Sleeping Policemen

by Dale Bailey

  “Pater noster.”

  —and Nick had felt a pulse of energy leap between them, shared recognition of a secret kinship: a sense of common interests, a faint disdain for the sweaty, beer-soaked frat boys and party girls crowded around the keg. When Finney finished, the room dissolved into heated debate. Turned out nobody knew Latin well enough to say who had won. Nick didn’t have an opinion—he wouldn’t know Latin from pig Latin—but Finney finally collected. The two of them spent the rest of the night talking. Finney told him that he was majoring in Classical Studies, a subject Nick thought had died in prep school about a hundred years ago. But they discovered a shared passion for contemporary fiction, and spent the rest of the night hunkered over the keg, discussing Iain Banks, Cormac McCarthy, and, as sunlight blooded the sky, Donna Tartt.

  Not long after that, one of the twins started stuffing firecrackers into empty beer cans and lobbing them into the center of the room. The explosions were tremendous, loud as shotgun blasts—a classic Torkelson conclusion to another night of binge drinking—and after that things broke up fast.

  Nick and Finney found Tucker passed out in a congealed puddle of vomit, and together they hauled him down the street to bed. Finney told him that Tuck had grown up down the street from him and that they had roomed in College Park since their sophomore year. “He’s a good guy, really,” Finny explained. “He just needs someone to look after him.”

  That had been the beginning of something else, too: the barely suppressed resentment Reed Tucker had borne toward Nick during all the long months since.

  It must have rankled, Nick supposed, being crowded out of your best friend’s life. Sometimes Nick pitied Tuck, but he wasn’t about to relinquish Finney or Sue for the sake of some spoiled asshole who had the good fortune to arrive on the scene before him. Besides, even if he wanted to, he didn’t know if he could.

  For the first time in a life too much like clawing his way barehanded up a naked cliff face, Nick felt like he had arrived at a niche where he might like to stay awhile. Maybe the money would give him the leverage to do just that.

  He paused in the foyer of his apartment house to count it. In the flicker of a dying fluorescent light, he pulled off the thick rubber band and spread the bills. They were all hundreds, most of them the new ones. The bigger Franklin looked more distinguished, somehow more stately. Nick’s heart sped and his mouth went dry. He’d never held so much money; hell, he’d never seen so much. He fingered through the fan, almost a hundred bills, nearly ten thousand dollars.

  In the same moment, he saw Glory receding in his mind’s rearview mirror. Cancer had eaten his mother when he was only six. After that he’d become a punching bag for his brothers, one of those inflatable kinds, the ones that keep coming back for more. Peace came when Jake and Sam left to work the rigs, and Nick had lost himself in books. Then his father came home from the Gulf, condemned for life to a wheelchair.

  Grades had saved Nick. Now, in an accident that felt like the rumble of a sleeping policeman, he allowed himself to see further down the road from Glory. The money meant grad school. He’d sent out half a dozen applications, all to state schools, affordable programs. With this he could make it into Chapel Hill or Vanderbilt. His thoughts clouded suddenly with an image of the dead guy’s face. He snapped the rubber band around the money and stuffed it back into his pocket; he turned and ran up the stairs to his apartment.

  Nick unlocked his door and stepped into his room, already stripping to his boxers. He opened the small freezer in his refrigerator, the light turning the apartment shadowy and mysterious, and placed the money underneath a bag of frozen green beans. He stuffed the bloodstained T-shirt into the trash. He emptied his jean pockets and put his wallet and keys beside the dish drain; he placed the bus station locker key beside them. At the kitchen sink he scrubbed furiously at his face and chest. Toweling dry, he turned to his bed on the far side of the room. The red glow of his alarm clock read 3:57.

  “Hey.”

  Nick screamed and back peddled over the trash can, trying to escape the dead man. He sprawled across the floor, garbage spilling around him, his T-shirt falling against his face.

  The bedside lamp popped on. Sue sat up in his bed, the comforter swaddled around her legs, her eyes swollen with sleep. She slept topless. Nick’s eyes lingered on the seashell pink of her nipples. He wondered what she had on under the covers.

  “Been waiting for you.”

  Nick looked away. He picked up the T-shirt and crammed it into the trashcan. He piled the rest of the garbage on top of it. When he looked back at Sue, she smiled coyly. Her hair, usually a deep copper, looked darker, almost black in the lamplight.

  She flung the comforter back with a flourish.

  “You coming or not?”

  “So you just left him there?”

  Sue lay half-atop him, her face cradled at his neck. Her breath warmed his throat; he could feel the weight of her breasts on his chest.

  Nick stared at the dark ceiling, doubt gnawing at him. “Forget it,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  And yet what else could he have done? She had known it somehow: had seen it in his face as he crossed the room, maybe, or sensed it in the tense planes of his muscles when she touched him. “What is it, Nicky?” she had said. “Tell me.”

  The dead man’s face loomed out of the dark, mocking him. “Nothing.”

  “Something’s wrong, Nick. What happened? Tell me.” She smoothed the hair from his brow, her voice husky.

  Finney’s question—

  —you going to Sue’s—

  —leapt unbidden into his mind, and before he knew it the words were out, a boast and a confession, a measure of his trust for her. And something else: a shackle meant to bind them.

  “We killed a man.”

  She did not move.

  He could feel his jugular beat against her lips. Then she laughed. Her hand slid down his chest to close around him. “Very funny,” she said. “Now tell me the truth.”

  “Sue—”

  She squeezed. “The truth, Nicky. What was her name?”

  “What—”

  “The girl who kept you out all night.”

  Squeeze.

  Nick arched his back and drew in a long breath. Tiny arcs of sensation leapt through his muscles.

  “Her name.”

  “It was an accident,” he gasped.

  He felt her shift in the dark. The delicious pressure at his groin eased and he found himself looking suddenly into the dark shadow of her face, the liquid wells of her eyes.

  “Nicky—”

  “For God’s sake, would I lie to you about something like that?”

  She released her breath slowly. “What happened?”

  And so he told her everything: the money, the key, the way the dead man had looked in the glare of the headlights. The way that bloody head had felt, cold against his stomach.

  That’s when she had said it, the words barbed with disbelief and horror, an accusation. “So you just left him there?”

  “I shouldn’t have told you!”

  And then, his voice anguished: “What else could we do, Sue? What else was there to do?”

  For a moment he fought them, and then tears came, silent and fierce, shameful, the way he had seen his father cry, sobs wrenched from him against his own volition. Sue did not draw away from him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She pressed a finger to his lips, kissed him gently. Then she rose over him like some night-flowering plant, a benediction.

  For a long time, heaving in the cradle of Sue’s thighs, Nick thought he wouldn’t finish. The events of the night, a vision of the dead man’s face—monstrous and distorted by their coupling—poisoned his desire.

  And then a fragmentary glimpse of the strip joint rose up to claim him, a throbbing bass line, a stew of sweat and beer, a curtain twitched aside to reveal two figures in an empty doorway on the far side of the smoky room: a dark-haired str
ipper and a heavy-set man in a leather vest, the girl fleeing, the man wrenching her around. Nick could not forget the raw jolt of excitement that surged through his loins when the man struck her. Stunned, he came off his stool, his beer clattering over in a spreading amber wave as the stripper reeled away; in the same moment, the man looked up. For half an instant, their eyes locked in something like recognition. Grinning, the man yanked the curtain across the doorway.

  Now, laboring over Sue, Nick felt himself abruptly engorge. Shutting his eyes, he drove himself savagely into her. He came like a gunshot, his mind filled with an eidetic montage of that moment, the hand raised for the blow to follow, the dark-haired woman stumbling back, that grin.

  “Baby,” Sue whispered, “baby.”

  Shudders took him.

  “It’s okay.”

  Afterward, he lay still in her arms until her breath grew regular, faraway in sleep. He lay awake for a long time after that, staring into the dark. Shapes formed and dispersed, mountain sky and road, the dead man in a crumpled heap, that grin.

  A black tide rose within him, a tickle of excitement at his groin.

  My God. That grin.

  Nick woke just before eleven, cold rays of December sun streaming through the two uncurtained windows. He woke with the decision made, the key—and the locker somewhere behind it—metamorphosed by dream into a solution. It was cold in the room—the radiator worked only every third or fourth day—and his breath clouded before him in a pale, luminous vapor.

  Sue lay curled up beside him, her chest rising and sinking in the rhythm of deep sleep. He watched her, thinking about the key, about the dead man who once held it in his warm grip. They were bound to him, he and Finney and Tuck—and now he’d managed to shackle Sue as well. He brushed a strand of hair out of her face and considered climbing back under the blankets with her; then her mouth popped open and a raucous snore escaped. He got out of bed, instead, and dressed hurriedly. In the kitchen corner of the apartment, he put on a pot of coffee and took a carton of eggs out of the refrigerator. As he scrambled the eggs and watched Sue beginning to stir, he mulled over the ideas that had formed in the void between consciousness and dreams.

  If the dead man had ten thousand dollars on him, what treasures might the locker hold? Possibilities from half a dozen cheap paperbacks suggested themselves. Drugs or guns. Hell, the Maltese Falcon, for all he knew. What he kept imagining, though, was the bounty of fist-sized rolls of hundred dollar bills a bus station locker could hold. The thought made the blood roar in his ears, made the dream-bloated visage of the dead guy waver and nearly disappear. He saw the rest of his life riding out under the stately gaze of Ben Franklin.

  “What are you grinning about?”

  Sue had slipped out of bed and into a denim shirt he’d left balled up on the floor. She leaned against the kitchen table, sleepy-eyed, sheet wrinkles etched across one cheek.

  “Sit,” Nick said, dividing the eggs between two plates. As they ate breakfast, he told her again about the key, about the treasures a bus station locker might contain. He ended by saying, “What harm could a look do?”

  Sue took a couple of slow bites. “You think that’s wise, Nicky? Are you sure you want to get more tangled up in this thing?”

  He stared at her, a tiny ember of anger flaring inside him. “You think I’m doing this just for myself? It’s not just my way out. This could be our solution, Sue. We could be together. Don’t you want that?”

  “Come on, Nick. That’s not fair.” She thrust her plate away and stared at him. Then: “What if there’s nothing there?”

  “Then no harm done. All we’ve wasted is a little time and gas.”

  They sipped their coffee, silence spinning out around them. Nick watched a cockroach dart from under the stove and disappear beneath the refrigerator. When he looked back at Sue, he recognized the pensive expression on her face: the fraught gaze of a child caught in the shadow of the Tilt-a-Whirl—equal parts terror and speed—her eyes filled with fear and longing, money for a ticket clutched uncertainly in her grubby little fingers.

  “Which station?”

  “Knoxville. Says so right on the key.” Nick stabbed at the last of his eggs. “I’m betting this guy dumped something there, planning to go back later.”

  “I don’t know, Nick.” She got up from the table and dumped her plate into the sink. She picked up her clothes and stepped into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

  Nick stacked the rest of the dishes in the sink and ran water over them. Just as Sue stepped out of the bathroom, a knock on the front door reverberated through the room, freezing them both in mid-step. They looked at each other. Sue, her eyes wide, mouthed You expecting someone? Nick shook his head. He glanced at the alarm clock. 11:45. Finney and Tuck would still be in bed. A rush of fear swept through him, the same one that had tumbled him over the trash can when Sue had spoken in the dark. His arms again felt the sacklike weight of the dead man.

  “Who is it?”

  “State police, sir. Can you open the door for a couple questions?”

  “Just a minute.” Nick shot another look at Sue and walked across the room on watery legs.

  Nick opened the door—and found his sight filled with five stark letters: EVANS. Startled, seeking balance, he stepped back, taking in the man behind the nametag, this sudden Evans. He was huge, seeming to burst out of his Tennessee Highway Patrol uniform, seeming to fill the small, dark hallway. His gut sloped over his gun belt and his arms were inflated and hard, like sausages inside his sleeves. He wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses, a Smokey Bear trooper’s hat pulled low over his eyes. He nodded at Nick and stepped into the apartment. Sunlight winked off the thin metal strip of the nametag.

  “You Nick Laymon?”

  Nick nodded and tried not to swallow.

  The trooper stared at him for a moment, and then looked at Sue. He smiled and touched the brim of his hat.

  “How do, ma’am.”

  Sue smiled weakly and looked away.

  “How can we help you, officer?” Nick’s voice sounded firmer than he had hoped.

  “Maybe you can’t.” He settled into one of the kitchen chairs, groaning and adjusting his holster. The leather creaked loudly. Nick glanced down and saw that it held a .45, the restraining strap loosed and pushed aside. A fleeting image of the dead guy’s gun flashed through Nick’s mind. Fear settled in his stomach like a sack of stones.

  “Just routine.” Evans paused, looking from Nick to Sue, then back to Nick. “Take a load off, both of you. This won’t take but a couple minutes.” They sat opposite him, the kitchen table between them. The trooper removed his sunglasses, exposing rheumy, porcine eyes. He pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket and speared it into the corner of his mouth. “A fella was killed last night. Most likely an accident, but we got to check all the angles—you know how that is, I reckon.” He grinned, and, for just a second, Nick thought he saw it slip, wavering on the thin purchase of his lips, as if something else lurked behind that smile.

  Evans took out a handkerchief and began to polish his glasses. “Witness placed a carload of college kids in the area, North Carolina plates.” He looked up at Nick. “Your name came up.”

  “My name?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How was he killed?” Nick forced himself not to look at Sue. He could feel her, though, fear radiating from her in hot, palpable waves. He tried not to think of the dead man, the way he’d felt under the wheels. The way he’d felt in his arms.

  “Can’t say right now.” Evans put the glasses away and folded the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Like I said, this is just routine.” He fixed Nick in his gaze. “You know anything about anything like that, son?”

  Nick hesitated. “I—”

  “He was with me, here, all last night, since about three yesterday afternoon.” Under the table, Sue took Nick’s hand. He glanced at her, holding his surprise in abeyance. Her eyes were bright, unwavering, her lips set in a t
hin line. So she was in it now, he thought. Committed. Just that simply she had purchased the ticket, shackled herself to the ride.

  And she had done it for him.

  Evans looked at her as if trying to remember her from long ago. “That a fact, ma’am?” He removed the toothpick and replaced it carefully in his shirt pocket. He looked at Nick. “You own a car?”

  “No sir.” Something like relief washed through Nick. “Never have.”

  “Well, now.” He produced a small notebook and pencil from his shirt pocket; he flipped through the notebook, then licked the blunt point of the pencil and carefully wrote something. “Well, now,” he said again. From the corner of his eye Nick saw a roach emerge from behind the refrigerator and scuttle across the wall behind Evans; it paused at a small fissure in the plaster to inspect some morsel. Evans finished jotting, flipped the notebook closed, returned it and the pencil to his shirt pocket. “You two let me know, then, if y’all hear anything.” His arm shot out with gunfighter swiftness, his head never turning, his eyes never leaving Nick’s. The flat of his hand struck the wall resoundingly, smashing the roach with a soft chitinous crunch. “I’ll be around. And don’t fret too much about any of this. It’s all routine.” He heaved himself up from the chair.

  On the wall was a small smear, the roach nowhere to be seen.

  Evans walked out into the hall. He turned in the doorway to face them, tapping the brim of his hat. “You two stay out of trouble, you hear.” Then he leaned toward them and tucked something into Nick’s shirt pocket. “Give me a call if you hear anything—there’s my card. Good day, now.” He turned and walked down the stairs.

  Nick closed the door quietly and fell against it, nearly collapsing. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.” Sue came over and he wrapped his arms around here. She pressed hard against him and he could feel her heart fluttering like a trapped bird, throwing itself against the cage of her ribs again and again. Nick reached into his pocket to retrieve Evans’s card. Only there was no card, just the roach, its legs still twitching.

  Sunday, 12 Noon to 8:30 PM

  Nick swallowed, met Sue’s eyes for half a moment, and turned away. Nausea twisted through his guts as he crushed the thing underfoot.