“A cross,” I said. “Fuck me.”
“What?” Nolen asked with the anxious air of a keener struggling to keep pace with his more witty peers.
Molly handed me the pencil so that I could show him. “See,” I said. “If you join the location of the baby toe at right angles to the finger line ... “
“And if you take the interval between the fingers ...” Molly added.
I eyeballed several more Xs along the length of both lines. There it was,
Ruddick dissected into quadrants, the stick-thin shadow of the cross, with the intersection matching Molly’s hypothetical intervals perfectly.
“If Molly’s right,” I said, pointing to the crossing, “that’s where we’ll find her ... what? Thumbs and big toes, I suppose.”
“Or her, ah ... her body,” Nolen said, his voice as thin as his face was white.
The lines were hand-drawn and inexact, but they nevertheless intersected in a shaded region containing grey blocks instead of the orange the map-makers had used to represent other large buildings.
“What is that?” Molly asked, peering for a title of some kind. “Another factory?”
“Nashron,” Nolen said, frowning and nodding. “The deadest of the dead. Packed up before there even was a China.”
The Nashron plant was old, positively ancient by industrial standards, built at the turn of the nineteenth century, long before zoning had become a going concern. A chain-link fence that had been skinned with scrap sheets of siding ran around the perimeter. The main structures loomed above, brick walls so stained and chapped they looked Roman, their monumental monotony broken only by the long rows of what had once been windows but were now empty frames, lattices of rotted wood about blackness—utter blackness.
“You gotta be kidding me ...” Molly said as Nolen pulled the cruiser across the turf and scrub thronging about the gate. The headlights flashed across an old rust-scabbed sign with red lettering—something about legalities. A large commercial real estate sign had been planted to the right, shiny new even in the dark.
“Think of the story, Molls,” I said as Caleb cracked the door.
She glanced at me in her wry, endearing way. “Yeah, hey ... I might even end up with, like, an in-depth special report.”
I grinned and winked. “I was thinking obituary.”
Not the best joke, I admit, given that we were hunting for Dead Jennifer’s thumbs and toes, but it kept me chuckling while Nolen sorted through keys for the lock—a land mine—sized thing hanging from a heavy- duty chain. Apparently Nolen and his deputies periodically accessed the grounds to check things out. “Tracking itinerants,” he explained, which I took to mean rousting bums.
I helped him yank back the gate, which was quite heavy thanks to the sheets of corrugated aluminum. Our flashlights probed the grounds: pale ovals revealing sumac, sundry weeds, and humps of rusted iron—old train parts by the look of them. We followed the remains of a concrete walkway. The night soared about us, painted the aural world behind the crickets and cicadas with utter silence.
We paused before a battered entrance: a heavy, metal-skinned door that had been smashed from its tracks. Our flashlights chased the shadows of weeds and debris deep into the structure’s interior.
“Eew,” Molly said with the bubbling beginnings of panic. “What’s that smell?”
I raised my flashlight to my chin, made a campsite face. “Me ... I always fart before battle.”
“You eat potato chips or something?” Nolen asked without the whisper of a smile. He seemed remarkably at ease, given the circumstances. This raised my hackles once again. I much prefer weak people stay weak, if you know what I mean. The idea had occurred to me that pretty much anything could happen on this nocturnal expedition, and that the world would be captive to the facts as the survivors told them. Just where were Nolen’s patrolmen anyway?
I thought of my revolver stuffed in the bottom of my bag in my room. Fawk.
“Follow me,” I said, striding over the low heaps of junk and over the threshold. The factory interior was at once cavernous and cramped with ruin, like a mine shaft and an airplane hangar all in one. Another stinker slipped loose as I picked my way forward; it felt like a hot marble between my butt cheeks.
The building was largely open, broken only by the ruins of stairs that led to a series of hanging offices above. Debris had been scattered like flotsam, leaving patches of floor bare. Sweeping my light back and forth, I glimpsed graffiti, stick imitations of the baroque stuff I was used to seeing in Jersey. I saw the same FUCK UP NOT DOWN as earlier. Numerous metal posts stumped the floor, the remains of long-dead workstations. The air reeked of water damage and industrial squalor. In the sea-wreck distance you could make out blackened presses, machinery that had been too ancient to auction, or so I imagined, when the factory had closed.
Nolen and Molly seemed content to follow me. We creaked forward together.
My memory, as always, continued to torment me. This time with a Tragically Hip tune about fingers and toes. I did a mental version of blocking my ears and singing, “Na-na-na.” If Molly was right, if we did find Dead Jennifer’s thumbs—or her corpse—I would rather attach the experience to something more emotionally appropriate, like some old Sabbath tune. My memories, remember, cling to their original emotional charge. Mashing together recollections from opposite ends of the emotional colour wheel often jars me to the point of becoming nauseous. Imagine a mouthful of shellfish and ice cream.
I’m not sure what drew my eye the first time my flashlight scrolled over the work table. The relative cleanliness, perhaps. Whatever the reason, I found myself turning toward it, stepping across the wobbly backs of several smashed cinder blocks. The table was one of those old metal jobbies you used to find in high school shop classes, the kind designed to protect ducking and covering students in the event of a Commie nuclear attack. The thing was about as big as a snooker table, and probably just as heavy.
The message on its back lent a whine of horror to the silence. Molly’s “Oh, God ...” were the only words spoken. Several moments passed before I breathed.
There it was: a cross in the plain fundamentalist style, made of some kind of wood ... only turned into a swastika with two thumbs and two toes set at right angles.
We just stood there dumbfounded. I found myself at once knowing they were real and thinking they looked like dollar-store fakes. The nails, especially—like something dripped from a candle.
“He is insane ...” Molly finally said, her face as ashen as the digits it regarded.
We all knew who she was talking about.
“No ...” I said. “Nill didn’t do this.” I’m not sure where this insight came from, the sudden realization that I knew him—or his type anyway. Nill had taken a long haul from the crack pipe of power. Like Nolen said, the Thirds owned this town. Why remortgage with a risk like this?
“Who then?” Molly cried.
“Someone who thinks he’s selling out.”
That’s the thing about power: it ropes in rationalizations the way shit draws flies. And Albert himself had said white supremacist types had a weakness for whacking each other ...
“Caleb?” I asked. Poor bastard. He was one of those guys: no matter where you aimed, you could be sure as shit that he would come stumbling into your sights. I thought of his daughter squirming and kicking in the pool. I thought of the Bonjours’ daughter doing the same in the open air ...
“Caleb?” I repeated.
He just stood there, terror in uniform. Molly, who had been aghast moments earlier, now had a covert, concentrated look, like the bitch who had won bingo yet again but was too wary of resentment to openly celebrate.
“I know what we need to fight these guys,” she said in response to my questioning gaze.
“And what’s that?” Nolen asked in a voice that was more than a little panicked. Was he thinking about his daughter swimming beneath Reverend Nill and his crazed eyes? To this day, I wonder.
&n
bsp; “Publicity,” she said, and I could see the triumph shining bright in the cracks of her sombre expression. She had found her break and she knew it. Poor Dead Jennifer.
“The national spotlight.”
Even for a cynic like me, that was a new one. The National Spotlight. A phrase from salacious crime shows and pompous cultural studies seminars come to the real world—and sounding almost normal.
What a rich and absurd life I lead. Chock full of nuts.
Molly said this and poof, the tension was gone. It’s funny how it works, the way we think in stories even when we find ourselves beyond the narrative pale. Complication had piled onto complication, and we had climbed the crisis summit. Here we were, stranded in the dead of night with assorted body parts in the wrecked heart of an old foundry, and suddenly it all seemed downhill. If it hadn’t been for Nolen and his uniform, I probably would have sparked a joint.
The only wrinkle remaining was that we had accompanied Nolen on this little adventure.
“It would be better,” he said with the blank face of a brain running successive worst-case scenarios, “if you two, ah ... let me handle this.”
He was speaking the international language of in-over-their-head amateurs now, a lingo I had learned from my commanding officers during the war.
“Yeah,” I said with a sage nod. “It would probably be better if you discovered this after you dropped us off at the motel.”
Molly had that squint women get when they smell masculine-scented bullshit. Motes of dust settled through the random wag of our flashlight beams. “What are you saying?”
We all get pinched by circumstances like this, times when saving face and necessity collide. Me? I embrace the embarrassment. Say Yeah, so I’m a dickhead—tell me something new. But Nolen was one of those guys who lived in perpetual terror of his weaknesses. The most he could do was stare at Molly with a kind of chagrined helplessness, as if wanting to point out that he was the one dispensing favours here ... at first ... but ...
I decided to spare myself the spectacle. “This Scooby-Doo stuff isn’t what you would call standard operating procedure, Molls. Caleb did us a solid, so now we’re going to do a solid for him in return.”
Nolen shot me a gratified glance.
“But I get to write about this, right?” She had aimed her light directly at Nolen as she said this. Skewered the poor guy.
“Of course, Molls. Only this time you’ll be the anonymous source you quote.”
I knew she would warm to this, and by all appearances she was. The wheels were turning, anyway ... maybe a little too much.
We began picking our way back across the factory floor, each of us mortified in our own way, not simply by what we had seen but by how the competing demands of our lives had, well, clouded things. Jennifer Bonjour was dead, for sure this time, and here we stood, negotiating self-promoting details.
Truth be told, I really didn’t have a problem with this. People die. It sucks. It hurts like all hell. And sometimes, when you’re a cop or a journalist or a private dick, it helps. Profiteering is just the nature of the beast.
Life.
We picked our way through dark industrial cavities, each of us muzzled by our own petty concerns. Then something, a sound, scraped out in the blackness. Our heads jerked toward the sound—off to our right. A shadow lurched. Our flashlights caught the rim of some ragged human form ...
And Nolen’s automatic cracked through the hollows.
Or something like that happened. Even though I pretty much remember everything I experience of the events I participate in, the truth is, my mind wanders sometimes. If my attention is sketchy, then my memory is sketchy as well.
Fact is, I was wondering whether I could lure Molly away from her laptop and into my bed. I wish I could say I was pondering the origin of multicellular organisms or the tragedy of the atom bomb, but no, it was Molly’s ass, plain and simple.
“No!” Nolen cried out in bad-acid-trip tones. “No-no-no-no—”
I stumbled forward, searching for the source of the rattle and gurgle in the dark before me. My shadow danced in the erratic light thrown by Nolen’s flashlight. My own light swayed and dipped, painting distant brick walls in dim watercolours, striking the jumbled confusion of the floor with electric detail. For some reason I remember the blood as black. I mean, I know it was red—the way blood should be—but I remember it as black.
The guy was laid out on his back doing a kind of tap dance across an ethereal floor. I understood instantly that it had been a head shot, that the poor bastard was dead, and that Chief Caleb Nolen was fucked—not murder fucked, but manslaughter fucked ...
Fucked enough.
I knelt into the old bum’s smell. He had one of those faces you’ve seen a thousand times, on street corners, staring out sidelong from alleys, asking for change, pinched around the light of a shining cigarette butt. Except that his left eye socket kept spilling blood.
With our flashlights converged, the bum glowed like an angel in the dark. We all gaped at him, stupefied. He was dead, as dead as dead can be. His body just needed some time to come to grips with the proposition.
“He had a gun!” Nolen shrieked from my side. He was the marksman. He knew his target was doomed. “Look for it! It’s gotta be here somewhere!”
Somebody always chokes in cases like this. Better the home team.
I stood and turned to Molly, who was little more than an apparition beyond the glare of her flashlight. I wondered what I must look like, frozen against the contrast of my shadow. Pale as an escaped con, I supposed. Blank as a bereaved comedian. I thought of all the others who had seen me in similar light.
Nolen was tripping and scrambling, searching for his magical gun. He had the look of a man stumped down to his bones. I almost laughed. And here he’d thought Jennifer was a mystery.
“C’mon,” I said to Molly as I walked toward her. “I’ll call us a cab.”
“You g-guys saw it, didn’t you?” Nolen cried. He was bawling now— pretty much. Weeping. Sobbing. It was all gone. He had trusted to his hopes, and instead his worst fears had come crashing through ... I’m innocent! his expression cried. Apparently innocents didn’t kill innocents.
Molly simply gazed up at me in numb horror. “Disciple ... You gotta do something!”
I looked at her and shrugged. It was way past my bedtime.
Track Eleven
THE THREE IMMOBILITIES
Things were getting weird.
Sometimes working a case is like being the parent of a large family: controlling the direction of the avalanche is the most you can hope for. Well, the avalanche had started, and things weren’t looking so good. If the Dead Jennifer Case had been a family, Junior would be smoking crack, Missy would be shooting amateur porno, and little Bobby would have been busted shoplifting panties at Walmart.
Needless to say, Molly politely declined my invitation to spend the night. “Let me get this straight,” she said in the no man’s land between our two motel room doors. “A girl is dead. A good cop’s career has been ruined. Some poor homeless guy took a bullet in the head. And you were thinking you might get laid a second time, huh?”
“We all grieve in our own way, Molls.”
She gave me a look I had seen 138 times before ... Funny, the way old dope smokers grow suspicion like fur.
“You actually scare me,” she said in the flat tone women reserve for utterly honest comments. “You know that, Disciple?”
She was exhausted, bewildered, and now she was hurt.
Even still, I said, “Yeah ... I suppose you have your fifteen hundred words to write ... “
Her tears took me by surprise. She started to say something but literally caught her mouth in her hands. She darted to her door without a word, but I knew what she had wanted to say.
Poison, Disciple. Why do you turn everything into poison?
I schlepped into my room, absorbed the chaotic landscape of tangled sheets, pocket trash, and tossed clothes. What
a slob I was.
Tired. So tired.
I smoked a joint.
Jerked off.
Bed.
Sunday ...
I slept like the dead. Cruel hearts always sleep soundly, I suppose. It was almost noon before I awoke.
I had no idea how police shootings were investigated in Pennsylvania, so I thought it would probably be a good idea if I stashed my bag of weed for the time being. I went to Odd-Jobs for a solo breakfast, hid my Baggie in the dropped ceiling of their washroom.
They had this ancient TV in the dining area, one of those fat-screen jobbies that had looked futuristic back in the Clinton days. A little electric window on the world, and a safe haven when Brittany, the waitress, caught you checking out her cleavage. There it was, live as live can be, electromagnetically speaking.
Ruddick was being televised. I could tell by the courthouse facade rising behind the saccharine beauty of the reporter’s face. Some local channel by the looks of her—too much asymmetry in her face for the big time. Too much nose. The volume was muted, or maybe broken, but the title glowing beneath the painted woman confirmed what I already knew ...
POLICE CHIEF ALLEGEDLY SHOOTS HOMELESS MAN
Molly had been busy. I felt a flare of pride for her, and no small amount of regret. Up to that point I had been anticipating some vigorous makeup sex ...
Celebrity has a way of booking people solid.
I returned to my room all perked on coffee and finally sat on the end of my bed with my cell. The time had come to call Mandy—Mrs. Bonjour. My brain was buzzing: it had yet to process the consequences of last night, let alone wrap itself around this latest twist in circumstances.
There was the Church of the Third Resurrection situation for one. It seemed to me that I was looking at one of two possibilities: either Reverend Nill was even crazier than I thought and he was the one responsible for Jennifer’s murder, or someone was trying to bring him down. My gut told me that it was the latter, but unlike the rest of the human race, I have no faith whatsoever in my gut. It does a fair to middling job processing my dinner into shit, but other than that, it clearly does not know shit.