by James Sallis
In the distance four loud cracks sounded.
“God, I hope that’s someone setting off fireworks for a holiday I forgot.”
His beeper sounded.
“There goes hope.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
BIG DOG AND B-SIDE turned up again a couple of days later, just after eight in the morning.
“Sure hope we didn’t wake you.”
“Nope. First thing I do every morning, get the day started right, is sit around without clothes on watching the news. Like to keep up.”
“We brought some news about your friend Roy Branning.”
“Hardly my friend.”
“Hardly anybody’s,” B-side said.
“Seems he may have been put down by one of his . . . associates. Nothing to do with you. What do you think?”
“I don’t, before noon.”
“We got on to this the way we get on to most things. Guy we see regularly, what we call a CI, heard some loose talk in a bar, passed it on. But then, you know about CIs.”
We were still standing in the doorway, where my clothes weren’t. When a young couple passed on the balcony, the girl did a double take. I felt my penis stiffen.
“Don’t draw your weapon unless you’re prepared to use it,” B-side said.
Funny stuff.
Big Dog glared at him.
“We know about you, Turner. Word’s come down to leave you alone, though. We don’t much like that.”
“Who would?”
“Right.” He stepped back, forcing B-side to scramble out of his way. “Who would like that? Or for that matter, who’d give enough of a shit to pay attention to what some desk jockey wants, you know? Anyone wants this job can have it. Hell, I’ll gift-wrap it for them, got a nice pink ribbon I’ve saved.” He half-lifted one hand in mock benediction. “Be seeing you, Turner.”
I went back to bed and was enjoying a luscious meal at a swank restaurant, accompanied by a woman every bit as luscious and swank, when a knock reached in and hauled me out of the dream.
“You Turner?” the small man asked. Something wrong with his spine, as though at some formative point he’d been gripped at head and hips and twisted. Dark hair grew low on his forehead, only a narrow verge of scaly skin separating it from the hedge of eyebrow. Cotton sweater with sleeves and waist rolled, cheap jeans with huge wide legs. “Something for you.”
He handed me an envelope.
“Just out?” I said.
“Three days.”
“Want to come in, have a drink?”
“Wouldn’t say no.” He pulled the door closed behind him. “Name’s Hogg.”
He kept watching me. After a moment I said, “What?”
“I was waiting for the jokes.”
“Fresh out of them. Bottle’s by the sink in the bathroom. Help yourself. Ice from the machine out by the landing if you want it.”
“Ice. Know I’m back in the real world now.”
He came out with two plastic glasses of brandy as I was reading the note.
Damn, man, you say you’ll take a message out, you mean it! Guess Roy won’t have to be worrying about my getting out no longer. RIP and all that crap. Now I’ll have to come out and get right on finding that money. Thanks again for carrying for me. Good man. Good luck.
Billy D
“Not that I mind drinking alone,” Hogg said, putting a cup down by me. “Alone. In a crowd. With camels.” His eyes looked as though they’d been separated at birth and spent their independent lives searching for one another. I lifted the cup in salute or in thanks and drank.
“Got anything lined up?”
“Sure I do. Ninety percent of it’ll fall apart before I even get there, way it usually does.”
“How many years you pull?”
“Ten to fifteen on my head, little over four underfoot— this time. Met some punk in a bar, both of us half drunk, heard all about his easy score, next thing I know I’m back on the boards. Damned embarrassing. Here I am, supposed to be a pro.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I was told where to come.”
“Billy D?”
He nodded and, downing what was left of the brandy, stood.
“You’re welcome to stay.”
“Thanks. But that’ll do me.” At the door he paused. “You’re the cop, right?”
“I was.”
“Couldn’t have been easy for you inside.”
“It’s tough for everyone.”
Hogg nodded. “I heard about you. You did okay. You helped a lot of people.”
My hubris.
Though never in all the years before or since have I needed the excuse of it to make an absolute mess of things.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“GODDAMN IT, Sue, just put the gun down.”
She sat on the porch swing, shotgun cradled like a new-born in her arm.
“Where’d you get that thing anyway?”
“It’s mine fair and square, Lonnie, don’t you worry. I traded for it.”
“Alban’s hurt, Sue.”
“Well I sure as hell do hope so.”
“We need to get him help.”
“Maybe his girlfriend could help. Why don’t you go find her? She’ll be hanging around the church somewhere.”
The porch was bare boards, couple of feet off the ground, and ran across the whole front of the cabin. The steps were poured cement. They didn’t quite match up with anything—ground or porch. Alban lay slumped against them.
“He’s bleeding out, Sue.”
“Good.”
“Now you know I’m gonna have to come up there, put a stop to this.”
She shook her head. Raised her left elbow half a foot or so to emphasize the shotgun.
“Wonder that thing didn’t blow up when you first fired it. Crescent, maybe a Stevens, from the look of it. Hard-ware-store gun. Damn near as old as this town. No one else has to get hurt here, Sue. Alban,” he called out. “You okay?”
Alban raised a hand, let it drop.
“Kids with your folks, Sue?”
She nodded.
“Freda’s still bringing home those A’s, I bet.”
Bates stepped out from the shelter of the Jeep and began moving very slowly, hands held in plain sight, towards her.
“They’re good kids, Sue. You don’t want to leave them alone.”
Noiselessly, Don Lee appeared on the porch behind her.
“We head down this road, take a few more steps along it, that’s what it could come to.”
Don Lee reached across the back of the swing with what I can only call infinite tenderness and took the gun. She offered no resistance, in fact seemed relieved.
Bates returned to the Jeep and picked up the mike.
“June, you there? Come back.”
“Ten-four.”
“Need an ambulance out to Alban McWhorter’s.”
“You have it. . . . What’s going on out there?”
“I’ll be home directly. Tell you about it then.”
Don Lee came towards us with Sue in tow. “Alban looks okay to me. Flesh wounds, mostly. My guess is she turned the barrel away at the last moment.”
“I’m sorry, Lonnie,” Sue said.
“We all are.”
“I love him, you know.”
“I know.”
“He’s gonna be okay?”
“You both are. Doc Oldham’ll be in touch. We’ll let you know what he has to say.”
One hand under her shoulder, other at her head, Don Lee guided Sue into the back seat of the squad. She peered out from within, raccoonish.
“Lonnie, can someone call my parents?”
“I’ll go by there myself.”
They lived in a white house back towards town. It stood out among its peers: paint applied within the last few years, yard recently mowed, a conspicuous lack of abandoned appliances and cars. The curtains were open and, as I soon witnessed, the door unlocked. We could see inside. Past the b
ack of the couch and two heads, animals gone biped strutted and spoke on the TV screen. When we rang the bell, two smaller heads popped up between the larger, facing our way. A handsome woman came to the door.
“Lonnie! How long’s it been?”
“Too long as always, Mildred.”
He introduced us. A beautiful smile, one eye (lazy? artificial?) that didn’t track. You kept wanting to glance off to see what it was looking at.
“You boys come right on in. Horace, see who’s here! What can I get you?”
“Nothing, thank you. Heading home to supper the minute I leave here.”
Lonnie shook Horace’s hand, then introduced me and it was my turn. Horace was a tall man, topped with a thicket of blond, haylike hair. He listed to the left, as though all his life a strong wind had been blowing from the east. Samplers and decoupage adorned every wall. Delicate figurines sat on shelves.
Mildred turned to the children.
“You know, I almost forgot to tell you, but when I went looking for liver in the freezer this afternoon—I couldn’t find it, which you have to know, since we ate hamburgers—I saw someone had sneaked a gallon of ice cream in there. I don’t know, but I was wondering if, once you’re ready for bed, just maybe, you might be interested in trying some.”
“It’s Sue,” Lonnie said once the kids were gone.
“We know what’s been going on, Lonnie. Everyone does.” This from Horace.
“She’s okay. So is Alban.”
Mildred: “God be praised.”
“Sue somehow got hold of a shotgun. I don’t think she meant to do much but scare him. Probably waited for him to come sneaking in—”
“He’d have talked back.”
“Always did have a mouth on him.”
“Don Lee thinks she turned the gun away at the last moment.”
“As she was firing, you mean?” Horace said.
Bates nodded.
“Wouldn’t have thought she had it in her.”
Horace and Mildred exchanged glances.
“Alban’s fine,” Bates said. “He’ll be out of the hospital in a day or two. There’ll have to be a preliminary hearing, but that won’t come to much. Sue should be back home about the same time.”
“We want to keep our grandchildren, Lonnie.”
“Sorry?”
“We don’t want them to go back there.”
“We love Sue—”
“—and Alban—”
“—but this has gone on long enough.”
“You want to take Freda and Gerry away from their parents? Sure they have problems. Which of us don’t? But you have to know how much they love those kids, what they mean to them. Take the kids away, their lives come to nothing.”
“You think we want to do this? It’s for their own good.”
“It always is.”
Afterwards I followed him out to the Jeep. Full dark now. Off the road to either side, frogs called forlornly. A moon white as blanched bone hung in the sky. It was some time before he spoke.
“I hate this shit,” he said, “absolutely hate it. Everyone’s right. And everyone loses.”
“True enough.” A mile or two further up the road I added, “But from what I see, you do good things here. You help people, bring them together, shore up their lives. Everything we think the job’s about when we start.”
“Then it changes on you?”
“Or you change. You listen to that hundred-and-tenth explanation and realize you just don’t care anymore, you don’t want to know. Helping people? Improving the community? Hey! you tell yourself, you’re just the dog that keeps the cattle from straying.”
Lonnie dropped me at the office. Few days back, he’d loaned me an old car he had sitting in the garage; now I figured to head back out to the cabin. I was looking down at the floorboard, thinking about a patient I’d had, Jimmie, who was convinced not only that he was a machine but also that he had less than a year left in his batteries, when someone rapped at the window. Startled, I turned. No one should ever be able to get that close without my knowing.
I tried rolling down the window, but it didn’t, so I got out.
“Once again the true gentleman,” Val said. “You hungry, by any chance? One of us owes the other one a dinner, I’m fairly sure.”
“I had plans.”
“Oh.”
“Of course, those plans were only to go home and drink half a bottle of a really good cabernet.”
“What, and let the other half go to waste?”
“Seems a shame, doesn’t it? Want to see where I live?” “Are you asking me out?”
“In, actually.”
“Better than calling me out, I guess.”
“I may even be able to scrounge up a handful of rice.”
“Not brown, I hope. Never can be sure, with you monkish types.” She walked around to the other side. “And I get to ride in this cool car, too! Lucky girl.”
Between us, she pulling from without, me pushing from within, we managed to get the door open. Soon we were well out of town, exiled to the moon’s province, in the company of owls. Neither of us said anything about how beautiful it was out here, though we both thought it.
“By the way,” Val said, “did I mention I’ve just had the worst day of my life?”
“Not that I recall.”
“No? Good. I was hoping I wouldn’t bring that up.”
The radio functioned on a single station: dim patter and songs from the twilight of the race. Val twirled the knob, found static, and spun it back. Herman’s Hermits, girl groups, “Under the Boardwalk.” She settled back, let her head rest, and moments later seemed asleep.
“I’m not,” she said when I pulled in at the cabin. “Almost, but not quite. Drifting . . .” She turned towards me. Green eyes opened and found mine.
We went inside.
“Whoa, why do I feel I’m walking right into someone’s head?”
“Things had gotten way too complicated. I wanted them as simple as they could get.”
Old wooden kitchen table by the window, a single chair. Bed across from it—little more than a cot, really. Shirts and pants on hangers hanging from nails in the wall. Stacks of T-shirts, socks and underwear stowed under the cot. Basin and pitcher on the counter. (Pump just outside.) Tooth-brush and razor laid out there. Books in undisturbed stacks along the back wall.
I popped the cork on the wine, one of those new plastic ones, and suggested we sit on the porch.
“Maybe I should hold out for jelly glasses.”
“And potted meat on toast points.”
The low, indefinable susurrus that’s a part of living in the woods sounded around us. Always that or dead silence, it seemed. Far off, something screamed once, a spear thrown into the night. We watched a silhouette, possibly two somethings, cross the moon.
“The world’s a shithole, isn’t it?”
I reached for the bottle on the floor by my chair and freshened our drinks. An Australian wine, 1.5 liters. We would run out of conversation before we ran out of wine. Picture of a koala on the label, an endangered species. As though we all aren’t.
“Except for music,” she added.
Then, after a moment: “I don’t know if it’s myself or the job anymore. Seems whatever door I open, I don’t like what’s in there.”
She held out her glass for more wine.
“You remember that night we sat out on my porch, hardly talking, with the night so quiet around us?”
I nodded.
“I think about that a lot,” she said.
Chapter Thirty
NOT MANY SHIFTS GO that way. Most of them, you hit the street already behind, dance cards filling faster than you’re able to keep track of. We spent the biggest part of that one rattling doors and doing slow drags down alleys. Had no calls for better than two hours, and when we finally got one it was a see-the-lady that turned out to be about a missing husband. We were twenty minutes into the call and halfway done taking a report when
her response to a routine question stopped me in my tracks, follow-up questions eliciting the information that the man had died ten years ago.
Back in the squad, I sat shaking my head.
“What?” Randy asked.
“That one.”
Randy glanced over as I pulled away from the curb.
“You notice the open kitchen window?” he said. “Saucer of milk on the sill?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
“Woman’s lonely, that’s all. So lonely that everything in her life takes on the shape of her loneliness.”
The next call was to a convenience store where the owner-proprietor supposedly had a shoplifter in custody. He’d taken a jump rope off one of the shelves and tied the shoplifter to it after a baseball bat to the thigh brought him down. But while he was on the phone, the shoplifter had chewed through the rope and gone hobbling out the door.
Nothing else, then, for some time. It was one of those clear, still nights that seem to have twice as many stars as ordinary, when sounds reach you from far away. We grabbed burgers at Lucky Jim’s and ate at a picnic table outside East High, squad pulled up alongside with doors open, radio crackling. You didn’t eat Lucky Jim burgers in the car. And you didn’t need extra napkins, you needed bath towels.
Randy seemed to be doing okay. He’d moved out of the house, put it up for sale, found an apartment near down-town. He was hitting the gym at least three times a week, even talked about signing up for some classes. In what? I asked. Whatever fits with my work schedule, he said.
Three obviously stoned college-age kids were having their own meal, consisting mainly of bags of candy, potato chips, orange soda and Dr Pepper, nearby. They packed up and left not long after we arrived. Two people just as obviously on the street sat beneath a maple tree. The man wore a Confederate cap from which a bandanna depended, draping the back of his neck and bringing to mind all those movies about the Foreign Legion I watched in my youth. The woman had gone on trying gamely to look as good as possible. She’d hacked sleeves from a T-shirt whose logo and silkscreen photo had long since faded and cut it off just above the waistline. Rolled pant legs showed shapely if long-and much-abused calves. “You know that bugs me!” the man shouted towards the end of our stay. She sprang to her feet and started away. “Why you wanna be doing that?” he said, then after a moment got up and followed.