Gatekeeper (3 page)

"We pull our guns and shoot it out, moron. What d'ya think?"

Wayne looked crestfallen, as if now he'd catch hell for not bringing a gun.

Their eyes tracked the cruiser as it soundlessly rolled near, the reflections from the plaza's mercury lighting making its windshield glimmer, turning its driver into a vague silhouette.

"Who is it?" Craig asked Jenny.

"I don't know yet. Can't make it out."

In the back seat of the car, Chris took another nervous hit from his beer can, filling the confined space with an audible slurping.

Craig twisted around to glare at him. "Right, genius. Take a fuckin' swig right in front of the cops."

Behind him, the darkness abruptly burst into a pulsing riot of piercing blue and white lights from the cruiser's strobes.

Chris dropped the can. David quickly moved his feet to avoid the splash against the floorboards. After one last wilting glare, Craig turned away without a word and slouched slightly into his seat.

Moments later, an oversized shadow came between them and the throbbing lights.

"Hi, boys. Good evening, Jenny."

"Up yours," she said.

A flashlight blinded them all in turn as the police officer carefully checked them out.

"Turn off the ignition and get out of the car, please. This side only Keep your hands where I can see them."

Craig opened the door, resuming his earlier, surly tone. "If it ain't Officer Sam. Long time."

"That's 'Sergeant Walker' to you, Steidle. Move over there."

One by one, they lined up against the car. David felt like his intestines were filled with liquid and that the slightest jarring might make them spill over.

"I suppose not one of you knows what the drinking age is," Sam Walker said. An eighteen-year veteran of the Springfield Police Department, he was working on his second and sometimes third generation of repeat offenders.

He put his face very close to Chris's. "Tell me once and tell me straight, son. What's your name?"

"Christopher Williams."

"How old are you, Chris?"

"Fifteen."

"And here's the big one. Was that a beer I saw you drinking just now?"

Chris's voice cracked. "Yes, sir."

Walker smiled. "Good boy."

He stepped back slightly and played his flashlight across David's face. "You're new. You fifteen, too?"

"Sixteen."

Walker remained silent a moment. David became suddenly aware of how quiet everything was. For the first time, he could hear the sound of the river water gliding by over the embankment. He felt like he was standing at center stage in an abandoned theater, sensing but not seeing dozens of eyes peering at him from a hundred nooks and crannies.

"I know you," Walker finally said, making David's heart skip a beat. "You're Lester Spinney's kid."

* * *

Lester Spinney opened his eyes and stared blankly at the darkened television screen for a moment, trying to remember where he was and why he was there.

"Les, it's the phone."

He looked over his shoulder at his wife, Susan, still dressed in her nurse's uniform.

"What happened?" he asked.

"You fell asleep watching TV again. Wendy turned it off before she went to bed." Susan offered him the portable phone in her hand. "Anyhow, it's for you."

She sounded tired, which matched her near-haggard expression. She worked at both the hospital and a local doctor's office, and the toll was beginning to show.

He took the phone from her. "Spinney."

"Lester, it's Sam Walker, down at the PD. I picked up your kid tonight."

Spinney sat up, alarmed. "What happened?" Behind him, he heard Susan pause at the door, frozen by his tone of voice. In the worlds they inhabited—hers of medicine, his as a special agent for Joe Gunther and the VBI—news of this sort was seldom good.

"It's no big deal," Walker quickly reassured him. "He was in a car with an underage drinker and one of the local bad boys—scumbag named Craig Steidle. He's not in trouble—blew double zeros on the breathalyzer. But I thought you'd like to hear about the company he was keeping. I have kids—older now—but I would've liked to have known."

Spinney passed his hand across his forehead and then gave his wife a thumbs-up to set her at ease. "No, that's fine, Sam. I appreciate the call. I'll have a talk with him."

Sam Walker's hesitation showed he wasn't quite finished.

"What else?" Lester asked.

"Well, again, it's nothing connected to Dave. I mean, he was just there. But I found some weed on Steidle and one of the others—a loser named Wayne Fontana—and when I drove up on them at the back of the Zoo, it looked like Steidle was about to score some crack with a user-dealer named Jenny Peters. She does a little hooking on the side." He paused again before adding, "I'm real sorry, Les—"

But Spinney cut him off. "It's fine, Sam. I appreciate it. You did the right thing. Is Dave still there?"

"Yeah. I thought you'd like to pick him up."

"I'll be right down."

Spinney slowly pushed the cut-off button on the portable phone, but kept it about chest-high, as if it now contained something valuable, if ill defined.

"What happened?" Susan asked from the doorway.

He forced a smile. "He's not in trouble, but he is at the PD. Someone in the car he was in was underage and had a beer. Anyway, Sam said it didn't look like he'd had a drop. I'll talk to him."

She frowned and looked at the floor. He could almost smell the guilt coming off her like a scent. Lord knows, in that, she wasn't alone, which prompted him to add, "Tough thing to avoid at his age. Sounds like he stuck to his guns, though. You have your shower. I'll go pick him up. Be back in no time."

She left the room without a word, so that when he rose, Lester Spinney was all alone—with only the misgivings he hadn't shared with her. 

Chapter 3

Gail paused on the sidewalk, looking up at the four-story building before her. Wooden, peeling, sagging, and vast, it was one of Brattleboro's infamous dens—an eighty-year-old maze of low-income apartments. A doper's haven, a magnet for illegal activities, and a museum of odd and offensive odors, it was also cheap, downtown, and a short stroll from the town's primary twilight-world hangout, the Harmony parking lot, where the "denizens of the night"—real and imagined—surfaced as each day's light faded to darkness.

Which was why she'd chosen noon to visit her niece's last address. It was late enough to hope a few people might be awake, while early enough that they might not have ventured forth on their daily rounds.

This was a slightly skewed and paranoid vision of reality, of course. For all her canniness and experience—Gail had variously been a realtor, a selectwoman, a volunteer at the women's crisis center, and a prosecutor at the state attorney's office in town—she was also a woman born to privilege. Despite her support of many and sundry causes aimed at protecting and elevating society's disadvantaged, she wasn't one of them, and had an outsider's visceral lack of ease in their company. She hated this about herself, not surprisingly, seeing it as suppressed prejudice and unworthy of her ideals, but it remained. And it sat like a lump in her throat as she eyed the apartment building's dilapidated front door.

Taking a breath, she left the sidewalk and entered.

Immediately, this internal social debate came under stress. The place was dark, narrow, hot, and evil-smelling. She walked along a close-fitting hallway lined with punctured and torn drywall, stained and covered with graffiti, amid the muted murmurings of a dispossessed populace. There were shouts and arguments, small children's cries, the occasional thrumming of music muffled only by a succession of thin walls. Doors slammed somewhere overhead, footsteps could be heard echoing from afar, and yet she saw no one as she slowed to a stop, uncertain of which way to turn. Encased in an invisible turmoil of stirring humanity, she felt utterly alone.

She looked around, wondering how to proceed. Last night, before falling asleep together at Joe's small converted Green Street carriage house just a block away, the two of them had discussed what must have happened to Laurie. Gail had been furious, her frustration and guilt fueling a rage against almost everyone and everything she could think of, from drug dealers, to lousy prevention in the schools, to society in general. She'd also gotten angry at Joe for what she thought was a fatalistic, even complacent attitude. He'd pointed out that technically, Laurie had been committing a crime here and that there was little the police could have done in any case. They had enough on their plates without trying to discover what had pushed Laurie over the edge. Besides, he'd added, not unsympathetically, it was pretty obvious from her condition what her motives had been.

But Gail hadn't been receptive. She hadn't taken it out on him—she was practical enough to know that from his viewpoint he was right: The police were not in the business of probing some young woman's emotional or psychological problems. But Gail could be. For most of her adult life, she'd made such missions a basic tenet of who she was—a person who really did try to do something for society's semighostly population of the poor, the despairing, and the generally marginalized. And her commitment in this had usually involved total strangers, not her own niece. Guilt notwithstanding, it became clear to her that she'd have to be the one to pursue the cause of Laurie's plight. In the end, steadied by that resolve, she'd calmed down and let Joe get some sleep. And the following morning, she'd set out on her course.

However, now that she was here, she was suddenly at a loss. The apartments had no numbers, there was no directory or bank of mailboxes she could refer to. She began to suspect that the door she'd used hadn't even been the main entrance.

"Who're you?"

She turned to find a young girl peering at her from down the hallway, having appeared as silently as a ghost. She was a solid child, seemingly square and round both, with thick, straight black hair cut like a helmet around her head.

Gail smiled. "Hi. I'm looking for Laurie Davis's apartment. I'm her aunt."

"And you don't know where she lives?" The girl's face was almost stern.

Gail decided to play it straight. "I've never visited her here."

"Smart. This place is a dump."

Gail smiled slightly, caught off guard. "You live here long?"

"Long enough to know that much."

"Good point. You know Laurie?"

"I seen her around. Not to talk to, though. Where're you from?"

"Across town."

The girl nodded. "You look rich."

Gail was stumped for a response. She was rich, certainly relative to anyone here. And while it rarely came up in conversation, her money was a subject of some embarrassment to her. She'd earned a great deal of it, true enough, but she'd also been brought up in its comforts—a fact that had clung to her like a confusing mixed blessing.

Gail changed the subject, feeling disappointed in herself. "Could you take me to her apartment?"

The girl also seemed let down by her response, because she made a small frown, turned on her heel, and merely said, "Sure," before heading off in the opposite direction, quickly taking a right and vanishing from view.

Gail trotted along to catch up, following her small guide along a confusing variety of hallways, staircases, and right and left turns. Despite the time of day, the whole place was somber, but without the coolness associated with what felt like an underground colony. It brought to mind the complex rabbit warren of lore, but one baking in the sun, making Gail wonder if, despite the warm weather, the heat hadn't been left on. The air was stifling and stagnant the higher they climbed. By the time the girl stopped in front of a scarred and splintered hollow-core door, a trickle of sweat was coursing between Gail's shoulder blades and she was feeling slightly dizzy.

"This is it. Have fun," the girl said, and began walking away.

Gail wiped her forehead with her palm. "Wait. How do I get in? Is there a super or a maintenance man or someone with a key?"

The girl looked at her quizzically. "Why don't you knock?"

Gail felt stupid, and out of her depths. A woman who had never hesitated to go anywhere or try anything, who was comfortable pitting her brains and abilities against anyone she met, had now twice been brought up short by a twelve-year-old.

She laughed self-consciously, not bothering to explain. "Right. Stupid. I think I'll try to cool down a little first. Thanks for your help."

The girl eyed her skeptically, let a small but telling pause elapse before saying, "Okay," and then took the hint and disappeared down one of the tunnels she traveled like a veteran miner in search of diversion.

Which left Gail pretty much where she'd been when they'd met, even if she now knew which door was Laurie's.

She looked down at the scuffed wooden floor a moment, thinking again about why she was here. She'd told her sister on the phone it was to collect a few of Laurie's things, if only to have something familiar to put by her hospital bed. But the true reason stemmed from her conversation with Joe. Gail wanted to search the apartment, to find something explaining Laurie's descent, maybe even some compelling evidence she could bring to Joe. Gail wanted to set things right and ease her feeling of impotence with some action, all while knowing in her heart that she was basically running in place—right now literally working up a sweat for nothing.

She glanced at the door again, considering how unlikely it would be that this building had a maintenance man standing ready with a passkey. Yielding to impulse, she reached out and twisted the knob.

The door opened.

Surprised, Gail stepped inside. The room was small, square, fetid, and a total, absolute, war-torn pigsty.

In its middle stood a man. Staring at her.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

He was skinny, longhaired, and unshaven, wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Both his arms had tattoos and his gaunt face looked mean.

Gail had been raped years before in what she'd thought was the safety of her own home. She had worked hard to place that experience out of her way if never out of her mind, but now it came back like the release from a dam, in a hot and sickening tidal wave.