The Killer Is Dying (13 page)
THE KID WAS STILL OUT THERE, making his move on black, stopping for his phone call, making his move on white. Though now the game seemed to have become less important. He spent a lot of time between moves just talking into the phone and looking around.
Christian got a bottle of orange juice out of the half-pint refrigerator. The table limped when he set the laptop down, so he scooted the legs around till it got better. Turned the computer on and, once it powered up, found the wireless connection. It sat there quietly waiting, locked, loaded, ready.
For what?
Getting in touch with the cop, the only tangible thing he had to grab on to, had been a bust. Should he try again? Guy had probably written him off by now. Decided he was a crank or crackpot. To get his interest back—Sayles, that was his name—he’d have to give him something. An earnest, as they used to say. Something to convince him that Christian had goods, had knowledge or witness, without giving up anything about himself.
He opened a message board and scrolled down without reading. He always imagined he could hear the computer’s drive whirring inside. He didn’t know if it spun, if it did anything like that, if it moved at all, but he heard it. Or thought he did.
Last few weeks, he’d been having this weird sense that … what? That he wasn’t alone? Not quite. As though someone were standing off watching or standing half a step to one side, maybe, seeing what he saw, almost a part of it. But that wasn’t quite it either. A sense of presence—that was as close as he could come. The drugs, he had figured. But that sense was still with him, and the drugs weren’t.
The feeling he had now was close. But different.
He turned. The kid had his nose pressed against the front window, looking in.
Christian went to the door. “Tell them I’m not here,” Christian said. The kid just looked. He had brown eyes that went gold when light caught in them. “Old joke … You need something?”
The boy shook his head. “My name’s Chris. What’s yours?”
“Christian.”
“Wow. We got the same name almost. Is that cool or what?”
“It’s cool. You want to come in?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“And I’m thinking you were also told not to bother me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Quite the moral dilemma.”
“What?”
“One transgression leading inexorably to another.” Christian stepped back out of the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell your mother I invited you.”
“That would be lying.”
“Not really—since I just did.”
The boy thought about it and stepped inside.
“You like chess,” Christian said.
“It’s okay. One of my teachers—Mr. Stuart? He taught me. Picked out six of us, those with the highest IQs he said, and taught us. I think I’m the only one that stayed with it. You don’t have much stuff, do you?”
“Only what I need.”
“That’s my old TV. Cool computer. Is it fast?”
“No. But then, neither am I.”
“Mine’s slow. Good, but slow.” He took in the books stacked on the window ledge and table. “You read a lot.”
“I’m guessing you do too.”
“Mostly online. You can get anything you want online—newspapers from all around the world, music, books. But you know that.”
“Anything you want, huh?”
“You can even order food, clothes. Never have to leave your house.”
“I suppose you could.”
The boy picked up the copy of
Earth Abides
atop the stack on the table and leafed through. “I read
Nicholas Nickleby
last week.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“Online?”
“You got it.”
“And never left your house.”
“You’re funny.” The boy held up the book. “Can I borrow this?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll bring it back soon.”
“There’s no hurry.”
“I read fast.” He looked at the monitor screen, where the menu for a forum on animal rights hung suspended. “What do you do, Mr. Christian?”
“For a living, you mean? Not much, anymore.”
“You’re retired?”
“I suppose I am.”
“And before?” He glanced back at the screen. “Were you a teacher? Or a biologist?”
“I was trained in the sciences. But I went another way. What about you, what are you interested in?”
The boy read the screen as they talked. “I don’t know. My dad was a teacher. That was his day job, though. What he really was, was a historian. The two world wars—he knew everything about them. People wrote him from all over the world asking for information. He died three years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Maybe I’ll do something like that.” The boy turned his head toward the house. “I better go. That’s my mom calling. She’s not calling me, she’s calling the dog. But the dog never comes, so in a minute she’s gonna be calling me to go look for him. His name’s Rommel. He’s old, and looks mean, but he’s—”
“A pussycat?”
“A pussycat. That’s good. That’s what he is all right.” At the door he turned back. “Good-bye, Mr. Christian. See you later.”
“Enjoy the book.”
“Yes, sir.”
The boy’s mother met him just outside the back door. Twice as they spoke, she glanced toward the apartment. Christian hoped the boy wouldn’t get into trouble over his visit.
Christian went back to the forum, dutifully scrolled through five or six entries before realizing that he had no memory of what he had read. He drank the orange juice, warm now and fairly disgusting, and, more or less from habit, began a sweep of the sites he habitually used for communication. There were two repeated messages from people inquiring about dolls. No follow-up message on Rankin. Nothing from the cop, from Sayles.
Distractedly, with images of hard-packed dirt trails and of rooms at the edges of cities sliding through his mind, he clicked at a series of links: a piece on army dogs abandoned in the Pacific following World War II, another about a man who’d fought in both Korea and Vietnam, the review of a novel about a Desert Storm grunt’s homecoming, slide shows of Revolutionary and Civil War reenactments, online stores selling authentic battle gear, memorial sites, veteran’s chat rooms, history pages, Wikipedia, academic essays studded with sentences whose second clauses seemed to rip away or confound whatever meaning he had drawn from the first, further memorial sites, blogs about lost loved ones, travel pieces. Then suddenly his attention was full on the screen.
To put things in order, this is what we all want. And here, we are on firm ground. But with the next step, the very next step, we begin to move violently apart. To some, individuals and societies alike, it is manifest that this order must be imposed, legislated, and enforced—impressed—from above. Others understand with selfsame certainty that, unless its growth is organic, unless that order comes from within, it is forever doomed.
I must, as you all know, return soon. My stay here has been short. I have seen so little of your world, finally, and have understood less.
Never forget that yours is a world of great beauty: these clouds, these trees, running water, the caress of wind. Yet so many of you do not live in it; you only visit; and choose instead to live in a world of words, of theories.
You are trapped, prisoners in your language, hostage to your insistence upon understanding.
Theories rule, and will destroy, your world.
Hours later, well into the night, when little of the world remained around him save the sound of an occasional passing car and the spill of moonlight over half the table, Christian got out of bed, turned on the computer, and tried to find the posting again. But try as he might, he couldn’t recover it, couldn’t reconstruct the steps that took him there. As he searched, moonlight moved across the surface of the table in a slow tide, touched his hands, and moved on.
“SO LET’S SEE if we can call up the spirits.”
Graves rolled the chair in close, hands on the keyboard. He sat there rocking two inches forward, two inches back, wheels squeaking. Man couldn’t just sit in a chair to save himself. Always had to be scooting, rocking, keeping time. Not from nervousness or tamped-in energy, though. This was something else.
In quick succession, too fast for Sayles to follow (he spotted Google and Dogpile as they zipped past), Graves entered
dolls
on a stream of search engines, then, appending a series of qualifiers here and there, moved the search (“Let things perk a while”) to the left half of a split screen. He went on keying—John Rankin, the
Arizona Republic
for the days following the shooting,
New Times
, Good Sam and other central hospitals, fire department and city records, half a dozen addresses—in what seemed free association. Screen after screen came up, bloomed with prompt boxes or site jumps, and dropped to the bottom bar. Good soldiers.
Sayles watched Gonzalez move with his coffee mug down the aisle between desks.
Barge
was the word that came to mind, not barge in the sense of rushing, but in that of a river barge pushing its dogged way upstream. Gonzalez had been shot last year during a routine traffic stop, then while in the hospital and almost recovered, got hit by a stroke. Came back from that, too, but to permanent desk duty. Did okay on the whole, but you could see in his face, in the pitch of his body, the concentration required even for simple tasks. The mug was a gift from his wife, customized with his shield number, and it was never more than two-thirds full. He held it well out in front, balancing himself with the other arm, eyes on the mug as though it were a carpenter’s level.
Sayles heard the snap of Sanders biting into an apple at the next desk. When had the chair wheels stopped squeaking?
Graves leaned back. “This is interesting.”
Unable to make much of what he saw on the screen, Sayles shook his head.
“I put in Rankin’s address, sent out a crawler for activity in the vicinity.”
“And?”
“A recent nine-one-one call just up the street from Rankin’s place, man unconscious in car. Paramedics responded with on-site treatment and transported. Probably just a coincidence, but …” Graves reached for the phone. “Let’s ask.”
Sayles noted with interest that Graves dialed the number from memory. And to a direct line, no getting passed along. A few moments of back-and-forth banter—someone he knew, obviously—then Graves asked his question.
Silence.
Graves swung the mouthpiece up. “Cooking.”
Then the phone went back, he listened, he said how much he appreciated it.
“It just got better,” he said as he hung up. “Caucasian male, late fifties to mid-sixties. Seriously ill, treated in ER, moves to a room—and he rabbits. No trace of him.”
“The hospital has to have—”
“He’s carrying a driver’s license with his picture. Shows his name as Gerald Hopkins. A case worker at the hospital tried to follow through when he went AMA. The license—”
“Was a fake.”
“And no other ID. A nurse in ER remembers that he said his name was Christian.”
“Another dead end. So we don’t know anything.”
“We know one thing.”
Sayles waited.
“We know he’s dying,” Graves said.
Dark night of the soul. There it was, looking in at him.
Sayles stood at the window. He’d stepped down the room to get away from the glare of computer screens and desk lamps. They were there, but off to the side, behind, distant and apart.
It was 2:48 A.M.
It was 2:48 A.M and Sayles was thinking how, despite white nights, a redoubling case load, and everything else that was going on, he never felt strung out anymore. Normal—that’s what would feel weird.
Stretched out flat on his back on the floor by their desks taking what he insisted upon calling a power nap, Graves was snoring. From the break room came the smell of burned coffee and the sound of the unwatched TV playing what seemed to be the same commercial over and over, something about the music we all love, before giving way to a program on the social behavior of cats and dogs.
They’d been to the hospital, then to every convenience store, gas station, coffeehouse, bar, and hole-in-the-wall nearby. Adding old-fashioned legwork to the enpixeled shadowboxing that, if you believed TV shows, solved all the crimes these days.
Sayles was thinking about one where the agents, detectives, whatever they were, rarely stepped out from behind handheld computers, oversize screens, and smart boards. They’d talk, the resident geek would hit the keyboard, after a while a couple of them would wander outside for a brief car chase or gun battle, then they’d be back in the game room. Need information? Rub the lamp. Driver’s license, passport, school and employment records, bank statements … all a keystroke away. Need photos? Tap into the security cameras at the pawnshop across the street.
How many viewers, he wondered, paused to think what this said about rights to privacy? Or stopped to wonder how easily these agents, detectives, whatever they were (fictional, of course), might be able to track you cradle to grave, follow you through damn near every hour of your day and days.
Not exactly the way it went, here in the real world. For all his reaching and all his volleys, Graves hadn’t got jackshit on Dollman.
Out there in the night, twin spotlights lashed the sky. Some store’s grand opening, or a bar hustling customers, or a sale at one of the stretch of car lots along Camelback. And someone forgot to shut down the lights.
When dogs play
, a level-voiced announcer was saying on TV,
they employ actions common to such activities as actual fighting, or mating—biting, mounting, and so on. It becomes important for them to signal their intent, to broadcast what they want.
The social order requires that the dogs agree to play and not to eat one another or fight or try to mate.
Despite himself, Sayles broke into laughter.
So, zilch on the Internet, and the legwork hadn’t done them any better. One half-assed lead from the backroom guy at a flower shop. Guy’s arms were about the diameter of a baseball bat, dark brown and shrunken-looking, as if they’d been half-cooked. The tattoos that once covered them had faded away, remnants of their color serving only to add to the skin’s unhealthy look.
He remembered, he said, because he’d been sitting outside on a long-delayed break, this humongous, hurry-up order for carnations and sunflowers, some poncy school thing out Mesa way. He was about to light his cigarette when he saw this soldier coming down the street. That’s what he said: soldier. “Man looked like shit, you know? And I’m thinking, Whoa … seen
this
before. Fuck flashbacks, they’re bullshit—propaganda, you with me?—but for a minute there I thought I was back in country.”
The timing was right, and when Graves asked what direction the soldier came from, the man pointed north, where at that moment a medevac helicopter was settling onto the hospital roof. But that was it. The man had nothing more to tell them, and neither did anyone else.
Luckily, Lieutenant Byerlein wasn’t hands-on, content to be left alone to tidy up paperwork and study for the law courses he was forever taking. They told him they’d be pursuing leads on another case, might run into overtime. They wouldn’t put in for it, but the presumption would cover their absence from the squad, use of department resources, working off shift, and, they hoped, whatever else came up.
Whatever else
had not, in their minds, included something like forty hours straight without much by way of break or food. Sayles’s eyes wouldn’t focus for more than minutes at a time. He could feel his body blurring, the border between it and the world around him breaking down, dissolving.
When he turned back from the window, Graves had resumed his seat by the computer. His finger hit the keys, a single sharp peck. His eyes went from what was on the screen to Sayles.
“Yo,” he said. “If you told me, I don’t remember, how’d you get onto the doll thing in the first place?”
“Came from a CI, when I was trolling. Didn’t think anything of it till I got the message.”
“From Dollman.”
“Right.”
“And it said ‘I sell dolls’?”
Sayles nodded.
“Interesting.” Graves’s chair was still. “You think he advertises?”
Sayles walked over behind him.
Graves pointed to a line of text on the screen. “This is from
Lock & Load
, basically a newsletter for mercenaries. Private security, bodyguard work, like that. And this, this, this”—he looked up at Sayles—“are off the Web, message boards at three different sites.”
Please confirm shipment of the doll ordered Feb 10.
I am an avid collector, and am interested in purchasing one of your exceptional dolls.
Would like to obtain another doll from you. Please contact me ASAP.
Please inform me whether you have dolls still for sale.
“The first one’s from a couple years back.” Graves did something that changed the screen. The other messages dimmed, leaving the last two highlighted. “These were sent through the same IP, roughly the same time of day, a week apart. Hang on … Here’s a third, just posted.”
I am looking for a special doll for a special friend.
Graves dragged it across the screen to line up with the other two, stared a moment, then looked up. “They’re talking about something other than dolls.”
“One definitely gets that feeling.”
“All worded similarly, could easily be to the same person.”
“Form and placement suggesting they don’t know the seller. Lot of walls between.”
“So, it’s not dolls, what is he selling, what are they trying to buy?” Graves pointed to the two highlighted lines. “Whoever posted these, if it’s the same person, he seems … eager?”
“Doesn’t help us much. We don’t even know who they are.”
Graves hit more keys. “Maybe it does. They’re looking, same as we are. And it’s not them we’re looking for.” Screens bloomed, dropped to the bottom. “These are ads, right? Break them down, that’s what they are. So …”
His chair went back into motion, two inches forward, two inches back.
“So we place our own ads.”
