World of Trouble (6 page)

Cortez pushes off from the wall and leans against the bars and starts talking, absently, casually.

“My mother was in a coma once. State hospital. Just two days. They brought her lunch and dinner, even though she was eating through a tube. Oversight, I guess. Or some dumb rule. Me and my brother ate it. It was good, too, compared to the food she usually provided for us.”

He laughs. I give him a half smile. I am never quite sure, when Cortez rolls out one of his long, involved stories, how true it is, how embellished, how much fabricated from whole cloth. The first time I met Cortez he was holed up in an ersatz warehouse on Garvins Falls Road, sitting on a pile of loot, which was subsequently taken from him by his erstwhile romantic and business partner, Ellen. He has told me three versions of that story, all with substantively
different details: she caught him unawares and chased him out with a hatchet; she tricked him in a bargain; she had another lover, who showed up with some friends and cleaned the place out.

He’s wandered back into the cell now and he stands beside the small toilet, examining his wide, uneven face in the mirror. I ask him how his mother ended up in the coma.

“Oh.” He cracks his knuckles. “You know. I cut school one afternoon to go home and smoke some weed, and I found her and her boyfriend, and the boyfriend was choking her. His name was Kevin. He had been a marine. He was choking her with two hands, like this.” Cortez turns from the mirror and mimes the gesture, knuckles knitted together around an imaginary neck, eyes bulging.

“That’s awful.”

“He was a bad man, Kevin.”

“So she was choked, and lost consciousness?”

He makes a vague gesture. “She was on crack also. They both were.”

“Oh.” My eyes flicker back to the sleeping girl. “What about her? I’m presuming an OD.”

“Bite your tongue.” Cortez presses his hand to his chest, mock horrified. “She’s not that kind of girl. Someone slashed her. She bled out. She—I don’t know. Her organs shut down.”

“No.” I’ve been turning this over, trying to remember the medicine of it. Not my specialty. “If a person bleeds enough to lose consciousness then they keep bleeding until they die, unless someone is present to staunch the wound.”

Cortez frowns. “You sure?”

“Yes. No.” I am trying to remember. “I don’t know.”

I shake my head in self-disgust. Why don’t I know? In five years, I might get to be good at this, at being a policeman. Ten years, maybe.

Cortez turns back to the mirror. I squeeze my knuckles into my eyes, trying to resurrect lessons from basic first-responder trainings. Academy courses, professional readiness seminars. The throat is a narrow place clustered with vital structures—meaning that, whatever else has befallen this girl, she is in one respect extremely lucky: whoever sawed into her throat stopped shy of transecting the carotid artery, stopped shy of the jugular vein, the delicate piping of the trachea. A simple blood test could reveal whether some illicit substance is additionally involved here, but at this point a simple blood test is a concept from an alien universe, it’s science fiction. Mass spectrometry and immunoassays and gas-liquid chromatography, all of it belongs now to a bygone world.

And the fact is that what Cortez said actually has the ring of truth.
Not that kind of girl
. But neither was Peter Zell that kind of guy. Nobody is the kind of person they used to be.

I study Lily’s calm face, and then look up again at the saline bag. I think some is gone now. I think she’s beginning to rehydrate. I hope so.

“Don’t worry, Sherlock,” says Cortez. “We’ll just wait for her to wake up and we’ll ask her what happened. Oh, unless it takes more than a week. If it takes more than a week, we’re fucked.”

He laughs again and this time I give it to him, I laugh too, I roll my eyes and shake my head. Next week, we’ll all be dead. This
station will be a pile of ash, and all of us inside it. Ha-ha-ha. I get it.

*  *  *

I leave Lily sleeping and Cortez smoking and tromp back through the woods to the crime scene.

If Detective Culverson were here, he would do a quiet, focused reenactment—walk it through, play all the parts. The girl was splayed out, facedown, pointing westward. Which means she was running from this direction, tripped here perhaps—fell forward this way. I pantomime her last desperate running steps, throw my hands forward like Superman. Imagine falling and landing, do it again, falling and landing, sensing behind me the shadowy form of my pursuer, knife in hand, bearing down.

There are plenty of distinct footprints in the thick mud of the clearing, but they’re from two hours ago, from us: the squared-off heel of my traveling Doc Martens, the wedge of Cortez’s cowboy boots. I can even see the circuitous routes of Houdini’s paw prints, dancing circles around the scene. But the ground around the girl is an indistinct mush of scuff marks, ambiguous indentations, ground-down leaves and clots of mud. Black traces in the surrounding brown. All signs of the assailant buried or washed away from the crime scene by the wet weather of the past two days.

I trudge back through the woods to the station, emerge onto the gravelly driveway that horseshoes through what was once a neat municipal lawn and is now an ugly field. Uneven beds of zinnias surrounded by overgrown grass like an advancing army. In
the center of the lawn are two flagpoles, two flags rustling listlessly in the light rain: the United States of America, the state of Ohio. I search as carefully as I can through the lawn, dividing it into a grid in my mind and moving through sector by sector. I find things that might be clues and might not be: a mound of peanut shells, a tangled half-foot length of twine. In a sector just north of the Ohio state flag I find three evenly spaced divots in the mud that look to have been left by tent poles.

When I’ve completed the grid I stand for a long time under the flags with my hands on my hips, rain in my eyes like tears, rain dribbling down my nose and chin. There is a level of tiredness where your body feels tender, like a bruise. Your throat hurts; your eyes sting. The hunger intensifies it—you feel shriveled, sort of, bent, burnt, hardened. Like the crust of something, the rind.

Budgeted for today I’ve got three little bags of the honey-roasted peanuts, plus a green apple from a basket we took from a Residence Inn in Penfield. I eat one of the apples rapidly, like a horse. I almost eat one of the bags of peanuts and then I decide to save it for later.

Two overlapping trails of blood; two passages down the corridor; one going out and one coming back.

Lily is attacked inside the kitchenette. She runs, blood singing out of her neck, perpetrator chasing after, and manages to lose him in the woods. Collapses in the clearing where we found her. Assailant goes back inside, blood still dripping off his three knives. Hangs them up and disappears.

Disappears, though, what does that mean? It means he goes
underground. Through the hole in the floor of the garage.

Right? Detective Palace, isn’t that right?

Right, except how does the determined and murderous perpetrator fail to track down a defenseless, hundred-pound girl, stumbling through the woods and bleeding from the neck?

Right—except why, and how, is he juggling three knives?

I stare up at the sky and clench my teeth and fight back a fresh wave of panic and guilt and desperation because I will probably never know. This mystery, along with my sister’s, will remain unsolved forever. It
is
the right place, the police station in Rotary, Ohio, it’s the right place but now it’s the wrong
time
, we’re too late, we didn’t get here in time to stop this girl from being attacked and we didn’t get here in time to stop my sister from slipping down through the earth and away. My fault. All my fault.

I rub my forehead with the heel of my hand, staring at the edge of the station lawn where it becomes the woods, seeing her, our nameless sleeping girl, racing through the darkness, hand clutched at her throat, trying to scream, unable, blood exploding from her wound.

*  *  *

It was not a trap after all. There really was a small-town zoo and these two well-meaning foolish teenagers really had freed the animals and the girl’s brother really was now trapped by a tiger. This was in early September, about two weeks ago, sixteen days maybe, halfway through our tortuous journey. Seneca Falls was a
gray town, uneasy calm, people out in the streets, some armed, some not armed, some in groups and some alone, everybody grave and on edge. Ten miles out of town is where we spotted the girl waving her arms, and we put her in the golf cart and drove at top speed, shivering and jolting over back roads to this tiny zoo and there he was, tank top, jean shorts, barely sixteen and scared out of his head, quavering out on a top branch, his fidgeting weight bending the branch low to where the animal was snarling up at him. Mangy coat stretched thin over the rickety ribs.

“What are we going to do?” said the girl, and I said, “Well—” and Cortez brought down the animal with one shotgun blast in the center of the nearer flank. The boy yelped and dropped out of the tree into the dirt, beside the dead animal. Gore and steam rising out of its exploded orange side. Cortez jammed his gun away and looked at me and said, “Can we go now?”

“Wait, wait,” the sister said, rushing after us as we clambered into the golf cart. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“If I were you,” said Cortez, “I would eat that tiger.”

*  *  *

“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED … DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED
.”

Cortez is in the dispatch room, standing mesmerized in front of the old foot-switch RadioCOMMAND, a solid black piece of dispatch-specific communications equipment, relaying
the same emergency-band warning message over and over. It’s a calm voice, the kind of dull affectless tone you used to hear waiting for tech support: press one if you’re calling for help setting up your device …

“Check this baby out,” says Cortez. “Still kicking.”

“Oh, sure,” I say, feeling a rich wash of nostalgia. “These machines are indestructible. And it would have been installed with multiple battery backups.” I’m remembering the same console at Concord PD. It was rendered obsolete by the digital laptop systems that were installed a couple years before I took the oath, but somehow no one ever wheeled it out of Dispatch, and it sat there in the corner, black and shiny and immovable, a monument to traditional police work.

The message coming out of the Rotary RadioCOMMAND shifts:
“FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES … FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES …”
and then the lady starts to list them, good old-fashioned Norman Rockwell town names:
“CONESVILLE … ZANESVILLE … DEVOLA …”

I run my finger along the dusty top of the machine. It’s a beautiful piece of police equipment, the RadioCOMMAND console, it really is.

“FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES …”

We stand there side by side, Cortez and I, listening to the charmless recital of town names. It is creating this low
wistful feeling in my heart, the woman’s voice, the drone of the machine, and I think it may simply be that I miss information. For most of my life the world was awash with news, with reports of things happening; and then in the last year they blipped off the radar, one by one, the
Concord Monitor
and the
New York Times
and then television, the whole concept of television, and the Internet with its ceaseless froth and churn, all of it just gone. For a while back in Concord, before my house burned down and I left, I had a ham radio tuned to someone named Dan Dan the Radio Man, and I listened to him all through the Mayfair Commission hearings. Dan Dan reported out the last round of IPSS legislation, hurriedly passed by the rump Congress, nationalizing grain silos and redesignating all national parks as camps for the internally displaced.

On the road you could get only the swirl of gossip and unconfirmed reports, the nervous trading of rumors, speculation, and fantasy. Someone says that the Hoover Dam has been dynamited by downstream Nevadans desperate for fresh water. Someone waves a paper, supposedly a copy of one signed by the president, declaring the United States to be “a sovereign and enduring nation, retaining in perpetuity its privileges over all territory currently encompassed.” Someone says that the city of Savannah has been “taken” by catastrophe immigrants from Laos, who have turned the town into a fortress and are shooting white people on sight; someone else says no way, it’s Roanoke where that happened, it’s totally Roanoke, and the CIs are from Ethiopia.

And now here we are, this is what’s left of the outside world:
packaged sandwiches and Band-Aids are being handed out under a tent somewhere in Apple Grove, Ohio.

“THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND,”
says the RadioCOMMAND.
“THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND
.”

I turn to head back outside, and a great rush of sparkles and stars paint the inside of my eyelids, and I stumble and catch the doorjamb and hold myself steady.

“You okay?” say Cortez, and I wave over my shoulder,
I’m fine
, here I go. But when I let go of the doorjamb and try to walk again I get another fireworks head rush, and this time I’m seeing bloody splatter patterns burned across my retinas. A girl facedown in a field. A door in the floor. A rack of red knives behind a red sink. A candy machine emptied of its candy like a gutted animal.

“Palace?”

I take a step—I’m very tired. I fall down.

“Henry. Hey. Get up.”

That voice. I wake up and that’s it—mystery solved. Nico is simply present, her eyes flashing in the darkness like a cat’s. She is kneeling at my side where I’m lying on the ground, waking me up like she used to wake me up to make her breakfast, poking at my chest with two fingers, sticking her face right up close into my face. “Henry. Henry. Hen. Hen. Henry. Hey. Hen.”