The Broken Ones (7 page)

Oscar returned to headquarters to write his report. On his desk waited a bouquet of flowers. The card read simply, “Commiserations. G. Haig.” Oscar flung them into the wastebin.

A week later, Oscar received two pieces of news: Jon had been released from the hospital, and the investigation into Geoffrey Haig was suspended pending “appraisal of progress.” One healthy diagnosis, one a fatal one. He left his inspector’s office on numb legs and marched straight down to the parking lot. The sun was low in the west as he pulled out of headquarters and steered into the heavy traffic. Everything felt fragile: the tangerine sunlight sparking off windscreens, the cool air, his career, his marriage. The whole world felt overwrought and teetering: another lingering, hard winter in the Northern Hemisphere;
more crippling earthquakes in Japan, Chile, New Zealand; bushfires and floods, cyclones and tsunamis.

He steered around a bus. Two young men in business suits crossed against the lights. Oscar leaned on the horn. One of the men raised a finger without breaking conversation. Oscar pressed hard on the accelerator and turned the wheel.

The setting sun was dazzling, striking the smears and dust inside the windshield into a wash of gold.
Commiserations. G. Haig
. Fuck him, the arrogant shit, Oscar thought. He couldn’t wait until the day—

There was a boy standing in the middle of the road.

Oscar jammed his right foot on the brake pedal and wrenched the steering wheel to the left. An instinctive move, and one that he would perform over and over in his dreams. The view over the car’s hood slewed away from the boy and toward the footpath. Oscar could feel the tires slip and squeal as the car hurtled too quickly toward the shadowed shop awnings above the footpath. Right in front of him, directly before the charging hood, a man and an adolescent girl were walking with their backs to the car that was about to hit them. Oscar turned the wheel again, right right right … but it didn’t respond. The tires slid. His foot was jammed so hard on the brake that his leg shook. Then a nasty jolt and the sound of metal snapping as the front wheel hit the curb and bent in like a losing boxer’s tooth. Vaguely, over the sounds of failing metal and squealing rubber, he heard people screaming. The car shuddered, its momentum slowed but still strong, and the front bumper smacked hard into the aluminum seat of a bus stop. In the dreadful slow motion of the inevitable, he saw an advertisement for a new romantic-comedy film starring two pretty American B-list actors—the shout line read, “Sometimes Nothing Fits.” The car smashed the seat aside, dumping its weight on one broken wheel and jolting as the other front wheel buckled. The hood was now just a few yards from the man and the girl. Maybe then the man heard something, the grinding of metal on asphalt: he began to turn. The girl, though, did not. Oscar could see that her head was down. She carried a schoolbag over one shoulder. Her hair was tied up in a loose bun, and wisps of chestnut hair as fine as spider silk drifted at the base of her skull over a long, cream-colored neck.

Oscar’s hands gripped the wheel as hard as if it were electric. The
steering wheel didn’t even kick as the front bumper struck the girl behind her knees. Her head turned, just a little, as if someone had called her name … then, as fast as the snap of a finger, the car ate her. Her spine whipped, and her descending pelvis struck the hood edge with a sound like a green twig breaking. Her head flung back and those pretty hairs blurred, then her legs, pinned under the stopping car, jerked her forward again and out of sight. But Oscar heard the crack as something broke on hard ground. The car juddered to a stop.

He unclipped his seat belt and rushed out into the cool air. He was aware of people screaming, of the sounds of traffic, of more tires squealing … but the thuds of his own footsteps and the tight hiss of his breaths were louder. The man who’d been walking alongside the girl, who Oscar would later learn was her father, was staring at his broken daughter, wearing a frown, as if unsure of what he was seeing. Oscar bent to the girl half hidden under the car’s sagging front. The blood was just starting to come from her in rivulets. One arm was cocked uncomfortably behind her back; the other seemed to reach forward like a relay runner’s. Her face was turned to the west, and was unmarked, but a corona was growing behind her cheek on the cold footpath—a spreading crimson puddle that reflected the light. Her eyes were glazed, and one was filling red with blood. Her mouth was open in a small expression of surprise.

Oscar looked around, ready to tell someone to call an ambulance.

The street was in chaos. Some cars had rammed others, and yet more were smashing into those. A truck had struck a light pole across the street, and wires were sparking. People were pointing in all directions and yelling. One woman stood stock-still in the middle of the road between screeching, sliding vehicles, staring horrified at empty space. A riderless motorcycle was spinning on its side down the middle of the road, trailing sparks. And in the sky Oscar saw a white jetliner plunging steeply to earth.

In the midst of all this, ninety feet or so down the footpath, a young man with a pale triangular face watched Oscar through eyes that were all black shadow.

Chapter
3

W
hen Oscar drove through the main entrance, he saw only one patrol car in the wide, leaf-strewn parking lot. He parked next to the white cruiser, pulled on his hat and coat, and stepped into the cold rain.

No overhead lights illuminated the field of wet asphalt, but that wasn’t surprising; these days even facilities like this had their power heavily rationed. Oscar rubbed his cold hands together. Dawn was still an hour away.

Neve was waiting near the tall chain-link fence, her cheeks flushed in the cold, wet air. Rain rumbled on her umbrella.

“How did you get here?” he asked.

“Train.” She pointed out into the dark. “It’s only half a click from the station.”

Jesus, Oscar thought. The trains were dangerous enough in daylight hours—they seemed to draw like magnets the barely hinged who wanted a captive audience to bash, stab, or burn. At night, even uniformed cops traveled in trios and wore Kevlar vests. But Neve was different from him in lots of ways. She carried her gun loaded, for starters.

“You should have stayed in bed,” he said. “I can handle this.”

She said nothing. Oscar noticed that the skin under her eyes was dark, a sign of poor sleep. He felt an annoying fillip of guilt. He covered it by indicating the lone squad car. “Interesting change.”

She shrugged. “Maybe Homicide hasn’t arrived yet.”

They avoided puddles in the potholed asphalt on their way to the pedestrian gate. Despite the steady rain, the air smelled ripe and spoiled, a thick brew of feces and rot.

Oscar pressed the intercom buzzer and waited. Cold seeped up
through his shoes. He pressed again. A tin sign was clipped to the fence, exhorting caution and explaining processes—all forms and functions of earlier, more ordered days. Someone had used a marker to write across the verbiage, “Shit.” Across a dark courtyard beyond the fence was a long, low building. A single light glowed behind one of the many windows.

“Hello!” Oscar shouted through the fence. “Police!”

A rectangle of matching glow appeared beside the window as a figure arrived in the open doorway. “Detective Manari?”

“Mariani,” Oscar replied.

The gate latch buzzed like a dying hornet.

The sewage plant’s night supervisor was thin; a cheap cigarette cantilevered from one corner of his mouth. He briefly touched hands with Oscar and Neve, then turned, picked up a stained flashlight, and led them deeper into the plant.

“Your friend is waiting for you,” said the supervisor.

It took Oscar a moment to realize that the supervisor was referring not to a corpse but to the police officer who was already there.

“We’re a separate department,” Oscar explained.

“Aren’t you detectives?” The supervisor finished his smoke and immediately lit another without breaking stride. He didn’t share.

“Yes,” Neve replied.

“Murders?”

“Generally.”

“Then you’ll love this.”

The supervisor opened a final door, and they were out again in the rain. The smell struck the nostrils like a blow and wiped the back of the throat like a filthy thumb. Oscar understood why the supervisor chain-smoked. They followed his drunkenly swaying light up a set of metal stairs. When their path intersected an empty walkway, Oscar saw the supervisor glare out at a patch of darkness and curse under his breath.

Oscar shivered. “Who is yours?” he asked.

The supervisor looked back at Oscar, as if ready to tell him to fuck right off. Soon after Gray Wednesday, it became rude and intrusive to ask a stranger who his ghost is. It was as if the phantoms were dirty secrets that, if unacknowledged, might suddenly disappear as readily as they’d arrived. Of course, they had not. Oscar found the question about
ghosts a useful button to press: people didn’t expect it. The supervisor ran his fingers through his greasy hair, seeming to remind himself that it was a cop who’d asked, so he should answer.

“My father,” he said, and snorted a sour laugh. “Cocksucker always said if I didn’t pull my socks up my life wouldn’t be worth shit.” He aimed his flashlight into the empty corner and grinned savagely. “Yet here I am, Dad, in a world of shit, so what the fuck did you know?” The supervisor looked again at Oscar and Neve. “Don’t know why we yell at them. They never talk back, do they?” He continued up the wet metal stairs. Oscar stole a glance behind him, but there was no sign of the dead boy.

A minute later they emerged on a gridwork landing; under a solitary halogen light sat a constable wearing a uniform as new and well-finished as his patrol car, smoking a cigarette. When he saw Oscar and Neve, he got to his feet.

“Barelies?” he asked. “Nine-Ten, I mean?”

Oscar nodded.

“Thank God,” the constable said. “Yours.” He headed for the gate, but Oscar caught him by the arm.

“Wait on. Where’s Homicide?”

The constable shook his head. “I figured it’s for you guys. And my shift ended an hour ago.” He shook off Oscar’s grip and hurried down the metal stairs. A door slammed, and he was gone.

“Luke!” the supervisor called into the surrounding dark. His voice echoed off hard concrete and metal. “Luke!” He turned to Oscar. “Hopeless shit. I don’t know how you go, but all I got for staff are hopeless shits.”

“I have her,” Oscar said.

The supervisor looked at Neve, then nodded bitterly, as if that confirmed how some people have all the luck. He gestured for Oscar and Neve to follow him along another walkway.

“On nights I used to have two guys, but one left and never come back, so now I just got Warm Hand Luke. He’s probably in the can jerking off. The rest of us need blue bombers to bar up, but Luke? He slings cheese all day long.” The supervisor shook his head and started down a steel ladder. “He’s a lazy fucking retard, but he sticks around because I let him keep what he finds in the secondary filter box.”

Oscar tested the ladder. It wobbled but held. He descended. “Like?”

“Oh, all sortsa shit. Sometimes money, sometimes costume jewelry that might clean up. So Luke hangs around here like a bad smell.” The supervisor laughed at his own joke. The sound of machinery grew louder as they went lower. “It was Luke who found her.”

They reached another metal landing. The smell was so profound that Oscar’s nostrils decided to surrender and accept that they were overrun. He could see Neve working hard not to retch. That was one good thing about predawn calls—no food to lose. They followed the supervisor along the gangway and around a corner, where he stopped and shined his flashlight out into space. The wavering beam picked up two enormous augers—parallel screws each three feet wide and thirty long, sitting beside each other like shotgun barrels. They were set in half-open tubes that rose at 45 degrees from some point below where Oscar and Neve stood to a concrete dam wall overhead. The massive screw on the right was turning, hypnotically rising and rising, lifting foul-smelling oily sludge up to the top holding tank. Its twin, the screw on the left, was still.

“There,” the supervisor shouted, leaning out over the rail and pointing the white circle of his flashlight beam downward.

At the bottom of the left screw, the light caught pale flesh. A naked body was caught in the metal. It had been savagely sectioned by the massive helical blade and was twisted at awful, unnatural angles. Oscar felt his gut tighten; behind him, he heard Neve vomit quietly through the grille floor.

“Smoke?” he loudly asked the supervisor.

The man appraised him through slitted eyes. “A dollar.”

Oscar shook his head and reached into one of his many pockets. He produced a sealed condom in a plastic wrapper. Worth more than a dollar, but Oscar simply didn’t have spare cash. The supervisor inspected the date on the seal, pocketed the prophylactic, and lit a cigarette for Oscar. The cheap smoke tasted like burned soil but settled his roiling stomach.