Tableau

by Michael Kanuckel

  The Jensen case and the matter of the Peters kid, several items of import kept circling around in his mind and snapping at him with predatory fangs. His interest was piqued. The way High Guard Bronson had gotten his back hair up when he found out that Ezra was looking into the death of the Peters kid, going so far as to break into his house (and had Ezra hit the button to lock his newfangled electric deadbolt? He didn’t know and didn’t feel like getting up to check) and threaten him over it; going to tune Ezra up a little, old Mitchell Bronson was- but he got a surprise, didn’t he? Jabjoth the conshop owner and his Weeping Man. Beverly Jensen’s family, like something out of a grimy mimic of a Truman Capote short story. Pembroke the lawyer, using much nicer language but still basically telling him the same thing Bronson had told him- to go fuck off. Beverly Jensen herself, in her seventies but looking half that, and the drug deal that everyone was insisting hadn’t happened. The good doctor saying that the woman could have lived another twenty years if whatever killed her hadn’t happened. Jim and his goddamned politics. All of this added up to something- Ezra just couldn’t see what.

  “Can’t let it eat you up,” Ezra said. He stretched his legs out in front of himself, toes of his sneakers (canvas hi-tops- he was off duty, and the engineer boots were out in the hall) pointed straight up, and got more comfortable in his chair. Maybe he’d take a nap before he fried something up for dinner and took himself to bed. Exciting life. “Ain’t that what ya told Connor? Gotta let it go. Gotta move on.”

  On a whim (and again, Ezra wouldn’t have called it fate, there was no such thing), he decided to call up the kid and see how he was doing. After two hundred kwic worth of bad mixed drinks in a bar and grill that was louder than a used car salesman’s suit jacket, he imagined the kid was doing not so hot. He had Connor’s number somewhere; not in a book, Ezra didn’t operate like that, and certainly not programmed into his phone. He had jotted it down somewhere, on a business card or the back of a takeout menu; probably the menu from the greasy little kitchenette serving paper thin hamburgers and squelching onion rings in back of the bowling alley where the two of them had rolled a few frames. Ezra hauled himself out of his chair with a groan (and how were things going to be, he wondered, when he was a done old man with used up knees and his back a creaking wreck) and went to hunt the kid’s number up.

  He found Connor’s number right where he’d thought it would be, scrawled on the bottom of a limp paper menu from the Eleventh Frame Lounge, among the untidy piles of similar debris covering the surface of the small table where his phone sat. He dialed the number, not sure what to expect- most likely a confused, fuzzy “Hello?” from a young man having one of the worst hangovers of his brief drinking career. In his ear the phone rang once, twice, thrice. Ezra was just about to hang up or leave a message when the ringing cut off, replaced by dead air.

  “Connor?” Ezra said. “Hello? You there, kid?” He could hear breathing, slow and uneven, and maybe some music coming from another room. Connor made some sound, maybe a word or maybe a sob, and then ended the call.

  “Shit,” Ezra said. He hung up the phone and stood there by the hall table, rubbing at his mouth with a fretful hand. He thought about how drunk Connor had been the night before. He thought about the look in the kid’s eyes when he’d talked about the life that could’ve been- the life he lost out on, the one that got traded in for a tour as a professional killer in a country like a frying pan full of blood and then a return trip home to hear about what a piece of shit he was and take a garden rake to the face. He thought about how the kid had just rolled along with him when Ezra took him by the shoulder and shook him. Connor had looked like a done fighter…he’d looked like a man who knew he’d lost and should just pack it up. “Shit,” Ezra said again, his voice only a whisper with ragged edges. He dialed Connor’s number again.

  Connor answered on the first ring this time. “Becca?” he said. His voice was mush; the kid was barely conscious. “Is that you, Becca? I’m sorry. I’m sorry I fucked everything up.”

  “Connor?” Ezra said. He gripped the ancient handset landline phone so hard that the plastic housing cracked in his white-fingered grip. “Tommy? It’s Ezra. Talk to me, Tommy-boy. What’s going on? Are you hurt?” In his mind, holding back the panic that wanted to rush in and muddy everything, was the cold assurance that he knew damn well what had happened; the kid had gone and killed himself.

  “Becca,” Connor said. “Sorry…”

  The connection broke.

  Ezra turned and hurled his phone across the hall; it punched through the drywall there with a dry little poomph and disappeared. “Shit!” he said again. He dashed into the kitchen and snatched up his suit jacket from its place hanging on the back of a chair, digging through the pockets until he came out with his Guard issued palmscreen. He fumbled around with the tiny screen until he found

  the icon he wanted and thumbed it hard, hand shaking. “C’mon,” he muttered, waiting to get connected.

  “Central Information,” a disinterested voice said finally. “If you’d like to-”

  “This is High Guard First Class Ezra Beckitt,” Ezra said. He rattled off his star’s ID number for good measure. “This is an emergency, son. I need the home address for a Strider Second Class Thomas Connor- and I need it right fucking this instant.”

  A beat of silence. “Copy that,” the voice of the office Guard down there in the bowels of the Justice Building said. Ezra could picture him in his mind: portly, balding, never cut out for the street- a file clerk, a tiny cog that nevertheless helped keep the machine running. The Guard’s voice was cool and controlled, anyhow. After another excruciating beat of silence, an interminable amount of time that seemed to stretch into an eon with nothing to punctuate it but the muted click of fingertips on a keyboard, he rattled off an address. Ezra dropped his palmscreen on the hilly linoleum that he kept meaning to replace and bolted out his back door, running for his car in the driveway.

  Underneath his suit jacket on the kitchen chair hung his shoulder holsters. The silvered barrels of his twin .45s glowed like old bone in the shadows.

  Fifteen

  Thomas Connor rented a tiny bungalow along a shady cul-de-sac lined with nearly identical tiny bungalows, probably all owned by the same landlord. Ezra slid onto Rowsdower Terrace doing about seventy, goosed the accelerator to even out his skid, and jounced over the curb and onto the lawn in front of number 227. His headlights splashed across the hedges growing around the front of the bungalow- and the form of a man in a long coat, hat, and gloves on the porch. The man had been jimmying around with Connor’s front door; when the lights hit him he whirled around in a swish of dark fabric, his face a blur of white beneath the brim of his floppy slouch hat.

  “Hey!” Ezra shouted, hopping from the driver’s seat before his compact was even settled on its springs. The man on the porch was faster. He vaulted the iron rail along the side of the three steps leading to the door, cleared the hedges, and was off like lightning as soon as his feet hit the grass. The postage stamp sized lawn was slick with the last of the morning dew and the man almost lost his footing. Ezra would have had him right then, but when he reached to his side to draw out a gun he found nothing. “Freeze!” he said, putting all the command in his voice that he could, knowing it would do no good. The man dashed through the next yard over, hopped a privacy fence with an economical grace the High Guard had to admire, and was gone. Ezra couldn’t worry about him now, anyway. He took the three steps leading up onto the porch all in one and tried the door. Locked. Hoping that young Strider Connor didn’t have a deadbolt setup like the one he’d just had installed, Ezra raised a foot and put it to the door. The cheap lock splintered in the jam and the door swung open, rebounding against the wall and coming back to him. He pushed the door away and moved in.

  Connor was sitting in a thrift store recliner in his tiny living room, glazed eyes showing nothing as he stared out into the darkness there. Ezra saw a bottle of whiskey and some sleeping pills near
at hand, both of them knocked over to spill what little was left in them on the piebald carpeting.

  “Shit,” Ezra said. “Aw, kid, shit. C’mon.” He ran to Connor and grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him. The kid was warm, but rattling him around was like manhandling a bag of wet mulch. Like all High Guards, Ezra was certified in emergency first aid- but that training was lost in a lightning storm of panic and all he had was instinct. He took the first two fingers of his good right hand and jammed them down Connor’s throat as far as he could get them. The kid’s eyes flashed open, terrified and confused. He made an awful sound- gluuraghhh!- and a great glut of vomit came spewing up his throat and out his mouth like a bucket of chum thrown into a wood chipper. Connor’s throat swelled visibly with the amount of shit trying to come up, and what hit Ezra’s shirt and bare arm was hot as a fever. He fought a brief battle with his own gorge, won, and sat the kid up so the stuff could come out and not choke him to death. The smell of the puke was awful, heavy. The living room looked like a bloody crime scene- all those toxic red mixed drinks from the night before, and some lumps that were maybe what was left of a cheeseburger and fries.

  The kid had regained some soupy sort of semi-consciousness now, eyelids fluttering and something akin to speech trying to tumble out of his befouled mouth. Ezra held onto him, one arm wrapped around Connor’s shoulders, struggling to keep him upright as he fished around in his pants pockets; looking for his palmscreen. After a few attempts at grabbing it came up empty, Ezra realized that the device was in the same place as his guns- back at home, probably skidded across the kitchen floor and on into the living room when he’d thrown it aside and ran out the back door.

  Ezra looked around frantically and saw Connor’s uniform jacket hanging from a closet door on the other side of the shabby living room. The brass buttons of the green and blue tunic glittered in the dim light thrown by a chintzy shaded lamp in the corner. He propped Connor up as best he could, ran across the room, and found the young Strider’s own palmscreen tucked into the inner pocket. He thumbed the all channels open button on the side of the device and bellowed into it. “Guard down! Guard down! We gotta Guard down, two-two-seven Rowsdower Terrace! Priority One, all available units scramble. Guard down!” He threw the palmscreen away from himself, ignoring the squawking chatter coming from it, and went back to the kid.

  “Thi isn’t the end of you,” Ezra said. He knelt in front of Connor, unmindful of the mess he’d put his knees in, and grabbed him by the face; his fingertips left stark white imprints in Connor’s cheeks as he shook the kid’s head back and forth. Connor’s eyes were blank silver slugs. The kid was far gone- maybe another ten minutes would have been too late. “You hear me? Ya get? You got work to do, Connor. You got a life to live. You hear? This isn’t the end.”

  Sirens wailed through the city, growing louder by the second. Connor made some sort of sound, it might have been a mumbled string of almost words: “Geddafug offame.”

  Ezra Beckitt held the young Strider up, rocking him. “This isn’t the end of you.”

  As fate (which Ezra would always insist didn’t exist) would have it, it was not.

  Sixteen

  When Ezra got back home, strung out from being questioned half a dozen times about what had happened to Thomas Connor and what hand he’d played in events and reeking of dried puke, he wasn’t surprised in the least to see the door of his little house standing wide open. He wasn’t alarmed, either; he’d left his guns in there and had no weapons but his own hands…but he had the feeling that weapons weren’t going to come into play here. He walked on inside and kicked the door shut behind himself. The house was dark and quiet. He saw the light of his reading lamp coming from the living room and went toward it. He was too tired to be scared.

  The man in the big coat sat there. His slouch hat was off, thrown over the arm of the chair he sat in, displaying an unlined and unremarkable face surrounded by coils of white hair, thick and long as any woman could want. His eyes, of no real color, turned up to mark Ezra as the High Guard came into the room, covered in dried mess that looked like blood. They were rimmed in red, those eyes, and weary; incredibly weary, as if the man sitting there in Ezra’s reading chair knew all the pain and sorrow of the world.

  “The boy,” the man said. His voice was soft; he spoke the way people speak during calling hours at the funeral home. “Did he live?”

  “Yeah,” Ezra said, and watched relief wash over the stranger’s unremarkable face; a relief he didn’t know what to make of. He leaned against the doorway into the living room and crossed his arms, looking his guest over. “Yeah, he did. No thanks to you, Weeping Man.”

  The stranger chuckled, shaking his head. “I am not Wal Ah’rukar,” he said. “If such an entity even exists. No, High Guard Beckitt- I am only a man.”

  Ezra pulled a battered pack of Chesterfields from the pocket of his jeans and lit one up, throwing the rest onto his sofa. “You know,” he said, squinting through a cloud of blue smoke, “I’m not sure if I believe that.”

  The stranger raised his eyebrows at Ezra. Like his hair, the eyebrows were white and thick. “You?” he said. “You, the hard-nosed High Guard, who doesn’t believe in anything but what your own eyes show you- and not even always that?”

  “Okay, so I don’t think you’re some half-assed desert god,” Ezra said. “But you’re not just some guy, either. So what’s your deal? Were you the guy the conshop owner saw inside Beverly Jensen’s car, or what?”

  “I was.”

  “Okay,” Ezra said. He came around the end of his couch and had a seat on it, leaning his elbows on his knees and peering into his guest’s face. “Let’s start there.”

  “Why don’t we start with a name?” the stranger said. “If we’re going to know each other, wouldn’t you think that would be the place to start? Call me Evan. Evan Nichols.”

  “Evan,” Ezra said. “Okay. Now, what were you doing in Missus Jensen’s car the day she died? And tell me how you were in it while you’re at it- the doors were locked when the first responding Guard got to the car.”

  Evan Nichols sighed; the sound was as weary as his pale, red-rimmed eyes. “It’s complicated. I’m going to keep it short, but I’ll tell you all- and then you must decide what you’re going to do with me, High Guard.”

  Ezra took a drag from his cigarette, rolling the fingers of his left hand at his guest: go on, go on.

  “Sometimes,” Evan Nichols said, “just sometimes, mark you, I can see when a person is going to die- when they’re going to die in a bad way. I don’t see heart attack victims, or people who die in car crashes, or even people who are shot during a robbery. I see people who are going to die alone... alone and ugly. People like your Beverly Jensen.”

  Ezra frowned. “How did she die, then?” he said.

  “It was drugs,” Evan Nichols said. “As you suspected. But her family isn’t covering up for her- they honestly believed that Beverly didn’t do drugs. Up until a few weeks ago, they were right. But you see, Mister Beckitt, the lady was finally starting to feel her age. It was growing more and more difficult to attract the sorts of men who used to line up to be with her, and when she did manage to lure one the lovemaking was no longer explosive as it used to be. She was feeling less- less passion and, even more disturbing for her, less desire for the act itself. So she turned to drugs. She started using Darchangel, and for a while it helped…but in the end she was a woman of a very advanced age, and the angel took her.”

  Ezra shook his head. “How can you know all that?”

  “I don’t know how I can,” Evan said. “Only that I can. I saw all of this, just as I saw that she would die. She was a respectable woman in most respects, Mister Beckitt…charity work, and a loving mother, and the force behind the successes of both her husbands- but too much of her sense of self was bound up in the idea that she should be desirable, that she should be able to make men tremble when she passed. Do you see?”

  Ezra could see it. He called t
he woman’s face up in his mind, and then thought of her thirty or forty years ago, before she needed any surgeries, when the red glow in her white cheeks was her and not makeup, when her breasts were pale natural globes men would give almost anything to have fall into their eager hands. She was dynamite. She got old. No matter what she did nothing could stop the march of time. The one thing she’d always known about herself, that she was a force of nature among men and could make them kneel to her, was gone. “You say that you saw how and when she would die,” he said to his strange visitor. “Why didn’t you do anything to stop it? You could have gone to her, stopped her from taking the drugs. You could have made an anonymous tip-”

  But Evan was shaking his head; shaking his head and smiling- a sad, bittersweet expression. “Whatever powers there be in the world, Mister Beckitt,” he said, “whatever it is that allows me to see these things, it will not allow me to interfere with the deaths I’m shown. Believe me, I have tried. Something always gets in the way, you see- a broken down tram, a bad connection on the phone… one time, a big long-haul transport jackknifed in front of me and I almost died myself. I cannot save these people.”

  “So, what?” Ezra said. His cigarette burned down between his fingers and he winced, crushing it in the ashtray on his coffee table and lighting a fresh one. This guy’s story had to be bullshit- had to be-, but it was interesting bullshit. “What’s the point of being able to see these people’s deaths if ya can’t do anything about it?”

  “You don’t see?” Evan said. He looked genuinely surprised at the High Guard’s lack of vision. “I can do something about it. Not prevent the deaths themselves, no…but-”

  “But you can protect the family,” Ezra said. It clicked into place in his head. “Yeah, okay. Missus Jensen’s family, they say no drugs. Won’t even hear about it. And you, you…what?”