Sleeping Policemen (24 page)

“You kill a trooper, cops be all over it like stink on shit. You killed one of their own. I been real careful, wiped everything down but the bottle and this here glass, and I'm plannin to take them with me.”

“Please,” Nick whispered. “Sue …”

“We'll talk about your little girlfriend in a minute, son. First things first. Damn forensics get you every time, so what you're gonna do, you're gonna take that knife and do a little impromptu surgery on these folks, if you know what I mean. Smart kid like yourself ought to know some surgery.”

“No—”

“Three bullets, one in the blonde, two in your big friend there. That's all. Then we'll get on the road.”

“No, please …”

Pomeroy leveled the gun and smiled.

“Best get to it, son.”

12:59.

Nick got Evans by the boots and lugged his inert mass to the far side of the tub. Then he hunkered over the blonde. He threw back the dismayed faces of Shaggy and Scooby Doo, revealing the blue interior lining, all the time wondering about the kid, the way he would feel when he found out that his mom had been slaughtered and dumped in a stranger's bathtub, wrapped like a side of beef in his cartoon sleeping bag.

Nick swallowed.

He jabbed the blade through the shiny fabric of the red dress where it bunched up at the blonde's pubic bone and slid it north. With trembling fingers, he peeled the twin panels of cheap material to either side, revealing smooth flesh of tanning-bed bronze. Her underwear was impractical. Stroke-book lingerie: a high-cut red thong and matching bra, her nipples like delicate scalloped shells beneath the lace. Everyday stuff? some distant part of his mind wondered. For the husband her wedding ring implied, or for someone else, a lover maybe? The mere idea shunted his thoughts into agonizing channels—the stolen hint of a strange cologne, a glimpse of crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray of Sue's car, his fears about Finney and Sue. And something worse, a vision of Finney's body crumpled in the trunk of the cruiser, useless as a rag doll, his hand closing reflexively around the spilled bullet, finally and irrevocably dead. Had to be, Nick thought, remembering that pink froth coating his best friend's lips. He had to be dead.

The word tolled like a funereal bell inside his mind.

Dead.
Out of my jealousy, my insecurity
—

His bowels twisted.

He had failed Finney. Had failed his friend. He glanced at the Rolex—

—
1:08
—

—and picked up the knife, knowing he had no time to wallow in guilt, not now, not if he were to save Sue. And yet still he hesitated.

“Can I have some gloves? I think Finney kept some under the sink.”

“You worried bout the AIDS, son?”

Nick stared dumbly into the blonde's expressionless face.

“That's the least of your worries. You live long enough to die of the AIDS, you can thank God in his sweet Heaven above you.”

Nick stared down at the blonde. He slid the blade between her breasts, flicked it upward. The elastic bra strap gave way with a little
pop
and the lacy shells fell back. The bullet had gone into her left breast, right where the heart would be on an anatomy chart. You couldn't ask for a better shot. The hole was a little larger than a quarter, its perimeter torn, the flesh bruised and blackened. Nick had expected more blood.

“Good thing about a little bitty caliber like this,” Pomeroy said, “it don't make a mess of things. That trooper of yours with his damn hand cannon, he lacked finesse. Bullet go right through someone, splatter em all over the wall and you don't got a chance of diggin it out. Man uses a gun like that lacks confidence in his own abilities.”

Click
!

Another sweep of the second hand, another moment flying into the maw of the past.

“If we don't get back to Gutman's by two,” Nick said, “they're going to start taking her fingers.”

“Who's that?”

“Sue. Remember Sue?”

Still Nick could not look away from the dead woman in the tub. Before his eyes, the white-trash features shifted, metamorphosed into Sue's patrician face, the bleach blonde hair transforming itself into soft, copper tresses.

“You should of thought of that fore you picked up that poker, son. I was willin to work a deal.”

“You don't understand.”

“I'm aimin to, but first you need to get cuttin.”

Nick didn't answer.

He remembered his father, hunkering over a fresh kill in the bayou woods, long years before he came home crippled in a chair. Dawn had just begun to print itself across the horizon, the barren trees black as Japanese ideograms against the graying sky. His father had laid a hand across the buck's heaving shoulder, still gushing hot life, and pulled from its sheath the Bowie knife that had been his father's before him, and which someday might have been Nick's if things had turned out differently. He cut the buck's throat with a single stroke. Then, working with the sure touch of a man who felt more at home in the woods than anywhere else—a man who shrank from the bookish and the learned which he called feminine—Frank Laymon set about showing his youngest boy how to gut a deer.

Nick stared down at the blonde's exposed torso.

The fiery second hand of the Cadillac's clock—

—
time is everything
—

—
everything is time
—

—blurred through his mind once again.

He bounced the knife lightly in one hugely swollen palm, that childhood hallucination sweeping back to claim him once again; he tested the edge with his thumb.

The blade was sharp.

He took a deep breath and leaned over the blonde.

The secret, Nick discovered, was not to think of that deer he had watched his dad gut all those years ago—not to think of the blonde as a once-living creature at all.

When he was a kid, just four or five years old, it was hard to remember, Nick had gotten this game,
Operation
. The game board was shaped like a desexed little man with a tiny, red light bulb for a nose; his body had been punctured here and there with metal-rimmed crevices in which tiny plastic bones had been secreted. The object of the game was to “operate” with a pair of metal tweezers, removing the bones without touching the metal rims of their cradles, closing an electrical connection that set the red nose to blinking in conjunction with this horrible metallic buzz. He couldn't remember where he had gotten the game—maybe from Goodwill where his mom found a lot of their stuff, maybe from Jake or Sam, who no doubt stole it from some richer, more timid kid—but it hadn't been complete, or so he had recalled years later at the Torkelsons, when one of the twins had produced a mint-condition gameboard as an event in what they had talked up around campus as a drinking Olympics, with medals to be awarded in funneling, quarters, beer pong, and surgery.

All those years later, Nick had felt a surge of jealousy as he looked down at the Torkelsons' deluxe
Operation
, still in its original box, complete with all its plastic bones and unfrayed stacks of play money and game cards. By the time Nick had gotten his version, the money and game cards had all been lost, and maybe half the plastic bones replaced with toothpicks cut to size. And yet for all that it remained one of the touchstones of his childhood, one of the few memories of his mother he retained at all.

When they had played, exactly, or why he did not know. But for once they had been blessedly alone—his dad at the rigs, Jake and Sam off on some brutish teenage errand—and Nick had had his mother all to himself. He could still recall the way her wavy, chestnut hair fell over her face as she knelt over the game board, the way she had brushed it away with a movement as deft as it was unconscious. Even then, only a kid, he had known that she was beautiful. Not till later—too late—would he understand that she had been lost: married to a man because of the child he had kindled in her womb. He must have seemed brutish to her, Nick had thought, newly risen from the jungle. And in her turn, she must have seemed to him like some kind of alien being, an interloper from a world where people had jobs that required them to wear ties, where people owned stocks and bonds and season tickets to the theater instead of the Saints: a breathing reproach of the life he had been born to.

But in that moment, before the cancer devoured her and Nick came to understand the fatal complexity of his father's heart, Sharon Laymon had been magical. Playing
Operation
, she had instituted an impromptu rule that allowed Nick with his clumsy childhood fingers to have three turns for her every attempt. She had crowed with delight, clapping her hands, when he lifted the metal tweezers, the butterfly from the little man's stomach clutched triumphantly between the pincers.

Smart kid like yourself ought to know some surgery
, Pomeroy had said.

Turned out he was right. In the remembered presence of his mother, for Sue Thompson, Nick could do anything.

He slid the knife into the bullet hole in the blonde's breast, and began to work the misshapen lump of lead into the light, focused on that stupid game, trying not to set the red nose to blinking.

At 1:23 he spilled the bullet into an open washcloth. Then he started on the trooper.

“Me and you,” Pomeroy said. “We're gonna play a game. Twenty questions, right? Way it works, I ask you a question. You don't answer up, I shoot you. Understand?”

Nick, bent over his work, nodded. “Yeah, I understand.”

And so Nick told him, the whole deranged sequence of events spilling out of him in response to Pomeroy's grunted queries, Evans and Tucker and the Smokin Mountain, Gutman squatting like a loathsome toad behind his mahogany desk, Sue screaming and screaming when they took her finger, and Finney. Finney crumpled lifeless in the trunk.

When he finished, his hands were red almost to the elbow, and something had died inside him. Two more lumps of lead lay atop the washcloth. He closed the knife and handed it back to Pomeroy. He lifted the gory washcloth, folded it around the used bullets, handed that back, too.

Pomeroy slid the washcloth into a pocket of his jeans. “Now, get me the trooper's keys, son.”

He leaned over, dug the keys from the uniform pants, and handed them back.

He glanced at the Rolex—

—
1:49
—

—and thought of Sue. Ten minutes.

And the thought sparked an image in his mind: Evans, grinning as he tucked the seeping pinky into his breast pocket.

An irrational hope leapt into his mind—

—
they can save it, reattach it
—

—but a deeper, despairing self knew the truth: that he only wanted it, a piece of Sue, a piece of the life he had lost. And more, that it would be base and disgraceful to leave it here in this abattoir, nestled close by the dead trooper's heart. He moaned as he leaned into the tub, fumbling at Evans's uniform blouse.

“What are you doin, son?” Pomeroy said.

And then he had it, the finger, slim and cold, the bone a blood-clotted knob at its base. Nick stood, brandishing it, barely able to recognize the washed-out specter in the mirror at Pomeroy's back: a broad-shouldered kid with the desperate, blood-speckled face of a dying old man; his eyes wild and empty, dry wells on eternity; his hands and arms gore-slick and stinking as he thrust the finger out before him, token, talisman, and plea for mercy.

He stumbled to his knees before the man with the gun, holding the finger out before him, and watched with horrified eyes as the second hand on the bloody Rolex swung through its arc once more—

—
click!
—

—eating time.

“Please,” he whispered. “We can save her.”

Pomeroy's voice was almost gentle. “Time to save anybody's over, son. Cops be turnin up the heat real soon, and I'm overdue for a vacation somewhere sunny and far, far away from here. I got the tape, and I got you, and you happen to bear a passin resemblance to one of them fellas that cut up poor Casey Barrett. That ought to be good enough for her daddy. You and me, son, we're goin for a ride.”

Tuesday, 1:57 to 2:59 PM

Nick filled his mind with waves, relentless gray swells, primordial and eternal, hurling themselves upon a broken shore. He imagined the chill water closing over his head, dragging him into the vast emptiness of the Gulf, an endless, rolling swell the dull, dead color of an elephant's hide.

He thought of waves, the sound of them slipping into the
crash
of seconds hurtling past, time spinning beyond his grasp.

He thought of the gray endlessness of waves—so he would not have to see Finney lying sprawled and broken at the foot of a mountain; so he would not have to see the emptiness of Sue's glazed eyes.

Pomeroy shoved Nick into the back seat of Evans's car. The stale smell of vomit enveloped him. He doubled over, sliding from the seat into the floorboard, retching. But nothing came up. He had emptied himself hours ago. Now he was nothing but shell, an empty husk—

—
a hollow man
—

—ready to crumble into ash at a touch.

Gasping, Nick heaved himself onto the seat as Pomeroy dropped into the front, slamming the door loudly.

“Fuckin giant,” Pomeroy muttered, leaning forward to fumble under the seat. Nick saw him tug—then yank harder, an apish grunt escaping him—and the front seat pulled suddenly away from him. Pomeroy sat up, situating himself—strapping the seatbelt around him and adjusting the rearview mirror so that Nick could see a square of bruised, yellow flesh, those beady eyes. The sedan swallowed him, a child playing grown-up. All Nick could see of him was a balding pate rising just above the headrest.

“Way I figure it, you're worth another hundred grand.” His eyes narrowed. He rubbed his jaw, his hand singing over the day's stubble. “At least that.”

Pomeroy rambled on as he guided the car through the quiet, winding streets of College Park. Midday. Most of the residents would be in class or cramming for exams. Nick thought of the waves, coming and coming again—not thinking of the way Tucker's finger seemed to curl beyond the edge of the overturned table, beckoning him to come look at the mess he'd made of things; not thinking of the way Sue had screamed and screamed, her maimed hand clutched to her breasts. Most of all not thinking of what might be happening to Sue right now.