by Matt Coleman
She tried to compose herself by talking. “Take a little drive? Isn’t that a bit on the nose? Do they give you a cop stereotype guidebook, or is it more of an oral tradition?”
The detective snorted a little but said nothing.
Cary pushed at the door handle with a knee, trying to wedge the lever up to try the door. “I don’t suppose I get to ask for a lawyer in this situation, right? Get my one phone call, maybe?”
The detective eyed her through the rearview mirror. “One phone call’s a myth, honey.”
Cary raised her eyebrows. “You don’t get one phone call?”
The detective smiled. “You get as many as you want, within reason. As long as you’re not being an asshole.” He stopped smiling. “When you’re under arrest. You? You aren’t under arrest.”
She nodded. “Oh, you’re right. I’m going for a drive. With my good friend whose name I don’t know and who handcuffed my hands behind my back.”
He nodded. “Oh, we can be friends. You tell me where it is, and we’ll be best friends. Braid each other’s hair and all kinds of shit.”
Cary glanced at his balding, pasty, freckled head and laughed a little. “Where what is? What are you talking about?” She wedged her knee under the door and pushed. The child…or prisoner-safety lock kept the door stuck, as she expected.
The detective shrugged. “We can go that route, too. Your choice.”
Cary fought back tears of frustration and stared out the window as the scenery grew less and less familiar. The ambient light from buildings and street lamps faded like her eyes were coming into focus and starting to pick out constellations she couldn’t name.
Concrete gave way to trees. Lanes narrowed. The straight-line, masculine grids of the city melted into feminine curves of countryside. Everything darkened. Every dirt road snaking out of sight into the woods intimated mysteries in clusters like mosquitos. Cary cringed at the thought she might be about to become another one.
They wound to a stop in front of a little concrete bridge. Underneath, a creek meandered off into the trees and rocks until disappearing into shadowy bends and twinkles of running water over a bed of moony stones. The bridge itself emerged as a vestige of nearby civilization—an altar to the city amidst the half-forgotten hinterlands.
Graffiti coated the length of the bridge. Some caught the eye in artistic expression, with stylized letters and cartoonish figures peeking out from behind them. In other spots, pure watertower scribbling. There were professions of love with dates and names and unintelligible abbreviations.
The detective pulled Cary out of the car, and they stood staring at the graffiti for a quiet minute. Cary leered over at him. “Where are we?”
He pointed with a nod of his head. “They call it Graffiti Creek. Kids drive out here from the city and spray paint shit on this bridge. Try to make sure whenever they evaporate in the city, there’s still some record of them somewhere. The world forgets. Graffiti Creek always remembers.”
They turned to the sound of a car pulling up behind them. The detective’s partner bobbed behind the wheel of Cary’s car. He pulled off the road and bounded down around the creek, angling up and pointing the car back up a hill toward the bridge and Cary.
The detective had gone to his trunk and pulled out an old water hose and some duct tape. He met his partner coming up the hill and traded him the hose and tape for a can of spray paint. The partner headed back toward Cary’s car, while the detective walked to the bridge, shaking his can. He called back, “Find anything in the phone? Boyfriend?”
The partner answered, “Yeah. Johnny.”
The detective stopped and cocked his head at Cary. “Johnny?”
The partner laughed. “That’s what it said.”
The detective shrugged and let out a huh. He scrawled, “I love you, Johnny. I’m so sorry. CAT” on the side of the bridge in neon orange letters. He scowled down the hill at his partner, who taped the hose to Cary’s tailpipe. He tossed the can into the creek. “Orange, Dick? Really?”
Dick, the dick, yelled back. “Picked up the first one. Does it matter?”
The detective walked back and grabbed Cary by the arm. “Guess not.”
He dragged her to her car and threw her into the driver’s seat. The car’s engine hummed, window cracked. Cary started into a chorus of: What are you doing? Why are you doing this? What did I do? But they shut the door and taped the hose into the window, sending a plume of dirty smoke right into her lap.
The detectives took a jaunty stroll back to their car, where Cary could just make them out as they sat on the hood to wait.
To wait on her to die.
Cary’s throat hurt and her lips smacked with streaming tears. She hadn’t even registered how loud she had been trying to scream, how frantically she wept and wailed, how terrified she was. The whole ride and even the walk to her car, Cary felt cool, hardened. But in the quiet of the pooling exhaust, she could recognize what her brother used to call “flight brain,” some imagined self she created to make her feel safe. Cary’s brother, Casey, was a few years older and prone to stages. His most memorable stage had been that of Casey Trubody, Survivalist Trainer. As a pre-teen, Cary had gotten dragged by the ponytails more times than she could count into the woods so Casey could put her through what had always felt like a useless stream of survival drills. And they would drill over and over and over. Because Casey Trubody, Survivalist Trainer, always told her: “In crisis, there’s no time to think. Muscle memory, Cary. You need it to be muscle memory.”
She had no time to think. The muscle memory exercise taking root in her head was one she had always felt pretty certain her Survivalist Trainer learned from the TV show Lost. Cary closed her eyes and counted slowly, letting her fear fill her body. “Lean into the fear,” Casey would say. Let it have you. But only for five seconds. “Don’t give it one second more,” he’d say it while punctuating each word with a sharp tap to Cary’s forehead. And at the silent five count, he’d snap. Cary could hear it as clearly as she could smell the poisoned thickness in the air. She started to hack and cough. Maybe her mind sped up the effects of the exhaust, but the windows were clouded over and Cary had no clue how long something like this took. She could barely see.
Which meant they couldn’t see her either.
She shot her hands down under her thighs and wriggled until they came up the other side. She reached down and untied both shoes, and then looped a lace through her ziptie. She painstakingly tied one lace to the one on the other shoe. Working her legs like riding a bike, Cary sawed at the ziptie until the plastic popped loose. She moved both wrists in circles, working out the painful ridges cut into them, and allowed herself a smug nod of appreciation. Getting out of zip ties had been Casey Trubody, Survivalist Trainer’s third lesson. They made it into a YouTube video. She reached for the door but stopped. If she stepped out, they’d put her right back with better restraints.
A car is a hell of a thing to get out of if the doors are off limits. Casey’s most terrifying lesson had been one on escaping a car submerged in water. Pressure builds around the doors so they won’t open. And breaking a window is damn near impossible. Cary knew both of these to be true because her borderline insane brother had locked her in an old jalopy and shoved it into a lake. Casey had to dive in to save her. The first time.
Cary pulled the emergency brake and put the car in neutral. She pulled her shoelaces all the way out and tied one end around the emergency brake release lever in the dashboard.
Coughing and panting, one hand over her mouth and nose, Cary squirmed into the backseat and pulled down the middle console. The opening led to the trunk, where a trunk release faced away from Detective Dick and his sidekick, Detective Evil.
She glanced down at her hips and whimpered, “Dammit all, Cary. This. This is why you should have skipped a dessert or two.”
Normally, Cary felt curvy. But occasionally, such as while cramming herself through the narrow opening into the trunk, she felt thick�
�maybe even a touch chunky. She finally tumbled through into the fetal position in the trunk. The air was clearer and she took a couple of deep breaths of stale, but clean air. She brushed herself off and clucked her tongue. “Nope. Still curvy.”
She fumbled around until she found the lever to open the trunk from the inside. Holding the trunk to keep it from popping wide open, she pulled the lever and pressed her face to the opening, siphoning in air greedily. She steeled her nerves and yanked the shoelace as hard as she could.
And nothing happened.
The car sat there, still and silent, filling with toxic fumes. Then, very gradually, it started rolling. Rolling. Faster. Too fast. The hill sloped steeper and longer than she had been able to discern in the dark. Cary would end up farther from the Dicks, but she was about to hit the creek bed at a fifteen-mile-per-hour clip.
Cary went ahead and let the trunk fly open and braced herself. A cluster of rocks blossomed to her right. Without hesitating she jumped from out of the trunk, trying to clear the rocks and hit the water in a roll. In the process, she lost a laceless shoe and banged a knee against a rock. But she landed smooth. Wet, but smooth.
The car careened off to the opposite side from where she landed. She rolled into a ball and came up running. The water came only ankle-deep. Cary kicked off her other shoe to regain some balance and worked her way to the bank. She didn’t look back, but she gleaned shouting and running.
The rocks were battering her feet, but she didn’t dare slow down. She cut off onto a trail into the woods winding up toward the road. If she made it to the road, she may find a car. At the very least the pavement would be easier on her feet to run. Both of the detectives looked out of shape, and fifty-ish—a good twenty years on her. The slight hill kept her oriented toward the road. She weaved through trees, the limbs scratching her neck and whipping her arms.
Stumbling out into the road, Cary paused and searched up and down for any sign of civilization. Looking to her right, she spotted Detective Dick emerging thirty yards away. They eyed each other for a moment before Dick pulled a gun from under his sports coat. Cary ducked and ran for the tree line. Something whizzed past a tree near her head, sending flakes of bark splintering all around her. A second later a pop jolted her heart, like someone popping a plastic bag right next to her.
She ran hard, staying in the tree line and keeping her head down. She stayed close to the road, even though the tree-nicking and proceeding crack happened three more times. As she ran, she picked up a different noise. Distant, but growing. A breathy whistle. The familiar horn of a train. They had crossed tracks shortly before they came to a stop. She picked up her pace. To her left heavy footsteps pounded and panting hissed through the trees. Behind her, feet on the gravel of the road, moving fast. She was being chased and flanked.
Then she saw it. The light. Barreling toward her at an angle. Through a clearing ahead she could make out the tracks. The train screamed in deafening wails now. She wasn’t going to make it. If the train cut her off, it would trap her with the two detectives.
Two more close misses and pops. She ducked and tried not to slow down. The train burst through the tree line, fully visible now, less than fifty feet away. She didn’t scrutinize the gun. Dick struck her as the revolver type. He fired six shots, right? It was the only chance she had.
She bolted for the road and glanced back. Dick swore and fumbled with bullets. She picked up speed on the road and sprinted for the tracks. The train’s whistle blared and shouts brayed on all sides of her. The tracks were right in front of her, and she felt the train’s power bearing down. She took one stretched out leap over the tracks.
The wind from the passing train slapped at her legs as she rolled safely to the other side. Looking back, she watched the detectives search for her through the gaps. Cary turned to keep running. She had a head start, not a safe harbor.
Chapter 6
Marlowe last went to a party somewhere between his fifth and sixth years of college. He used to love them. But after eight years, he needed to shore up and finish out his accounting degree. And then he got a real job. And he realized right away he didn’t want to stay in entry-level for any longer than necessary. Marlowe signed up for every survey team, every after-hours review of books, and every extra bit of grunt work. Whenever a promotion came up, he wanted to be the one who “put in his time.” So parties got replaced by audits, like the one he begged out of when his little brother came up missing.
Missing was nothing new. Marlowe and his baby sister had been hunting down their brother, the middle child, since he hit junior high. Every time, he ended up in a place like this. Some run-down house in a neighborhood where people didn’t file noise complaints. Marlowe forgot how the music felt somatic. Every part of him sensed it. The tips of his fingers even buzzed with it. Each thump gave him this feeling in his heart and stomach, like the nervousness of kissing a girl for the first time. Walking around in a party did something to him—almost too much—made him want to close his eyes and drift up into the social ether.
Marlowe waded through clouds of smoke, trying to keep from breathing too much of it in. He talked to women. As dangerous as approaching women at a party could be, they were always more receptive. A trio of them hung against a wall and held red plastic cups out in front of them like vacancy signs. They brightened when he approached, sizing him up and enjoying what they found. He flashed a smile. “You ladies seen a guy who look like me? Almost identical, but not as attractive. A little shorter. Go by ‘Do Right.’”
The girl in the middle clucked her tongue. “Yeah, I know Do Right. I haven’t seen him though. Not in a few days.”
Marlowe nodded solemnly and thanked them.
“Wait, sugar. Where you going?”
Marlowe laughed and waved politely, still retreating. “To find my brother. You ladies enjoy your evening.”
An answer like that meant he needed to try the next party. On his way out to his Civic, Marlowe checked his phone to search for another posting and found a message from his sister.
As an older brother, Marlowe grew up cursed by this juggling act. They all three shared a mom and a dad. People guessed differently, because Marlowe and Do Right resembled so much, while Shelley stood a foot shorter, gleamed several shades darker, and looked at least ten times more beautiful.
They all three grew up as good-looking kids, but Shelley golfed at a different handicap. While the two boys relied on mischievous eyes and boyish grins, Shelley grew up looking like a more compact, shade darker Iman. Having a younger sister with supermodel looks and a younger brother with a propensity to find trouble meant Marlowe took plenty of late night phone calls.
The dad they shared died in a car accident when Shelley was only a few months old. He nodded off on his way to night classes. A few more months and he would have finished an engineering degree—a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket out of the projects. But instead, their mother spent the next decade and a half working two or three jobs.
She found some rich family’s address to use in order to put Shelley in better schools than the ones Marlowe and Do Right suffered. Marlowe took up the mantle of “man of the house” with a curled lip and determined gaze. He wore it like a badge of honor. Do Right and Shelley were more responsibilities than they were siblings. And the shoes Marlowe tried to fill grew bigger every year. His father faded from the flesh-and-bones hospital janitor to the legend of a perfect dad—the windmill Marlowe could never conquer.
He worked his way out of a pastiche of puzzle-parked cars and called Shelley from the road. “Shells. What’s up?”
“Did you find him?”
“No. Total bust. Found a girl who knew him. But nobody has seen him.”
Marlowe listened to Shelley’s breathing through the phone. Heavy. Nervous.
“Shelley. What’s the matter?”
“I need a favor, Marlowe. A big one.”
Marlowe’s lip took on its familiar curl. He sniffed once. Resolved. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. Anyt
hing.”
“Do you know where Graffiti Creek is?”
Chapter 7
After his back-alley meeting with Juliana the waitress, Sameer had two hours to kill before meeting Seamus’ editor for lunch. Seamus worked for a news magazine, which provided a little more flexibility than a newspaper. The editor, Margaret, didn’t offer much help over the phone. She claimed the magazine tried not to keep too tight of a leash on their writers, so Seamus did not have to keep her abreast of his latest projects. Sameer, however, after ten minutes, convinced her to meet with him while she ate lunch. She would be in a little park next to a falafel truck in Dollar Hill, only about a hundred yards or so from the Hill Street Cafe.
Sameer spent his spare time walking the bike trails and sidewalks of Dollar Hill. There were several small parks dotted about between law offices and government buildings. He didn’t stand out as badly as in the Cafe, as there were all kinds of people coming and going. Though most wore business attire.
Seamus didn’t talk much about his work, other than to share a story with Sameer once he finished writing it. But Sameer knew one thing about the process. Seamus loved to use homeless people as sources. As he wandered the grounds of Dollar Hill, Sameer came across numerous homeless people, mostly men, lying on benches or leafing through trash bins. He planned for this. His inside jacket pocket brimmed with dollar bills. He would approach each person as if he were trying to pet a strange dog. He would offer up the dollar and the photo of Seamus. But by a quarter to noon, no one admitted having seen or spoken to Seamus. An information void which cost Sameer eighteen dollars.
Having given up on the homeless population, Sameer made certain to be sitting on the concrete ledge around a fountain directly across from the falafel truck by 11:55. As promised, Margaret appeared out of a throng of workers breaking for lunch at straight-up noon.