Cole pressed on the doorbell until he thought he broke it. Anything, any action, to cloud out the creeping fear he knew to be true.
Mia was gone.
Not home. Not now. Or worse, sprawled across the upstairs hallway carpet, stained with blood, dead, executed, a promise kept per the Mighty Kings. A gun and a bullet and a woman in a marriage reunited in the Ring of the afterlife. There she was, her ghost, floating over the Bay on some fantasy night, the night of a full moon, clasping hands again with Chuck, their head wounds still open (and matching) but meaningless now, just together again, silhouetted like the bike and E.T., with Cole still on the Earth looking up, an ant.
A hit, on Mia. It’d be too damn soon! Cole had done his deed, played his part, did as told! Up went the rocks in the gravel front yard. He hoisted them two at a time, over his shoulder, oblivious or in total disregard to whatever neighbors might see or think. A key. A key. A back-up for the front door. Small and silver. Well kept amidst the stones, Cole remembered, from once upon a time. Four down; six over. Another time: Seven down; two over. Once again: Three down; three over.
Nine down; first rock. The key glinted in the afternoon sun. He picked it up, chain and all, paying little attention to the attached slip of construction paper, focused only on his footsteps, over the cluttered gravel, up the three short stairs, to the front door lock, into the slit, tumblers falling within. It opened.
“Mia?”
The security beeped. Did Cole remember the alarm? Was it even the same? He did. And it was. It shut the hell up, but Cole didn’t.
“Mia?” he asked. And he asked it again. And again. And each time he asked, his voice raised and stuttered and quickened as if it were the sloshing water in a glass cell in an increasingly impossible escape attempt. “ME?” he cried, using the short form.
But from room to room, hallway to window, closet and kitchen, the woman was gone.
Or worse, sprawled along some other hallway, in some other home, dragged out by her hair by Eastwood or Ben Lee or whomever. Tossed atop a garbage truck in a big black plastic bag amid coffee cups and baby diapers, gone, dead.
Or at work. She could be at work. He glowered at the calendar on her fridge. He almost forgot. It was a Thursday, middle of the afternoon. She was a busy attorney. She didn’t hang out and wander the Bay and skip her responsibilities.
Not like Cole.
He only noticed then he’d left the front door wide open, soon as he’d swooped in. He returned to it, pulled the key out of the lock, and shut the heavy oak. And he finally paid attention to the construction paper slip chained through a hole punch to the key. The slip was red, shaped like a heart. Didn’t say anything on it. Didn’t need to.
Whoever this was meant for would’ve gotten the message.
Some other lucky dog, auditioned for the Ring, perhaps.
Returning to the kitchen, the oven said it was about two in the afternoon. That gave him a couple hours until he could expect she’d come back. But every wasted minute made the outstanding threats from across the Bay loom larger, uglier, realer. Frame High Corner. Make Four Fingers disappear. Keep Four Fingers alive. Find Chuck Hattaran’s killer. Discover what it was she saw in the guy.
Chuck. Here he was, framed photo on the mantle of the fireplace in the living room. Polo shirt, khakis, a J.C. Penney model, watch on his wrist, New Balance shoes, fresh from a run probably, gotta keep in shape, fuck this guy.
Looking anywhere but above the fireplace, holding his breath like Four Fingers in the cab, he finally wound down, found his center. (In a house that had once done that for him on the regular.) The last time he was here, the place was infested with candles in you-know-who’s honor. Now, those were gone, nary a trace, like the mourning never happened … but the evening certainly did.
Or some evening, anyway. The place was still a mess, fabric bundled together like old Christmas lights, furniture askew, the feng shui or whatever all wrong. Could this mess be the aftermath from the same night he stepped inside, saw the orgy? (But that was five days ago.) Surely, she’d have cleaned up. (Or had they met again since?) Throw pillows on the floor, bunched up rug, couch cushions aggravated, drapes drawn tight. It told a story.
And it reminded him why he was here.
Cole needed some evidence. The kind that convicted. Something irrefutable. Even unspeakable. He returned to the foyer, by the front door and staircase, where the end table sat. For a moment, a memory slapped itself over reality, when first one then twenty golden wedding rings convened together along the wooden knots, a congress of holes. For a moment, Cole looked back through the wide walkway to the living room, visible from here, where bodies enjoyed one another, giving in to every rotten impulse two thousand years of patriarchy had attempted to repress. For a moment, Cole melted into water and poured along the cracks on the first floor’s wooden slabs, the candles back and lit, night cued up, music rich, the Ring rung in, with Cole among them, rematerializing into a solid. Faces spinning around like a Christmas pyramid, faster with the body heat, faster and faster and familiar: Mia, come and gone; Chuck, come and gone; La Mitad, come and gone; Yaromir, come and gone; the rest unclear, unsolved, until the man with the long nose stared down Cole. The man from those portraits, the paintings, in Napa. The man whom Yaromir could never forget, and whom Cole never knew …
Or did he?
The sirens made it real. But they were distant, out to some other emergency in the Sunset District. Cole shook off the memories and returned to two in the afternoon, standing at the end table, fingers on the wood. There were no rings here anymore. Not even Chuck’s.
So, where would she have put that?
He bounded up the steps to the second floor, ignored the snake of framed photographs slithering along the wall, and barreled for the last door at the end, the bedroom (but wasn’t it all a bedroom, he thought). He halted in the open doorway, scanning the daytime darkness, comforter spilled to the floor, smelling of perfume from Mia’s morning, something apricot (she liked that), and more pictures of him, more than he remembered.
He started with the dresser drawers, top to bottom, hands shaking despite himself, feeling like he was on Kinsey’s computer again, so long ago.
It’s allowed.
It might even save her life.
Socks. Gloves. Lingerie. Jewelry. No rings. None. The other two levels: shirts, pants, the stuff she didn’t care to hang. No rings. No luck. He tried the nightstands, both sides of the bed. Nothing. He tried the closet, running fingers through fabric. Nada. He ducked under the bed, feeling in the dark, like a kid on the look-out for presents in those can’t-wait weeks before a birthday. No, sir.
“Stop it!” she had barked, once, when he was inside her, and as he asked her about a new purse, and if it was a gift from Chuck. “You’re such a boy,” she had said, always so hard on him when all he wanted was helpful information, intelligence, or insight in how to better please her, and how to best be with her. To snuggle up. To get in the middle. To grab the invisible, inarticulate, impossible thing they had together and then make it his thing.
But staring at that purse now, in her bedroom closet, in the dark, in the corner, the furthest corner, swaying from a hook, the last place he had to look, he felt a cold release, the same as walking out into the snow in your pajamas.
He didn’t have to search anymore.
“Three cops and three robbers,” she had said once, on the couch at his place, still half-clothed but not for long, with Cole on top, hungry, handsy. “Gotta get back to jail.” She squeaked, he grabbed. “But they got to cross the Bay.” She panted. Him, too. “And they only got a small boat. It can only carry two at a time.”
“Mia, you are so fucking weird,” he had said to her.
“If you got a cop on one side of the Bay, you can’t have the robbers outnumber him. If there’s a cop there, there needs to be more cops than criminals.”
“Does the cop got a gun?”
“Doesn’t matter. Can’t outnumber. How do you—how do you get ’em over?”
“I don’t know …” And it was true; he didn’t and he didn’t care, swept up in the warm world of Mia. But every second he didn’t play her game, he felt her wilt, lose interest. “Okay, all right.” He pawed at the problem. Three robbers. One boat. Three cops. No solutions.
“The robbers run? I don’t know. I don’t—I don’t see it. Not without putting the robbers on their own boat, alone, and let them go over themselves.”
She bucked. Squeezed. She returned to technicolor and rolled her eyeballs into her lids. “Exactly,” she said with a whisper.
At one point in the puzzle, two robbers would sail themselves over voluntarily and lock themselves back up. It was the only way to complete the puzzle.
“Exactly what?” he’d ask later. “That felt like cheating.” He was getting dressed, about to report to work. “You can’t let the robbers row themselves.”
“Why not?”
“Your puzzles, lady …” He downed the rest of a room-temperature domestic and placed it on an end table next to the couch. “You do that with him, too?”
But she shut down. “You don’t ask that.”
“You were talking to my husband earlier,” she had said, clavicle-deep in a knock-out dress.
“Which one is he?”
“Guess.”
Cole had looked around, side-eyeing suits and blues at the banquet hall. “I can’t imagine any of these knuckleheads would be good enough for you.” He returned his attention to her, expecting a blush, but the only one beet-red was Cole. He covered his mouth, coughed. “Someone in disguise, then. Let me guess. That cop gone missing. Gus Shulman.”
She had raised an eyebrow all the way to her hairline. “You know about Shulman?”
“Only that we don’t know.”
She looked over Cole’s shoulder, and seemingly content, she brushed fingers down his sleeve.
“Still not my husband.”
“So I’m still guessing then?”
“Mm-hm.”
They fucked in the hallway.
“A donor?” He guessed between thrusts. She said no. “Works for the union?” She squeaked yes. “A lawyer?” She wailed yes. “Full head of hair?” She cried yes. “Chuck Hattaran?”
“Yes!”
“You love him?” he asked meekly when they were done, still not dressed.
“What kind of question is that?”
“You, uh, you true to him? I mean, you do this, but …”
“Yes. What a thing to say.” She slipped her panties back on and grabbed her purse off the tile floor. “You’re a bad man,” she said.
“I’m really not.”
But she was already gone, and the last thing he saw was that purse she held behind her.
Cole found the ring by the purse in the closet.
He left the purse alone, hanging there.
He shut the closet door. He clicked off the lamp on the end table.
He promised himself.
He swore to himself.
He would bring the ring back.
***
“Go,” Cole said to the taxi driver.
He held the wedding ring in the light, marveling again at its plainness. Chuck’s finger was still wider than Cole’s (like that would’ve changed). He knew because he fastened the damn thing on again. It still didn’t feel right. It never did. In fact, now, it didn’t feel like anything. Less like weight and more like gravity.
He had left Mia’s house locked, just as he found it, key back in the rocks, gone for good. It was closure he hadn’t yet wrapped his head around. He was still filled with billions of neuron connections pleading to remain in place, to relive the past, fumbling for memories, but soon enough, one by one, each would be eradicated, replaced with something fresher, healthier, better, until Cole was new.
“You a Herald guy, too?” Cole asked the driver, a black guy with a flat face. Cole felt strangely jovial, despite the fact that he knew he still had a lot of minefield to skip over. The driver didn’t reply. Cole chewed on that, pulled at his wallet, grabbed some bills. The driver saw the green.
“Yeah. I’m Herald.”
“So you answer to money then.”
“What do you answer to?”
“Fair point.”
“Got a message?”
“Nah.” He stuffed the money back in his wallet, the wallet back in his pocket. “Just feeling out this city I thought I knew.”
“Shit. I don’t know nothing about this damn city anymore.”
“You just got to find someone who loves you,” said Cole. “Buddy.”
“VROOM and gloom, boy,” the driver said. “The future. Somethin’ ain’t right.”
“Eating at your business.”
“Mm.” He drifted off after that, not coming alive again until they were in the brief Geary Boulevard tunnel, headed east towards Fillmore. He gawked into his rear-view mirror, where Cole’s big head was right in the way. “Can’t see back there.”
But Cole could. Cole was looking out the back window, fixated on the car behind them. Too distant to make out the driver, particularly in the dim environ of the tunnel, but close enough to make his fresh tattoo sting again with gooseflesh.
It was a hearse, black and blue, and it had been tailing them since he left Mia’s.
He ducked in his seat.
“Shit.”
“What is?” asked the driver.
“No idea. What’s it look like?”
The driver peered through the rear-view. “Don’t know. Don’t know what we’re looking at.”
“Still there?”
“I guess?”
“Jesus, man!”
“All right—”
“Jesus!”
“All right, now. You’re all right.”
They came out of the tunnel, back to sunlight.
“Look again,” the driver said, slowing down.
“Don’t!”
“It’s all right now. It’s all right.”
The driver played with the brakes, shifted lanes once or twice, and at the next intersection, flush with the hospital, the driver evened out, sighed a breath of relief. “It’s gone.”
Cole glared out the back window, eyes running along the hospital, the street, everything. No sign of a hearse.
“What do you think it was?” the driver said.
Cole cleared his throat, rubbed his chest until his heart evened out. “Might’ve been a VROOM. Angry at you cabbies.” Yeah. “That was it.”
“It had the wipers? I didn’t see that.”
“I don’t know, man. Hard to be a cabbie, huh? A lot to deal with.”
“And what do you deal with?”
“Homicide.”
“Well,” said the driver. “We almost there, boy. What Fillmore club you say it was again?”
“I didn’t,” Cole said. “It’s the Shape Note.”