by Jess Walter
She should call for backup. She should have called for backup the minute she saw the car, but this second-guessing, this inability to trust herself, made her decisions slow and muddy. Without looking away from the figure in the driver’s seat, Caroline reached with her right hand, patting the floor in front of the passenger seat until she found the butt of her handgun. She climbed out of the car carefully, using her door as a shield. She pointed the gun toward the red car and edged out from the car door to her left, sliding, staying low. The driver’s side window on the red car came down slowly.
“Both hands out the window!” Caroline yelled. She steadied the gun.
He did and right away she knew by the skinny, shaking arms that this wasn’t Lenny Ryan. Caroline edged closer until she could see that it was a boy in this car, maybe eighteen, nervously waiting for a ticket. She allowed the gun to slip to her side as she approached the red Nissan Sentra. A boy in a baseball cap looked up at her.
“Did you just drive past Corbin Park?” Caroline asked breathlessly.
“No, I swear,” said the boy too quickly and more than a little defensively, as if driving by Corbin Park was illegal.
Caroline stood next to his car, breathing heavily. She looked in every direction, then back at the car and the nervous boy. She could see a bottle peeking out from just beneath his car seat. He moved his foot to cover it. “Hand me that,” she said.
He reached down and handed her a bottle of Mickey’s Wide Mouth beer.
“Is this any good?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Uh, it’s not mine.”
She laughed, releasing tension, then dumped the beer on the ground near her feet and tossed the empty bottle in the backseat.
“Recycle that,” Caroline said. “And”—she tried to think of something—“signal when you turn, okay?”
Caroline walked back to her car and climbed in. She opened the glove box and put her gun inside, then closed it. Her cell phone flashed at her from the passenger seat—the numbers 9, 1, and 1 still on its face. She picked up the phone and turned it off.
When had she lost confidence in her senses? In New Orleans, when she’d been so certain she’d seen a girl being molested on a balcony? Or earlier, when she’d failed to stop Ryan from pushing Burn over the bridge? Or had the erosion begun six years ago?
Caroline started her car and drove back through her neighborhood, cutting up a side street along Corbin Park, a slim crust of pleasant homes around the park, fading quickly to apartment buildings and run-down houses with backyard sheds and cars on the lawns, to her neighborhood of small brick homes and remodeled bungalows.
She was surprised to find her house completely dark, then remembered turning off all the lights when she hid—apparently from some kid in a red Nissan with his first beer.
She hated going into a dark house, and anyway, this felt like one of those nights when it wouldn’t be worth the effort of trying to sleep, when her mother’s insomnia would get the best of her. She drove south on Monroe, a street of fifty-year-old, three-story brownstones mixed in with newer burger joints and appliance shops and convenience stores. Every third car she passed seemed to be red.
She parked at a meter in front of the Public Safety Building. At the turnout in front of the building Dale Henderson, the graveyard patrol sergeant, was climbing out of his car. He’d been Caroline’s sergeant for a while, after Dupree had transferred out of patrol. Henderson waited for her and they walked toward the building together.
“What are you doing here so late?” he asked.
She smiled. “The fellas like it when I come in early and make coffee. What about you? Sounds like you guys fell into the shit tonight.”
“How’d you hear about that?”
“Radio.”
Henderson nodded and held the front door for her. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Caroline said.
“Well. You’re still close with Dupree, right?”
“Ye-e-e-ah,” she said cautiously, wondering at the way he said “close,” at the meaning of “still.” “Why, what happened?”
“Well, for one, he showed up two hours after his shift was over, without calling in. And he jumped into a street fight and got stabbed in the shoulder for his effort.”
Caroline felt her neck muscles tighten. “Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. Couple of stitches. But when I asked him why he didn’t call in, he got all bent out of shape and finally said he was asleep in his car in front of his wife’s house.”
They stopped and faced each other in the large open foyer of the Public Safety Building. Directly ahead was the police sergeant’s desk and behind that, the door to the detectives’ offices.
Caroline had a bad feeling. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
Henderson glanced at his shoes. “Well, maybe this isn’t my place, but having gone through a divorce myself, well, sometimes”—he struggled to find the words—“the other party doesn’t understand how much is at stake for the one leaving his family.”
Other party? Caroline’s hands balled up into fists. “I don’t know what you think, Dale, but—”
He interrupted her. “A single person like yourself just goes…with the flow, so to speak. But for a guy like Alan…well, his decisions have an impact on other people.”
Caroline turned and walked away.
He followed her. “I know it isn’t my business—”
She said over her shoulder, “There is no business, Dale.”
“I’m not being judgmental—”
She stopped and spun back to face him. “No, that’s exactly what you’re being. And you’re full of shit.” She stalked off, and this time he let her go. She punched in the code on the door to the detectives’ offices and found herself in the long, bright hallway in front of the Special Investigations Unit, her anger bleeding away into worry about Dupree. She shouldn’t be surprised by Henderson. There were no bigger gossips in the world than cops; you can’t ask people who traffic in the flow of information in the community to turn it off when they return to the office.
Caroline swept her card and entered the SIU office and was immediately struck by the differences between her old office and her new digs. In the task force office, there were pictures on the walls of dead women, maps of where their bodies had been found or where they had disappeared, and, of course, Spivey’s ubiquitous timeline.
The SIU office seemed almost quaint by comparison, pictures of busted drug houses here and there, photographs of cocaine and methamphetamine in its most common forms, charts of ecstasy and other designer stuff. It could be a high school science lab. Caroline went to her old desk and opened it, pulled out the thick file on Burn, with copies from all his court cases, adult and juvenile, and newspaper clippings after his death. The headline on the biggest story, a month after Burn washed away: “Family Still Waiting for Drowned Drug Dealer.” That story was accompanied by a photograph of a young-looking black woman, Burn’s mother, holding a picture of him in his sixth grade football uniform, his helmet proudly in the crook of his armpit.
Caroline picked up the thick file and backed out of the SIU office into the hallway, made sure the door lock clicked, and started for the task force office. She thought about Henderson, the way he implied that she was to blame for Dupree’s situation, and although it made her mad, she felt the tug of guilt nonetheless.
She slid her ID card, entered the room, and there was Dupree, as if he’d just popped out of her thoughts. His back was to her, and he was standing at her desk holding her sweater. When the door closed, he jumped, dropped the sweater back on her chair, and turned.
There were only two lights on in the room, dim desk lamps turned downward. Seeing him there in his uniform reminded her of their time on patrol together, and she realized, maybe for the first time, just how long they had been wrapped up in each other like this and how much it had taken out of both of them.
“You scared me,” Dupree said.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said. He looked around, realizing that she must wonder why he was in the task force office. He waved his ID card. “I didn’t think my key still worked but it does. They probably ought to get that fixed.”
“What are you doing here?” Caroline asked.
“I was on my way to write a report about how I went to a concert, fell asleep in my car, and got stabbed by a couple of drunks. How about you?”
There was a time—when she used to see him in that uniform regularly—when Caroline would’ve called Dupree the minute she saw that red car in front of her house, but everything felt different now, and she couldn’t get Henderson out of her mind. The other party. “Catching up on some work.”
He noted the dismissiveness in her voice, and he felt suddenly like a swing-shift patrol sergeant snooping around in the office of a top-priority task force.
She moved around to the worktable in the middle of the room, so that the table and her desk were now between her and Dupree. “Where’d you get stabbed?” she asked, as if she were asking where he’d gone for the weekend.
“Shoulder,” he said.
“Oh.” She put her files down on the table and began leafing through them, avoiding Dupree’s eyes. “Did you get stitches?”
“I’m on my way.” He was baffled by her matter-of-fact, condescending tone. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“You can’t talk about it? What, I’m a security breach now?”
“No. It’s nothing like that. I just needed to look something up. You know how that is, one of those details that you can’t shake.”
“Yeah,” Dupree said, “I know about things you can’t shake.” Her cold reserve ran across him like sandpaper, and it struck him as ironic that the woman he thought about most had pulled the furthest away. “Well,” Dupree said, “I should go file my report. I don’t want to hold up my firing.”
Caroline smiled sadly as Dupree backed out of the office and let the door close.
He stood in the hallway, trying to comprehend what had just happened. He could handle it if Caroline didn’t want to be with him; lately, he didn’t want to be with himself. But that pitying tone was unbearable, and he thought again about Debbie drawing the curtains, about being outside, and suddenly he had the urge to just lay it out there for Caroline, his feelings and the blame and everything. Everything he had done was for her, to be with her, to take care of her. She could ignore him, but she couldn’t ignore that.
This time he slammed his key card into the runner. It flashed green and he pushed the door and found Caroline staring at the floor in front of him, as if he hadn’t just walked out of the room, but melted into the carpet. She looked up at Dupree and he wondered if he could swallow the words that were rising in his throat or if there was some reason to say them—I have loved you for so long—because as soon as he thought the words he knew they would sound trite and empty and beside the point. She knew that he loved her. And that wasn’t the point, anyway. Love is easy; the drunks on the street tonight loved each other. What he had given her was what he couldn’t even give his wife: six years of loyalty, fidelity, and sacrifice. He stood before her now, playing the years in a split second and believing right then that the job and the marriage and every assorted unhappiness was just a symptom of her, and he felt the need to explain himself, to show that he had fallen because of her. His shoulder ached, and even that seemed to be her fault, as he racked his memory for words more powerful and revealing than “I love you,” something that would show all he had done for her.
“When I got to the house that night six years ago,” Dupree said quietly, evenly, “you were standing by the guy you’d shot. And the knife—” He closed his eyes and tried to stop, knowing this would only break her in two. But part of him knew this had been the point all along, hurting her the way he hurt now, making her need him again.
“What?” she asked, but she could imagine what he was going to say and it made her sick. “The knife was what?”
“On the floor in the kitchen,” he said, “near the woman. The guy didn’t have the knife when he came at you. I picked it up and dropped it next to him.”
39
Lenny Ryan found himself thinking about the dog he’d had growing up in Vallejo. His old man got the stupid animal—Lab mix of some kind—as a watchdog, but it just whimpered by the door all night, Lenny’s dad throwing shoes from his bedroom and yelling at it to shut the fuck up. Then each morning his dad took the dog outside and leashed it to the front porch, and the minute he let go of its collar the dog tore through the yard, its leash uncoiling until he got twenty yards away, where it snapped like a whip and jerked the dog back by its neck.
The dog would get up then, take a piss, and run in the other direction until the leash snapped at exactly the same point on the other side of the yard, Lenny’s dad yelling and laughing and getting the dog more agitated, until it raced off in another direction and…snap. Every morning began this way. His dad thought it was great, but Lenny found it sad that the dog seemed to forget every day what it learned the day before. Each morning it bolted as quick as ever, and even when it approached the ring of dead grass marking the end of its leash the stupid dog picked up speed, as if everything it had learned about the world was untrue, as if this time it might finally break free and just keep running.
Lenny was surprised to have that dog pop into his head while he lay flat against the ground, watching the street from beneath a van in a used car lot on Division. He’d been forced to hide just a mile from the lady cop’s house—way too close. The streets should be full of police any minute now, and then he’d be on his way back to Lompoc or whatever version of state hole they had in Washington, where he’d live out his days walking the yard with the bangers and addicts, the stupid and mean and sick, all talking about the action they’d have when they got out, this piece of ass or that job or that bit of revenge, how when the doors opened this time, they’d break free and just keep running.
Lenny lifted himself onto his elbows so that he could see the dark street from the shadows beneath the van. Nothing. Was it possible the lady cop hadn’t seen him? No way. She walked out of her house and stared right into the eyes. She must have seen him. Maybe they had set up a perimeter and were closing in. He pressed himself flat against the ground again.
Then again, they might not go for prison. What did they use in this state? Gas, electricity? He thought this was one of the states that gave you a choice. Hanging might even be one of the choices. Jesus, what would that be like? Snap.
Shelly had a dog. It was always yapping and so Lenny hadn’t paid any attention that morning when it went all crazy and the cops came, searched the house, and found Shelly’s stash—enough meth for an intent-to-deliver charge. Since it was his house, he was the one who got popped, but he figured he could do a year easier than Shelly, anyhow. He hadn’t counted on catching five from the bitch prosecutor—some pinched old broad who stood at the podium in a short, gray suit flexing her calves. She talked the jury into a nickel upstate because it was Lenny’s third strike, making that sound like the first two were slicing the heads off babies instead of theft of a car stereo and assault.
He spat and thought that he had some legitimate strikes now for the lady with the twitchy calves.
He rolled out from under the van and crawled under one parked closer to the street. He peered down Division but still didn’t see lights. A few cars trolled easily down the street. Obviously they hadn’t cordoned off traffic. The only explanation was the one that made no sense: She didn’t call for backup.
Nothing this woman did made sense, from the first time she drew down on him and the pimp. After Lenny pushed the pimp into the river he tensed up, expecting to be plugged by her but she didn’t shoot him. She ran downstream after the pimp and Lenny wouldn’t have given her one in a thousand, but goddamn if she didn’t just about do it. Leaning over the bridge watching her, Lenny caught himself rooting for her.
Then, when he saw the lady cop again on the street, posing as a hooker, something clicked. He couldn’t stop staring at her. She wore her hair the same length and color as Shelly used to. He hadn’t noticed that before. While she walked along Sprague that night, he broke into her car and went through her glove box until he found an envelope with her address on it. He’d just left her car when she came walking down the street. He showed her the girl in the refrigerator because suddenly it seemed important that someone know what he was doing. He supposed that was why he left her the box with Shelly’s stuff. And why he drove past her house sometimes. Like today.
He hadn’t even planned to come to Spokane today. He spent the morning working around Angela’s cabin in the woods north of town—stringing new barbed wire, repairing a pump house that collapsed under the snow. Sometimes, when he was working, Lenny imagined that he was like the other men he saw on the ranches around Springdale, and his old life seemed like someone else’s. In that life, he and Shelly were always longing for better shit—better sex and better highs and a better life. Maybe Angela had been knocked down enough that she understood what a waste of time better could be. Better is the dog running against his leash. Maybe life could be a string of small, bearable moments—work in the sun, come in for a sandwich, watch TV.
Today at noon, Lenny had come inside for a sandwich, switched on the TV, and caught the beginning of the news. The pimp’s body had finally surfaced. Lenny stood in front of the TV in his work clothes for a long time, holding his sandwich at his side. He wrote a note for Angela and took her car into Spokane. He parked outside city hall, checked his shaved head and beard in the mirror, took a breath, and went inside. All this time, he’d been worried that someone would recognize him, but that turned out to be the easiest part. Most of the people didn’t even look up from their windows, and the one person who asked for his identification didn’t even compare the picture of Angela’s ex-husband to him. The other part turned out to be more difficult than he’d imagined, though, and he bounced from department to department collecting building permits and zoning applications, wondering if this would be easier if he’d gone to college.