Devil in the Wires (20 page)

 

Chapter 49

A Body in the Springtime Ice

W
oollard called. “I want you to see this.”

But I didn't want to see it, I didn't want to see it at all.

The sky was bright and blue. The snow lay piled along the roadside. A bus had stalled slantwise at the corner of our street, and the driver was making calls to try and get it moved. Eventually she jumped down from the cab, stood in front of it, and lit a cigarette.

­People were clearing paths along the sidewalk. It was like cutting through cheese—­square-­sided, narrow little walkways. Guys with shovels shaking their heads at one another. “This is fucked up, man.” Already, though, you could see the little beads of dew upon the surface. The temperature was up again. The snow was going to melt.

Not fast enough. There were no paths cleared, back behind the museum. It took me half an hour, picking my way through snowdrifts, till I saw him waiting for me in the park beside the bridge. His spring shirt was gone, replaced with a large, dark overcoat and heavy shoes.

I trudged through snow to get to him.

“Well now, Mr. English. How d'ya like Chicago weather?”

The air sparkled with light. The wind whipped up the tiny flecks of ice, and the sun turned them to diamonds for a second. Then they fell.

All around, the fields were bright, glaring. I wore shades. I'd planned on sunny days, but not like this.

“She's in the water,” he said, very matter-­of-­fact. “It's not pretty. We're having trouble, trying to get her out.”

He led me through the drifts, retracing his own footsteps, which cut back over the hill, between the trees.

“So why am I here?”

“Why? I thought, hey: why not?”

We moved slowly. He kept talking.

“Guy came by to check out his boat, y'know? Saw her there, and like any good, upstanding citizen, he called it in.”

“Again. Why am I here?”

“Ah. You're here, Mr. English, for a good reason. Remember what I said, 'bout things being
unusual
? When you get two or more of 'em together?”

“Yeah.”

“I want your project closed.”

“Good luck with that.”

“I know. I've got the mayor, the city and the federal government to go through first. Yeah. I'm saying what I
want
, not what I'm going for. This is unofficial, you remember? All our conversation. Unofficial. Right?”

“That's right.”

We were coming up on the cop cars now. There was a nasty sense of déjà vu about the whole thing. He stopped, and looked at me.

“All right,” he said. “So—­unofficially—­it's your turn.”

I shrugged.

“Not giving? 'Cause I know you got something. I know you do. And I was hoping you'd play fair.” He gave me a long, hard look. He didn't blink. “What do you guys say? Cricket, or something?”

“If a thing's not fair, we might say it's not cricket, yeah.”

“
Not cricket
.” His English accent was terrible, but no worse than my American.

I said, “You get deer in Chicago?”

“What?”

“Deer.”

“Huh. Well, we got the Chicago Bulls. Chicago Bears. We got the Cubs. No, no deer. Is this a joke?”

I shook my head.

He said, “Might get 'em in the suburbs. Not the city.”

“Big?”

“What's this about?”

“Big deer? I mean, moose-­size?”

“White-­tailed deer. It's the state animal. Not big. Though there's hunters tell you different. Why?”

“Your watch work?”

“I stopped wearing it. Wife says she'll get me a new one, next birthday. You ask some wild kind of questions, English. What are you getting at?”

“I don't know. Wish I did.”

“Then what are you suspecting?”

“The new—­new vic.” The police slang felt wrong in my mouth the moment I said it, but Woollard didn't comment. “Same as the others? Torture?”

“Looks like it. Far as we can ascertain.”

“I know a guy. Dayling. He was . . . involved in the retrieval of the god we have here.”

“Go on.”

“He had a thing about—­it wasn't clear. Pain. Shock. Thought he could use it to do things. Change things. He said the god helped him escape from where he was. He . . . yeah. He sort of said it took him back in time.”

“And does that sound likely?”

“No. No, it doesn't.” I shrugged. “I make connections, but they don't go anywhere.” I remembered what Angel had said, about the special gift of seeing links. Only it wasn't special. If I couldn't work it all out, follow the logic trail right to the end, then it was useless.

“Can we can talk to this friend of yours?”

“He's in England.” I smiled. “He's in a psychiatric hospital.”

“That figures.” He kicked at a heap of snow. “You know something, though, English? Every time we get another of these cases, there's a little part of me gets up and does a jig. 'Cause one day, maybe today, the motherfucker's gonna slip up and leave us something we can use.
Then
all we gotta do is find the son of a bitch. Know what I'm saying?”

T
he marina was frozen. Somehow, I'd not expected that. Frozen solid.

The ice had a pearly quality, silver-­gray in the sunlight. The boats were frozen into it, a ­couple of them leaning at bizarre angles where the freeze had caught them. Seagulls whirled above, and their shrieking had an ugly, bullying quality, as if the men below should have worked harder, though it seemed to me that there was little more that they could do.

They clustered on a wooden jetty, staring at something down below them in the ice. Some had long, wooden poles which they thumped repeatedly onto the surface, hoping to break it. No one trusted the ice to take their weight, but at the same time, it was strong enough to resist their efforts to crack it. A dull, irregular drumming counterpointed the gulls' cries.

“Hey. Take a look.”

So I leaned out, and I looked down.

Her hair was caught in the ice. It fanned out, fogged and dark. Her face was in the water. In the ice. Her bare back was exposed. It was puckered and ripped; the seagulls begged and threatened up above.

Like the others, she was naked. A light-­skinned black woman, and they were trying to break her free and get a rope around her, pull her out.

I looked away.

Woollard wasn't watching her, he was watching me.

“If you're gonna ask me if she suffered, then the answer's yes. If you're gonna ask if there'll be more like this . . . then that depends.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Je-­sus. We pray to him, but he don't always take the time to help us out. Or maybe we've got other deities to deal with here, know what I'm saying? What you think?”

He said it, “day-­itties,” like he'd never heard the word before. It was disingenuous, I knew; a smart cop who's spent long parts of his career playing dumb.

He put his hand upon my shoulder.

“You're looking kinda greenish there. Take a walk with me, OK? Let's talk a while. See, there's a strange thing about you, Mr. English, and it's this: I trust you. You don't say much. When you do, it's never helpful. But I always think you wanna tell the truth. I don't get much of that, y'know, in my line of work.”

“No. I don't think I do, either.”

“OK. So, maybe, we do this thing together . . . what d'you say?”

We walked back, following our footprints again through the snow.

“Who gets to be Batman? I'm not being Robin, I should tell you that.”

 

Chapter 50

God in the Streets

F
redericks wrote:

You're sounding a bit stressed there, mate. Pour yourself a stiff one, settle back and watch the footie. Or forget about it and come home. Remember the golden rule: nothing is worth losing a good night's sleep over.

Or your marbles, come to that. Chin up!

Two minutes later, I got:

Besides—­who made you Poet Lareate all of a sudden, anyway?

I wrote back:

The city is alive. I lie in bed some nights and I can feel it, every piece connected, everything linked up, the way it feels on a retrieval when it's all going well and you can sense the contours of the thing, and you lay the wires out so and so and you're mapping the energy even as you're doing it, placing it into containable, controllable forms. Almost like that. Almost. Except it's too big here. It spreads across the city and I feel like I can glimpse it but never understand its real shape. Things are going wrong. The lights, the warmth, the hum of the AC, the ­people in the streets all swirling back and forth . . . the calling of the devil in the wires. It's not like there's a plan. It's not like there's a consciousness behind it. It's like the old science experiment we did in school. You scatter iron filings on a sheet of paper, then place a magnet underneath. The filings shuffle into patterns. Move the magnet and the patterns change. That's how it is here. You drop the god Assur into the streets and tenements and office blocks of the city, and everything just shifts into new patterns, and an old god stamps its mark upon the modern world. New and old pull at each other, disrupt familiar patterns. Movements shift. Somehow I can't help thinking Woollard's right, there's a link between the Beach House and the killings. Too much coincidence. The link may not be a precise thing, cause and effect, but it's there, I'd swear it.

We had another one last night. A body left on the jetty near the Beach House. No freak weather this time, nothing like that. After the body in the ice, after the rest of it . . . then this. And something happened yesterday, something that brought it all much closer. This is no longer a thing that I can stay outside of, an observer, not for Woollard, Shailer or Seddon. Now there are ­people that I care about being threatened. That's something that I can't allow.

 

Chapter 51

The Attack

“Y
ou were there, Chris!”

“I was not!”

“I saw you. I saw you there.”

She slumped in the chair, her long body molded to the cushions. But her fingers clutched the chair arms, and her knuckles were white.

“That wasn't me. That—­I think that's Shailer's expert. His consultant. I thought it was him behind the killings, but they're not his style. He's—­”

“God damn it, Chris! It was you! It looked like you! It fucking was you—­”

“But younger.”

“I don't—­Jesus. It was dark, I mean, for God's sake, why are you, what—­”

She shook. She twisted her fingers together. I knelt beside her.

“Angel,” I said. “It wasn't me. All right? I have a . . . a double. Someone who looks like me. He's not human. He's one of them. A god. Sort of.”

She shook her head. Riff fussed around her, whimpering. She put her hand over her face.

“Was it that guy again? Gotowski?”

“Uh-­huh.”

“I'll talk to someone. This cop I know. Jesus, Angel. You're sure you're all right? Really?”

“No. No, I'm not sure. I'm not even sure why I let you in here—­”

“Tell me, Angie. Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”

It had been late, she said, already dark. She'd been busy all day, and Riff needed some exercise. So she took him to the field beside the lake. A lot of it was still boggy with meltwater, but there was a children's play area, fenced in. No one about. She took him inside, unclipped his leash, and let him go. He charged about, full with energy. It was all great fun. She clapped her hands, she urged him on. Then someone said her name, “Angel.” Just quietly, like that, and everything had seemed to freeze. The traffic sounds had died. She couldn't hear Riff. He'd been there just a second back, and then . . . “It was like a dream—­or a nightmare. I was scared, only I didn't know what of. Then I saw Paul. He was very close, and I remember thinking, he couldn't have gotten that close or I'd have seen him. He was the one who'd spoken. And there were these three other guys, behind him, a bit further back, and . . .”

“One of them looked like me?”

“No, no, you weren't there yet. But they came into the playground. That jerk Gotowski, he was all,
Now you're scared of me, aren't you?
There was no one else around, Chris! A summer night, and there was no one there! I called for Riff, only he didn't come. The place still looked the same, only it wasn't, you know? It was like an image of the place, or . . . I don't know. I can't explain.

“It was obvious what was going to happen. But even then, he wouldn't come at me directly. He had his pals move in from the side. One of them got my elbow in his face. That still hurts, actually. I kicked at them—­I kicked at Paul, but I was only wearing sneakers. The thing that bothered me was Riff. I couldn't hear him, and I was so scared something had happened to him. I was more scared of that than anything else. I yelled at Paul, ‘What have you done with my dog?' And still there was nobody around, no one . . .

“And that's when I saw you.

“I couldn't believe it. You were just standing there, over near the road, and there was a streetlamp lit up one side of your face, and you did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just stood there, and you watched . . .”

“Angel. That wasn't me.”

“It looked like you, and—­I don't know. Maybe your hair was longer, or—­I don't, I just don't know. I yelled for you. And then suddenly I could hear again. There were traffic sounds, and, it was like a pressure lifted. And then this wonderful boy—­” she scratched the dog's head, “he came racing up, barking his head off, and the guy still had hold of me, and he was just so mad—­Riff, I mean, biting and snapping—­” Riff, as if denying this, rubbed his head along her leg and drooled politely. “Then somebody was running over, but it wasn't you, Chris. It was just some passerby, trying to help. And Paul and the others, they were gone, and . . .”

“I wasn't there. What you saw—­” and I wondered how to explain it to her. “You're sure of it? You're sure it looked like me?”

I have ducked a lot of things in life. A lot of work, a lot of responsibility, a lot of relationships, when they got too much trouble to maintain. But some things follow you. It's like they've got their hooks deep in your skin, and you can't shake yourself free, no matter what you do.