The Killer Is Dying (15 page)
THESE TWO WERE ABOUT as subtle as a preacher’s fart during a moment of silence for the dearly departed.
Keep walking.
No question it was a stakeout, and almost certainly what’s his name, Sayles. And his Sancho Panza. Question was, why. The shooting had gone cold by now, the cops had to have better things to do, Rankin was alive, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around to care. So why were these two still on the train? They didn’t know that Rankin had other eyes on him, or about the new doll postings—couldn’t. Or could they?
So he kept walking, carrying his plastic bag—like he’d run up the street for a pint of ice cream or milk and was heading back home.
Heading home. He was, of course. Just like in all those gruesome, mournful Protestant hymns.
But not right now.
He stuffed the plastic bag in a mailbox as he passed. With the cops hibernating in their car, he was out of here, didn’t need protective coloration anymore. He couldn’t even remember what was in the bag, something he’d picked up at a Circle K or AM/PM.
You always think your life is heading for something: some grand turning point, the moral decision that will define you forever after, an outcome. Medical school. Happiness. A profession. Family. Saving the free world.
A block or so up from Rankin’s, as he’d come out of the alleyway where trash bins and abandoned furniture stood sentry, a bicycle had passed on the street. Nice old bike, knapsack threaded through the handlebars. Kind of bike, back in his day it might have had plastic streamers coming off the handlebar grips. The rider, early teens maybe, looked to be deep in thought, and Christian wondered now if the boy thought
he
was heading for something.
The tan Honda had come by twice, once a couple of hours back, give or take, while he was sitting on a low wall up the street with a newspaper he’d snagged, again not too long after he spotted the stakeout, just before he ditched the plastic bag.
That night he had one of those dreams where he knew he was dreaming, where sometimes it seemed he was the central character, it was happening to him, and other times like he was just watching from a distance, a mute witness. He was standing in an apartment that looked familiar but continued on forever, on into shadow past the couch, table, chairs, and rugs he knew. At first he was speaking to someone, but then the someone became an image, a photograph or an uncompleted painting, or a mirror, but it wasn’t himself he saw in it.
You thought you would change the world, the image’s voice said, no trace of threat or challenge, simply conversational.
Maybe … once, he responded. Then: Don’t we all, when we’re young?
We lose the dream.
Maybe we have to, to go on. Or maybe we only misplace it, as we do so much else.
Is that why we are all so sad?
Are we? Sad? How can we be, with life so full around us, with so very much in the world to engage us?
But always the bad ending.
Is the ending what matters?
He woke in sheets damp with his sweat. Without pain, though, and strangely at peace. Needing desperately to pee. Pitch-black outside and in. Had there been another power outage? He stumbled over the chair on his way to the window, looked out, and still could see nothing. It was then he realized he was blind.
HE HAD
HIS MONKEY WIFE
in his backpack, the backpack lashed to the handlebars, and he was wondering where everyone was. This wasn’t a way he usually came. Nor did he know why he took the route today. Got to the end of his street, to the edge of his neighborhood, then turned on impulse into Fern. Fern was a long, long street that snaked through three different apartment complexes. The street was unnaturally wide but, because the apartment lots were dense with trees, didn’t look or feel wide. It looked narrow and dark, and it felt claustrophobic.
Having run the chute, he spilled out into
this
neighborhood, something with Gables in the name, he saw on one of those little signs they add to the regular street signs. Coral Gables, Green Gables, Clark Gables, something like that. Like this was some special, defined place, apart from the jumble.
He was thinking about the people he read to, wondering what their lives were like. Dark and narrow, like the street he just left? Or bright, empty, and unlived-in, like this Whatever Gables?
One of the few signs of life was a couple of men sitting in a car at curbside. They both faced forward, the driver slouched down, the other sitting up straight—maybe looking for something? Neither was talking.
What did those people at the center think about? What kind of expectations, what kind of memories, did they have? He was pretty sure they hadn’t imagined their lives coming down to what they were.
Last night he had foundered in a dream, the world gone pitch-black around him, him feeling his way, one hand high, one low, along a wall. No memory or idea where the wall might lead, but it was solid, it was what he had to hold on to, it was
there
. He sensed (maybe, he thought later, maybe it was the sound of his own breathing reflected back at him) that he was coming to something, an end, a corner, a doorway. Then he had come fully awake and realized he was in his bedroom, pressed up against the inside wall, paralyzed.
The dream stayed with him, an afterimage superimposed on everything he saw and touched around him, making it all seem vaguely unreal or distant. The dream was beside him through breakfast and the clean-up, there through a much-needed shower as he examined his finger (healing, but still no sensation in it), there as he sat at his computer, there for the run through his regular sites. Only when he’d settled to work did it fade.
He had three e-mails inquiring after shipments. This was not good—and not like him at all. Those items should have gone out days ago. He responded, apologizing, pleading a sudden upswing in business and promising immediate shipment or, if that proved unsatisfactory, a full refund.
Two of the items, he had boxed and ready to go. He printed a label for the third and left it in the printer tray to remind himself, then e-mailed for pickup.
Both a collector in Michigan and what appeared to be a small specialty museum in Ohio had e-mailed about the antique optics set he had posted, eleven lenses used maybe a hundred years ago to test vision, each lens in its own leather case, the set itself housed in a beautifully crafted teakwood box.
Another requested additional photos of the child’s pink porcelain tea service.
A man to whom he had sold a small banjo with the painting of a blackface minstrel on its head and, later, a “Rastus” ventriloquist dummy, e-mailed to ask if by chance he had come across any new examples of plantation art.
The rest of the e-mails were straightforward and easily dealt with. After that, and after he wrote a couple of checks, yearly insurance on the house, and a “donation” payment to the free clinic (
This is not a bill
), he was done.
He clicked back over to his favorite sites and backed through the subsequent commentary—was it real? a hoax? what did it say, and what did it
really
say?—to the latest entry from Traveler. He read the posting over and over.
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.
That night, thinking of Traveler’s posting, he remembered how it had felt riding his bike that afternoon, how he had been all alone moving through the world, he remembered the sun’s warmth, the wind on his skin, and he remembered the faces of the people he read for, as though he had brought them something precious, something extraordinary, instead of just a story from an old secondhand book.
Jimmie walked through the kitchen into the garage. Here was a story, too, one he had pieced together. Apparently, after his mother left, his father had gone out, bought heavy storage boxes from a moving company, and packed up everything he deemed hers. The boxes sat as they had sat for years, perfectly stacked, perfectly aligned, against the garage’s rear wall, a solid block two deep, four wide, and taller than he was, each box carefully labeled.
Jimmie went out to the porch, to the glider whose frame had rusted through last year so that now one side dragged on the floor. He heard, from another porch, another house, someone shouting angrily. The moon was bright. It hung in the sky out over the Superstitions and seemed not to move at all, as though it had all the time in the world.
“AND HOW DO YOU feel about that?” Graves looked out to where a fat man and a car needing a tire change were fighting it out at curbside. “Listen to me, I sound like some damn social worker.”
Sayles laughed. “Yeah. You have to talk about it,” he said. “Get it out there. Don’t hold in.”
“Learn to let go.”
Sayles glanced over as the light changed. “Man, I feel so much better now.”
Graves was about to tell him enjoy it while you can, the bill’s coming, but Sayles went on.
“How I feel, is that she was saying good-bye.”
Graves made no response. They were pulling into an area that had once been central Phoenix but was now a two-mile stretch of crumbling churches, front-room tax preparers, the odd chiropractor, and blasted houses, some of them caved in or partially burned out.
“Interesting choice for a meeting place,” Sayles said.
“The mall?”
“Fight your way past the skateboarders covering the parking lot, you get to the old folks inside. Median age is what, sixteen? Fit right in.”
“There’s a Denny’s, round the back.”
“That thing’s still there? That used to be the regular stop out this way when I first went on the force.”
“Like most of us, it’s not what it used to be, but it is still there.”
A scatter of bedraggled cars occupied the parking lot. Most of the mall’s business these days came from the neighborhood, or got bussed in. Besides, it was early in the day. Close to a dozen Hispanic males stood by one of the entrances, hoping for day work.
“You think there’s anything to this?”
“Has to be.” Graves looked out at the hopeful workers. “Those guys have families, you think?”
“Most of them. Here
and
back home.”
Graves shook his head. “That sucks.”
“Yep.”
“Well … Like I told you, I went in early, thinking I’d at least do a run-through and update on our files—you know, the cases we’ve been ignoring? I’d just got started when the first e-mail came in.”
“And it said—”
“Dolls. I hit reply and sent a question mark. When he came back with Officer Sayles?, I said yes. He wanted to know if you were still interested in someone connected with a shooting at the Brell building. The message was garbled, but readable. No way I thought it was really him, not at first, and there was all kinds of weirdness—misspellings, run-ons. But he had the correct address for the shooting.”
“And he asked for help.”
“Not in so many words, but that’s what came across. Said he had been contacted by the person he thought responsible for the incident.”
“Still guarding his words.”
“Right. And that he’d set up a meet he was unable to make. Just let it hang there. So after a minute of staring at the cursor blinking, I said maybe I, meaning we, could help with that, make the meet for him. That’s when he sent through the details. I asked how we could contact him, but he was gone. Dead air.”
Sayles pulled in at the Denny’s. Two other cars in the lot, those plus a pickup with sideboards made of scrap lumber, filled with yard tools and palm cuttings.
“We been chasing this guy how long, and he comes and finds us?”
“Hey, it works for deer hunters.”
“Graves, you’re a city boy, what the hell do you know about hunting?”
“I read. I listen to people.”
“Sure you do. So why us? The thought that we’re getting set up for something cross your mind?”
“More than once … Maybe we’re all he has.”
“All he has for what? We don’t know who he is, what he wants, how he fits in.”
“Maybe we’re about to find out.”
They were out of the car, walking to the door. “You’re full to the top with maybes today.”
“Think positive.”
Despite the span of windows, what with the posters and three-inch-high letters of painted-on specials obscuring them, not to mention the dinginess of those windows or the lack of internal lighting, walking in was like entering a bar, some zone of perpetual evening. A young man in overalls sat at the counter forking in eggs with one hand, texting with the other. Four other singles sat around the room. The waitress was leaning into the order window talking with the cook.
Graves and Sayles took a table near, but not too near, the door. The waitress brought water, not something you saw a lot anymore, and menus. Sayles opened a menu. Its once glossy surface was thick with ancient smears and spillings.
“Samples,” Graves said. “You want breakfast?”
“I’m going to check out the bathroom and the back. Order for me.”
“What do you want?”
“Doesn’t matter, it all tastes pretty much the same.”
“Good point.”
Graves watched the waitress make a swing through the front, refilling everyone’s coffee, on her way to their table. She set the carafe down at the edge, took out her pad, and told him the specials. He ordered two.
“Large juice is only twenty cents extra.”
“Why not? Two tall oranges. Thanks.”
She smiled, then ducked her head. Sensitive about the crooked teeth, he figured. Been doing that her whole life.
Two new diners came in while Sayles was away, a twentyish couple in what looked to be self-consciously thrift-store clothes. Another left, climbing into a Pinto with cardboard taped over a rear window and red plastic film over both tail lights. The food arrived shortly after Sayles. Minutes later a new patron entered.
“Hunter’s vest,” Graves said.
“Got it.”
One of those guys who looked young till you took a closer look, wearing what Graves’s father to his dying day had called dungarees—jeans to the rest of us—and, under the vest, a blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows. Unlined face, save around the mouth and eyes. Light brown hair still full, not thinning, but dry-looking, dull.
He walked by the counter, glancing this way and that, then around the corner into the back area.
“What do you think?” Graves said.
The man came out from the back and sat at the counter. The waitress stepped in, brought him a coffee, asked if there was anything else.
“I think he knows who he’s looking for, by sight.”
“Our man, you think?”
“Could be. And maybe you could stop jamming those eggs in your mouth long enough to go check the parking lot.”
Graves went out, circled the building, returned.
“It’s around back, almost out of sight.”
“Tan Honda?”
“You got it.”
Together they stood, leaving the food half eaten, and stepped toward the counter. The waitress’s head turned. She said something, and the cook came out a side door, leaned against the wall watching.
The man didn’t look around, but he knew they were there. You could see it in his shoulders.
“You have a doll for sale, I believe,” Sayles said.
They’d stopped a yard away. Now the guy turned. His eyes went from Sayles to Graves back to Sayles.
“You’re not Christian.”
“Your friend couldn’t make it.”
“My friend … right. So he sent you.”
“That’s about it.”
“And who would you be?”
Graves took out his case, held up the badge. The cook nodded and went back into the kitchen.
“Cops,” the man said. “He sent cops. That’s pretty funny.”
Graves and Sayles took the stools on either side.
“Guess that means you don’t want to buy the doll, huh?”
“Tell you the truth,” Sayles said, “we’re not even sure what a doll has to do with it.”
“Interesting,” the man said.
Sayles smiled. That was one of Graves’s favorite expressions.
“That you’re looking for me, I mean, and don’t know why.”
“We suspect that it has something to do with a shooting that occurred some time back. At the Brell building?”
“Right now,” Graves added, “we need to see some ID.”
The man took out his wallet and set it on the counter.
“Thank you, Mr.”—Graves flipped it open—“Barnes.” Then, to Sayles: “Carroll Barnes. Local. No credit cards, couple thousand cash, give or take.”
“You’re not going to tell us we need a warrant for that?” Sayles asked.
“Figure you learned that in cop school.”
“Are you armed, Mr. Barnes?”
He shook his head, then asked, “How is Christian? But wait, you came in here not knowing who you were looking for. Do you at least know
him
? And how he’s doing?”
“Something else we don’t know, I’m afraid,” Sayles said.
Graves added, “We haven’t met him.”
“Makes this quite the reunion, doesn’t it?”
“Let’s get back to the shooting,” Sayles said. “Tell me about John Rankin.”
The waitress advanced apologetically behind the counter. “Are you going to finish your breakfasts, or should I clear the table?”
Make room for all the waiting customers, Graves thought. “Go ahead. We could use some fresh coffee, though.”
She nodded, brought prefilled cups for both of them, then went about seeing to the remains. The cook was keeping an eye on them while doing his best to appear not to.
“I don’t know John Rankin,” Carroll Barnes said.
“Christian, then.”
“Interesting. I don’t know John Rankin, but you don’t seem to know much at all.”
Sayles was silent, signaling with his eyes for Graves to stay quiet too. It was all about negative space—something a lot of interviewers never learned. Space has to be there, to get filled.
“Do you even know what he does for a living?”
Sayles shook his head, waited.
“He’s a hit man, a contract killer. Has been for forty years. Probably longer.”
“Interesting,” Graves said, and the three of them exchanged glances.
“Can I assume that I’m under arrest?”
Again Sayles said nothing.
“Or,” Barnes went on, “is that something else you don’t know?” What might have been a laugh, or just the man clearing his throat, sounded. “I suppose it was only a matter of time.”
