Tableau

by Michael Kanuckel

  While the kid went through this drunken soliloquy, Ezra flagged down a waitress. “Get this guy some food, and quick,” he said to the young woman in the painted on leggings, her serving tray over her chest like a shield while his blue eyes pierced her. “I don’t care what. And cut him off, for Christ’s sake. No more drinks.” The waitress, her eyes wide and shiny and her mouth agape in the face of the High Guard’s wrath, nodded and ran off. Ezra turned back to Connor, slipping back into the tale and snatching the ends of it back up. “What was it?” he said. “What’d she say to you, Connor?”

  Connor drained his glass and raised it high in the air, waggling it back and forth. At the bar, no one seemed to notice him and after a moment the young Guard sagged, giving it up with a world weary sigh. “I thought I was going to marry that girl,” he said. “She was everything I wanted, Ezra. Funny and smart, always just full of this energy…like a light was in her. And she believed in me, I think that’s why I loved her so. I used to draw, and she would sit next to me and just watch me for hours. Like I was magic. I was going to do comics. You know, superheroes and all that shit?”

  Ezra nodded. The waitress returned with a platter of fries and a big greasy burger and slid it in front of him. He paid the bill and put the food in front of the young Guard. Connor didn’t seem to notice the plate; he was lost in the land of faraway.

  “Then outta nowhere, Becca broke up with me,” Connor said. A tear slipped from his eye to cut a shining track down his scarred cheek. Ezra wanted to credit this to how drunk he was and nothing else, but he could see the pain on the kid’s face. Like it was all still fresh. “She was gone from school a few days, wouldn’t answer her phone. Figured she was sick. But then she came back, and her face was like cold stone. Said she couldn’t be with me no more. Wouldn’t say why, wouldn’t talk to me no matter what. I ended up quitting school, joined up with the Grand Sea Army. Got stationed in Agarib at first, that wasn’t so bad- sun and surf, watching the girls on the beach in their mesh microkinis…but then I got sent to that mess in Ashigul. When I come back, I joined the Guards. I never knew what it was, why she left me. Not till Darlene told me.”

  “So what was it?” Ezra said. He thought he had a pretty good idea, but the kid still needed to tell it to him. The kid also needed to eat. Ezra nudged the plate of food closer, bumping it into Connor’s forearm. The kid looked down in surprise, as if the food had materialized from the ether while he wasn’t looking. He grabbed a couple fries and stuffed them in his mouth.

  “Good,” Connor said through a mouthful of mashed fried. “They got good food here. It’s not Dee-lite Tonite or nothin, but what can ya do?”

  “So what was it, Tommy?” Ezra said. “C’mon, now. Cut it open.”

  “Becca got pregnant,” Connor said. “Don’t know how- well, course I know how, I’m no genius but I’m no goddamn Cullen either. But we used protection, and she was on the pill. Didn’t matter. She was pregnant. Her father went through the roof. No daughter of his was going to be a dropout teen mom. He made her get an abortion, told her she wasn’t to see me no more. He wanted to see me brought up on rape charges as well, only the both of us was underage and he couldn’t get the case off the ground.”

  Ezra sat back in his chair. “You didn’t hear all that from Big Sis, did ya?”

  “No sir,” Connor said. “I am a trained Guard, after all. I been diggin around. Becca’s still in the city, but she won’t talk to me- there’s folk that will, though. I got a piece of the story here, another bit there. People do love to talk. No, Darlene’s version of the story is all about how I came sniffin around her innocent baby sister, knocked her up, and then took off on the high seas and left her to clean up the mess.” Connor shook his head, chuckling. The laughter was pretty close to sobbing. “Hell, maybe she even believes it. Darlene was off at university when it all happened, and who knows what her parents told her about it.”

  “So she took after you with a rake,” Ezra said.

  “Aye, she did do that,” Connor agreed. “An she got a face full of gas and hauled off to the Justice Building on three big charges that the attorney from the corporation she works for got whittled down to nothin. But that’s not what bothers me, Ezra. Becca not talkin to me, I got so that doesn’t really bother me either. We both growed up and moved on, more or less. High school was a long time ago.”

  Ezra thought about how high school had been about six years ago for the kid, but kept quiet.

  “The thing I can’t get past is thinkin bout what could’ve been,” Connor said. He stopped for a moment then, eating some of his soggy cheeseburger. When he bit into it a huge glop of ketchup and mayonnaise squirted out from the back to plop onto the plate. A good burger was a messy burger. “It would’ve been rough, but we could have made it work. Becca could’ve kept going to school, I would have found a job somewhere. We coulda been a family. I could be a father right now. A son, or a little girl. That’s what I can’t get over. What could’ve been.”

  Ezra nodded. He was only a few years older than Connor, but he knew plenty about thinking of the life that might have been. He spent plenty of his own time dwelling on it- hadn’t he just been thinking about how much he wanted to talk to Robin Drake when the good doctor called him? What could have been…yeah, that was a subject that could rip a man up, all right. And what could he say to this young man about it now? What, that he shouldn’t think about how the child that might have been his was butchered on an operating table (and somewhere far out of the city for sure, where the girl’s parents wouldn’t have to worry about any of their friends catching wind of it) with him never knowing? That he should get over the love and life that might have been his if things had gone different? Yeah, he could say that- for all the good it would do.

  “When my tour of service was over and I come home,” Connor said, “the captain of my Veterans of War post asked me what I was gonna do with myself. I said I didn’t know. Find a job somewhere, try to be like regular folks and forget that I was trained to kill. Forget the burning huts, the kids with gleaming eyes flashing in their skull faces and detonators in their dirty hands. The wailing women, ripping at their clothes and hair when the menfolk got brought back in the front bucket of a payloader to get dumped in sandy trenches. I done a lot of bad things, Ezra. You go in thinking it’s war, kill the enemy…but no one tells you about how it’s gonna be. Recruiters don’t talk about seven year olds screaming their god’s name while they blow themselves up in front of your transport. The propaganda doesn’t show your CO shooting a teenage girl in the head after she cut him with the jagged end of a broken bottle. I done killing things. I say to myself that I had to, but sometimes I don’t know. And I wouldn’t have been there at all, ya get? Me and Becca, if we had stayed together and had that baby…I’d be a father right now, instead of a killer.”

  “You don’t know how it would’ve been,” Ezra said. “Might have been worse. No way to tell, kid. When you really care for someone, when you love someone, that’s when life can really put the screws to ya. There’s no way for you to know.”

  “No,” Connor said. “There ain’t.”

  “There’s also no way of knowin what’s ahead, ya get?” Ezra said. “Maybe better things, someone else to love, the family and the picket fence- maybe worse things. It’s the wheel of fortune, Tommy-boy. You pay your money an you take your spin, that’s all.”

  “Might be crooked but it’s the only game in town,” Connor said. “Right?”

  “Hey,” Ezra said. “It sure as hell beats the alternative. You should go home. Get some rest, kid. You know that old song, the sun’ll come out tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, it always does.” Ezra put his hand on Connor’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, shaking the young Guard back and forth. The kid just went with him, head rolling around. He was like a fighter just before his knees unhinged on him and sent him crashing to the mat. And Ezra wasn’t so sure, looking at Connor, if the sun would come out tomorrow fo
r him or not. He felt for the kid, too. From the sound of things (of course he was drunk though, and when someone was good and drunk the old loves and angers of one’s life tended to get magnified a good deal), he and his girlfriend had really been something- high schoolers or not. Maybe they could have been the family Connor imagined, with the little house somewhere in his old neighborhood, him punching a clock in some factory or warehouse and coming home to dinner and hugs and kisses from the wife and the little one. Walking through the park holdings hands, swinging the kid between them as they went, goofy grins on their faces, all that. “Hey,” he said. He put his face right in front of the kid’s and smacked him lightly on the cheeks until he was sure he had his attention. “You can’t let it eat you up, kid. Ya gotta stop pickin at it and let it heal. Now c’mon- let’s get you home an into bed.”

  Connor looked at Ezra as if he was trying to figure out exactly who this guy in the wrinkled black suit was and what he was doing sitting in front of him. His expression was akin to the one people get when they run into someone they’d gone to high school with but weren’t able to pull their name up from the depths of life and memory, only drunker. Finally he nodded, then started to rummage around in his pockets; trying to find his credstik, pay the tab.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ezra said. “I got it.”

  When Ezra finally got himself home that night and checked his vidscreen notifications, he saw the tab from Wallace’s Inn at Jacob’s Court and let out a long whistle; whatever a Lava Minecart was, Thomas Connor had sat there at that little table in the shadows and drank almost two hundred kwic worth of them.

  Thirteen

  “Case is closed.”

  Ezra came on into his office, eyebrows raised at his guest and steam curling around the top of his to-go cup from Stardew’s. Jim Gorton stood behind Ezra’s swivel chair, taking up most of the available space in the tiny cubicle. The commissioner’s suit gave him an extra foot of total wingspan; it was dark grey with a faint pinstripe, a blood red pocket square matching his wide tie. What little hair the man had left was lubed up and combed straight back over the broad expanse of his forehead. Ezra knew what this look meant: it was Jim’s “don’t fuck around with me right now” getup.

  “Morning to you, too,” Ezra said. He moved around the corner of his desk and made for his chair. Jim had no choice but to move out of his way, going around the other side of the desk and standing in front of it. “I gotta glazed an two raspberry filled. Got two of them because they don’t always have ‘em an they’re my favorite…but I’m willing to share with ya.”

  “Not kiddin around, Ezra,” Jim said. “The Jensen case is closed. She died of natural causes; heart attack- or whatever technical term they use for one these days. Write up your final reports, file them, and get on to the next case- and count yourself lucky that the family isn’t filing a formal complaint about how you handled things.”

  Ezra lifted the lid from his coffee, blew over the surface of it, and took a sip. The coffee was good and strong. The kid running the front counter had looked at Ezra like he was speaking a foreign language when he asked for a coffee with sugar instead of some half-frappe mocha whatever with extra foam or whatnot and a triple pump of vanilla bean extract, but apparently they did still know how to brew regular old joe. He followed the sip with a bite of his raspberry donut, savoring it while Jim stood in front of him and shifted his weight from one dress shoe clad foot to the other. The commissioner had his tactics; Ezra had his own.

  “What was the guy doing there, then?” Ezra said when he was finished with his bite. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about that? Did he see her having a heart attack, lean in her window to try and talk to her? If so, he didn’t call for the medics. No one did. So what about the guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy a witness saw approach Missus Jensen’s car.”

  Jim snorted back a laugh. “Witness,” he said. “Jabjoth Saheza’lal. Down at Londell’s substation the Guards call him Gabby Says-it-all. He’s in there two, three times a month with his bullshit. There’s a Darchangel drug kingpin in the old warehouse down the alley from him. There were two guys in black cloaks fighting with swords on the roof across the street. He saw a little shrunken apple face with glowing orange eyes staring at him from inside a storm drain. Some witness.”

  Ezra shrugged. “Didn’t say nothin to me about swords or glowing eyes,” he said. Just a demigod who wanders the world weeping for the dead, he thought- but didn’t add. “He saw a regular nondescript Streeter, regular clothes, come up to the car and then walk away. Sounds like a drug transaction to me. And then the woman was dead, Jim. What about that?”

  “What about it?” Jim said. “The woman was seventy-four years old, Ez. She dropped. There was no guy. There weren’t any drugs. The case is closed, and I don’t wanna hear another goddamn word about it.”

  Ezra shook his head. “Just tell me this, Jim,” he said. “Just tell me, and be straight true about it. Are you going along with this because you have to, because of politics and not rocking the boat, or did they give you an actual boat out on Aerry Lake?”

  Jim’s broad, ruddy face went the shade of an old brick, except for two hectic white crescents under his flinty eyes. For a long time he didn’t reply. Ezra could see him mastering himself, trying to get some semblance of control before he opened his mouth. “We been friends a long time, Ezra,” he said when he finally spoke. “Been through a lot of shit together- especially after your partner got killed. The Internal Affairs guys wanted to look at you for that. They wanted to look at you hard. Figured you either had a hand in it, or let it happen. I pulled you out of that fire, and never said a word about it to you. I did it because I already had that kind of pull, and I knew you were a good Guard. And now, what? Now you think I’m like Wendt? Let me tell you somethin, Ez. It’s somethin you need to hear, because apparently you haven’t figured it out yet. We aren’t the Law. We are agents of the Law. We don’t make the rules, and we sure as hell don’t run the show.”

  “So who does?”

  Jim raised his open hands- hands so big that he could pick up a watermelon in each of them and crush them to pulp- and spread them apart. “The people with the credits to produce the show in the first place,” he said.

  “People like Leon Jensen?” Ezra said. “Him and his trained walrus of a lawyer?”

  “Case is closed, High Guard Beckitt,” Jim said. “Write it up. Then see Captain Johannson for your next assignment.” And then he was gone.

  Ezra leaned back in his chair, finishing off the first raspberry filled and pondering the second one with narrowed eyes. “Koo koo kachew,” he said, and snatched it up.

  Fourteen

  Ezra wasn’t the sort of person who believed in fate. There was no master plan, no forces good, bad, or ugly watching over the lives of mere mortals and pulling a string here or blocking a road there to ensure that events played out as they were ordained. Maybe there was luck, but if so then it was blind. Happenstance: all manner of things beyond what one could actually control in their life were just happenstance. Still, later on he would have to wonder…wonder about how things might have played out if the good doctor had answered his phone.

  Ezra sat in his living room chair, surrounded by books he didn’t want to read and movies he didn’t want to watch, smoking a cigarette that he didn’t even want to smoke. He thought about pouring out a drink, whiskey, and nevermind the ice or the soda. He didn’t want that, either. What he wanted was to chew this thing over some more, gnaw on it like a dog with an old fragment of cracked bone. He wanted to worry at it, to shake it around in his teeth until something broke loose. Normally he would call on Jim when this mood took him- but this time Jim was part of the problem. Ezra kept thinking about the commissioner, his talk of the people with the creds to make the show, and getting more pissed off and disgusted about it by the moment. Agents of the Law, not the Law themselves. Fuck. So, he called up Leonard Forest. He figured that they co
uld go out (to a real bar, anywhere but Wallace’s Inn at Jacob’s Court, thankya) and have their own little wake for the mystery case that was now the closed case, but no dice- the good doctor’s phone went straight to voicemail, a curt recorded message that said “I can’t get to you right now, leave a reason for me to bother.” Either Leonard was truly unavailable, or he was still pissed and didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t make much difference which one.

  Probably he should do what Jim said and let it go. One old dead rich bitch, so what? Tomorrow morning there would be another case, a new murder for him to dig through like a slimy sewage pipe, Hatis City had half a million people living within her boundaries and most of them would kill each other over a pair of shoes or a bet on a baseball game, and Ezra could go out and chase that scumbag down and put him away. Thirty more years of that and he could retire. What a fairy tale.

  “Don’t wanna just let this one go,” Ezra said out loud. He wasn’t startled by the sound of his own voice in the empty living room. Like his father before him, Ezra was a great one for talking to himself. His dad used to say that talking was just thinking done out loud- and an idea or a thing he needed to remember tended to stick better if he said it. Ezra could remember him out in the kitchen fixing them lunch (hot dogs, maybe, or mac and cheese…or his “famous” burgers, the secret recipe of which he had promised to one day share with his son but never got around to doing it before he died) because his mother was out at her part-time summer job or maybe just playing cards with her friends that day, talking just a notch over under his breath but loud enough to hear over the ancient black and white television sitting on top of the fridge and playing a steady parade of moldy old reruns. “That’s the thing.”