The Killing Game (25 page)

“Thank you, Nikki. The group still in session?”

“They should be breaking up. Go on back. You remember the room, right?”

Muriel Pendel smiled. “I’ve only been there a couple hundred times.”

She opened the door to a broad and indirectly lit space. A dozen men and women from mid-teens to early thirties sat in chairs circled on a gray carpet. Dr Sonia Szekely sat across the room, notepad in hand, a petite woman in a sizzling orange dress. Her face was broad and Slavic, sixty-four years of history lined into coarse skin, but the facial topography suggested a life rich in smiles and laughter. The woman looked up and her bright eyes sparkled further at seeing Muriel.

“Sit with us, Muriel, we’re about finished. Everyone remembers Muriel Pendel, right? Wilbert’s mother?”

A gaunt and hollow-cheeked man with legs crossed tightly at the knees turned and frowned under disheveled black hair. Muriel noticed several other faces that didn’t look pleased at the mention of her son’s name.

“Where’s Willy?” the gaunt man asked. “Is he coming back?”

“Willy’s been busy,” Muriel said. “He’ll be back soon, I hope.”

The man pulled a strand of hair down his forehead and looked at Muriel. His face was expressionless.

“Will he be nicer?”

“Willy’s working on things,” Muriel said with a forced smile. “Like we all are.”

“You aren’t working on anything,” the man said. “You’re too fucking perfect.”

“That’s enough, Nicu,” the Slavic woman said. “You know Muriel is in the parents group. We all work on our issues and an apology is in order.”

The man looked away. “I’m sorry, Mrs Pendel.”

“It’s OK, Nicu. Willy can say mean things sometimes.”

“All right, then,” Szekely said, dropping her notepad into a multicolored carpetbag. “We’re done for today. Good work, everyone. See you all next week.”

A thirtyish red-haired woman near the far corner of the circle held up her hand, waving it like a pennant in a wind. Her eyes were wide with excitement.

“I’ve been saving my news all session. Guess what, everyone? I finally got my degree in accounting.”

A pause as minds grasped the fact, followed by cheers and applause. Someone lifted the woman’s hand like a victorious boxer. Everyone gathered to hear the details.

Muriel felt a tear escape from her eye. The first time she’d seen Kristen Wallencott – née Kristen Dodrescu – the then-seventeen-year-old girl was prone on the floor outside the circle with her face in her hands, never speaking or meeting anyone’s eyes. Two years later Kristen ran away from home in February and was not found until May, a dazed and dirty amnesiac selling herself on a corner in San Diego. Returned to her parents in Mobile, Kristen resumed her position on the floor of the group. But after four years of Dr Szekely’s group therapy, Kristen had made an incredible leap into life.

Szekely touched Muriel’s arm. “Let’s go to my office and let Kristen enjoy her moment.”

The pair entered the doctor’s private office, the walls a warm green, the carpet a deep and relaxing umber. Muriel sat across from the desk as Szekely sat behind it, opening a drawer and withdrawing cigarettes and a lighter.

“You don’t mind, Muriel?”

“God no. I’d love one myself.”

Both women lit up, Szekely sliding a glass ashtray the size of a dinner plate to the front of her desk. She leaned back and exhaled a plume of blue smoke. “Willy’s still avoiding returning to the group?”

“Not for lack of trying by Bert and me.”

Szekely nodded. “When did Wilbert enlist at the police academy, Muriel? I thought he was taking auto-repair classes at a technical college.”

“Willy’s been at the police academy for three weeks. It was a whim, so … maybe a month ago.”

“Why did he quit school?”

“He said someone fiddled with the engine he was working on. But it was just an excuse to leave.”

“The usual trouble?” Szekely asked.

Muriel fidgeted with her cigarette. “Focusing, yes. Plus there’s math involved. And computers. Willy’s good with his hands, but being an auto mechanic is so computerized today. I can understand his frustration, but can’t understand why he decided he wanted to join the police.”

A sad smile from Szekely. “I think you can.”

Muriel stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, twisting it into the glass long after it was out. “Willy thinks it’ll be glamorous and let him be in charge. He’ll get a badge and a uniform and a gun and put people in holds and knock them to the ground.”

Szekely nodded. “Willy still feels powerless. It generates insecurities he won’t acknowledge.” She paused. “Willy’s living on his own, isn’t he?”

A humorless laugh. “Kind of. He’ll come in and grab half the food in the fridge, his father’s beer. But always when we’re out.”

“You took him off the parental dole a few months back, I recall, as incentive to finish school and find a real job. How did that go?”

Muriel studied her hands. “We, uh, reinstated it when Willy suggested he might move home again. It was … uh, we thought it might be…”

“You’re feeling guilty because you don’t want Willy back home, right?”

“Yes, I mean no … I mean…”

Szekely leaned forward and stubbed her cigarette out, her head wreathed in smoke. “Stop beating yourself up, Muriel. It’s natural. Willy’s twenty-four, he should be out making his own way. Willy’s not retarded, nor does he suffer from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome like Oana and Nicu. He has relatively few of the extreme emotional problems associated with so many of the orphans. Sociopathy, for example.” Szekely shook her head. “You remember Bogdan and Cezar. So sad, such a waste.”

Muriel nodded slowly. “I know we have it easy compared to some of the parents, Doctor. Still, it’s been frustrating. Maybe Bert and I went into the adoption cycle with too many stars in our eyes. But there were so many orphans, so many wounded little souls…”

Harry and I visited three other scumbuckets who’d threatened me. The last one we visited, Robbie Jay Turnbull, lived in a decaying trailer in a marsh, the table covered with plates of dried food, cans and bottles on the floor, rats scuttling through the walls.

The last time I’d seen Turnbull he was cooking meth and selling to gangs for resale. Harry and I had crossed paths with Turnbull on another matter and decided to take him down as a gift to society. Using personal time, we engineered a purchase with me as the buyer, then dropped the whole package into the MPD’s narcotics division. Turnbull should have done a dozen years but dropped the dime on fellow sellers and bought the sentence down to two years.

He’d pledged to kill me several times.

But it appeared that in his year back on the street RJ had progressed from cooking meth to consuming it in historic quantities. All the teeth remaining in his mouth were rotten and his tongue lolled from gap to gap, poking through like a curious adder. His sagging flesh called to mind wet newsprint without the writing. His eyes resembled flies, or maybe they were, flies everywhere in the trailer, a fog of buzzing dots.

Turnbull pretty much stayed motionless on his couch the whole time, dressed solely in stained BVDs and one brown sock, staring at a muted
Jersey Shore
with his mouth open and going “Ar-arrr-arrrr” in answer to our questions.

Actually, we only asked three questions:
How you doing, RJ? Are those rats we hear?
and
That ain’t
Downtown Abbey
you’re watching, right?
By then we’d determined Robbie Jay Turnbull incapable of walking a dozen feet, much less stealthily scoping out and killing other human beings.

“Have a nice life, Robbie,” Harry said as we left the reeking trailer, knowing if Turnbull managed to live out the year he’d be doing pretty good.

We ended up at the garage at half-past seven. A couple cops from the floor below were leaving. They shot me glances and didn’t say anything.

“Screw ’em,” Harry said.

Neither of us wanting to revisit overloaded desks, we parted ways. The sun was still high, June near the summer solstice. Though I spent most of three seasons wishing for days that were three-quarters sunlit and cursing whoever mishandled the hanging of the Earth – why the tilt? – tonight I wished an early dark, perhaps providing a place to hide.

I waved as Harry drove past, heading toward home and his girlfriend, Sally Hargreaves. They’d mix a drink, fix some chow, listen to jazz. And hopefully, as Bob Dylan put it, forget about today until tomorrow.

I thought a long moment, pulled my cell and dialed, holding my breath through the rings.

“Hello, Carson,” Holliday said.

“You wanted to talk about something?” I said.

A pause. “It’s maybe the kind of thing best left alone.”

“When talking about things that shouldn’t be talked about, I find it easier to not discuss them on Causeway. How about I pick you up in ten minutes?”

I was two minutes early, yet Wendy stood on the stoop outside of her apartment, an inexpensive complex favored by students. I looked to the side and saw a swimming pool ringed by lithe and tanned bodies. Bottles of beer filled hands and tabletops. Kanye West rapped from a sound system.

“Looks like you’re missing the party,” I said.

“All they do is drink and play the same twenty songs. It’s like they never left high school.”

I studied the overeager smiles, heard the forced laughter and the loud,
look-at me!
voices. A tall kid in a dripping T-shirt yelled “
Watch this!
” before bouncing a dozen times on the diving board and cannonballing into the turquoise water, the splash pulling squeals from poolside. Someone turned the music up louder.

Most of those folks believed they were happy at that moment, perhaps as happy as it was possible to get. They had youth and drink and music and seemingly endless nights of thrilling, meaningless release in a procession of arms and beds. Music and television and movies had assured them such behavior constituted happiness, thus a fair amount of those folks would lock themselves into an unreality show called
Today at Poolside
and never venture beyond.

Yes, they would marry, have two-point-one children, buy houses in the suburbs and plant dogwoods and azaleas. But to make that sort of operation work correctly you needed to understand the broader world, allowing it to change you in places, while setting other boundaries where it could not reach. Knowing how to arrange yourself for the journey took an amalgam of curiosity, skepticism and introspection most people didn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pool skimmer.

The music changed to Cee Lo Green singing the uncensored version of his hit, the poolside crowd bumping hips, hoisting bottles, and howling
So fuck you!

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

There are two ways to cross Mobile Bay in a vehicle: on the elevated Interstate 10, what’s called the Bayway, and the Causeway, a slender strip of earth and pavement barely above sea level. The Bayway is a concrete flume filled with fast metal and hot fumes and with all the charm of an open sewer.

The Causeway has far less traffic. There are restaurants along its eight-mile passage, some fancy, others ramshackle fish houses. Marsh grasses grow at water’s edge. Gulls, ducks, ibises, pelicans, cranes, all claim the Causeway as home. Now and then a surly gator waddles from the water and sunbathes in the road, the local constabulary having to encourage the critter back into his brackish haunts. Generations of relatives fish together from the banks of the Causeway, the occasion less about fish than family.

We passed the Drifter’s Bar and pulled from the road. I reached into the cooler and produced two bottles of Bass Ale, handing one to Wendy. Without a word we leaned against my truck and let our eyes float south over Mobile Bay, the falling sun turning the water into a sea of trembling gold. After several minutes Wendy set her bottle on the hood, crossed her arms and stared across the bay.

“This has been the most amazing month of my life,” she said, her voice tinged with wonder.

I nodded. “I enjoyed the hell out of my time at the academy, too. I walked in the door scared to death, but within a week knew I was where I needed to be.”

“That’s only part of what I’m talking about,” she said. “The rest was the thing which maybe should remain unmentioned.”

“On the Causeway there are no topics beyond mention,” I said. “Speak your truth.”

“All right, then. I recently fell for someone.”

“What?” I said, my turn for surprise. “Who?”

When she turned her eyes to me I knew.

Gregory was in his office catching up on writing code, thinking it ridiculous for someone of his caliber to grind out such crap. Work was for morons and robots. If he were wealthier – twice as much or so – work would be unnecessary. Even undulating markets offered ways to make money. A seven per cent return on investments would generate over three hundred thousand dollars annually. With that kind of money, he could pursue his hobby full time. There were over forty pennies in the vase.

His computer bonged. Time to check the trap and head to bed.

Gregory changed from businesswear into cargo pants and a polo shirt. Picked up the flashlight. There hadn’t been any cats for the past two nights, the supply getting low.

Gregory tiptoed to the backyard and pulled the cover from the trap.

A cat! And not just any cat, a prize feline: big and shiny and black as coal, with four distinctive white paws.

“
Mow
,” the cat said.

“
Mow,
” Gregory repeated. He lifted the trap to his shoulder and jogged to the house, pumping his arm in victory. He didn’t have much time to deal with the cats these days, but it always calmed him.

My phone seemed far away as it pulled me from dreams both warm and safe. I slapped the bedside table for the device. “I think you left it in the kitchen,” Wendy said. I felt the bed rebound as she left the mattress.

“Ummph,” I said.

“Do you want me to answer?” she asked.

“Sure.” I yawned cobwebs from my brain and heard jogging feet, Mix-up’s claws scratching on tile as he followed Wendy to the kitchen. She was back seconds later, holding the phone.