“You can fight it, Cars,” Harry said, setting his beer on the hood of my truck. “The insubordination charge …”
“Three TV stations and two radio outlets have me telling the world what I think about Baggs. Maybe my future’s elsewhere.”
I’d retreated to the Causeway to lean against my truck, drink beer and consider my future in a department where colleagues could suspect me of a ridiculous action. A department where the Chief of Police hated my guts. Where my best prospect had me busted back into uniform, years of hard work turned to dross. Harry’d figured out where I was and joined me.
“Don’t even begin to think like that,” he said.
To the west a container ship pulled from the Mobile River into the bay, a dark shadow against the shimmering lights of the city. I wondered if I could somehow stow away inside a container marked for delivery to a murder-free zone, Antarctica maybe.
“I’m on tape again, no way to deny what I said. Maybe I could put my Baggs appraisal up on YouTube.”
“Not funny.” Harry paused. “Or maybe a little.”
I stared into black water lapping at the reeds and traded dark future considerations for even darker ones from the recent past. “What’s not funny is four dead in two weeks and not a single place to look.”
“The killer’s falling apart. You said so yourself … going batshit with a sword, throwing it into the bushes. We’ll get him.”
“How many people will he take down first?”
Harry pitched his emptied can into my pickup bed. “You’ll be barred from the department tomorrow, Cars. What can we put in motion before the ax falls?”
“We need to update Kavanaugh. We’ve got to run Muriel Pendel’s friends and associates through the wringer, and we’ve got to ensure every cop has seen the flier.” The word flier prompted a memory. “One more thing has to be cleared.”
“Which is?”
“Mailey mentioned a traffic stop where a guy shit himself after he blew through a hard red. A flat-out violation.”
“What’s the big news? I had a guy crap himself once, an old wino who—”
“Austin didn’t write the guy up, Harry.”
Harry did a double-take. “The same Horse Austin who empties ten pens a week writing tickets?”
I nodded. “If something bad happened during the stop, Austin wouldn’t have written a ticket. No ticket says no incident, no need to keep the recording in case the offender contests the citation.”
Harry crossed his arms and watched the blinking light of a jet high in the black sky. “I’d love to see the recording of the stop. Think Mailey’d tell you day and time?”
“He brought the incident up in the first place.”
“How do we get the recording?”
“They’re filed in Temp Records for a month, right? Sergeant Lizzy Baines sitting atop the pile?” I made kissy sounds. “Baines has the more-than-slightly-warms for you, Harry.”
“Be that as it may, I’m with Sally now.”
“You don’t have to move into a Motel 6 with Baines, bro. Just blow in her ear and give her a glimpse of leg.”
While Harry mumbled unrepeatable phrases, I pulled my cell and had the dispatcher patch me through to Mailey. It was a B week, meaning he was on night shift.
“Mailey? It’s Carson Ryder. Horse around?”
Hesitant. “Not right now. He went to get, uh, a cup of coffee.”
Sure, I thought, recalling Austin stashing the brown bag under his seat at the retirement home. With vodka replacing the creamer. “The stop with the guy who had the scoots? Harry and I need to see it. No big deal, just another part of the investigation.”
“If Horse thought I gave you that he could make my life—”
“For chrissakes, Mailey, it’ll look like we found it on our own. What’s really on that recording, by the way?”
A pause. “Watch it yourself.”
Mailey told us enough to find the recording and I promised we’d never tell Austin where the information came from.
“All right,” I said to my partner as I slid my phone into my pocket. “All you need to do is get the tape from Baines. First thing tomorrow would be nice.” I threw my empty can in the bed of the truck and shot a look at the container ship, angling closer as it turned for open sea.
It seemed to be saying, Last chance for Antarctica, Carson.
Gregory leaned over the coffee table and inhaled more of the white powder, an explosion of white sparkles in his head. He closed his eyes and marveled at the clarity in his mind. In the past, his only clear thoughts had been about math and software code, the numbers and symbols etched black against a snow-white background, clear and dynamic and understandable in every permutation. Even when the numbers zipped through his head at supersonic speeds, transmuting into new structures and giving revised answers, they were easy to follow.
It was everything else that was so difficult to understand. Love. Conscience. The ridiculous and antithetical pronouncements of the morons.
But now it seemed he could see through the morons like windows. See their halting and faulty machinery. His trouble was having to exist at their level. To translate their chimp-like language and find faces to meet their faces. But the white powder gave him the ability to fly above them. To see in perfect clarity that which had always been denied to him. Why was something that opened one’s mind so widely illegal?
The fucking cops again.
Gregory was naked because it felt so good. He brushed white powder from his chest, leaned back against the couch, and thumbed the remote for the fifth time tonight. He’d stashed his video camera in the flower bed of the empty home across the street from the model home and it was providing the best movie so far: a couple entering the home for a showing, exploding out the door seconds later, the woman vomiting, the man fumbling at his cell. The cop cars racing up, the useless ambulance, the dark vans pouring out geeks and freaks like circus clowns.
And then, Ryder, the big negro at his side. Ryder looked ten years older than the night of the Ballard girl’s event. Slumped, pale, worn. He was wearing a light jacket over jeans, the jacket looking as if he’d slept in it for a week.
How do you like your warrior now, Blue Tribe?
Gregory delighted when the sword was found in the bushes, though he couldn’t quite remember why he’d left the weapon – a spur-of-the-moment decision. No matter, his Event Suit kept him safe, covered from crown to toe. The suit, crafted after Ema’s comments about crime-scene evidence, made him invisible.
The phone rang again. Ema, no doubt. She had called over a dozen times, left texts, voicemails, messages on his answering machine.
“We should have supper tomorrow, Gregory. Give me a time, dear. I’d like to see you.”
“Gregory, are you there, dear? Pick up, please?”
“Gregory, are you well?”
“How’s the volunteering, Gregory? Are you busy tomorrow?”
Listening to the drone of Ema’s voice was like bees buzzing: Bzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzzzz. Gregory realized he was making buzzing sounds. They tickled his lips. He wavered to his feet, laughing, and put his arms out at his sides as if he was flying. Buzzzzzzzzzzzz, he hummed, flying through the house like a bumblebee. Buzzzzzz. Six million dollars on its way, a sextitextijillionaire! Buzzzzzzz-fucking-buzzzzzzzzzzz!
Gregory flew into the kitchen, swooped down to the refrigerator and drank from a bottle of apple juice, feeling it run down his throat as it ran down his neck and chest.
When he replaced the bottle on the shelf he saw the Tupperware container used to store sardines, the bait for his cat-catcher. He remembered he was a master trapper of cats, a pioneer in feline entrapment. Only yesterday old lady Millard had remarked on the dwindling number of cats in the neighborhood.
I got them, Gregory Nieves had wanted to scream in her face. I have taken away the dishrag cats!
I picked up Mr Mix-up on the way home, entering my house to find the answering machine blinking like a strobe. Wendy stood from the couch as Mix-up ran to his bowl. She was wearing blue shorts and a white tank top and was hands down the best thing I’d seen all day.
“Can I get you a beer?” she asked. “Or would you prefer—”
I nodded. “Something stronger.”
She fetched the Maker’s Mark, poured a double shot over ice. “I see I’m in demand,” I said, nodding at the phone as my bourbon arrived.
“All except two are reporters asking you to deny or expand on your comments about Baggs.” She’d heard the messages as they arrived.
“And the two?”
“One’s from a guy named Roy McDermott. He wanted you to call when you got a chance.”
McDermott was a former investigator for the FCLE or Florida Centre for Law Enforcement who’d recently jumped into upper-level administration. We’d worked together when Bama criminals headed to Florida or vice versa. We’d also fished together for snook, a sleek and powerful fish species found in mid-Florida and points south, my favorite gamefish. I figured he was passing through and wanted to meet for a brew. Another time, Roy.
“That leaves one call,” I said to Wendy. “Chief Baggs, I expect.”
“A very loud and angry Chief Baggs.”
“I take it he used the word suspended?” I asked, sipping my drink.
“Until further notice, which he claims will never happen. Do you want to listen?”
“No, I want to take a container to Antarctica.”
She watched in silence as I emptied my glass and considered my options, arriving at one I thought perfect. I went to the answering machine and pressed Erase All.
“There’s nothing I can possibly do tonight,” I said. “So I’m declaring a moratorium on killings and case histories and politics and general human idiocy. This house is now a free space, as distant and inaccessible as Antarctica.” I twiddled buttons on my sound system. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastorale, filled the room as I replaced electric light with candlelight.
Wendy went to the front window and peeked between the blinds. Said, “Wow, look at that.”
“What?” I asked.
“It’s snowing.”
Gregory sat astride his Bowflex, pumping furiously, watching his shining muscles in the mirror. The white powder let him work out harder than ever before. He was sweating away toxins from food and the bacteria that infested his insides. Bacteria that had hidden in his muscles, in his guts, in his spine, all were being washed away.
He was becoming pure.
The alarm rang on Gregory’s computer: time to check the trap. He dismounted the Bowflex and wiped his body with a towel. There were no more faces on the wall, he’d stripped them away after returning from the model home.
A pure man didn’t wear the faces of others: he built his own.
Gregory walked to his office to disable the alarm. He’d put several teaspoons of the powder on his desk, spoons of it in every room. Gregory sniffed from a mound of powder and felt it sparkle across his neurons. He walked downstairs and outside, no need for clothes. If old lady Millard saw an Adonis in the dark, she’d not be offended, she’d want to fuck him.
Gregory strode to the rear of his yard and stripped the burlap from the trap. The half-moon dropped enough light to see a small and frightened creature huddling in a corner and mewing plaintively: a kitten. Gregory returned to the house with the trap held high above his head.
“Braka ros n’da hasun …” Gregory chanted as he walked, stealing even Ryder’s song from him. “I faw telawan telawon.”