Threshold

by G. M. Ford

  Mickey kept his mouth shut and his eyes averted. The Chief clapped him on the shoulder again and then disappeared into his office and closed the door.

  Mickey stood there for a moment and then started across the room, over to the borrowed desk he’d been using. He went through the drawers. Same stuff that had been in there when he got the desk.

  A brown evidence envelope rested on the blotter. From the look of it, Joseph’s diary, back from the lab. Mickey slipped it under his arm. As he turned to walk away, he noticed the clear plastic bag under the desk. Joseph Reeves’s personal effects.

  His first instinct was to leave them there, and walk out. He took a step toward the elevator, but stopped, went back and picked up the bag. Just in case anybody ever wanted the stuff. At least that’s what he told himself.

  He took his time leaving the building. Walking slowly. Making it a point to take it all in, savoring the sounds and smells one last time. He traded two-fingered salutes with the Duty Sergeant, pulled open the door, and stopped dead in his tracks.

  They were halfway up the stairs. Holding hands. Jen and Joanna.

  “Oh,” they said in unison.

  Mickey let go of the door. “Yeah . . . oh,” he said.

  “We were over at city hall . . . they said . . . you’d . . . that you were . . .” Jen said.

  “I’m done,” Mickey said.

  “You resigned?”

  “Nope. I was fired.”

  “Just like that?” Joanna asked. “Don’t they have to . . .”

  “There’s a process,” Mickey said. “They’ll have a couple meetings with the union. Work out how much of my pension I’m going to get, that sort of crap. But I’m definitely out of here.”

  Jen reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Oh Mickey . . . I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Mickey said. “Tell you the truth, I’m ready to move on with my life. I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m gonna do. I just know it’s gonna be better than how it’s been for me lately.”

  Nobody spoke. Jen had one hand entwined with Joanna’s and the other on Mickey’s arm. Out in the street, a Metro bus disgorged a load of passengers and then went roaring off down the street.

  Mickey cleared his throat. “Listen . . .” he began. “I’ve had all this crap floating around in my head about the two of you and what the whole thing said about me, and what people were thinking about me.” He cut the air with his hand. “All of which pretty much turned out to be bullshit.”

  They both looked astonished.

  “Turned out I was just feeling sorry for myself.” He shrugged. “Wish I’d handled it better, but it is what it is.”

  “You did fine,” Jen said.

  “You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think love is hard to find.”

  Jen removed her hand from his sleeve. “Good luck, Mickey,” she said.

  Mickey nodded and headed down the stairs.

  He looked smaller, lying there on the steel table, waiting to go home. A profound sense of loss numbed Grace’s chest like polar ice as she walked around the table, taking in Gus Bradley for what would surely be the final time.

  Dead bodies had always affected her that way. Never seemed to Grace that a person’s mortal remains had much to do with the being she’d known in life. Always seemed like the body was just the vehicle they happened to be driving when they ran out of gas, and that whatever it was that made a person a person had managed to slip out of the driver’s seat and disappear without a trace.

  She thought back to the story Gus had told her, about losing his daughter and how his marriage had fallen apart, and realized that sad tale was virtually all she knew of his life, and how, despite all the hours they’d spent together over the past few years, they had somehow managed to remain strangers.

  She held her breath, reached out and put her hand on his broad forehead. He was cold. His skin felt thick and rigid, like chicken skin. She swallowed a sob, pulled her hand back and stuffed it deep into her pocket.

  Behind her, the door opened. She didn’t look. Didn’t want to see them coming for him. Didn’t want him to go. Some childish instinct was telling her that it couldn’t be real if she didn’t look at it.

  “How you doing?” a sudden voice asked.

  Mickey Dolan was standing there by her side.

  “I’m okay,” she said. She looked his way. “How’s Cassie doing?”

  “She’ll be out later today. She’d have been out already if she hadn’t tied a can of cream soda into a sweat sock and used it to beat the hell out of a couple of women who’d been harassing her.”

  Grace almost managed to grin. “My mother says the Royster family is going to go back to Hardwig when this is all done.” She shrugged. “The rent’s paid on the duplex for the year. The girls really liked that school they were going to, so you know . . . why not. Hardwig’s a nice enough little town.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Mickey said. “I think sometimes it’s better to leave everything behind and just start over from scratch.”

  He looked down at Gus. “In his own way, he was a real good man,” Mickey said.

  “I thought cops and robbers were supposed to be like cats and dogs.”

  “Me too,” Mickey said with a sigh. “I guess things aren’t as black-and-white as I once figured they were.” He ran a hand over his face. “A lot of things,” he added.

  Behind them, the gleaming double doors burst open, and a pair of blue scrubs— coroner’s orderlies—wheeled a gurney into the autopsy room. Grace and Mickey slid into the corner, giving the orderlies plenty of room to maneuver Gus into a black rubber body bag and then onto their cart. They were graceful at their work, almost as if they’d known Gus in life, and were aware of the degree of physical respect he would have required of them.

  As they started off, a fresh pair of shadows appeared in the doorway. Teddy stepped aside and let Vince Keenan precede him into the room. Vince stood with hands folded in front of him as the cart came abreast of him, then raised his right hand.

  The cart squeaked to a halt. Vince reached down and slid the body bag zipper down a couple of feet. He stood for a moment gazing down into Gus’s lifeless face and then pulled the zipper back up and nodded at the orderlies.

  “Seems like I’ve known Gus all my life,” Vince said, as they wheeled him out the door. “Like he was my uncle or something.”

  “I remember when he used to come to our Little League games,” Mickey said. “Had one end of the bleachers all to himself, because the other parents were all so shit scared of him they wouldn’t sit down there.”

  Vince nodded. “My old man somehow could never find the time. Said he wasn’t about to spend a couple of hours every week watching me sit on the bench like a loser. But Gus . . . he made it more often than not.”

  “Funny. I didn’t know him that well, but for some reason I’m gonna miss him,” Mickey confessed.

  Vince raised his gaze and looked over at Mickey. His eyes were hard as gravel. “Like you said, Mickey . . . sometimes shit like this is just the price of doing business.”

  Teddy followed Vince out through the double doors, and the silence of the dead settled over the room.

  Grace leaned her shoulder against Mickey’s. He could feel her swallowing her tears, trying to be brave like she imagined Gus would have wanted. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. She hiccupped once and covered her mouth with her hand. Mickey patted her back. She put her head on his shoulder.

  “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “No,” Mickey said. “No it wasn’t. You didn’t shoot anybody. All you were doing was trying to help somebody out.”

  She cried for a while. Somewhere in the bowels of the building another motor started, adding to the underlying hum of technology that flowed around them like an un
seen stream.

  “Gus and I were talking about how weird people are,” Mickey said, remembering his grandfather again. “How they’re more than willing to take the blame for stuff that couldn’t be helped, and absolutely unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for the stuff that could. Almost like if they plug up all their guilt holes with bullshit, there won’t be any room for the real stuff to get in.”

  “If I’d just walked away,” Grace whispered.

  “My grandmother used to say, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,’ ” Mickey said.

  “And . . . she was so close.”

  “Who? My grandmother?”

  “Sophia,” Grace said. “She was right there. Wanting to come back to us.”

  Mickey hugged her closer. “Maybe you ought to finish it, then,” he said. “Maybe if somebody comes back, you won’t feel so much like somebody’s gone.”

  Grace thought it over. “She’s in Memorial Hospital,” she said finally. “They’ll never let me . . .”

  “Yeah,” Mickey said. “They will. I’ve got friends in low places.”

  Mickey was someplace else. Out on Whitefish Lake with his mom and dad, splashing water on each other and yelling at the top of their lungs. The squeak of the chair next to his dragged him back to Memorial Hospital. He sat up and looked over.

  “You’re cured,” Pamela Prentiss said.

  “Of what?” Mickey Dolan asked.

  “Whatever erectile malaise you claimed to have when I hit on you the last time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “All a body’s got to do is watch you watch her. That and the fact that I’m a nurse, of course.” She cut the air with her hand. “It’s an airtight diagnosis.”

  Before Mickey could work up a blanket denial, Sophia Salazar’s door opened and Grace appeared. Pamela Prentiss jumped to her feet. Grace started walking their way.

  “She’s coming out of it,” she said, when she got close.

  Prentiss went into nurse mode, jogging across the gleaming floor and disappearing into the room. “That was quick,” Mickey said. He checked his watch. “You been in there what . . . an hour.”

  Another nurse and a pair of orderlies came sprinting down the hallway and slid into the room.

  “I helped her find her edges,” Grace said. “After that, it was easy. She wasn’t ready to leave us yet. It’s like Roberto told me . . . they had a lot of plans, a lot of things they wanted to do. Start a business. Have some babies. She was ready to come back to us.”

  The wind had slacked off. This morning’s clouds had been blown to the western horizon, leaving a bright neon sky glowing overhead.

  Mickey opened the car door and lifted the pile of Joseph’s things from the passenger seat. When Grace slid in, he handed her the pile.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Joseph’s stuff,” Mickey said, starting the car. “I’ll stick it in my garage, in case anybody ever wants it.”

  He looked over at Grace, who’d pulled Joseph’s diary out of the evidence bag and was slowly leafing through it. The lab had inserted clear plastic sheets between the pages, giving the charred bundle the appearance of a small spiny animal.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  “Starved.”

  “Want to catch a bite?”

  She seemed surprised. “You and me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure . . . I guess. Celebrate my new life among the leisure class.” She pinned him with those icy eyes. “Is this a date?”

  “If you want it to be,” Mickey said with a smile.

  “I want it to be,” she said, and went back to leafing through the diary.

  They were halfway up Strander Avenue, headed for Scott’s Bar and Grill, when Grace suddenly sat back in her seat. “Have you read this?” she asked.

  “The diary? No.”

  “It’s not a diary.”

  “What is it?”

  “A long love note.”

  “To who?”

  “Somebody named Brian.”

  Without willing it so, Mickey lifted his foot from the throttle. The woman in the car behind tapped her horn and swerved out around them.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “No doubt about it,” Grace said. “He was in love with a guy named Brian.” She flicked her fingers at the pages. “This is all my life was nothing before you. You’re everything to me stuff.”

  “Unrequited, maybe?”

  “No way,” she said. “Thing’s full of times and dates. Brian liked so-and-so movie and he didn’t. This restaurant was really romantic. These two had a thing going.”

  Mickey eased the car into a Metro Park and Ride lot and jammed it into park.

  He looked over at Grace. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

  “The pissed-off Mrs. Reeves,” she said.

  He pointed to the bag containing the rest of Joseph’s effects.

  “Lemme see that,” he said.

  She handed it over. Mickey went in armpit deep, all the way to the bottom where the cell phone had come to rest. Brand new phone. Still had juice in it. Something like two dozen calls, all to the same local number. Nothing longer than twenty seconds.

  Mickey dialed the number. “The number you have dialed has been disconnected and is presently out of service. Please check the—”

  Mickey hung up and called Dispatch, figuring it would take a few days for his departure to make its way around the grapevine. “This is Sergeant Michael Dolan.” He recited his former badge number. “Connect me to Technology please.”

  Click. Click.

  “Technology. Yester.”

  “Got a number I need to run.” Mickey read the number.

  “Disconnected.”

  “Who had the number the last time it worked?”

  “Brian Price. 4311 Shannon Terrace.”

  “He leave any kind of an emergency contact?”

  “Didn’t have enough credit to satisfy Ma Bell. Needed his grandma to cosign for the service.” He read the grandma’s phone number. Mickey pulled out his pad and wrote it down.

  Mickey broke the connection and then gave Grace the short version.

  “So . . . where is he?” she immediately asked.

  “Brian?”

  “Yes, Brian! Your friend and lover has an accident. He’s in a coma. You never bother to get yourself on his visitor list? Never once show up to see him? Instead of being there for him, you suddenly move and change your phone number?”

  “Explains the phone calls Joseph made,” Mickey said. “Twenty calls over two days. I wondered about that. You know . . . you call and get the same recording three or four times and most people are going to stop calling. It was like Joseph couldn’t believe it. Like it just had to be some kind of terrible mistake.”

  “And then he killed himself when he realized it wasn’t.”

  Grace plucked Joseph’s phone from Mickey’s fingers and dialed the number he’d written down. “May I speak with Brian, please?” she asked.

  Mickey could make out a woman’s voice on the other end. Probably the grandma, he figured. Whoever it was sure liked to talk.

  “How wonderful,” Grace said, after a while, and then listened some more.

  “When was this?” she asked.

  Two minutes later, Grace said. “Yes . . . yes . . . thank you. I will. Yes.”

  She pressed the phone against her chest and closed her eyes.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she said.

  “Try me.”

  “Brian’s attending art school in Atlanta. He was planning to go to school here, you know, like community college, because he didn’t have the price of tuition, but guess what?”

  Mickey waited for the punch line.

  “
He won the lottery. Twenty thousand bucks.”

  “Do tell. When was this?”

  “Four days before”—she made imaginary quotation marks in the air with her fingers—“Joseph’s accident.”

  “And to think . . . you’ve been blaming yourself.”

  “To think.”

  “I’m thinking maybe we should return Joseph’s things to his mother.”

  “It’s the least we can do.”

  She was standing on the second step of an aluminum ladder, planting pink begonias in a pair of window boxes over on the south side of her condo. She was decked out for a Beatrix Potter movie. Big white English garden hat. Flowered apron, elbow-length gloves. The whole Mr. Toad’s-coming-to-lunch look.

  Whatever transient joy she might have been deriving from planting flowers evaporated the second she looked their way.

  She set her jaw like a bass. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  Mickey held out the plastic bag. “These belong to Joseph,” Mickey said, setting the bag on the grass. She looked down at the bag as if it had teeth.

  “This too,” said Grace, putting the book on top of the bag.

  “Get out of here,” she said.

  “You bought him off, didn’t you?” Grace blurted.

  Her spine stiffened. She untied the sun hat and took it off.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Brian Price. Joseph’s lover.”

  Roberta Reeves shuddered at the sound of the words. Almost as if she’d been slapped in the face.

  “You paid Brian’s art school tuition just to get him out of town,” Grace added.

  “Get away from me,” she growled.

  “Joseph and the pool. Was it really an accident?” Mickey asked.

  Her lower lip began to quiver. She pointed down at the bag and the book.

  “Get off my property and take that filth with you,” she said.

  “Did he tell you? That day by the pool? Is that what happened? He told you he was gay? Hoping to maybe get a little love and support from his mother?”

  Her body began to shake as she climbed unsteadily down from the ladder.

  “He was an abomination,” she whispered. “A disgusting pervert.”