Suspended In Dusk (22 page)

“You won’t like it if they do.”

At least her voice is whole again, and surely his must be. “You still think I’m joking. Why would I joke about something like this at my age, for God’s sake? I didn’t even know it was Halloween.”

“You’re saying you don’t know what you just said you know.”

“Because your colleague told me. I don’t know how long I’ve been here,” he realises aloud, and the light dims as if to suggest how much air he may have unconsciously used up.

“Long enough. We’d have to give you full marks for persistence. Are you in a cupboard, by the way? It sounds like one. Your trick nearly worked.”

“It’s a coffin, God help me. Can’t you hear that?” Coe cries and scrapes his nails across the underside of the lid.

Perhaps the squealing is more tangible than audible. He’s holding the mobile towards it, but when he returns the phone to his ear the policewoman says “I’ve heard all I want to, I think.”

“Are you still calling me a liar?” He should have demanded to speak to whoever’s in charge. He’s about to do so when a thought ambushes him. “If you really think I am,” he blurts, “why are you talking to me?”

At once he knows. However demeaning it is to be taken for a criminal, that’s unimportant if they’re locating him. He’ll talk for as long as she needs to keep him talking. He’s opening his mouth to rant when he hears a man say “No joy, I’m afraid. Can’t trace it.”

If Coe is too far underground, how is he able to phone? The policewoman brings him to the edge of panic. “Count yourself lucky,” she tells him, “and don’t dare play a trick like this again. Don’t you realise you may be tying up a line while someone genuinely needs our help?”

He mustn’t let her go. He’s terrified that if she rings off they won’t accept his calls. It doesn’t matter what he says so long as it makes the police come for him. Before she has finished lecturing him he shouts “Don’t you speak to me like that, you stupid cow.”

“I’m war ing ou, ir––”

“Do the work we’re paying you to do, and that means the whole shiftless lot of you. You’re too fond of finding excuses not to help the public, you damned lazy swine.” He’s no longer shouting just to be heard. “You weren’t much help with my wife, were you? You were worse than useless when she was wandering the streets not knowing where she was. And you were a joke when she started chasing me round the house because she’d forgotten who I was and thought I’d broken in. That’s right, you’re the bloody joke, not me. She nearly killed me with a kitchen knife. Now get on with your job for a change, you pathetic wretched––”

Without bothering to flicker the light goes out, and he hears nothing but death in his ear. He clutches the mobile and shakes it and pokes blindly at the keys, none of which brings him a sound except for the lifeless clacking of plastic or provides the least relief from the unutterable blackness. At last he’s overcome by exhaustion or despair or both. His arms drop to his sides, and the phone slips out of his hand.

Perhaps it’s the lack of air, but he feels as if he may soon be resigned to lying where he is. Shutting his eyes takes him closer to sleep. The surface beneath him is comfortable enough, after all. He could fancy he’s in bed, or is that mere fancy? Can’t he have dreamed he wakened in his coffin and everything that followed? Why, he has managed to drag the quilt under himself, which is how the nightmare began. He’s vowing that it won’t recur when a huge buzzing insect crawls against his hand.

He jerks away from it, and his scalp collides with the headboard, which is too plump. The insect isn’t only buzzing, it’s glowing feebly. It’s the mobile, which has regained sufficient energy to vibrate. As he grabs it, the decaying light seems to fatten the interior of the coffin. He jabs the key to take the call and fumbles the mobile against his ear. “Hello?” he pleads.

“Coming.”

It’s barely a voice. It sounds as unnatural as the numbers in the answering messages did, and at least as close to falling to bits. Surely that’s the fault of the connection. Before he can speak again the darkness caves in on him, and he’s holding an inert lump of plastic against his ear.

There’s a sound, however. It’s muffled but growing more audible. He prays that he’s recognising it, and then he’s sure he does. Someone is digging towards him.

“I’m here,” he cries and claps a bony hand against his withered lips. He shouldn’t waste whatever air is left, especially when he’s beginning to feel it’s as scarce as light down here. It seems unlikely that he would even have been heard. Why is he wishing he’d kept silent? He listens breathlessly to the scraping in the earth. How did the rescuers manage to dig down so far without his noticing? The activity inches closer—the sound of the shifting of earth—and all at once he’s frantically jabbing at the keypad in the blackness. Any response from the world overhead might be welcome, any voice other than the one that called him. The digging is beneath him.

Outside In

Brett Rex Bruton

6

I swing my feet from beneath the warmth of the covers and down onto the cold, hard copy of the opening paragraph. I slip a cigarette from the crumpled packet lying on the bedside table and light it with a shielded flame from a beaten, copper lighter. A thick cloud of smoke and vapour drifts from my open mouth and disappears into the darkness of the bedroom. The shape beneath the covers behind me stirs. I reach back with one hand, trace the depression where the waist meets the curve of a buttock, then stand. A robe hangs from the back of the bedroom door. I lift it from its hook and slip it over my shoulders as I leave the room.

Is this all going as planned? Hell, who knows? I’m not even sure I
have
a plan anymore. Private investigators—private dicks—we’re a resourceful lot. Always got a card up our sleeve. Trust a woman to muddle the narrative.

I move towards my desk, past the open window that looks down upon the glowing lights of the Old City District. Far below, long strings of winding halogen mark the steady progress of city traffic as it winds between the towering arches of the magno-rail. The hum of Higgs-Boson engines drifts up from the streets far below, and a glowing snake of light slips by almost silently as a rail carriage winds its way between the rooftops on its cushion of air.

The landscape of lights and curious architecture momentarily distracts the narrator. By the time his attention returns to me, I’m stubbing out my cigarette in an old, brass ashtray and opening the top-right drawer of my desk. I ignore the folded bundle of oilcloth and the .38 snub-nose it contains and instead remove a small, carved box. The light of the desk lamp catches the intricate engravings, and as it flows across their edges, their shapes ripple and change. They swirl across its surface. Their clusters grow tighter. As I lift the small clasp and open the lid, I feel reality re-align. A compression of gravity warps the text around me. I hold the maguffin up to the light. Something in the narrative goes ‘
click
’. As does the hammer of Starla’s revolver.

The glowing tip of her cigarette reflects in the polished gold of her .22 Purse Protector. Accessory
haute couture
. Never leave home without it. Silhouetted in the bedroom doorframe; the lights of the city turn her hair into a faint halo. She’s left the sheet on the bed.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says, her voice the whisper of a Hollywood starlet, her lips the colour of cherries, “I told you that thing was no good.”

Damn. This is too early for a twist.

1

A field mouse walked through my door a week ago. A tiny thing with large eyes made larger by the glasses they hid behind. The old dirt on her shoes said one of the rural districts. Her modest blouse said maybe one of the outer burbs instead. Either way, she hadn’t been in the city long.

My receptionist, Connie, brought her tea, no sugar, while she sat across from me and begun her story. She introduced herself as Tabitha Berg. I said: “Hi, my name is Hank Jewel”, daring the narrator to contradict me. Tabby passed me a picture of an angel—hair like spun gold and lips the colour of cherries—and told me: “She’s my sister, Starla Berg, though she’s called herself Starla Bright for about as long as I can recall. Always had a head on her. Thought the world was just waiting to be her oyster. Couldn’t wait to crack it. We lived out on a turbine farm by the Plateau. That was before Starla disappeared.”

I backtracked a paragraph or two, mentally underlined my first guess, then politely asked her to continue.

“Almost five years ago, Starla vanished. We searched everywhere—even dragged the river—but she was gone. Then I see this in the newspaper.” She handed me a clipping of the angel on the arm of Four Finger Kennedy and a dart of jealousy stuck me in the gut. “I asked around,” she said, “That’s the Kennedy Club. And that’s Keith Kennedy.”

Four Finger Keith Kennedy. One time goodfella, now a top-ranking untouchable. I whistled in through my teeth and slid the photograph and snippet of newspaper back towards her. I told her in my best condolence voice that if her sister wanted to stay lost, that was her concern. Tabby knew where she was. If she wanted Starla back so bad, she could fetch her herself.

Tabby’s wide, mousy eyes closed to thin, hard chips and I began to rethink my previous assumptions. “She can stay dead,” she hissed, each word hitting the page with the clink of broken glass, “but when she left, she took something from me. I want it back.”

I leant back in my chair as the story suckered me in, then told her what it would cost.

She paid.

2

The Kennedy Club was a hornet’s nest painted a pretty shade of maroon. Goodfellas, oldboys and made men crawled in every corner, while top dollar alley cats strutted their heels between the tables. The bartender served me a whiskey in a crystal tumbler worth a little more than my suit, but a fifty slid back beneath the glass got me directions and a password through a green door at the back. Powerful men in an assortment of fedoras locked eyes with poker-cube retina lenses, matching their willpower with equally despicable personas across the globe. No smoked spectacles here.

“What can I get you?” asked bartender number two, and I gazed up at the pantheon of bottles ranked behind him. No green glass here either. Prism bottles climbed the wall, the colours of their contents shimmering, their ostentatious names too numerous for the narrator to list. I pointed and mumbled. I could hear my credit chip sobbing. The tender poured me a glass of ember spirits and sparkles, but before the credit link registered, a voice beside me said; “Put it on my tab, Deek.”

The picture hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was a sunrise. Her eyes were twin storms of grey. The narrator’s description made it as far as the delicate crease where her slender neck met her clavicle before he had to stand up from his desk and pour himself a glass of water. When he returned, he found us at a booth away from the noise. She’d heard I was looking for her. She lit my cigarette and I lit hers, and we laughed as the liquor did its work.

Maybe her hand was a little too close to mine when Four Fingers’ goons rocked up. They had me sliding along on the toes of my boots before my glass had the time to hit the ground. We were almost to the back door when Starla put a candle to the corner of an antique Irma Stern and people started shouting. One meathead turned to investigate. The other I doubled up with an Italian heel to the goonies. As he crumpled, I saw the fine impressions of an adrenal augment spider-webbing beneath the skin of his neck. I took a moment to register how lucky I was before scrambling down to the end of the paragraph and slipping around the edge of the page.

3

“She’s really been looking for me all this time?” Starla asked as we sat in the bucket seats of my vintage Vitron. We’d been stealing time since that night in the bar. At first, I couldn’t find the heart to tell her our meeting hadn’t been coincidence. But that night, I’d convinced her to slip her handlers and meet me in the alley behind Four Fingers’ home, and I came clean.

“Yeah,” I said. I thought of the look in Tabby’s eyes and lied through my teeth. “She misses you. Seems they thought you were dead.” I waited the appropriate amount of time, then continued; “She also says you took something. Something she’d like back.”

She leant her head down. The light of the old car’s panel display cast her face in a pale blue light. I kept my eyes forward. She may have been smiling. She may have been crying. Then she took my hand in hers and everything was ok.

“I was never much of a farm girl,” she said, “Mucking around with generator couplings and CO2 sieves… I knew there was more for me. More to me. Then one day, Tabby and I are walking through the north field and the world begins to feel… thin. False.

“Tabby almost trips over this small box. It’s just lying there, like it was waiting. We open it up and I’d swear that every blade of grass in that field bent towards us. People talk about being the centre of the universe, but to actually
feel
it? To know it? By the time we began walking home, I already knew I was leaving.

“I met Keith my first day in the city. Took him a single evening to wine and dine me. He was small time back then—part time bookie, occasional wise guy. With me by his side, he was made in three years. Four years in, I told him about the maguffin.”