A human being is rarely more than a yard from something he or she can use to damage someone else, and people I know got hurt in all those situations, one stabbed in the throat with a bottle opener by a woman whose mouth was pouring blood but who believed that her life would make no sense if her common-law husband got arrested. The cop got full honors; the woman got a long spell in jail; the guy who’d punched out her teeth in front of her kids is now living in some other woman’s house. Sitting in her chair, fingers drumming on its shabby, ash-dusted arms, unable to understand why her kids are going out of their way to enrage him and why the stupid bitch won’t do anything about it or bring him another beer, and what is it about her face sometimes that makes him want to smash her nose completely flat? Sooner or later one of his scumbag neighbors will run off with his television or his car battery or his shoes, and you’ll turn up and have to treat this guy with the respect he now commands as a victim.
That’s police work. It’s hot sidewalks at twilight. It’s banging on flimsy doors. It’s telling big-eyed children everything’s okay when it’s clearly not. It’s drunken girlfriends who swear that their guy never fucking did nothing—until they realize that their own position is precarious, at which point they’ll volunteer yes, Officer, he might be a Nazi war criminal. And it’s married couples shouting at each other in their yards, hoarse and inexplicable grievances grown so old that even the protagonists don’t recall how they started, and thus it comes down this afternoon to someone forgetting to bring coffee back from the store and so you stand around talking about this for forty minutes, and then you leave, with handshakes all around, and a month later you or someone else will be back to stop them from killing each other over whose turn it was to take out the garbage.
I was on the job for ten years. I turned up and did what I was paid to do, entering people’s lives only when they’d begun to go wrong, after the God of Bad Things had decided to pay a call. In the end my own life started to veer off course, as policemen’s lives do. The problem with being a cop is, you wander into the field of play of the God of Bad Things so often that you wind up permanently on his radar—as a meddler, a spoiler, someone who has tried to mitigate his attempts to stir disappointment and pain into the lives of humankind. The God of Bad Things is a shitty little god, but he has a great memory and a long attention span. Once you’ve caught his eye, you’re there for good. He becomes your own personal imp, perching on your shoulder and shitting down your back.
Or so I believed, every now and then. I know it’s a heap of crap. But still it came to feel that way.
Being a writer actually made sense after this, and not just because I had long ago been an English major in college. Patrol Division is an intensely verbal profession. You spend every day judging what to say and how to say it; learning to get what you want via sentences even the drunk, drugged, or clinically stupid can understand; then interpreting and sifting the replies of people for whom the truth is a third language at best. If it comes to violence, they may have more experience at it than you do, and certainly fewer boundaries. Sure, you can have backup on site within minutes, but it takes only seconds to end your life, and if you had to call in the helicopters last time, then your next walk down that street will be long and hard. Your ability to choose the right words, to judge tone and stance—that’s what the job boils down to 90 percent of the time, not least of all through the truly endless paperwork, in which you learn to express yourself in a clear, concise fashion, with just a touch of fiction here and there.
Certain terms take on an iconic role in your life. “Sir” or “ma’am” is how you reassure victims they’re being taken seriously—but you employ these words with the perpetrators, too. “Sir, would you step out of the car?” “Ma’am, your husband says you have a knife.” “Sir, I’m going to ask you one more time to put down the gun and get on the fucking floor.” It signals theoretical deference, a withdrawable politeness, recalling the way mothers refer to their children by first and last name only when they’re trying not to say “you little fuckhead.” “Perpetrator” is a key term, one through which you reduce the infinity of difference all individuals represent to their being merely the punishable committers of an (alleged) crime, thus setting them in clear opposition to the victim/s, to yourself, to the universe at large. It’s a big, weighty concept, often concentrated to “perp,” and from it everything else follows.
A “weapon” is an object someone can carry that makes it likely he or she is or may become a perp. An “MO” is the characteristic way in which a perp perpetrates. A “victim” is a role created by the act/s of perpetrator/s. An “intruder” is a specialized form of perpetration, enshrining within its eight letters everything that needs to be said about the inviolability of private space (as defined through property law) and the wrongness of someone who puts himself inside the walls we erect against the chaos of other people. Even a murderer is just another kind of perpetrator, nothing more.
Not every cop is concerned with these matters, of course. But some are, just as there are neurosurgeons who scream at the ball game and priests who while away confession planning the evening pizza: Okay, my son, so you harbor lustful thoughts about your neighbor—but the real question is, anchovies, or not? Your job is to find the utterances that provide a structure for each situation, to show a path out of the present moment that does not involve jail or death. Armed with your words, you cleave the night with your judging hand and set the world to rights. In those written reports, at least. The judicial system has a way of blowing the fog right back in. Lawyers have different words and use them to different ends. Their structures are clean and theoretical and do not have to stand the test of working in stairwells, parking lots, and bars.
And when you leave this circus?
Leaving the police force is like getting out of jail, though not in a good way. It’s like being fluent in the language, culture, and geography of a country—which overnight slides off the planet, taking all its inhabitants with it. Suddenly all this insight and autistic absorption means squat. You need instead to understand what’s been happening in the real world, how to deal with people now that you’re not wearing a badge, and what all these weird normal folks have been talking and caring about while you and your fellow inmates were blinker-focused on the bad, bad, bad.
As a readjustment it’s pretty major. Probably only being dead is going to seem like more of a jolt.
The places I had photographed in L.A. were crime scenes, of a specific type. My book was called The Intruders. The cover showed the house where a woman named Leah Wilson had been found dead: just a standard murder by person or persons unknown, but one that really got under my skin. The pictures inside were also locations where a person or persons had unlawfully gained access to someone else’s place of residence or work. Once there, they had committed a crime, from burglary to rape and murder. Houses, garages, the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant, hotel rooms both cheap and expensive, a coffee shop in Venice Beach. None of the photographs showed victims, nor did I try to capture the aftermath of the disturbance. In the text accompanying the pictures, I merely described what took place—as best I could, as a nonwitness—along with a flavor of the neighborhood. In the photos I was trying to take the places back to where they’d been in the world before something came from without and changed their texture forever. I have some idea why I was doing it. I had spent all my working life dealing with after-the-fact. In effect the photographs themselves were untruths, as they always are.
The idea I now had was simple. It’d occurred to me before but I’d dismissed it, because I’d seen The Intruders as a one-shot. Maybe Fisher’s visit had given me a push, though I still believed that the cops were correct in assuming Bill Anderson to be the best suspect in the murder of his wife and child, and so that crime did not revolve around an intruder.
I realized I could do the same thing again, for somewhere other than L.A. Seattle, say.
I wouldn’t have access to information about crim
es or long-term knowledge of the neighborhoods, but I could work around the former, and some research and talking to locals could cure the latter. A phone conversation with the crime desks of the major newspapers would be enough to put me on their radar. I could even try talking to Blanchard again, if I could face it. Missing-persons cases do sometimes start with an intruder, after all. The more I sat and stared out the window, the more the idea made sense. I guess I’d always seen myself as a one-shot kind of guy. But how had Gary put it? Something about nailing your colors to the mast. Enough time had passed.
Maybe I had to accept that an ex-cop was what I was.
When I surfaced from these thoughts, I realized I could hear music from the living room. Amy had something playing, which meant she couldn’t be working too hard—and wouldn’t mind my testing the idea out on her.
I was halfway to the door when I slowed, as the music registered as more than generic sound. I listened for a moment, assuming that what I was hearing would change. It did not, however, and so I walked into the living room. Amy was sitting on the couch. She had a sheaf of documents on her lap but wasn’t looking at them. Instead she was staring into the distance, slightly hunched, as if she’d been in the same position for a while.
“Hey,” I said. I felt tense. There had been a time, a year and half ago, when I’d seen her this way occasionally.
She blinked and turned to look at me. “Miles away.”
“What are you listening to? Not your usual kind of thing.”
“We all grow, babe,” she said. “You want some tea?”
“You mean coffee?”
She frowned vaguely. “No. I’d like some tea.”
I shrugged, not even having realized we possessed such a thing, and walked over to the glass doors as she went to the kitchen. While I waited for her to come back, I looked out at fir trees and dogwood and a sky that had lost the morning’s blue clarity and was turning to cool gray. Many types of music go with such a view.
Old-time jazz is not one of them.
An hour later I was running through the trees and finding it hard going. I didn’t usually go out two days straight, and my body didn’t get what I was trying to prove. I wasn’t sure I did either. I’d just felt like I wanted to be out of the house for a while.
I tried to return to what I’d been thinking about in the study, but my mind wasn’t interested anymore. It wanted to worry on the idea of the music Amy had been playing instead. So I tried to empty my head, concentrated on the slap of my shoes on the ground, on the smell of the trees, the cold air as it sucked and pushed in and out of my lungs.
As I pulled back around toward the big pond at the bottom of our land, I realized I could hear my cell phone ringing. I slowed, trying to fumble it out of my sweatpants pocket, then stopped. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen. I walked toward the pond as I put the phone to my ear, looking up at the house, wondering if it was Amy calling.
“Jack,” said a voice. It was male.
Hearing his voice was no less surprising the second time. “Gary, hi. You caught me out running.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Look, we need to talk.”
“I haven’t changed my mind,” I said. I was only half listening. Now that I could see the house, about a hundred and fifty yards up the hill, it looked as though someone was standing out on the deck.
“I’m not really calling about that,” he said, and hesitated. “You were in Seattle a couple days ago.”
“How do you know that?” I said. “And, in fact, how do you even know my cell-phone number?”
“I’d like you to come back here. As soon as you can.”
“Gary, I’m kind of concerned by the idea that you might have been following me. Maybe you’d better come here, explain what’s on your mind. Because—”
“I can’t come to your house,” he said quickly.
“This is starting to sound strange,” I said, keeping my voice steady. I could see now that it was Amy standing out on the deck. Of course—who else? “Round about now you’re going to need to give me a good reason not to end this call and block your number. And call the cops.”
There was silence on the line. Amy was looking out over the forest, unaware that I could see her. Since she wasn’t wearing a coat, she wouldn’t be out there for long. She really doesn’t like the cold, and it was sharp enough now to be sending a thick little cloud of condensation up around her face.
“It’s about Amy,” Gary said. “I’m sorry, Jack, but there’s stuff you need to know.”
chapter
EIGHTEEN
You kept moving. You kept moving. You kept moving. That was what you did. If you were moving, then you were going somewhere. If you had somewhere to go, then you were a proper person and nobody bothered you—and so you kept moving even when your feet hurt and you could no longer tell the difference between where you were and where you’d been. If you stopped for a moment, they looked at you. They asked if you were lost. They asked if you were hungry or thirsty and where your mommy was. They didn’t seem to realize that these questions hurt.
Madison was very glad she had her coat, and not just because Seattle’s streets were cold. She was glad because it had been expensive, and other people seemed to know that. This meant that some did not bother her, people who she sensed would have been only too happy to bother her otherwise. It helped, too, that she was tall, like Mom.
She was also glad it was now day. The night had been very long. After she arrived in the city, dropped off near downtown by a man in a pickup who’d stopped to use the restroom at Scatter Creek and been glad to give a girl a lift when presented with one thousand dollars in cash, she had realized she still had no clue where to go. So she was in Seattle now—so what? The sense of purpose that had driven her since she left Cannon Beach was flagging. While it had been present, everything had seemed easier. It was like doing what a bigger girl said because you wanted to be her friend. It was like when you were in the kitchen and you’d had a couple of cookies and weren’t supposed to have any more—but then suddenly you looked down to see that there was another one in your hand, half eaten. Whoops. As if there were another arm inside your arm, lifting it, doing things, but when Mom came in and found you there, caught cookie-handed, suddenly it was just you, alone.
Maddy had seen Daddy at dinner, too, saying this was the last glass of wine but then seemingly unaware of his hand lifting the bottle to pour just a little more. Mom had it, too, in stores, and maybe in other ways. At times over the last months, Maddy had seen her mother sad and quiet, as if she’d decided something. But that evening or the next day, she would be happy again—and how could that be, unless she had decided against an earlier decision? How could you mean something and then not mean it? And one time Madison had come into the house to find her on the phone, and maybe it was just her imagination, but she thought her mom looked like she’d been caught cookie-handed, too. Madison wondered if maybe everybody’s life was like this. She hoped it wasn’t just her. And she hoped it wasn’t going to keep getting worse.
At least she wasn’t hungry or thirsty now. The man in the pickup let her have some of his coffee and gave her half his sandwich when he dropped her off. She had known while offering him the money that many people would decide to bash her over the head and see what else she had, but this man hadn’t been one of those. She’d known this before getting the money out. His eyes were pink, and he smiled a lot, and she knew he was a man who just wanted an easy life. Mom had often told her she was good at judging people. Her dad usually added “and getting them to do what you want,” but he’d be smiling, and he meant it as a good thing.
She spent several hours walking the city streets, going some other way when she heard footsteps or shouting. She tried calling home from a pay phone, using coins she knew she’d taken from her mother’s purse before leaving Cannon Beach, which she now felt very bad about. She was not someone who stole. But the phone had rung and rung at the house in Portland, then gone to the an
swering machine. It was the middle of the night, okay, but there was a phone right there on their bedside table. Why wasn’t Daddy at home? She tried calling Mommy’s cell, too, but for some reason kept getting the number wrong. She knew it, she knew that she did—she’d gone to a lot of trouble to learn it by heart a couple of months before—but now it seemed to have dropped out of her head. She tried a few numbers that sounded right and woke up a few angry people, but none of them was her mom.
So she kept walking. She felt sometimes like she was looking for something, and at one point she found herself walking up a long and really steep hill and into an area where there were nice, big houses. She stood opposite one of these for a while, in the darkness, but it just made her feel angry and sad. When it got really cold, she found an alleyway back toward downtown that had a deep doorway some distance along it, and she sat huddled up in her coat. The doorway smelled of old pee. She meant to stay awake, but she couldn’t. She was exhausted with all the walking. With pretending that she wasn’t really, really scared.
She fell asleep, but it was not a good sleep. Things kept coming into her head and going around and around. Some made her happy, like a dream full of glimpses of little girls, pretty and smiling, and another of her sitting in a chair in a nice house with a view over the bay. Some were sad or frightening, like one where she was running along a concrete path down near the water itself, out of breath. She liked dreams, normally. They could be funny and interesting. These were not. They were like she was channel-surfing and found some new batch of channels that hadn’t been there before. Some did seem a little familiar, from years back, from when she’d wake in the night to find that Mom or Dad had run in to see why she was making that noise. Other were dark and noisy and grown-up…not nice. She never quite saw anything that she shouldn’t see, but she believed that if she watched for long enough, she…would.
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