Wave (19 page)

Karen wanted to jam the pedal to the floor and roar up the bridge. She wanted to, but she wouldn’t. The risk would be tremendous—the very efficient and disciplined Corporal Moreland undoubtedly knew how to shoot out a car tire. And Karen had a feeling that a few of his friends were on the other side. It would only take a few words into the walkie-talkie to alert them. What was that saying she’d heard on one of those police shows? Something like, “You can outrun a car, but you can’t outrun a radio.”

She waited until he looked in her direction again; she knew he would. When he did, she held up a hand to her ear as if she was holding her cell phone, and shrugged as if to say, I still can’t get through.

When he came over she said, “I’m sorry, Corporal, but could you try on your phone again?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He entered the number and waited. As she fully expected, no one answered.

“Sorry, ma’am, there’s no response.”

She gripped the wheel and gazed angrily forward. “Well, what am I supposed to do?!” she snapped, using her hand for emphasis. “Do you really think I should just sit here and wait while—”

“Actually, I have an idea,” Moreland said. “I’ve just been told that the local police are sweeping the area, looking for people who haven’t gotten out yet. I can tell them what’s going on with your boys and ask them to send someone to the house.”

“I can’t just go over there and get them myself?”

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry.”

A tear broke from her eye and ran down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly. “All right, fine.”

Moreland replied with a single nod—the same gesture he undoubtedly used with his superiors—and produced the cell phone again.

Her eyes still on that rising stretch of white road with the broken yellow lines running up the middle, Karen whispered another prayer to the God she’d worshipped her entire life.

A dispatcher received Moreland’s call and consulted a hastily written list she’d made of which officers were in which areas. The Ericksons lived on the secluded corner of Julia Avenue and Julia Lane in Holgate. Ted Ramsey was over there. The dispatcher was a thirteen-year veteran and processed the information in a heartbeat—Ramsey was in car twenty-two, a navy-blue ’97 Chevy sedan with a burned-out right taillight. She got behind the microphone and made the call.

A few streets over from the Ericksons’ home, Ramsey was cruising along with the windows open, one big hairy arm hanging out as he looked for any coat-hangerless doors. He hadn’t seen any yet and was frankly hoping he wouldn’t. He had been born and raised here and was wholly devoted to his job and to the people of this community; he knew them all and cared a great deal for some of them, but he also had a family—a wife and three little girls—and, like many others this day, he didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the Causeway when that wall of water came over the horizon.

Then he saw a door conspicuous for its lack of a hanger. Sonofabitch, he swore under his breath as he realized whose house it was. He knew the family better than he cared to—the Connallys. LBI’s resident poster family for dysfunctionality. They’d had it all—drinking, drugs, petty theft, violence. Sometimes the two sons lived at home, sometimes they didn’t. The daughter had left years ago, dropping out of high school and moving out west somewhere. She’d been the smart one, Ramsey thought. What chance do you have of putting a life together for yourself in that kind of environment?

For all he knew they had left and, just to be defiant, one of the boys purposely left the hanger off the knob. Wouldn’t be the first time one of them went out of the way to defy authority.

He parked in the street with the motor running and his temperature rising. He decided to go around the side instead of the front. As he reached the driveway, he noticed there were no cars; the family had three. Another good sign they had in fact left. He tried the door, but it was locked. He pounded on it and rang the bell. He would wait exactly thirty seconds, he told himself. When the deadline passed, he hammered one more time, then turned sideways and rammed it with his shoulder. The cheap deadbolt ripped from the aged molding without resistance.

“Anybody home? Hello?”

There was a strong food smell, which undoubtedly had seeped into the walls and the carpeting and was now a permanent part of the house’s personality. He moved quickly from room to room, following a floor plan that matched a hundred other postwar homes in the area. He started in the kitchen, then went into the living room. To the left was a hallway with doors on either side and one at the end. He pushed each one back just far enough to look in. It took no more than a minute to sweep the entire first floor.

Next was the adjoining garage. Entering, he saw cardboard boxes everywhere, some split at the corners with their contents pouring out like entrails. Newspapers were piled dangerously next to the furnace and the water heater.
No risk of a fire after today
, he thought darkly.

As he turned to go back inside the house, a garbled voice cut into the stillness—“Twenty-seven report, twenty-seven report.”

He took the walkie-talkie from his belt. “This is twenty-seven. Go ahead.”

“Ted, I just got a call from one of the National Guardsmen. He’s got Karen Thompson with him. You know the Ericksons, over on Julia and Julia?”

“Sure, Bud and Nancy. Why?”

“Apparently they watch the Thompsons’ two boys, and they haven’t been answering their phone. Karen works on the mainland and wants to be sure they got off the island. Can you check it out?”

“Soon as I get out of here. I’m in the Connally’s house.”

“What are you doing there?”

He started down the hallway, his mirror-polished boots clomping on the worn linoleum.

“No hanger on the door. No cars in the driveway, either, so my sense is they left and didn’t put one out.”

“Big surprise.”

“With a little luck they’ll take the insurance money and move south.”

“That’d be nice.”

“Anyway, I’ll check out the Erickson place. I’m only two blocks away.”

“Right. Over and out.”

“Out.”

He replaced the unit and went through the living room to the carpeted staircase.

“Hey! Anyone up there?”

He paused, listening, and debated whether or not he should even bother going up. Again, procedure demanded it, but with every second making a difference, was it worth it? What was the logic he was working against? The idea that someone would knowingly stay here? Ramsey was born and raised Catholic and cherished the gift of life as much as anyone, but one amendment to those beliefs was the strong opinion that people could do with their life as they chose, and if someone wanted to sit around waiting for a tsunami to come and subtract them from the population so be it. He knew this was not in step with the dogma of his profession, but that didn’t stop him from thinking it.

“Hey, I said is anyone up there?”

Again he paused, and again he heard nothing.

He decided to abandon procedure and get moving to the Ericksons’ place. They were nice people, good people, people worth being concerned about. These idiots couldn’t even spare five seconds to put a goddamn coat hanger on the front door.

Then he heard the groan. It was weak, but it was definitely human.

He bounded up the steps three at a time and came to a short hallway that connected two rooms. Both doors were closed. He tried the right one first and was hit with another vicious stench—unwashed clothes intermingled with the unmistakable aroma of marijuana smoke. The slanted ceiling that followed the angle of the roof was covered with posters of rock bands from all eras—Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest and Def Leppard, Phish and Dave Matthews. There were empty plastic soda bottles (Dr. Pepper, mostly) and paper plates with dried food pasted on them. But no people. He closed the door before nausea set it.

Opening the second one revealed the source of the groan—sprawled on the bed was Kevin Connally. Early twenties, acne, crew cut, bad teeth, all bones and elbows. His room didn’t smell much better than his brother’s. His eyes were closed but he was smiling, head arched back slightly, hands on his stomach. On the nightstand beside him was a hypodermic needle. Somehow Ramsey doubted it was for insulin injections.

“Oh, shit….”

He moved in and shook Connally by his knobby shoulders.

“Come on, wake up. Snap out of it!”

He slapped him lightly on the cheek (inwardly he wanted to slap him so hard his head spun around like a top, making that
whupwhupwhup!
cartoon sound). Connally just groaned some more.

Ramsey slid his hands under the kid and lifted him. There was virtually no effort required; he couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds. It seemed obvious that the drugs were slowly but surely eating him away. How bad was the addiction, he wondered. Was the kid taking in food at all? And where was he getting the cash? Ramsey was pretty sure he didn’t have a job. Was he selling to support his habit? And did that mean there was a flow of the stuff on the island? He knew LBI wasn’t clean—what town was anymore?—but he was pretty sure it wasn’t a major problem. And what about the kid’s parents? Did they know what was going on? Even if they didn’t, this would mean trouble for them—big trouble. Huge fines, maybe even jail time. Kevin wasn’t a minor, but he was still under their roof. Was he one of these kids who forbade their parents from entering his room, and were they stupid enough to obey?
What a friggin’ mess
, Ramsey thought. Under different circumstances….

Hoisting Connally over one shoulder, Ramsey turned sideways to get him through the bedroom doorway. He had to exercise some peculiar geometry to turn him again so they could go down the staircase.

A few steps down, Connally began to convulse. It wasn’t an unusual response to filling one’s system with foreign chemicals, but, in his haste, Ramsey hadn’t anticipated the possibility. He released the boy on reflex, then tried to grab him again. It was this second motion that caused him to lose his balance and fall forward. The two of them moved through space in slow motion, time stretching into infinity in every direction. They rejoined at the bottom, Connally bouncing and rolling down the carpeted steps while Ramsey sailed over him. Ramsey’s head struck the wall above the landing, knocking him unconscious. Connally continued convulsing for a few minutes, then came to rest. He was not unconscious, per se—he had simply slipped back into his crack-induced state of ephemeral nothingness.

They lay together like lovers as sunlight reached through the vertical blinds and drew long shapes on the carpeting.

BethAnn had just about reached the entrance/exit to the trailer park when Mrs. Foster popped into her head.

She would be eighty-nine this year. Eighty-nine and still kicking, as she liked to say.
Kicking is hardly the word I would use
, BethAnn thought. The woman moved at about the speed of evolution. She had more wrinkles than a dried apple. And she wore a wig that was so phony it should’ve had a chin strap.

But what really irked BethAnn about her, although for the life of her she couldn’t understand why, was the way she shuffled her feet—
shh-shh-shh-shh
—like pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. She could hear the woman outside her window in the mornings, putting out the garbage, then shuffling back into her Fleetwood doublewide—
shh-shh-shh-shh
. How long had she been doing that? BethAnn often wondered. Did she do it when she was younger, back in the early Jurassic?

Mrs. Foster also wore the same thing every damn day—that white-and-light-blue floral sundress, the one with the food stains and the frayed hemline. Easy on, easy off. You could even sleep in it. The irony of being critical of someone else’s hygiene never occurred to BethAnn. Her own considerable odors were acceptable, but she found those of others revolting beyond description.

Everyone else in the LBI Trailer Park loved Mrs. Foster. She was small and sweet, quick with a smile and a reassuring, grandmotherly sentiment. She seemed to have an interminable supply of warm wishes and positive thoughts. She would apologize profusely if you needed help with something and she couldn’t give it. She would first apologize, then explain in detail how she once was able to do so much, back in the days when Ike was president and you could walk the streets of Manhattan at night with no worries.