They move toward Katie. At her. Like predator to prey.
Her back is to them.
One man steps ahead of the other. His hand comes out of his jacket pocket. Grips something dark. A pistol.
Katie lifts a bottle of wine. Examines it.
The second man draws a pistol. Doesn’t raise it. Never gets the chance.
Katie senses something. Starts to look back. Never finishes turning.
The first man’s gun is level with her head when he fires.
Didn’t deserve it. So young.
Too much happens at once. I experience it more than see it. A flash. Katie’s hair seems suddenly tossed, as if by some rogue gust of wind. She drops from view, disappearing behind the display racks along one aisle, a avalanche of limp flesh and cotton and denim.
The clerk ducks behind the counter and covers his ears.
Didn’t deserve it.
The first man adjusts his aim downward and fires twice more. A splash of red sprays upward and splatters the glass front of a cold case.
I notice now that my heart is pounding. Throbbing. The
thrum thrum thrum
the only sound I hear. Drumming in my ears. My whole being seeming to pulse with its raging cadence as I stay fixed on the screen.
The first man has fired three shots. He steps back. Turns his head toward the second man, and he now steps forward and aims his gun toward the floor. Where my sister’s crumpled form would be. He hesitates, then he fires. Once. Twice. Three times. His hand is shaking wildly.
This is Eric. I cannot see his face, nor any feature which would identify him. But I know.
The first man turns completely away from where my sister lies, unseen, and grabs Eric by the shoulder. Signaling him, it seems. Eric struggles to calm his trembling and fights to get the gun back in the jacket’s baggy pocket. The first man has no such trouble. His gun slips easily away. He is practiced. Smooth. A pro.
I can only suspect that James Estcek is the other I do not know. The other which Eric’s dying words made real. But what I see here only makes my need to know more pronounced. The life which James Estcek has led, according to his criminal file, paints a picture of a man capable of what I have just witnessed. And what I am still witnessing.
The first man moves toward the door, pulling Eric with him. The clerk ducks completely out of view as they pass by and disappear out the front door. Gone.
The image crackles for an instant then goes black, the recording over.
Over.
I sit still as my gaze lowers. Drifts off the screen to the desktop. To the paper I had folded a few moments before. What I have scribbled upon it could very well lead me to the man I just watched murder my sister.
And then?
My heart begins to slow. My breaths come steady. A calm, for some reason, settles over me as that question hangs there before me.
If I find James Estcek, and if I am somehow able to convince myself that he is the one who put the first bullet into my sister’s head, what will I do?
What will I be capable of?
It is that question which troubles me most because, in the few days since Kerrigan’s call woke me from the dream of my sister and me romping along the shore of the lake, I have come to realize that the bounds I had set for my life were illusory at best. I am fumbling now through a new truth, and I am more scared of
not
finding the full measure of what will be revealed than I am of what does lie ahead.
My hand moves the mouse, dragging the cursor across the screen and closing the search windows. I tuck the notes I have made in my shirt pocket and stand. By the clock it is just past thirty minutes. I come around the desk to the sound of chatter in the hall, Kerrigan’s voice mixed with another in discussion. He will come through the door in a minute or two. I will wait until he does, and I will thank him, and then I will be on my way.
To find what I must find.
Chapter Fifteen
UTL
By osmosis one absorbs the language of cops if they spend enough time in their presence. A lifetime as the son of one, as well as my place in the department ministering to the needs of those in uniform, have allowed the combination of code and nomenclature to filter into my consciousness. There are times when they deal with a choice Adam Henry, whose name might be Bob or Enrique, but who, nonetheless, is an ass hole in their eyes. On occasion they find a DB, and a van from the medical examiner’s office is dispatched to collect the dead body.
Sometimes, though, they find nothing. Even though they want desperately to locate a person, or a thing, their efforts are fruitless, and the acronym of the moment is used—UTL.
Unable to locate.
I play cop in the darkening hours after leaving Kerrigan’s office, driving through neighborhoods built on dreams, but caught now in a hopeless eddy of decay. Few, if any, of the faces I see, bright young or sullen old, will ever break free of the current which keeps them here, its power more than enough to heave them back upon the shore of their reality should they try to escape, or drag them down from this world completely. These people I pray for on any normal day, on any other day, their plight taking the whole of my thoughts. But this day turned night is no other day. No normal day. And though I see their faces through the windshield as I cruise slowly past row houses with windows barred, and by bodegas with knots of youths gathered in front, their dangerous gazes tracking me as I approach, it is only for comparison’s sake that I look at all. To see if any of the faces match the one I hold in my mind, burned there a few hours before as I stared at Kerrigan’s computer. Blonde hair, blue eyes. James Estcek.
But he is nowhere to be found. Six hours staring through the windshield of my car brings me no closer to James Estcek. The paper with addresses and dates and associates of his rests on the passenger seat next to me, checkmarks by each a confirmation of a search likely destined to failure. I am not my father, or Dave Benz, or any other officer of the law with wiles and will. I have stepped from my car not once on this endeavor. Have spoken to not a single soul to ask about James Estcek. Where any cop would seek knowledge through interaction, compliant or forced, I have avoided exactly that. Possibly because to do so would be just one further step over a line mostly obliterated already. Or it could be that I am afraid. Not of my personal safety, though that could easily be a concern in most of the environs I have visited this night. I wonder, as I did in Kerrigan’s office earlier, if finding and facing James Estcek will reveal to me more of my true self than I am willing, at this moment, to accept.
Even entertaining the possibility of that self serving view turns my stomach the instant I realize I am allowing such an excuse to free me of the course I have committed myself to—bringing a fuller measure of right to Katie’s death. To her murder.
I do not call the thing I might find justice. It cannot be that now, if it ever could have been. Just a sort of grim finality beyond the ending of her life. Still, it is what I seek, and to purposely not pursue whatever cold satisfaction might come can not, in the least bit, be acceptable. Not after what I have done to this point. I have failed my calling in ways that I will account for, I am certain, but I cannot fail Katie. Not when I have the chance to do right by her. For her.
A red light stops me at an intersection, side street crossing a boulevard. I could look up and read the signs which name the streets, but where I am is not a concern right now. Where I am going is. I take the list from the passenger seat and look back through the places I have given only cursory attention to. Places I rolled by craning to see if the face of James Estcek stared out at me from the shadows of a porch, or the recesses of an alley. Among the bars and clubs and corners and apartment buildings tagged with a jumbled mix of gang graffiti and spray-painted memorials to those lost to the lifestyle of the street, there was a small house I passed by early on. West of the city a few miles, in the Township of Maywood. A once solidly blue collar city now teetering between rampant crime and yuppified revival. A place where industry once provided a living for families without extended commutes. The very place where James Estcek was born, and raised, and where, if the information gleaned from Kerrigan’s office was correct, his mother still lives.
* * *
I reach the house on 6
th
Avenue closer to one than to midnight, the hum from the Eisenhower a din behind me, traffic on the expressway sparse at this hour, but still enough to float a low moan the several blocks to where I stop my car and get out.
It would be expected that the lights of the blue house be doused by this time, but they are not. A single window upstairs is lit, and a pair on the first floor just beyond the porch glow with pulsing shades of blue, a TV clearly on inside. Someone is home.
I move up a walkway which bisects the browning yard and climb the three steps to the porch. One half of a swinging bench hangs from a chain looped over an exposed rafter, the other resting on the porch floor, the expanse beneath my feet covered long ago by fake green turf, edges peeling up now, rotted boards being revealed by time. There is no door bell that I can see. No knocker. No storm door, even. Just a slab of crafted wood which I rap my bare knuckles on three times and wait.
It is quiet beyond the door, no sound of approach and, even stranger I suppose, no hint of a television turned to any normal volume. The shifting light on the sheer front curtains leaves no other explanation than someone up watching a late movie or sitcom rerun. Possibly whoever is home has dozed off on the couch, or is already upstairs in bed, leaving the inexplicably mute television to play through ‘til morning.
“Who are you?”
The challenge comes through the window. I look and see one half of the curtains drawn back, a face peering out at me. A woman, her age written in lines that gouge her cheeks, and neck, and the spindly hand I can see grasping the curtain. It is not scrawled upon her like a number, but like the scoured landscape of a life thus far. Worn, but not worn out. Or away. There is a bright wariness in her eyes, though not of a stranger at her door in the hour past midnight. Hers is a caution that seems universally applied. To one and all despite situation or time.
This woman trusts no one.
“My name is Michael,” I say, a bit too loud I realize, thinking it necessary to breach the glass between us. I soften my voice and step closer to the window. “I’m looking for James Estcek.”
She does not react in any manner obvious to me. Neither surprise or worry. There is no evasive tilt of her head. She simply stares at me for a moment before responding.
“What did he do?” The question comes with abrupt familiarity. I am not the first to have come knocking at an odd hour making this inquiry.
“He didn’t…” I hesitate and choose my approach carefully. This woman has no incentive to be helpful to me, much less cordial. I cannot press my need for information. Not yet. “Are you Moira Estcek?”
“My shitbag ex left fifteen years ago and took that name with him,” she tells me, little bits of spittle flecking on the inside of the window.
“But you are James’ mother?”
“I’m not putting up bail,” she says before that path can be headed down.
“I’m not a bondsman. Or a cop. Or…” I could spend an hour telling her I am not any of the people who she has come to associate with the disappointment of her son’s criminality. Or I can offer her a measure of the truth behind my visit. “I’m a priest.”
She reacts in a way that seems instantly alien, the hardness about her softened by surprise, a flash of dread rising from a place this mother thought existed no more within. “Jimmy’s dead?”
“No,” I counter quickly. I am not here to bring pain to this woman. Even if hurting James Estcek were the thing which I sought, vengeance by proxy would be a hollow substitute, and I am not the kind of man who imagines satisfaction in such a scenario. I am not. “James is fine, as far as I know.”
The softness that was there vanishes. Moira is incapable of consciously emoting anything even hinting at a vulnerability. Whatever walls she has built over her life are high and stout, crafted stone by stone like the growing linkage of Marley’s great chain. An unplanned construct of the life she chose, and the life dealt her.
“I’m trying to find him to deliver some news about a friend,” I explain.
“Losers,” she says, nearly scowling, the blunt edge of her manner back in full. “Every last one of them. Thieves and lowlifes.” She begins to close the curtain. “Get the hell out of here.”
“Please,” I say. The curtain has already swung back across the window, but she has not withdrawn. The silhouette of her, haloed in a cloud of the television’s radiance, is still there. Just beyond the wispy fabric.
“I don’t know where he is,” she offers, seeming a shrouded statue behind glass, words coming without movement.
“Does he come by?” I ask. “Ever?”
“Sometimes,” the answer comes. Just cold and factual. No hint of joy or revulsion. “Then he’s gone again.”
I think for a moment, then reach into my jacket, a pen and small notebook habitually kept pocketed there. I remove the small pad in which I have, through the years, recorded notes about a wedding to perform, scrawling personal details to flavor the vows so they are not just a rote performance. Or the time of death of an aged parishioner. The favorite prayer of an ailing friend. All these things are still there, an accounting of sorts of the journey through my calling. A collection of words and particulars which, at this moment, I cannot stand to sample, even if only to flip through to find a blank page. Instead I turn to the very back and peel the final small sheet out and pen a series of numbers on it.
“This is my phone number,” I say through the window, eliciting no response from her. She does not go to the door. Does not open it and accept what I have. Beyond the glass and curtain the shape of her is fixed. I fold the paper in half and tuck it into the space between door and jamb. “Call me if James does come by.”