  Peterson told her. He tried to lighten it, but he couldn’t. The girls, all of them, the one in the Broken Promise, the dancer in the Rendezvous who was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby, and the fourteen-year-old he had followed along side streets just dug into him too deep.

  When he finished, Anna went to the sink to rinse her mug, standing with her back to him. “You said she called her Molly?”

  “Molly, yeah,” he said. “The dancer called her Molly.”

  Anna turned to face him, wide-eyed as though something shocking had just occurred to her.

  “It’s not worth finding out about her,” Anna said, “not to risk your life. Not to me. Not any more. They could have killed you.”

  “I think they meant to. They searched me and found the badge. Killing a cop brings down a whole lot of thunder.”

  “And if they hadn’t found the badge?” she asked.

  Peterson made light of it with a shrug, but the strained look on his face said something different. They both fell silent for a moment, then Peterson said, “Thanks for bringing me here.”

  Anna shook it off. “I take in stray cats too.”

  “They stay long?”

  “Never more than one night. You ready for toast?”

  He nodded, and she pulled a loaf of bread from the breadbox and popped two slices into the toaster. Then she sat back down across from him.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. The girl in the Rendezvous told me her name, Debbie Wilson, and where she was from. A few more minutes with her — you never know — but she was scared. Maybe too scared. Maybe I should have left her alone. And now they know who I am. Tricky to go back, to help her. To find out about Molly’s friend.”

  “Her friend?”

  “Debbie said Molly panicked when her friend didn’t come. That’s why she ran away.”

  Anna reached for his hand and clicked her tongue at his innocence. “It’s girl talk, Peterson. Her friend didn’t come. She missed her period. I thought you said she wasn’t pregnant.”

  Peterson suddenly realized what Anna was saying. “She wasn’t. But she believed she was. Desperate about it.” His brain hurt to think, to remember what Crouse had said about the girl cutting out what wasn’t there.

  “That’s why the rag doll,” he said, more to himself than to Anna. He pressed his hands to his pounding head. Then he lowered his hands and looked at her. “I have to go back to the Rendezvous, don’t I? I have to get Debbie out of there. I told her I would. I promised her. I told her boyfriend to leave it with me. She’s pregnant, and I have to go back and get her out now.”

  Anna spread her arms and gripped the sides of the table. “We had a woman at the Birthright Centre two years ago, a woman who was sleeping around, doing drugs, working the street. Old looking. Haggard. She was Roman Catholic and didn’t want an abortion. I was on duty the night her pimp broke through the locked door and dragged her down the stairs by the hair. He threatened to cut my face if I said a word. I didn’t. I was so scared … I was so scared I couldn’t move. You have no idea what it’s like to be a woman and to be that scared. To be so vulnerable. These girls don’t have a choice, Peterson. They don’t.”

&n
bsp; “And you want me to give them one?”

  “I don’t know if you can. It’s a vicious circle these girls go through. They work the streets. They get pregnant. Some get abortions, some have the child, and then they’re back working the street. No one cares. No one really cares.”

  She wrung her hands, then got up and pulled her jacket from the chair back. “I don’t know what I’m saying. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing you can do, and you’re a cop.”

  She stared out the small window above the sink. “There’s nowhere for her to go, is there?”

  “Not where they wouldn’t find her.”

  “So what are you looking for?”

  Peterson hesitated.

  “You’re not thinking of here?”

  Peterson saw it frightened her just to say it. He shook his head. “They’d find her here. They know I’m a cop. She runs, they’ll think she’s running to me, and they’ll buttonhole anyone close to me. They’ll kill her for that. Her boyfriend too. And if they find her here, they’ll kill you.”

  Anna blanched. Her arms hung stiffly at her sides.

  “Even if she turned Crown witness against them, I can’t protect her,” Peterson said. “I can hide her, but for how long? Then what?” He stared into his coffee mug. “Real life. It’s ugly and it’s hopeless.”

  Anna started for the door.

  “Anna!”

  “I’m going to mass,” Anna said, “and then the nursing home. Right now, I need to pray. I need something to believe in, something more than the ugliness of your life.”

  Painkillers didn’t help much. It hurt to sit, to stand, and to walk. It even hurt to breathe. Peterson winced and groaned his way out to Danny’s car and had to hold his torso stiff and straight as he got in.

  Danny watched all this with great amusement, his tough friend mewling like a cat. “Tell me the other guy looks worse than you.”