Authors: Ben H. Winters
So—then—so—I stand up, pace in a tight circle—so she fought back, Jean fights back but is captured and subdued. Let’s say a pill or pills, let’s say the assailant pushes something into her mouth, covers her nose with his hands and forces her to swallow.
No—stop—I stop, smack the wall with my hand, think faster, Palace, think better. We’re in a fast-moving scenario here, victim two—Nico—is already sprinting off into the woods, I’m the killer and I’ve got to catch her, can’t let her go. I hit her with something. Knock her down. Jean’s in the dirt—unconscious?—gets her with one quick smooth slice to the throat and then I’m off and running after victim two, after Nico Palace tearing breathlessly in her sandals through the woods.
But I checked Jean’s body, while she was asleep, when she was still Lily, I checked her scalp for blunt force trauma, surely I did.
She was, though, she was
still
. Pills or an injection or the blow of a hammer to the side of the head, she wasn’t moving when she was cut and Nico was.
I find that I’m panting, pacing, horrified. It’s out there, it’s up there, the dark heart of the sky, coming in fast.
Focus Palace but I can’t but I have to. Keep going.
Killer catches up to poor Nico in that second clearing, gets on top of her and pins her down, and she’s terrified, she’s awake, she’s writhing, and he grabs her from behind and slashes her throat
until it’s open.
I am trembling, like I’m there, like I’m in the scene, like I’m cutting or being cut.
There’s something else, too. I turn around, away from the window, look at her one more time, wiping tears out of my eyes, feeling my knife hand clenching and unclenching. There’s something else.
Among the messiness and the gore of the wound there is something—I crouch—lean forward, take out my measuring tape, and murmuring apologies to Nico, after all that she has suffered, murmuring “holy moly” and then “holy shit,” I peel back small portions of her lacerated skin, one-tenth of a centimeter at a time, and I keep discovering them—smaller cuts within the larger, lines as small as insect legs. I move my magnifying glass across the neck and confirm that these smaller cuts are regularly spaced at quarter-inch increments along the whole line of the wound.
Parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound. Dr. Fenton would say that nothing is certain, that certainty is for schoolchildren and magicians, but that parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound strongly indicate that the weapon used was a serrated blade.
I burst out of the dispatch room and run down the hallway, hands spread out to either side like an animal wingspan, fly down the corridor to the kitchen to confirm my snapshot memory of the knives on the rack behind the kitchen. Butcher’s blade; paring knife; cleaver. Nonserrated.
Back in Dispatch I run it down for Nico, explain to her about her wound, the parallel superficial incisions and what they mean. I remind her, furthermore, that the only serrated blade I am aware of, in the context of this investigation, is the sawtooth buck knife noticed by Atlee Miller, hanging from Astronaut’s belt.
“Policeman.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
Cortez. Tentative expression, narrowed eyes. Looking at me like I’m not actually okay.
I clear my throat. “I’m fine. Did you crack it?”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I am. Did you get us down?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the tarp.
“Palace,” he says. “Is that her?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s her.”
I give it to him fast, the thumbnail sketch only. “The sleeping girl, whose name is Jean Wong, originally of Lansing, Michigan—her memory of the incident in question is very uneven, essentially empty, but she was able to lead me directly to a field in the woods where I located the body. Cause of death is a deep wound to the throat with a serrated blade. That’s about—that’s about what we’ve got. So.”
I stop abruptly. I know exactly what I’m doing by talking this way, very rapidly in crisp and distinct policeman diction, I’m stringing words out around my grief like a perimeter, like caution tape.
Cortez nods, solemn, adjusts his ponytail. I wait for him to ask again if I’m okay, so I can tell him I am and we can move on.
“Death,” he says instead. “It’s the fucking worst.”
“Did you get us down there?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Okay. Okay, great.”
He backs out of the room rather than turning, and as I stand up I see that for some reason I took one of the knives with me, the blood-stained butcher’s knife from the kitchenette. I’m holding the handle tight in my fist. I look at it for a second and then I slide it into my belt, on the inside, close to my thigh, like a huntsman.
So the group goes underground but then Nico pulls a runner and Jean runs after her and Astronaut chases them both, catches them, kills them one by one.
This is last Wednesday, sometime after four thirty p.m., probably closer to five. Me and my dog and my goon rolled in about three o’clock on Thursday morning. Hours. A margin of hours. I can’t forget that. I won’t.
It’s Astronaut, or it’s Jordan and he’s using Astronaut’s knife.
Or it’s Tick, or it’s Valentine. Or it’s none of the above.
Nine times out of ten, in the usual run of things, a person is murdered not by a stranger but by a friend or family member, a husband or wife. There are exceptions—my mother was one—and neither is this the normal run of things. We live now in a world of wolves, blue towns, red towns, people roaming the countryside in search of safety or love or cheap thrills. Nico and Jean may well have
emerged from their society of rogues unharmed, only to be set upon by some monster roaming the landscape, someone who had always wanted to slash the throats of two girls and took his opportunity before disappearing, laughing, into the woods. Plenty of people wear sunglasses. Plenty of people carry serrated knives.
“Ready, Policeman?”
“Yeah,” I say to Cortez. “I am.”
We are standing beside each other, hands on our hips, staring down the metal stairwell that descends, as predicted, from the middle of the police station garage. The infamous wedge of concrete that had hidden it has been reduced to a pile of rubble, which Cortez has arranged on a tarp beside the resulting hole, a pyramid of uneven stones. He’s sweating like crazy from his exertions, his T-shirt is soaked, his ponytail unkempt and sweat-matted, rolling down his back. Peering down into the darkness, licking his lips.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay, okay. We get down there, first challenge will be getting through the blast door.”
“Blast door?”
“People build bunkers, this is what they do: they put in a toilet, a generator, and a blast door.” He’s fitting on a Rayovac headlamp, tightening the straps. “Plus, of course, I’ve been up here jackhammering for the better part of an hour.”
“And nobody came up.”
“Because they didn’t hear.”
“Through the blast door.”
“Gold star for you, Policeman.”
He hands me a second headlamp, and I loop the straps over
my ears and across my scalp, wincing as the Velcro of the fastener brushes the gash on my forehead. “You can’t shoot through a blast door unless you’ve got a shoulder-mounted nuclear bomb, but you sure can pick the locks.” His headlamp winks on. “Well. I can.”
Cortez is talking fast, grinning like the devil, eyes flashing with excitement, ready to rock. There is a new intensity about the man, a thrill of having cracked the floor and a twitchy excitement about heading downstairs—almost as if this is his case and I’m the one tagging along to lend him a hand. He can’t wait to see what’s down there, what comes next. I’m feeling what he’s feeling, too, I need to know, I have to, and when I stare down into the darkness of the stairwell, beyond the edge of my headlamp’s halo I see Nico’s face, eyes closed, the dark red savaged mess of her throat.
Cortez steps down first, heavy boot heel clanging on the top metal step, me coming one step behind. The narrow metal stairwell shivers under our heels.
“Hi.”
A timid voice, from back the way we came. Jean is standing in the doorway that leads out of the garage back into the hallway. Cortez and I both stop at the same time and turn our heads, and our headlamps crisscross like prison-break spotlights on her small worried face.
“You’re going down?”
“Yes,” I say. “We are.”
“You must be Jean,” says Cortez. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
She shifts from one foot to the other in the doorway, shivering, holding herself tightly. She is wearing black pants and a red T-shirt
I gave her out of Nico’s abandoned backpack, and over that one of my extra jackets, which hangs on her like a monk’s robe. She hovers there, uneasy, like she wants to leave but can’t. As if she is a ghost, captured in the gloomy corner of the garage, tethered by her curse to a given radius.
“Can I come?” she says.
“Why?”
“I just—I want to.”
I step back up, out of the hole. “Do you remember something, Jean? Something you can tell us?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No. I don’t.” She crosses her arms, sniffs the thick gray air of the garage. “I just want to come.”
“Well,” I start, but at the same time Cortez says: “No.” I look at him, and he shakes his head. “No way.” Before I can marshal an argument, which I am not sure I have, Cortez is talking fast, stage-whispering his objections: “A, this girl is, tops, a hundred pounds; B, she’s unarmed; and C, she’s clearly not in a healthy place. If you gather my meaning. We don’t need her.”
“She’s been down there. She can guide us.”
“It’s a hole in the ground,” says Cortez. “I think we’ll figure it out.”
I look at Jean, who looks back at me pleadingly, wavering on her feet. She doesn’t want to be alone, that’s all. She’s so pale standing there in the dim light that she is virtually transparent, like I might look away and look back and she’ll be gone, she’ll just slip out of existence.
“Policeman, listen,” says Cortez, no longer bothering to whisper,
his eyes fixed on the thin staircase leading down. “We’re not going in there to play ping-pong in the rec room. This isn’t all the set-up for a surprise party I planned for you.”
He’s right. I know he’s right.
“Jean,” I say softly.
“No, it’s—” She turns away. “Fine. Okay.”
“We’ll be right back,” I tell her, which probably isn’t true, and “you’ll be fine,” and of course that’s not true either.
“You can’t save everybody, my boy,” says Cortez, while I watch Jean wander from the garage and maybe back to the holding cell that has somehow become her home, or maybe she’ll be darting off into the woods, taking her chances in the broken world until it’s gone. Or maybe she’s done, maybe she’s had enough and when we come back we’ll find her up here, hanging by a bedsheet, eyes bulging and lips blue like Peter Zell.
We go down. Down we go.
Cortez descends first and I follow him into the darkness. He’s whistling, softly, “hi-ho, hi-ho,” and I follow the sound of him whistling and the clang of his boot heels on the metal steps, my headlamp catching half-lit visions of his back and the backs of his shoes, until he reaches the bottom and stops and says, “Huh.”
There is no blast door. We come off the last step onto a cement floor; cement walls; a long basement hallway. It’s cold, noticeably so, an easy ten degrees colder than upstairs; cold and dark and utterly silent. The smells of old stone, of mold and standing water, and underneath that a more recent scent, an acridness like something burning somewhere nearby. As we look around the empty room our
headlamps cut overlapping slices of yellow gloom from the darkness.
It’s nothing. It’s just plain nothing. It takes a moment or two for me to identify the feeling creeping up into my bones while I’m standing here, staring at this long empty quiet hallway. It’s disappointment is what it is, a low cold disappointment, because some part of me had
wondered
. At some point without meaning to I had allowed some faint bubbles of hope to form and rise. Because of all of it—not just the damn helicopter, but all of it: the impressive geographic reach of this group, from New England to the Midwest; the Internet capacity, Jordan nonchalantly hacking an FBI database on a dial-up connection while the rest of the world is in rapid regression toward the Stone Age; those mysterious heavy crates Atlee Miller saw being trucked down here on Wednesday afternoon.
Some idiot part of me was expecting to find a hum of activity. A rogue government scientist in a white coat barking out orders. Last-minute preparations for launch. Beeping consoles and screens filled with maps, a world beneath the world, humming along, preparing for action. Something from James Bond, something from
Star Wars. Something
.
But it’s nothing. Cold; darkness; a bad stink; spiderwebs and dirt. Under the staircase there’s a cheap wooden door, hanging open to a tiny room: fuse boxes; mops; a black potbellied furnace, silent and rusted.
Where are the
people
? Where are my buddies Sailor and Tick and Delighted, where are the brilliant revolutionaries, vanguard of the future? Where have the spiders scuttled off to?
Cortez, for his part, seems unfazed. He turns to me in the
strange wavering light of the headlamps, and his spooky excited grin is still in place. His face looks chopped up and put back together.
“Who knows?” he says, reading my mind. “Maybe they went out for milk.”
My eyes are slowly adjusting to the dimness. I look up and down the hallway.
“Okay,” I say. “How do you want to do this?”
“We’ll split up.”
“What?
I turn back sharply to him and our two pools of light form together and I see that his eyes are wide and flashing. There’s definitely something going on with him, I saw it up at the top of the steps, some new eagerness coming to life in his head, taking center stage.
“I’ll go thisaway,” he says, like the sheriff in a Western, pokes his thumb off into the darkness and starts moving.
“No,” I say. “Wait. What? Cortez.”
“Just holler. Just do Marco Polo. Don’t worry.”