I woke up sweating. My pulse was racing. I blinked my eyes — once, twice, three times. They showed me nothing but blackness. I ripped at the sheets coiled around me, panicking. Finally, I freed myself of their loops. I sat up, letting my legs fall over the edge of the bed, rubbing at my eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the dark. After a moment, I was able to make out the curtained square of the motel room window, the low rectangle of the nightstand, the female curves of the lamp. I put two fingers to my wrist and felt my pulse, willed it slower, slower, slower . . .
I reached for the glass of water I always keep on my nightstand — even in motels. Especially in motels. My fingertips brushed it, almost knocked it over, found it again. I drank it in one gulp. For a moment, I considered calling Gracie, but I thought better of it. Instead I sat listening to the wind prowl around the motel parking lot, rattling the leaves across the pavement. This was nothing to wake Gracie over — I’d had a nightmare, that was all.
More specifically, I’d had the nightmare. The same one that had been plaguing me for years, waking me up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, just like this. Only this time it seemed more vivid — closer, if it was possible for nightmares to get closer.
I rubbed at my temples until the last shreds of night-terrors left, then went to the window, pulling the cheap curtains aside. Across the motel’s quiet little parking lot, the wind was pushing a stunted palm tree around, making its shaggy head rattle. A frond detached, dropping to the pavement. I stood and watched, staring at the palm tree, then past the palm tree out at nothing. There was nothing to look at except shadows. But the shadows went on for a long way. I could sense him out there, somewhere inside them. I imagined I could see him — just a little ghostly glow, far off, a dim firefly dying out in the night air. I was close.
I said his name in the dark: “Vernon Green.”
I wondered if he heard. Could he feel me, closing in? Was he out there, somewhere, awake in the dark? Afraid?
I let the curtains fall back and lay down.
I was a long time getting to sleep. I lay a while, eyes open, trying to remember the nightmare. It was gone. It was funny, the way it broke up into fragments and drifted away. I couldn’t seem to remember any of the details — couldn’t seem to remember anything about it.
Later, I wouldn’t think it was so funny.
When I woke again, the room was full of pale dawn-light. The cell-phone chirped at me from the nightstand. I picked it up. “Hello?”
“Lance? Are you all right? I had — I had a bad feeling. I had a dream — that you had been shot.”
“Yes, Gracie. I’m fine . . . Gracie?”
She sounded like she was near tears. I imagined her laying in her narrow little bed with her blankets piled over her, and cold-cream smeared all over her face. Did she still use cold-cream? We were both silent for a moment, and then she continued.“I’m sorry. But it was awful — you were shot, and you fell apart. I had to put you in a suitcase, because you fell apart. I couldn’t find all of the pieces, and . . .”
“It must have been a very large suitcase.” I sat up, crossing the hard indoor-outdoor carpet to the bathroom.
She laughed, despite herself. “It was a normal-sized suitcase.”
“I must have been very small, then. Am I usually a dwarf when you dream of me, Gracie?”
I flipped the fluorescent lights on in the bathroom, staring at my sagging bulldog-face in the mirror, the mess of gray hair falling down over one eye.
“You’re usually a punching-bag when I dream of you, Lance.” I could almost hear her smile. “Or a tree-sloth, if I want something better looking.”
I felt my sense of humor sliding away. The eyes in the mirror were tired. They wanted to rest. I squeezed them shut and opened them back up, pleading with them to just see this one last case through.
“I’m so close, Gracie. I can feel him.”
She was silent for a moment. Then: “Just be careful.”
I snorted, almost disgusted. How many years? And always, the same line. It didn’t mean anything, anymore. “I’ll be sure to keep my limbs screwed on tight, so I won’t fall apart on you.”
“Very funny, Lance. But I was thinking. Maybe . . . I’m not doing anything, really. Just sitting at home and staring at my computer screen, or looking out the window. Maybe . . . maybe I could come out there. Help you find him. I could ride along like I used to, sometimes. Keep you company.”
“No, Gracie.”
“Why?”
“This is something that I have to do alone. I can’t — ”
“I’ve known you for so long, Lance. It would be almost like being alone, even if I were there. I just — ”
“I don’t think you’re clear on the concept, Gracie. Being alone involves one person. One singular being, without anyone else. Because having someone else there would mean that they were there together. And together is the opposite of alone.”
There was another long moment of silence. I had just opened my mouth to ask if she was still on the line, when she blurted out, “How many years, Lance . . . and you still condescend to me. When will it stop?”
“I . . .”
But she had hung up. I set the phone on the counter and started the shower. I stripped down, avoiding looking at my aging body in the mirror. Mirrors are for the young and those with what it takes to grow old gracefully, without knotted scar tissue and a gut from too many years spent sitting in cars. I stood under the cold water of the shower, my teeth chattering. I pressed my head against the hard tile. Close. I was close. My hands balled up into fists. I rolled my knuckles along the tiles. Just a day, just a few more days. Slowly, the water heated up. I raised my head and let it pour down on me, trying to remember the nightmare, trying to keep the details in my head, because they seemed important, seemed relevant, seemed . . . I must ask Gracie about it, must tell Gracie about it . . . I drop over the side and for a moment I seem to be suspended in the air, the sun reflecting off the glass of the helmet, reproducing itself in the water droplets on the glass. I see my hand outstretched toward the sun, enclosed in the metal of the glove. Then the splash, muted through the metal and glass of the helmet, and the water closes aquamarine over me, the sun becomes a hazy golden ball, going away.
I shut off the water and dried myself with the cheap motel towel. I shaved, dripping condensation. It was hard to get at the stubble in the creases of my neck. I cut myself, and stanched the flow with the stiptych pencil in my travel case. The mirror-face, smeared with mist, watched me shave with powder-blue bloodshot eyes. This is my last case. All my searching ends now. I can feel the end, so close. But can he feel me coming?
I dressed with the lights out, in the morning haze that bled through the curtains, harnessing the Browning hi-power underneath my left shoulder, over my starched white dress-shirt, tightening the palm-tree tie that Gracie bought me one LA Christmas, and covering the gun with my black chalk-striped jacket. Somewhere along the line, chalk-stripes came into style again.
I went outside. The morning air was cool and desert-dry. I climbed into my Ford Taurus and pulled out of the motel lot, driving over a palm-frond with a crunch, blinking into the light as my eyes struggled to adjust. The little white motel dwindled to a thin strip in the rear-view, and then was gone. I took out my notebook and flipped it to the address. I rubbed my finger over the ink. I had him this time. Nothing in five years, and now — now I had him solid. All of a sudden, someone answered my ad in the Times, the reward ad, and told me he had some information. Nothing he was willing to part with over the phone, but he had given me enough to assure me of his credibility. He knew Vernon Green. Knew where he lived, what name he was using. I was close. And afterwards, I would retire on the little bit of nothing I had saved up, and . . .
I started thinking about Gracie. About what she would do if I retired. She had been my secretary when I first got my own office. She had been there when the place reeked of new paint and sawdust, with a tiny hat perched atop her winding hair, with gloves on. Nobody wore gloves anymore. How many years, since people had worn gloves? When was the last time I’d seen Gracie in gloves? Where would she go when I shut the doors forever, and stopped doing pick-up work for the insurance companies, missing persons work on people who didn’t want to be found, loss prevention?
I had a terrible image of her alone in her too-yellow little kitchen, staring out the window the way she stared out the office window, the way she had for . . . And why had she never quit? Even after Sarabeth Green died. We’d sat in that office together. Me rolling a letter opener back and forth across the blotter. Her staring out the window at the street, turning her head to glare at me when I stopped rolling the fucking letter opener and reached for the flask in my jacket. My drinking seems strange now, even to me. But then . . . everyone had whiskey on their breath then. Men in suits, half-drunk all the time trying not to think about whether the milkman was fucking the wife they neglected, or whether she would find out they were doing the same to their secretaries. Or maybe it was just boredom. Or maybe we drank because . . . I drank because Sarabeth Green was dead. Because she was dead, because I was in love with her, and because after the whole shitstorm hit the papers, I didn’t have a customer for three months. Three months solid. Then they forgot. Just like that, they started to come in, and everything was okay again, and I hadn’t gotten anyone murdered. Every once in a while, I’d get a funny look from someone . . . but that was all. Just a look.
For three months, Gracie stared out the window and took half-pay. I opened her lunch-box when she was in the bathroom once. She had bread and butter. And a thermos of grape juice. Before Sarabeth Green was killed, Gracie’d had cucumber sandwiches and fresh-squeezed orange juice every day.
So I thought about Gracie. I wondered if she had money to retire on. I wondered where she would go. I worried about her sitting in that kitchen alone, and I thought about how gray her hair had gotten. And then I thought . . .
And then I thought about Vernon Green in my office, and Sarabeth’s picture, and how it had all started.