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.