18 APRIL 1982
DETECTIVE GREGORY STETSON SAT IN HIS OFFICE, eleven o’clock at night, staring ahead at nothing in particular, biting mindlessly on his thumbnail. An old habit, a bad habit.
His office was larger than the guest room of his house that his mother-in-law slept in during her too-frequent visits from St. Louis, and this fact alone, even on a night such as this, filled him with something resembling joy.
Stetson adored his office. Every square foot, every sea-blue carpet fiber. He loved unlocking his office in the mornings. He loved shutting the door behind him when he went out for coffee. He loved locking it at night, the music the key made in the dead bolt. He loved the painting Mindy had given him after his promotion—a lone hunter in an overgrown forest, double-barreled shotgun slung over his shoulder, staring up at a full and bright moon shining through the trees. He loved the pictures on his desk, pictures of himself and Mindy. In the latest picture they’d taken, Mindy wore a blue dress pressed tightly against her eight-months-pregnant belly. She held her hands over her stomach. And Stetson, standing behind her in a blue sports coat, held his hands over hers, cradling their unborn child.
Most of the other detectives sat in desk-clumps scattered haphazardly about the open floor of the precinct, but not Stetson. And to make it all sweeter, he was also the youngest detective on the force, in possession of what Chief Gonzalez called “exemplary acumen for the promotion to detective.” And when he’d requested an office in which to apply his talents in peace, the chief said he’d look into it. The next day, the chief showed Stetson to his new office.
It overlooked a quiet park, ash trees stoic beside a glimmering pond. During the day, a few senior citizens showed up and threw bread into the pond and waited for ducks. The ducks rarely arrived, but the seniors didn’t seem to mind. Old folks, old habits.
The other detectives whispered about him when they thought he wasn’t listening. He knew this. After all, he had “exemplary acumen.” They passed rumors in hushed tones, leaning over their desks. The typical green-eyed, jealous bullshit. One of his favorite idling activities was to swing open his office door and watch the gossiping detectives fall perfectly silent, sitting at their desks and leafing through files like choirboys digging their noses in hymnals. When these rumors made their way back to Stetson, he was surprised to find that some of their speculation was true, but even those that had some kernel of truth were flavored by some crazed conspiracy based feebly on a reality they did not understand, could not understand, would never understand.
Let them whisper, Stetson thought, while I save this city from itself.
On this particular night, though, Stetson was the only detective left in the precinct. The janitor was running a vacuum outside his door. Stetson was expecting an important call at any moment. They had agreed on eleven o’clock, but it was currently five past. He checked his Rolex every few moments just to see if time was still moving forward the way he remembered.
He had nearly chewed his thumbnail clean off when his rotary phone rang on his desk. He sighed, picked it up, and set it back down. He checked his watch.
The rotary phone rang again. He sighed again. He checked his Rolex again. But this time he picked it up.
“Stetson,” he said curtly.
“Greg?” Mindy’s sweet, sleepy voice whispered into his ear.
“I’m working late, Min. Can’t talk right now.”
“You didn’t tell me you’d be working late. I was worried sick over here.”
“Something came up. Can’t talk right now. Waiting on a call.”
“When will you be home?”
“I don’t know. But I really can’t talk right now.”
“What came up at work?”
“I have to go, Min.”
“Are you safe?” she asked.
But he was already hanging up. And just a moment later, the AN/PRC-18 walkie-talkie stashed beneath his desk came alive with a static yawn, followed by a piercing frequency that burst through the speakers. Phone lines could be tapped, but the AN/PRC-18 operated on a frequency that belonged solely to himself and the man hopefully on the other line. Paranoid? Maybe. But he wouldn’t put it past some of those lousy desk-clusterfuck detectives to try and crucify him for doing exactly what they all knew he was doing, for doing what any of them would do, given the chance, for doing exactly what had gotten him a promotion and an office with a nice view, for doing something that was helping the city they had all sworn to protect. So he kept the walkie-talkie locked in his bottom drawer in the office that he locked each night.
“Seventy-first and Pulaski,” said the deep voice on the other end.
Stetson brought the receiver close to his lips. “Roger that. Stay put.”
* * *
Stetson knew where to look for him. In two years’ time, he’d come to know the way that the Kingfisher’s mind worked. He preferred unlit alleyways, gravel drives, construction sites, dead ends, underbellies of bridges. The areas the casual observer’s eye naturally drifted over, like the space separating words. These places, Stetson thought, they were reflections of the Kingfisher—you would never see them unless you knew what you were looking for. And the more Stetson worked with the Kingfisher, the more he began to casually notice these spaces, and the more he realized that the city seemed to be built for the Kingfisher. Chicago was an architecture of lost places. A myriad of shadowed corners, recessed secrets. Plenty of real estate for those who wished to remain unseen.
So when Stetson saw construction scaffolding climbing the sky alongside 71st and Pulaski, he knew he would find the Kingfisher somewhere inside the site. He threw the unmarked car into park across the street and was careful to get out of his seat slowly, so as not to raise alarm from any observing party, even though he saw no one. He walked casually across the street, hands in his pockets, and ducked beneath a metal girder meant to ward off street traffic.
Inside the construction site: rebar crawled out from Druidic concrete slabs; backhoes and cranes loomed over a dig site; a bulbous concrete mixer; pallets of bricks and two-by-fours grew up from the ground, the sheen of cellophane wrapping reflecting the full moon hanging overhead.
Stetson heard only the sound of his own footsteps in the gravel, unhurried but louder than he would have liked. He moved forward, farther into the site, looking for the Kingfisher. He wondered if he could have possibly come to the wrong place after all. But then he heard a cough. Phlegmatic, wheezing. And he set off in its direction at an even faster clip, arms pumping at his side, his tie flapping over his shoulder.
Stetson saw him, the Kingfisher, standing in the shadow of a rusted staircase that crawled alongside what looked like an aluminum silo. The Kingfisher’s back was against the wall. As Stetson neared him, the Kingfisher pointed at the man lying before him in a heaving mass. The man, as if on cue, coughed. Blood or spit or both dripped in black strands from his mouth like fat raindrops on this cloudless night.
“Jesus,” Stetson whispered. “Is he going to live?”
The Kingfisher didn’t say anything. Stetson thought he might have seen him shrug, but even that was uncertain.
“Where’d you end up finding him?”
“Address you gave me. He didn’t run. Pulled a gun.”
“Really?”
“Made it easy.”
The man at Stetson’s feet coughed again, followed by a low rattle in his lungs that faded as quickly as it had come. He was broken and curled, legs bent backward in some impossible pose, his arms hugging his back. Like a flower in reverse bloom.
The man let out a groan, soft. And then he went silent.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Stetson asked. He couldn’t rip his eyes away, no matter how much he wanted to. It didn’t matter how many of the Kingfisher’s criminals he had seen twisted, broken, reassembled, disfigured—each time it struck him with the same impact, the realization that we are so much more fragile than we think. So easily broken, so capable of bleeding out into the dirt.<
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“He pulled a gun,” the Kingfisher said. “And he fired it at me.”
“What do you care? It’s not like he’s going to actually hurt you, right? Why do you have to do this to them?”
The Kingfisher didn’t respond. He tucked his head down into his shoulders, raised them in a sort of lazy response.
Stetson asked, “What was he going to do to you that would make you do this?” When he realized an answer wasn’t coming, he turned back to the broken mass before him. “I don’t think he’s breathing.”
The Kingfisher crouched down and laid a hand on the man’s neck. He rested it there, this shadow over another shadow, the two temporarily joined, and then he stood back up slowly.
The Kingfisher shook his head.
“Fuck,” Stetson whispered. “I’ve told you. I’ve told you about this. And you said you’d be more careful.”
“He pulled a gun,” the Kingfisher said in his same flat voice. “He would have killed me, too.”
“And just how the hell would he have managed to do that?”
The Kingfisher turned around with a sigh and paced a few steps. “He would have killed me if he could.”
Stetson reached for the flashlight on his belt and shined the white beam at his feet and then passed it over the body. It was worse than he could have imagined. Blood poured down the man’s shirt, shining against the fabric. As Stetson passed the flashlight over his face, he saw a black man whose nose lay folded over his cheek, the skin around his eyes swollen to the size of plums, and his mouth opened to a scream that would not come.
“Who the fuck is this?” Stetson whispered, a sick feeling overcoming him. Cold sweat poured down his forehead; his throat went dry.
“That’s the guy,” The Kingfisher said over his shoulder. “The guy you told me about.”
“No,” Stetson whispered, and then a shivering pulse ran up his spine and crawled from his mouth at a volume that penetrated the once silent night. “No, it’s not the fucking guy. Goddamnit, it’s not the fucking guy. That’s not him. Who is this?”
The Kingfisher turned around and traced Stetson’s flashlight. He seemed to be looking down at the dead man, trying to make sense of this, but that could have just been an illusion of the shadows, an illusion of Stetson’s own sudden sense of vertigo as he folded over, hands against his knees, breathing heavy as he tried to reason the unreasonable.
“What did you do?” Stetson asked. “Tell me exactly what the hell did you do?”
The Kingfisher didn’t say anything at first, only leaning closer to the body while keeping a space between them. And when he did speak, it was only a whisper. “He pulled a gun.”
“Every time, I give you the fucking name, and I tell you where they might be. I describe what they look like. I give you a fucking physical description. And now this happens?”
A train whistled past in the not-so-far distance. The wheels kissing the tracks, roaring southbound.
“Jesus fucking Christ Almighty,” Stetson felt himself shouting. “You fucking imbecile. I just can’t wrap my head around what little goes on in your stupid empty head. Every time I tell you exactly what to do. I give you everything you need. And then you go off and do this and now I have to take care of it for you? Is that what this is? I clean up your murder? Because that’s what it is. You murdered this man.”
The Kingfisher crouched down and looked at the dead man. He ran his hands over the man’s eyes, closing them.
Stetson stuffed his knuckles into his mouth, bit down. He felt blood on his tongue. “You’re a fucking joke,” he said, in a voice as low as he could manage. “That’s what you are. I may not be as strong as you or as fast as you or as whatever-the-fuck-you-are, but at least I know how to identify a person. This guy is black, for Christssakes. I told you, the guy you’re looking for is a white guy. Caucasian male. White guy. I mean, holy shit. White. White. White.”
“He was at the address,” the Kingfisher said in a voice that was just a breath, dead in the air. “He had a gun. What was I supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to get the right guy,” Stetson screamed, voice straining. “You killed the wrong guy. And now I have to deal with it. Now it’s my problem. Mine.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t remember. I didn’t know.”
“The only thing this guy did to you was pull a gun. And can you fucking blame him? Some freak-of-nature came bull-rushing towards him. Anyone in their right mind would have pulled a gun. You killed the wrong guy. He’s dead. You did that. You. Only you. You murdered him. This isn’t on me.”
“I know that,” the Kingfisher shouted. He lunged toward Stetson—a movement that was not a movement at all, but rather an instantaneous shift of his body from one place to the next—but stopped just a foot away. “I know what I did,” he said. “I know what I did and I didn’t mean to do it.” He turned and walked back to the edifice behind him, leaning against it, tucking his head between his shoulders. He was never as big as the newspapers said he was, but here he was, not even as big as Stetson remembered him being. He seemed to shrink with each passing second. Stetson thought he might have seen his wide shoulders shake, but just for a brief second.
Stetson ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked around to make sure they were still alone. “Go home. Get some sleep. I’ll figure this out. I’ll take care of it.”
Stetson could only make out the whites of the Kingfisher’s eyes as they stared before him at the crumpled shape of his creation. A mangled body curled into the tortured shape of a question mark at the end of a question unasked.
And now the Kingfisher was saying something, a long and stringing thought, but the words didn’t seem to make it past his lips.
“It’s OK,” Stetson assured him. “Just go home and get some sleep. I’m sorry. You did what you thought was best, right? That’s all that happened here.” And now he was speaking rapidly, trying to convince not only the Kingfisher, but also himself. “But, listen, no one has to know this was you. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll call it in. I’ll say I saw some guys fleeing the scene. No one’s going to think twice. It’s going to be OK. Hey. Listen to me. It’s going to be OK. And besides, he had a gun, right? Who knows who he might have killed with that same gun? Maybe he was planning on robbing someone or killing someone with that gun. You did something good here. Let’s just forget about this whole night, OK? We’ll give it a couple days and start fresh. Take some time and get some rest.”
But the Kingfisher remained standing there, staring down. He slid down the wall until he was sitting, and brought his knees to his chest.
Stetson had seen this man jump from a seven-story rooftop to the sidewalk, unscathed. He had felt this man lift him off the ground with a single hand wrapped around his throat. And Stetson nearly pitied him now, this man who could perform extraordinary and unimaginable feats. A man with powers and abilities Stetson would give anything to have, now reduced to a child’s posture in the gravel. You can give a man all the strength in the world, but you can’t strip from him his human weakness.
“There’s no shame in this,” Stetson said, although he knew there was. There was nothing but shame. Paralyzing and suffocating shame. A dead man at his feet. An innocent man. Those lifeless eyes. “It’s going to be OK,” he said, more to himself than the Kingfisher, surprised by the softness of his voice. Softer than he had ever heard it passing from his own lips, softer than he would ever hear it again. He reached out a hand and laid it on the Kingfisher’s shoulder. It was bone-hard. Stringed and warm and muscled and cold.
“I didn’t know.”
“I know.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You did what you thought was best. That’s all you or I could ever hope to do.”
19 MINESWEEPER
“WHAT’S THIS?” Fester inquired in a sleep-laden, two-packs-a-day drawl.
Wren jumped, fell back against th
e racks of shoes. For a large man shaped like a deflating beach ball, Fester was astonishingly feline in his movements. She didn’t know her boss was at the alley this early hour of the morning, much less that he was so nimble at sunrise.
“What is this?” he repeated, pointing a cigarette-stained finger at her laptop.
Wren herself had woken up only a half hour ago, literally rolling out of bed just in time to catch the L. No time yet to adjust to the new day, squinting at the sun pouring through the handprint-smudged windows of the train car. No time yet to think of yesterday, even. When she’d arrived at the alley a few minutes ago, she flipped on the lights, put cash in the drawers, and ran a vacuum halfheartedly behind the counter. There’d been no trace of Fester, but then again, he was known to sleep in his office sometimes. Though she had never actually seen the inside of his office, she’d heard from coworkers that he had an air mattress and an extensive and valuable vintage Playboy collection. How they knew this, though, she didn’t want to know.
So she was both dismayed and fearful to look up and see Fester’s sunburnt bulk standing in front of the counter, his face reddened like brick with pale circles around his eyes where he often wore a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses.
“This?” Her voice broke like a twelve-year-old boy. Most people made her nervous, but him especially. “Oh, sure, yeah, it’s my laptop.”
“No shit,” he said. “I mean, what’re you doing on that thing?” Fester’s accent Wren had always guessed to be from Kentucky, maybe Tennessee. How he ended up owning and operating a bowling alley on the South Side of Chicago, Wren would never know, nor did she really care to. He was enigmatic in the least intriguing way possible, a cipher she didn’t care to solve, or for that matter, speak to face-to-face.
“I was playing a game.” And then she nodded at the empty lanes. “It’s a slow day.”
“What game?”
It took her a few beats to think of one. “Minesweeper?”
In reality, she had been scouring every corner of the internet—the darkest catacombs populated by nothing more than bones, smiling skulls, and the most egregious of internet trolls—for a final video from the gunman acknowledging the leaked ME report, his promised release of the hostages. There hadn’t been one yet, which she took as an ostensibly good sign. Perhaps he wouldn’t put out a final video at all and instead, he would simply stop all communication and disappear into the beyond. But Wren wanted a final video. She wanted to know that she had done something good. She wanted visual proof that the hostages were safe. She wanted to know it was over. All of it. She wanted absolution.
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 18