Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [23]
Rick had given up on the handcuffs, which lay splayed upon the table. The mood was suddenly wilted and depressed. There was no more oxygen left in the room, and what did we have? No new ransom demands. A half-assed boyfriend and a schizophrenic.
“Keep me informed,” said my boss. “And watch your back.”
I went out through the kitchen exit to avoid passing close to Andrew.
Seven.
The fog was a surprise, but along the coast it often comes up quickly. When I left the police station, sometime after six, everything smelled of water. The air wasn’t air but cold humidity that had congealed. From inside the car, the windshield was impenetrable. I let the defroster blow. According to the dashboard readout, the temperature had fallen to thirty-seven degrees.
Someone was rubbing a clear circle in the driver’s side glass. Fingernails scratched and a round face peered close, spooking me. When I lowered the window I saw that it was Margaret Forrester. With hair frizzed out by the mist and some kind of seashells on a thong around her neck, she looked like a creature hauled out of the sea, a siren, regarding me with dark eyes that seemed to shine with strange compassion. Steam curled and vanished from her small-sculpted nostrils as she considered what to say.
Finally it was just, “Drive carefully.”
“I will. You, too.”
She smiled sympathetically and reached in and patted my hand on the wheel. I grinned like a cat until she had withdrawn and the window rose again and sealed off the vaporous outside.
What was her concern? Was it for Juliana, disappeared into the dark psychic stink of America? The fog was blanking out the street lamps, making the night unnaturally dim, a guttural gray through which they shone just faintly. But sometimes the fog would be a lens, diffusing a pair of headlamps passing behind a tree so its outline would spring out, monumentally visible, each twig and leaf in flashing silhouette as if etched by a laser.
I wished for that same shocking clarity in our search for Juliana, even as I fought a growing instinct it would not occur. There was uncertainty beneath the frenzy of the briefing, a stain of helplessness that seemed to be numbing Rick. We were all giving in to the fear that we had failed. Look at us, Andrew and me, fighting in public like dogs over territory.
I dialed his pager: Code 3-AG.
Emergency.
It was ten long minutes of creeping through fog until he called back.
“Still in the briefing?”
“That’s been over.”
“I’m sorry for what happened back there.”
When he didn’t gush, Oh my darling, I’m sorry too, my instinct for compromise evaporated.
“We never talked about going with Willie John Black.” My voice was hard.
“This is not working,” Andrew decided abruptly. “Let’s forget it.”
“It’s a little late, don’t you think?” I listened to his impatient snort into the mouthpiece. “This is what I told you would happen on the beach.”
“I work independently. I don’t report to the lieutenant every time I take a crap.”
“Now you’re accusing me of pulling rank.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“But you’ve said it, about this very thing, Willie John Black. ‘What is this, pulling rank?’”
“When? When did I say that?”
“This morning, at breakfast.”
Now there was silence. I knew what he was thinking: just like a woman to start whining about personal shit.
“Andrew? We’re still together on this, am I right?”
“Sure, baby,” he said with penetrating indifference. “Doesn’t matter to me.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Kiss up to your boss, that’s cool. Just stay out of my business.” He hung up.
Sometimes the temperature drops and you are blinded. All that I could see in front of me was swirling white and not the labyrinth beyond—the sudden drop-offs, veering alley walls and bottomless puddles into which whole cars could up-end and disappear—creeping inch by inch all the way to Westwood, and the police scanner was jammed with accidents, hit dogs, frightened seniors lost at indistinguishable intersections, reports of a fire.
A bus