Sleeping Policemen

by Dale Bailey

  He turned to the begrimed window, scrubbing his right hand absently against his jeans. He adjusted the blinds and peered out as Evans emerged onto the cracked sidewalk below. The trooper paused to gaze thoughtfully at the efficiency for a moment; then he turned and crossed the street to an unmarked, blue cruiser parked in front of a hydrant. A moment later the car slid away from the curb, cruising into the Sunday-blighted streets of Ransom like a shark. When Nick turned, Sue was right behind him. Looking into her face, he saw the fear in her eyes—the fear and something else, a half-familiar flicker of excitement, that same reckless glow of terror and defiance he sometimes saw when she leaned over him, swollen with desire, to propose some new and daring bedroom game, Unbidden, the thought came to him again:

  She was in it now. Committed.

  Something uneasy moved within him, ground shifting under his feet, tectonic plates of fear and desire. He did not want to think he had made a mistake in telling her about the dead man. He did not want to think about why he had done it.

  “What about the locker?” she asked.

  “The locker can wait.” He turned away.

  “Nick—”

  “The locker can wait, Sue!”

  They stared at one another for a moment. “Finney first,” Nick said. “Then the locker, if that’s what we decide we want to do.”

  They negotiated the debris-choked streets of the Fort and the drainage ditch behind College Park Townhouses in prickly silence. Nick watched Sue from the corner of his eye, feeling her withdraw beyond fresh fault lines. The money lay folded like a lump of lead against his breast. The irony of the moment did not escape him—that in trying to hang on to her he might let her slip away—yet he could not imagine surrendering the wad of bills.

  He was relieved when Finney let them into the townhouse if only because it stoppered the relentless flood of images—that fatal tumble of rags in the Acura’s wake; Sue’s face, remote and patrician as she worked above him in her private rhythm; and last of all, the Gulf, oil rigs astride the far horizon like a fever dream of cyclopean invaders. Finney ushered Sue into the foyer, a small space with doors opening to either side, bathroom and kitchen, the hall extending on into the main living space, with stairs leading up to two bedrooms and a second bath. Finney turned as Sue started down the hall, his face impassive, cold. He gripped Nick’s shoulder hard. “You didn’t tell—” he whispered, but Nick shrugged the hand away, brushing past him.

  “Sue’s not your problem anymore,” he said flatly, without bothering to lower his voice. He followed Sue into the living room, a study in post-modern neutrality: ivory carpet, end tables of chrome and glass, a minimalistic arrangement of creamy furniture. Coals flickered in the fireplace, and bloodless December sunlight streamed through the sliding doors overlooking the deck.

  “Nicky,” Finney said. “Listen—”

  Nick turned, pointing. “No, you listen.”

  Finney slouched by the door into the kitchen, his hands in the pockets of his baggy, stone-colored cords while Nick told him about the trooper. He stood there a moment after Nick finished, his face thoughtful. Then he said, “I think we’re going to be okay.”

  “Okay?” Nick glanced at Sue in disbelief. He repeated the word. Louder. “Okay? I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to say, Finney. I’m talking about a mountain of Tennessee state trooper—”

  “Nicky, I know. I saw him, too.”

  He said it so quietly, so matter-of-factly, that it took a moment for the statement to register. Nick paused, a glut of panic caught in his throat.

  He swallowed. “Could you repeat that?”

  “I saw him, too.”

  “He was here?”

  Finney nodded. “Nine o’clock. Maybe ten.”

  “And you gave me up to him?”

  “No, Nicky, of course not—” Finney began, but his eyes betrayed him. They darted toward something over Nick’s shoulder, a mere flicker of movement, almost imperceptible, but enough.

  Nick turned.

  Tucker leaned in the doorway that framed the stairs. He would not meet Nick’s eyes.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” Nick said.

  Tucker lifted his hands. “Wait a minute, Nick—”

  “You gave me up, you son of—”

  “I’m not the one who ran to tell my little girlfriend, was I, Nick?”

  “Keep Sue out of this!”

  “I’m not the one who dragged her in!”

  Nick felt Finney’s restraining hand atop his shoulder. He cursed and turned away, to stare out across the deck at the dead lawn. He felt an unexpected heartsick twinge for the flat reaches of the Delta, the slate gray swells of the Gulf beyond.

  “What Tuck did or didn’t say, that’s not the point, Nick,” Finney told him. “The point is, this trooper, Evans, he’s got nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he had anything, even an iota of evidence, he’d have arrived with warrants, detectives, hell, TV cameras.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Finney.”

  “It’s true, Nick, whether you want to admit it or not.”

  Nick shrugged.

  “He would have asked to see the car—he’d have brought a warrant to see the car if he had anything.”

  “He didn’t ask about the car?”

  “Only if I had one.”

  “And?”

  “I do.”

  “Jesus,” Nick said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “What the fuck, Nick?” Tucker said. “For all we know, ten cops might be sitting in your apartment. How’s it gonna sound, you’re talking to them and the phone rings, huh? You think you could carry that off? We didn’t know when somebody was going to show up over there.”

  “You shut the fuck up, you little—”

  “Think about it, Nick. He’s right.”

  “We didn’t even have a story worked out, Finney!”

  And now Sue spoke, her voice like balm, soothing them. “What did you tell the trooper, Finney?”

  “I said we spent the evening with Nick,” Finney said, without turning his gaze from Nick. It was like a challenge, that look. Everything’s under control, it said. It said, Trust me. That expression had worked magic on the Senator’s face for nearly two decades now, charming the faithful voters of Tennessee, steamrolling challengers great and small with the sheer force of its confidence. “I said we were playing gin rummy and drinking beer.”

  “That’s it?” Sue asked.

  “That’s it?” Nick turned to stare at her. “That’s not what you told him, Sue.”

  “Close enough, Nick. I said we were together, didn’t I? So all four of us were together, that’s all, that’s our story.”

  “Clean and simple,” Finney said.

  “Yeah,” Nick snapped, “even Tucker ought to be able to remember that one.”

  “Nick,” Sue said. “Trust me.”

  Nick glared at her for a moment, certainty crumbling under the combined weight of their insistence. The choking anger subsided a little, replaced by something that felt a lot like giving in.

  “The only question now,” Finney said, “is what next?”

  “Nick and I talked about the locker,” Sue said.

  “Fuck that,” Tucker said from the doorway. “We leave the locker alone. We should get rid of the key and try to forget the whole thing ever happened.”

  “We should—”

  “This isn’t one of your little games, Sue,” Tucker said. “We could go to jail.”

  “You lay off her. I’m the one found the key. If I want to know what’s in there, then I’ll look.”

  “Didn’t you get enough last night, Nick? Do you have to have more?”

  “Fuck you, Tucker. I need this money!”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Finney said. “We’re in this together. And if we don’t stay that way we’ll all go down together. Right?”

  Silence.

  “Right?”

  “Whatever,”
Nick said.

  “You just keep him off me, Finney. I’m fed up with Nick’s bullshit.”

  “Fine. Okay. But this time Nicky’s right. He needs the money. We’ll check out the locker, Nick takes what he can get, but that’s the end of it. Understand?”

  “Goddammit, Finney,” Tucker said. “This is stupid—”

  “We’re just going to check the locker, Tuck. That’s the end of it, I promise.”

  Tucker stared at Finney for a moment, his lips white. “Fine, then.” He turned to point at Nick. “But get this, Nick: when the shit comes down, it’s on your fucking head. And that’s not a threat, that’s a promise.”

  Nick didn’t speak. He just stood there, staring into Tucker’s frightened, angry face, struck suddenly with a sense of how out of place he was here, in this place, among such people—Finney in his loafers and Brooks Brothers cords, Tuck in a Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt that had cost twice as much as Nick’s second-hand leather jacket and two-year-old Keds. He felt the hot shame of it mount into his face, and he knew suddenly how everything would turn out. If it hadn’t started already, it would soon enough—money and privilege and more than a decade of friendship closing ranks against him.

  Fall guy, he thought. That’s me.

  And then Sue crossed the room to him in that knowing way of hers, like she had some kind of sixth sense. He felt her mouth quick against his own, the pressure of her breasts, and an image from that morning possessed him: Sue, rising over him like a night-blossoming plant, engulfing him in her heat.

  He pulled her close, felt her hand drop away to dig in the pocket of his Levis as she kissed him. Her fingers brushed the shaft of his cock, teasing, and then she turned away, holding something shiny aloft like a trophy.

  The key.

  That was Sue, he thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “So let’s see what’s in the locker,” she said.

  They found the locker just as Nick had imagined, in the Knoxville bus terminal, a dingy, single-story brick building broken by the curve of a glass and plastic-faced snack bar, some late-sixties architect’s idea of futuristic chic: natural light and potted palms, ushering Greyhound proudly into the twenty-first century. Nick laughed softly at the idea as Sue swung the Mercedes to the curb before a hydrant. For him, it was more like coming home.

  He climbed out, stretched in the shadow of a freeway underpass.

  “Nice location,” Tucker said.

  Nick shrugged. Sagging and rundown, the station was virtually identical to half a dozen such terminals on the line from Glory to Ransom: vacant lots and the cast-off husks of cars, the air dumpster-ripe even in the cold, and sharp with the stink of diesel, a stench Nick always associated with leaving. Leaving Glory. Leaving Ransom.

  “Let’s go, Nicky, you can show us the sights,” Finney said, clapping him on the shoulder. But Nick fell back instead, content to follow them along the broken sidewalk, Finney with his coattails flying and Tucker shivering in his Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt. And Sue. Yes, Sue, striding confidently between them. He watched her especially, helpless to resist the rolling cadence of those hips. And then Finney threw an arm casually across her shoulders, sparking that image once again, Finney moving atop her, his long back sheened with sweat.

  What did Iago call it?

  The beast with two backs.

  “Nicky!”

  Grudgingly, he hurried to catch up and Finney swept him into a playful headlock, scrubbing his skull with a knuckle like he was maybe twelve years old. A dark weight lifted from Nick’s heart. Laughing, they swept through a cluster of old men at the door and down the stairs into the terminal, a tired, fluorescent-lit room bracketed by ticket counter and snack bar. A coin-operated television blared from a row of black plastic chairs, and a few black guys clustered by the vending machines. Nick caught a glimpse of them as he passed—baggy jeans and Raiders ball caps and a momentary stillness as their gazes passed over his friends—and then he spotted the lockers: two walls of them, on either side of a gate into the boarding area.

  Memory pierced him. The dead guy lolled boneless in his arms, that bloody Aryan head bearing like a stone into his gut. He glanced over at Finney, and that momentary sense of camaraderie evaporated as abruptly as it had come, like a summer drizzle on the hot skillet of an August highway.

  Nick swallowed hard as he reached out and took the key from Sue, aware of the way it held a little piece of her, the way it held her heat.

  He glanced down at it—the number, 409, embossed in its smudged plate—then scanned the lockers. He spotted number 409 right away, top row, third from the left hand side. He paused before it, utterly still inside, those same scenarios unfolding in his mind: drugs, guns, the fucking Maltese Falcon. And maybe, just maybe, a bag full of money. He could almost see it, a bounty of those fist-sized rolls, the new hundred dollar bills, Ben Franklin’s genial overfed face ushering him into a whole new life. He shrugged lightly, like a boxer warming up before a title fight, the weight of the cash in his jacket suddenly comforting somehow, portent of blessings still to come.

  “What are we waiting for?” Tucker said.

  “Nicky—”

  “Okay.”

  Anxiety seethed in his bowels. As he lifted the key, a strange doubling occurred. His hand and the hand of the dead stranger on the road clutched that key, his fingers and the fingers of the dead guy fitted it trembling into its slot. For a moment he did not know who had died on that mountain highway, Nick Laymon or the dead Aryan with his .45 snug under his arm. Then he twisted the key and collapsed into himself again.

  The door swung open.

  At first he thought the locker was empty, and then he saw the padded manila mailer lying within. Not a suitcase of cash exactly, but something. Maybe enough to get him through grad school and into some tenure-track assignment.

  If he was careful. If the mailer held cash.

  Nick reached for it at the same time as Tucker; he pushed the other boy’s hand away, and lifted it out himself. He knew right away it wasn’t money. He could feel the shape of the thing, flat and rectangular, three-quarters of an inch thick. A black current of disappointment poured through him, an infinitely receding tide dragging him from an aspiring shore. He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until it burst out of him.

  Suddenly he had to urinate. His bladder burned with it.

  “What is it?” Tucker said.

  “Shut up,” Nick said.

  “No, I wanna—”

  “Outside,” said Finney firmly, steering them back toward the door. Nick swerved toward the restrooms on the far side of the ticket counter. “I’m right behind you.”

  “You okay?” Sue said.

  “I have to piss.”

  He went past the ticket counter and up a short flight of stairs. The men’s room was to his right, a plain, wooden door that swung soundlessly open at a push. A dying fluorescent light flickered within, producing an almost subaural hum. An enormous white man obstructed the sinks, brushing strands of greasy hair across his pate. Two black kids in oversize jeans and hockey jerseys were arguing about something in the archway that gave onto the urinals. Nick slid past them and stopped before a urinal, wedging the mailer under his arm. He fished himself out of his trousers and waited for a moment, unable to release the flow of urine. And then it came, a hard, yellow arc, the acrid stench of it rising to mix with the other odors that hovered there, almost palpable—a fouled toilet and too many unwashed bodies, the faint, clean pine scent of over-matched disinfectant.

  Nick flushed and turned away. The black kids had gone with a last flourish of shouts. The fat man grunted and made room for Nick at the sinks. “Fucking niggers,” he remarked, working with a toothpick at a few cancerous stumps of teeth.

  Nick ignored him.

  He laid the mailer on the ledge and washed his hands. He studied his image in the mirror: deep-set eyes and close-shorn brown hair, shoulders broad from long days in the warehouse, working until every muscle ached. Not
handsome, he thought, but not unpleasant either. Just normal. He didn’t look like a guy who could run down an innocent man, steal ten grand, and go looking for more.

  But the plain fact of it was there, too. He could see it in his eyes, a wariness he’d seen only once before, in the eyes of that frightened deer. The sense that he was hunted.

  Nick closed his eyes and leaned over the sink to splash water on his face. When he lifted his head, he gazed with renewed intensity into the visage staring back at him from the rust-stained mirror. In the depths beyond the wavering image reflected there, he sensed something inexorable rising up to claim him. Fate, maybe. A bloated, terrible fish, wearing a dead man’s face.

  The others were gone.

  Nick stood at the foot of the stairs, clutching the mailer as he scanned the terminal. The black guys still huddled by the vending machines, and a punked-out kid in engineer boots and orange-spiked hair studied the magazines in the newsstand, but otherwise the terminal was empty. No Finney, no Tuck. No Sue.

  A black tide of certainty buoyed him up: They had left him.

  Left him.

  Nick repeated the phrase under his breath, his mouth bitter with the ashes of a previous betrayal: an afternoon the previous spring, Finney’s voice. Why didn’t you tell me Sue’s folks were coming in? The thing was, Nick hadn’t known—might never have known if Finney hadn’t screwed up and let it slip. Finney and Sue had gone to dinner with them while Nick had spent the evening laboring over a Shakespeare paper, unaware.

  Stupid and unaware.

  “She didn’t tell you?” Finney had said. “She said she called you, you weren’t—”

  And then, lamely: “Oh hell, Nick. I’m sorry. It’s just Sue. She didn’t mean it.”

  But she did, Nick had seen it in her eyes later that same afternoon when he dropped in at her place unannounced. Her parents were still there, Mira, a brittle forty-something blonde in an iridescent pantsuit, and Campbell, broad-shouldered and handsome, his red hair trimmed close above a prominently boned face.

  “This is my friend Nick,” Sue had said, the word she chose—