Fast Falls the Night

by Julia Keller

  Watching Molly run through the rest of her protocols, he thought once again about how much he was attracted to her. And again he was ashamed, given the dire situation, and so he forced his mind to alight on something else: on, for instance, the abject filthiness of this floor. Jake had used the toilet in here many, many times—that was the reason he stopped in at the Marathon, although he knew Danny Lukens chalked it up to the promise of conversation and free candy—but he had never really looked at the floor before. Not like this. Why would he? Why would anybody? The grime was systemic. There wasn’t a single square inch that looked clean. The room smelled just as you would expect it to: It smelled of piss, and of the bleach with which Danny or one of his colleagues attempted, regularly and ineffectively, to mask it. It smelled of rot. It smelled of mildew. But it was the specific and disgusting appearance of the floor that preoccupied Jake just now.

  What would it be like, to die on such a floor?

  Because the girl was clearly dead.

  That was what he called her in his mind—“the girl”—even though he knew it was politically incorrect, as well as technically inaccurate. She was not a girl. She was a woman. Young, yes, but a woman. An adult. Yet somehow, he thought, it was always easier to refer to a woman of any age as a girl. And maybe it wasn’t an insult, after all. Maybe it wasn’t rank sexism. Maybe it was because people wanted to see all females, at their cores, as unformed and malleable and promising. Men were disposable. But women were special, potentially salvageable, regardless of how many years or in how many ways they had abused their bodies.

  “What do you think?” Jake said. What he meant was: Is she going to make it?

  Molly answered without looking up. She didn’t stop working. She was checking the girl’s arms and legs for any other recent injection sites, running two gloved fingers up and down the ashen skin.

  “Don’t know.”

  He wondered if Molly noticed the floor, too. How gross it was. How a smeary, yellow, snot-like film made it slippery. How the brown crud in between the tiles could have been regular dirt or possibly human feces. Impossible to say, really, without a lab test or a good long sniff—and who the hell would ever want to bend down close enough to do it?

  Molly’s cool relentlessness always impressed him. No matter where they were—and he had worked with her in some wretched, rackety, godforsaken places—her focus on her job was steady, implacable. It annoyed him that he had allowed himself, just a moment ago, to think about her in a way that veered well outside the lines of the professional.

  And yet he was drawn to her. One of these days he might just summon the nerve to ask her out. For a meal, maybe. Wouldn’t matter where. As long as it was far away from dirty floors and used syringes. And dead addicts.

  Ernie was back. He didn’t dawdle, but he wasn’t hurrying, either. He had one hand clamped on the end rail of the gurney, waiting for Jake to step clear of the doorway.

  “Helluva night,” Ernie said, in a flat voice. He was in his mid-forties—or so Jake guessed—and he sported a luxuriant handlebar mustache the color of brown mustard. Both curling ends of it stuck out from his face in a manner that Jake found somewhat comical, but he had a hunch that this was not a man who allowed himself to be laughed at, or even teased in a mild, friendly way. There was an air of prickliness about Ernie Edmonds, a simpering pride belied by his sloppy appearance. His trousers were a size too small. They probably hadn’t been when Ernie first purchased them, Jake told himself, but they surely were now. The waistband was folded double in front to accommodate his soap-bubble belly. Unlike Molly, he wore his light blue polo shirt untucked. His sneakers had no laces, effectively turning them into slippers.

  Ernie’s radio spat out a gob of static and a rushed muddle of words, to which he responded, “Copy that.” Molly turned and peered up at him, too focused on the task at hand to have listened to the call, asking him with her eyes to fill her in. “Another overdose,” Ernie said. “Burger Boss parking lot.” He jerked his head at Jake, a rough signal that meant the deputy needed to get out of his way, to move even farther back out of the doorway and into the room, toward the grimy toilet. Ernie bumped the gurney over the threshold. Only about 10 percent of it fit in the small space. They would have to make do.

  “Jesus,” Molly said. “Not our run, right? Somebody else handling?”

  “Yeah.” Ernie fiddled with the hardware on the gurney. His movements were not infused with any sort of intensity. Neither he nor Molly would say so out loud, but this was now officially the Land of the Lost Cause. Urgency was pointless. The girl on the floor was gone. She had died before they arrived, and she would be just as dead when they dumped her on the gurney and her arms flopped over the sides and they picked up those arms and piled them back on her motionless chest. She would still be dead when they shoved the gurney into the rear of the ambulance and slammed the doors. And yet the siren would still scream and the red light would still turn around and around on top of the vehicle, awakening people needlessly from their sleep.

  It was all part of the charade, Jake thought. All part of the little show they had to put on—but a show for whom? For God? So that He’d know they were still trying? So that He wouldn’t get fed up and just abandon the area, leaving them to deal with all this crap by themselves? Maybe. But Jake had another theory, which he had never shared with anyone: The dramatic urgency of first responders—red lights, yowling sirens, the stepped-up pace and the terse talk—was a piece of misdirection. It was a tactical dodge, a way of delaying an acknowledgment of their collective failure to drag the victim back to this side of the line. They had lost, but if they kept fighting, or looked as if they were, the loss might not sting quite so much. They had done this so many times, the three of them; they had seen the same sort of waste. Felt the same sort of drag-you-down futility.

  “Gotta run,” Jake said. Molly and Ernie had a backup team, but he didn’t. Steve Brinksneader was working a multicar accident on Savage Ridge Road. Jake needed to be heading out to the Burger Boss to deal with two more unconscious bodies. Another squad of paramedics would meet him there.

  Jake would have to scoot around Ernie to get out of the bathroom, but Ernie didn’t budge. He was too busy looking at the girl on the floor. He ran a tongue around the inside of his mouth, making his mustache quiver. He frowned.

  “I know her,” Ernie said. “That’s Sally Ann Burdette.”

  Molly did not comment, which tipped off Jake that maybe she, too, had recognized this girl, but wasn’t letting herself think about it. Not while she was working.

  Unlike Ernie and Molly, whose families went back several generations in Raythune County, Jake had lived here only a few years. Faces didn’t spark a long train of associations in his mind. The only Burdette with which Jake was acquainted was a county commissioner. “Any relation to Sammy Burdette?” he said.

  Ernie nodded. “You bet. This gal’s his niece.”

  “Was,” Jake said.

  “Was,” Ernie agreed.

  Sally Ann

  2:20 A.M.

  They thought she was gone but she wasn’t. They thought she was dead but she was still alive. She could hear them. She couldn’t see them and she couldn’t feel anything, but—for a few seconds more—she could hear them. The sound was loud and then it wasn’t loud, like the sound of a train going by; first it’s soft and then it’s really LOUD and then it fades away again. There was a name for that. She knew the name for that. She did. She loved learning new things. She was good at school. Well, she was for a while. Then she wasn’t anymore.

  What did they call that thing where the sound changes? She knew. She really did know the name and if she had more time, she’d remember it. If she had more time, she’d do a lot of things.

  They didn’t know what she knew.

  No one did. No one would ever know what it felt like to be her, to watch your life like you’re watching the fish waggle around in the big glass tank at the Petland out at the mall. Back and forth. Back and fort
h. She’d watch those stupid fish and she’d think: That’s me, that’s it. That’s my life. Back and forth. Same old shit, over and over again. If she tried to get anywhere, change anything, do something, she failed. It never worked out. She had a boyfriend once, back in high school, named Johnny Ehrlich—everybody called him Lick, because of the way you said his last name but also because of the dirty joke—and when she told him (BIG MISTAKE) about her plans to get out of Acker’s Gap, he grinned at her, which was sort of gross to look at because most of his teeth on top were gone and his face was caving in on account of it. He would surely look like a wrinkled old man before he was twenty-five. He’d said, “Yeah, right.” And that just went right through her, like somebody had shot her in the heart with an arrow: Yeah, right. Like it was a joke. Like she was a joke. Like everything was.

  Lick gave her the heroin. First time. Somebody said heroin would feel like being kissed by Jesus. Wow. Those words made her shiver and dance inside, even before the heroin itself did. Just the sound of the words. Some words, certain phrases, did that: She felt them all the way down to her toes. They made her toes curl, in fact. Her English teacher, Mrs. Mason, once told her that she was good with words, that she had a “gift” for them (that was the actual word she used) and she really ought to think about trying for college and being an English major and becoming an English teacher or a writer. Or both.

  She wished Mrs. Mason had never said that because there was nothing worse than somebody telling you that you had a gift for something. That they believed in you. That you could do it if you tried. When they said that, it just made it easier for you to disappoint them. Aunt Dot was always doing that: giving her compliments. Then she had to live up to them. Which was impossible. Aunt Dot could rot in hell for all she cared.

  Lick said he also heard that heroin was like a ten-minute orgasm. Right again.

  Tonight was a mistake. She knew instantly that something was wrong. She’d realized that and then there was a long Nothing and then she heard them working on her and at some point, before the next long Nothing, she thought:

  Doppler.

  That was it. That was the thing with the train and the sound, the coming-toward and the going-away. She had been good in school, not just in English but in science, too, and sometimes she thought she might—

  Charlie

  3:14 A.M.

  Charlie Mathers poked at his shirtfront with a pudgy index finger. Yep: bingo. A dime-sized drop of melted ice cream had landed right next to the third button up from the bottom of his shirt, at the point where the swell of his belly reached its mushy apex. He had experienced considerable initial difficulty in finding the spot, despite having actually witnessed the ice cream sliding off the edge of the spoon, because the only source of illumination in the living room right now was the stubborn blue stupor of the TV set.

  He frowned. He made a soft clucking noise with his tongue. He would have to notify Doreen about the spot, so that she could pre-soak his shirt in Shout to ensure its removal during the regular wash cycle. His wife had tried to wise him up, again and again, about chocolate: It was a killer, laundry-wise, and if he didn’t want his clothes to look as if they’d come down with a bad rash, he would have to either alert her to the presence and location of every stain, every time—or give up his late-night gorges.

  Charlie chose the former. Eating ice cream directly out of the carton while Doreen slept upstairs, a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit marathon unspooling before him courtesy of one of those upper-tier cable channels whose name he could never recall, was now his nightly routine. He enjoyed the linked chain of incidents of make-believe mayhem, a reliable supply of fictional havoc running back to back to back to back to back. Charlie couldn’t get enough of the show. He loved the thing they did between scenes, that ominous two-beat chime (bomp bomp) that not only tied off the just-concluded tragedy but also warned of worse to come. He never tired of the murders and assaults and suspects and clues and false trails and last-minute twists and cynical dialogue, interrupted only by commercials for lawyers specializing in bankruptcy protection, or for hair-removal products (aimed at women), or hair-restoration products (aimed at men), or for bathroom cleaning supplies (aimed at everybody).

  The current episode was a beaut, which explained his most recent spillage. He’d been massively preoccupied. The gap between the lip of the carton and Charlie’s open mouth had not been vast—it was mere inches—but his eyes were welded to the screen and its depiction of Stabler and Benson caught up in a fiery argument over the best way to interrogate a twitchy punk who may or may not have raped and murdered a twelve-year-old girl. And Charlie had paid the price. A majority of the final delectable spoonful from a half-gallon carton of X-Treme Chocolate X-Plosion, his favorite flavor by far, had landed on his stomach instead of in it.

  “Dang,” Charlie said. In truth, his regret was inspired more by having missed that last lovely taste on his tongue than by the making of a new stain.

  Dang was his most extensive foray into the forest of epithets. He never ventured any deeper. Thirty years as a deputy sheriff in a rough, dark county filled with rough, dark people—real-life bad guys, not the fake ones on TV—and still he had never developed the habit of casual cursing. Doreen always said that that was what she’d first noticed about Charles Comstock Mathers, and what had drawn her to him: He was a gentleman. He did not take the Lord’s name in vain. He touched the front brim of his hat when a lady passed him on the sidewalk. Yes, he had his flaws: He was overweight and unrepentant about it, and he was far too gullible, especially when it came to the purchase of self-help books and CD series, and he could be rather silly at times, and he would never rise higher than deputy in the sheriff’s department of Raythune County, West Virginia. But he was a good man. And so, twenty-seven years ago, Doreen Sharpley had accepted his offer of marriage, a decision that had benefited both of them, bringing a mutual happiness and contentedness that—or so it seemed to Charlie—would forever elude Benson and Stabler, who were not married to each other, of course, but who should have been, at least in Charlie’s opinion. Benson and Stabler had been sweet on each other for years. You could just tell. That’s why they fought so much. Stabler eventually left the series—that is, the actor playing him did—hence Charlie liked these early episodes best, when the two of them went at it like cats in a bag. Fortunately, the older shows were the ones most likely to end up in marathons.

  “Dang,” Charlie repeated.

  He moistened his fingertip and dabbed at the spot. When he told Doreen about it in the morning, she would surely sigh and shake her head and mutter something about how civilized people ate ice cream out of a bowl and not out of a carton in the middle of the night—but she wouldn’t really be mad at him. It was a performance. A little show. He knew that. She didn’t mind his slovenly habits. Those habits guaranteed that he needed her. And Doreen needed to be needed. Charlie had figured that out by their second date.

  Hey, Charlie thought. Maybe that was the issue with Stabler and Benson. They were too independent. Neither one needed the other.

  His attention shifted from the brown dribblet on his shirt to the TV screen. Stabler had just stormed out of the precinct, swinging his suit jacket over his shoulder and bolting away while Benson was in the middle of a sentence, and she was none too happy about it. Charlie could read her hurt feelings right on her face: the slowly widening dark eyes, the slightly parted lips, the grim set to her long jaw. Nobody could push her buttons the way Stabler could.

  Geez, Charlie thought. Get a room, you two. He grinned at himself. He was a rascal.

  When the landline rang, he was still so deeply involved in his ruminations about Stabler and Benson and their long-smoldering, non-romance romance that his entire body bounced and shuddered. If he had been holding the ice-cream spoon, he would have dropped it in his lap, making yet another stain for Doreen to contend with.

  The phone lived on the small end table next to his recliner, alongside the remote. Charlie grab
bed at the slender plastic stalk—it was a cordless, with identical brethren distributed around the house at convenient locations—and mashed the answer button with his thumb, cutting off the next ring so that it wouldn’t wake up his wife.

  “Yeah?” Charlie said. His voice was gruff. He didn’t care about sounding cordial. If this turned out to be some drunk who had misdialed, he’d let the bum have it.

  “Charlie. Hey. It’s Jake. Figured you might still be up.”

  Charlie relaxed. “You figured right.” He reached for the remote and muted the TV. He didn’t turn it off; he needed the light.

  Jake was his former colleague and still his good friend. They had worked side by side as deputies for the last few years of Charlie’s career. They still kept in touch, even though Charlie wasn’t on the job anymore, and Jake knew he would be awake. Charlie talked a lot about his fondness for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit marathons that ran so reliably through the night. When Jake was working the night shift, he checked in from time to time, asking advice, testing out theories. Jake wasn’t too proud to admit that Charlie knew a hell of a lot more about law enforcement—and especially law enforcement in Raythune County—than he did.

  “What’s going on?” Charlie said. He kept his tone light and breezy, the default setting for his conversations with Jake, who was a bit of a rascal himself.

  “Just a minute.” Odd. There was nothing breezy about Jake’s tone.

  Charlie, by now more than a little puzzled, heard a noise through the receiver that he recognized: the sticky bramble of static from a police radio. Jake was talking to a dispatcher, asking a question. The words were too muffled for Charlie to make them out. He strained to isolate and identify the rest of the background noise: Tangled-up voices, high and low. Rattles. A heavy hum. The hum sounded like a truck engine stuck in an overworked gear. Charlie could envision the low successive puffs of exhaust, each one exiting the tailpipe like a proud fart.