After that, we had a long silence—silence in this case meaning no more back-and-forth between Bernie and Travis Baca. Otherwise, there was plenty to hear, starting with Bernie’s heart, suddenly pounding like a drum in his chest. And he’s got a big strong chest, like a drum to begin with, so . . . I got no further with that one. But hey! Pretty far, to my way of thinking! Another sound was the bounce bounce of the basketball on the court, actually somewhat like Bernie’s heartbeat. The two of them together made a kind of music. Wow! What a thought! Was I on fire or what? Here’s a funny thing about being on fire: it can happen in just part of you. Another part can be doing its job at the same time, if that makes any sense. And if it doesn’t, let’s leave it at this: the other part of me, not the on-fire part, happened to notice that Travis was gazing across the court, a gaze that fell on the long-armed basketball player. The long-armed player gazed back, then—what was this? Pulled out a cell phone from down in his pants? The perps at Northern State had cell phones? You never stopped learning in this business. Travis turned away.
“How did Mickles stab you in the back?” Bernie said.
Travis looked at Bernie, cocking his head to one side, like he was seeing him differently. “Know what?” he said, standing up. “We’re done.”
“Not so fast,” Bernie said. “If you got dealt a bad deal, maybe I can help make it right, make it right for Billy, too. Are you planning to meet up with him?”
“What for?”
“You tell me.”
Travis’s eyes narrowed. “Dream on.” He started walking away, stopped, turned. “One more thing—don’t come back.”
• • •
“How’d it go?” said Assistant Warden Stackhouse, back in his office. “Seem rehabilitated to you?”
“Need more time to evaluate him,” Bernie said. “Which is kind of what I’d like to do.”
“Meaning?”
“When does he walk out?”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re fixing to tail him?”
Bernie spread his hands. “Beats me.”
“Front gate at zero eight thirty,” Stackhouse said. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Just that police report.”
Stackhouse shook his head. “Not available—some screwup downtown.”
“What kind of screwup?”
“They’re scanning all the files, decade by decade, converting to digital. You’ll be able to access anything you want on your phone in real time. Can’t argue with that.”
“Wouldn’t even try,” Bernie said.
“But right now Valley PD’s a madhouse. They can’t find shit.”
That sounded bad. Was there anything easier to find? Not that I could think of. Valley PD was in big trouble—that was my takeaway.
• • •
“This is my day off,” Captain Stine said.
“No such thing in a job like yours,” said Bernie.
“Maybe,” said Stine, “but that’s for me to say, not you.”
He rocked the baby carriage back and forth. Inside was the baby, all covered up except for his fat little face. His eyes were closed. He smelled great. Was this a good time to lean in and give him a quick lick? I wasn’t sure. We were in a park between the last of the downtown towers and the zoo. I’d been to the zoo once, would probably not be returning. But from right where I was, the zoo not even in sight, I could easily smell the tigers, as well as the chimps. The chimps smelled a lot like humans—more so, in fact. The smell of chimps helped me understand the human smell even better, if that makes sense.
The baby stirred in his sleep, made a little groaning sound.
“Uh-oh,” Stine said. “Mona wants him to sleep till supper time.”
“Ease off on the rocking a bit,” Bernie said.
“This is too hard?”
“When they almost catapult out is a clue.”
Stine eased off on the rocking. The baby settled down. “I’ll be sixty-eight when he graduates from high school.”
“Maybe he’ll drop out,” Bernie said. He gazed in at the baby. “Got his looks from Mona—you lucked out there. What’s his name?”
“Kyle.”
“Nice.”
Stine glanced across the carriage at Bernie. “And his middle name’s Bernard.”
“Yeah?” said Bernie.
“Mona wouldn’t hear of it as a first name,” Stine said. “Not esthetically pleasing, she says.”
“She’s right about that,” said Bernie. His face was a little flushed, for reasons unclear to me. I knew for a fact he hadn’t had even a sip of bourbon yet today.
Now they were both looking at the baby. The baby lay there, eyes shut tight. He wasn’t bringing much to the table, in my opinion.
“Maybe it’s crazy,” Stine said, “even pathetic. But I wanted to be a captain in the worst way. And it wouldn’t have happened except for you.”
“Uh,” Bernie said.
Stine turned to him. “So what’s so important it couldn’t wait?”
“The original file on an old case that may be connected to the Ellie Newburg murder.”
“What about it?”
“Unavailable, ostensibly on account of digitizing. I need it anyway.”
“Email me the details.”
“Thanks,” Bernie said.
“But records are a mess right now, no ostensibly about it.”
“A file has to be somewhere,” Bernie said. “Where are you on the Newburg case?”
“Nothing but dead ends so far.”
“Is that according to Mickles?”
“Don’t start.”
“Why him?” Bernie said.
“We went through this already,” Stine said, “but because I know there’s no one more bullheaded than you, meaning I was going to be condemned to go over the whole thing till the cows come home, I checked with the chief of D’s. The call went in in the normal way and Mickles was next up, as per their system. That’s that.”
“As per their system? What’s that mean?”
“Organizations rely on systems, Bernie—in this case, parameters of district, seniority, fitness reports, other metrics like that. Mickles came up. Finito.”
Bernie looked at Stine like he was going to say more, but he did not.
“What?” said Stine. “Spit it out.”
Which Bernie didn’t do. Bernie—a man, yes, but not the spitting kind. I was glad of that. Hard to explain why, and besides I was otherwise engaged in a careful examination of Bernie’s head. Not a delicate sort of head, yet bullish? I wouldn’t have gone that far. But did cows find him bullish? Was that why they were coming home? I was lost.
“Just get me that file,” Bernie said.
The baby groaned again. Bernard was his name? That’s Bernie’s name, sort of, although the only person I’ve ever heard call him that was his old kindergarten teacher who we ran into once, I forget where. “Learn how to behave in all these years, Bernard?” she’d said. Still, you couldn’t ask for a finer name. Stine eased off on the rocking.
• • •
Bright and early the next morning—and how I love bright and early, sharpens you up like nothing else, although there’s also a lot to be said for dark and late—we were parked on a little rise off the highway to Northern State Correctional, in easy viewing sight of the front gate, closed at the moment, nothing happening. Bernie sipped coffee from a paper cup. I sat up nice and tall, just breathing. The smell of coffee mixed with the smell of greasewood in a very interesting way. I sniffed at that mix from several angles, if you get what I mean.
Bernie glanced over. “Something caught in your nose, big guy?”
Which had to be Bernie’s sense of humor. He can be quite the joker, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned.
“Or is it something else?” he went on. “I’ve read that you have over twenty million—”
A banged-up old van appeared on the highway, rounded the curve below us, and stopped near the gate, pulling over to the side of the road. We had vans like that out the yingyang in these parts. No reason to stop talking, Bernie, especially when you were clearly gearing up for something big. I had twenty million what, exactly? It sounded like way more than two. But what? And where?
“Easy, big guy, easy,” Bernie said, taking the binoculars out of the glove box. “Gotta get that plate number, just in case. Need to pee, maybe?”
No! I did not need to pee! I needed my twenty million—but then, funnily enough, I did need to pee. I hopped out of the car—“Knew it,” said Bernie—and marked the biggest greasewood bush I could find, marked it up, down, and sideways so it would stay marked, amigo. That brought something new to the coffee and greasewood smell, spicing it up nicely. I was just getting down to the last few drops—although I always hold on to a little something because you never know—when an ambulance came roaring up the highway, lights flashing, siren blaring. The gate swung open, and the ambulance barreled through, disappearing around the bend that led to the prison.
After that, things got quiet. Bernie checked his watch a few times. “Any minute now,” he said. That had to mean soon, but nothing happened soon. Some time later, the ambulance came back the other way, no lights this time, no siren. The gate opened and the ambulance drove through—not fast—and headed up the highway. I preferred it the first way, meaning zooming with lights and siren, no telling why.
I got comfortable on the shotgun seat, the most comfortable seat I know to begin with. Hard to beat this, Bernie and I side by side in the Porsche, time passing. Why were we here, by the way? Did it matter?
Bernie checked his watch one more time, got on the phone. “Assistant Warden Stackhouse, please.”
“Unavailable,” said a woman at the other end. “Would you like his voicemail?”
Bernie clicked off. “I would hate his voicemail. I would also hate—”
The driver’s-side door of the beat-up van opened and a woman got out. Bernie watched her through the binoculars. I don’t know what he saw—and I’m no fan of binoculars, which make humans seem even more like machines than they already do—but I saw that she was wearing a baseball cap with a ponytail sticking out the back, a very nice look, to my way of thinking, plus a light blue sweat suit, and sneakers. She walked up to the guardhouse, knocked on the door. It opened and a guard stepped out, a woman, but lighter-skinned than the guard from yesterday. They seemed to talk for a bit, and then with no warning, the ponytail woman slumped to the ground like she’d lost all her strength in an instant and lay still.
We were on the move before she hit the ground, the Porsche fishtailing as we ripped down the dirt track that led from the lookout to the highway. The other guard—the male from yesterday, in the know about me and Slim Jims—hurried out of the guardhouse, bent over the ponytail woman. By the time we’d driven up and jumped out of the car, the guards had her on her feet. One patted her on the shoulder. The other held a bottle of water to her mouth, tilted it up, but she shook her head wildly, knocking the bottle to the ground.
The female guard saw us and raised her hand in the stop sign. “Hey, just a minute.”
“It’s all right,” the other guard told her. “They’re friends.”
“What’s going on?” Bernie said.
“Uh, the lady’s here to pick up a released inmate,” the male guard said. “Unfortunately, he seems to have met with an accident this morning.”
The lady turned to us. Hard to tell human ages sometimes. From her ponytail and the way she moved I’d have thought she was around the same age as Bernie, but her face had more lines and creases, something you saw on people who were living hard lives. At the moment she also looked real weak, her face all washed out.
“He’s dead,” she said. She kicked the water bottle away. Her voice rose. “Fifteen years and now he’s dead. Dead, dead, dead! How is that possible?”
“Something in the weight room, ma’am,” the male guard said.
“Something in the weight room, something in the weight room. You told me that already. I’m asking how is it possible?”
“We don’t have the details yet,” said the female guard, “but as soon as we do—”
“I don’t give a shit about the details! How is it possible? I need to know how it’s possible!”
The guards looked at Bernie. He bent down, picked the water bottle up off the road. Most of the water had spilled out, but there was still some at the bottom. He handed the bottle to the ponytail woman and said, “Drink this.” His voice wasn’t gentle, in fact, harsh and demanding. The ponytail woman looked a bit startled. She put the bottle to her lips and drank it down. After that, she straightened up and stood under her own power, some color returning to her face. Then she handed the bottle back to Bernie.
Bernie has a lot of nods, as I may have mentioned, and now he showed me a new one, more of a bow, almost like he was grateful that the woman had given him back the empty bottle. No idea what was going on, but her gaze settled on him in a new way.
“And the name of your friend?” Bernie said.
“My brother,” the woman said. “My kid brother.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bernie said.
A silence fell over all of us outside the guardhouse of Northern State Correctional. Then the wind rose, soft and rustling in the hills.
The female guard nodded, like she’d been waiting for the go-ahead. “The inmate’s name was Travis Baca,” she said.
The ponytail woman spoke softly, maybe too softly for anyone to hear but me. “A free man, not an inmate,” she said. “As of today.”