End Times

by P A Duncan

  “Don’t you move,” she told Scott and went to the doorway.

  The two men got into a silver Honda Civic and peeled out of the parking lot. Mai closed and locked the front door. By the time she sat across from Scott, she’d holstered her gun.

  “Where’s my mother?” he asked.

  “Out. She and I had quite the chat about your bleak future. Scott, you handed some tapes out at a middle school today. You gave one to my kid.”

  He looked away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t piss me off right now, Scott. I know it was you. You know, I don’t give a fuck you disappointed me, and I’m only mildly angry you tried to force that crap on my kid. Your mother sat here earlier and cried over your worthless ass. I hope that means something to you because she’s a good person. I hope it gets through the fog your friends have filled your head with because you won’t be here for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you little shit.”

  Scott looked, tears in his eyes. “I…I didn’t mean to hurt her. They, you know, came back to me. I told them I couldn’t do no more illegal stuff, and they said fine. They only gave me the tapes to distribute and some stuff to read. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You violated the terms of your probation. Besides being truant from school and quitting your job, you’re guilty by association. Remember what the judge said about that?”

  The doorbell rang, and Scott looked toward the door, hopeful.

  “No,” Mai said, “your friends aren’t back. That’s the police and your probation officer.”

  Officer Davis Russell had his best gruff policeman expression on when he walked into the house, trailed by the probation officer. The three adults talked, and Russell agreed to cuff Scott’s hands in front of him and to cover that with a jacket. They agreed as well that the probation officer would drive him away. No fodder for the neighborhood gossips.

  “Can my mom come see me tonight?” Scott asked, sounding like a little boy.

  “We’ll see,” said the probation officer. “Let’s go. I’ll explain everything on the way.”

  Russell turned to her, mouth quirked in a smile.

  “If you say, told you so, you’re off the payroll,” she told him.

  “I’d never say such a thing. I checked with the judge. She’s inclined to go along, especially if you’re paying for it. Don’t be surprised if she starts referring all her juvie cases to you.”

  “Tell her I’m out of the youth-saving business.” She took in his nice suit and sophisticated tie. “You look quite handsome. Sorry for interrupting your date.”

  “Don’t be. It wasn’t going well. She has a thing about cops, but sometimes you give into the pressure.”

  “A set-up? I’m disappointed in you, Dave.”

  “Me, too. So, this place in France. I asked a couple of military guys I know. It is true the guy running it was in the French Foreign Legion?”

  “The very same.”

  “How do you know someone who was in the French Foreign Legion?”

  “Dave, do we have to have that conversation again?”

  “Sorry. Blind, set-up date notwithstanding, you and your mysterious job are the most exciting thing going on in my life.”

  “How depressing for you.”

  “But, French Foreign Legion. That’s too cool.”

  “There’s a big surprise awaiting young Master Wilder, though. Emile is six-six, about 285, takes no shite from anyone, including me, and is blacker than the ace of spades.”

  53

  Useless

  Near Monroe, Wisconsin

  The woman’s screams pulled him from the bed, down the hallway, and deposited him at the nursery door before he remembered he was naked. What he saw from the doorway made him forget about his pants.

  Jerry’s wife cried and screamed while striking at her husband with her small fist. Jerry tried to pull a plastic bag from her arms while dodging her blows.

  Why the hell were they fighting over a plastic bag when it wasn’t dawn yet?

  The bag wasn’t empty.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed and covered the width of the nursery in two strides.

  His long arms reached past Corazon’s flailing fist and snatched the bag. Beneath the translucent plastic, a small pale face stared back at him.

  “Call nine-one-one,” he ordered, and Jerry, once his subordinate in the Army, obeyed. Corazon sank to her knees and folded over her pregnant belly, sobbing.

  He knelt on the floor and put the child flat on his back. He ripped away the plastic over the boy’s face and saw the child had sucked some of the bag into his nose and mouth.

  Damn.

  Once he’d cleared the child’s airway, he tilted the head back and covered the three-year-old’s nose and mouth with his. Four quick puffs. The boy’s chest rose with each puff but stayed still.

  He checked for a pulse. Nothing. He rubbed the boy’s chest and called his name, once, twice, three times. No reaction. His fingers traced the boy’s rib cage and located the notch at the bottom of the sternum. This is a kid, he reminded himself. Using only two fingers, he gave the child’s heart fifteen compressions.

  The boy’s open eyes were vacant, both pupils blown. The little rosebud lips were blue-gray, but he alternated breathing for the child and compressed the stilled heart. He looked at Corazon. She shuddered, no longer crying. Her tear-filled swollen eyes begged him. He didn’t offer any reassurance. That would be too cruel.

  Jerry returned, his breathing on the verge of hyperventilating. “Ambulance on the way.” He knelt on the floor on the other side of the child and also called his name. Jerry shivered when no answer came.

  “Get my pants,” he said to Jerry, doing more chest compressions.

  “Wh…What?”

  “My pants. The medics will go ape-shit if they see a naked man with his mouth on a kid. Get them.”

  Jerry scrambled away again and returned after the next cycle of breathing. The other man took his pants and grabbed Jerry’s hand, placing his fingers on the sternum notch.

  “Press here, fifteen times, the speed of a normal pulse,” he explained.

  Jerry gave a half-hearted push as the man splayed his pants out before him.

  “Harder,” he said.

  “I…I don’t want to hurt…hurt him.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to say the child was beyond being hurt. The mother would hear.

  “He’ll heal. Push!”

  His pants slipped on with ease, and he got to his knees to zip them. He took over the CPR once more. Jerry’s efforts had been half-assed, maybe because he knew it was hopeless, but this was a kid. He had to keep trying until the paramedics said it was all over.

  John Thomas Carroll’s focus narrowed and shut out everything except the cycle of CPR.

  The ambulance crawled away, no lights or siren needed. A black sedan trailed it, white lettering on its doors reading, “Coroner.” This rural county couldn’t afford its own ME, so a local mortician had the extra duty.

  Once he’d pronounced the boy dead, the coroner had authorized the paramedics to sedate Corazon. Otherwise, they’d have never gotten the body from her. When the coroner handed Jerry his business card and extolled the services of his funeral home, Jay Carroll decided he needed to be anywhere except in the same room as an asshole.

  When the paramedics had arrived and taken over CPR, Jay had retreated to the room where he slept and finished dressing. Now, he stood on the front porch, the flannel shirt and wool socks scant protection in the raw morning air. He watched the ambulance until it disappeared. The flag on the short pole attached to the porch post fluttered for a while before it stood out in a stiff breeze. The movement drew his eyes to the flag, with its stylized bird in primary colors.

  “Twerky, Twerky!” little Jared had chanted when Jay had put up the flag the day before Thanksgiving.

  The day after Thanksgiving, the child was dead.

  Uselessness almost pushed him to his knees, as
it constantly had since he’d come home from the Gulf War. Everything around him was as dead and lifeless as Jared Parker’s lips.

  The state policemen who’d arrived with the coroner and had questioned all of them came out onto the porch and zipped up his parka. He was fatherly in appearance but probably far from that if you gave him shit. Once, when he’d worked as a security guard, Jay had given some thought to being a cop. The Army had had more appeal though, but he respected cops, especially sheriffs and the staties. They were often on the front line of crime with no SWAT unit or high-tech gear. That self-sufficiency was something he admired.

  “You okay, son?” the trooper asked.

  “Yes, sir. I…I didn’t like hearing the coroner doing a sales job for his funeral home.”

  The cop winced. “Yeah, I didn’t like that either. I’ll have a word with him. Aren’t you cold?”

  “No, sir. I’m from near Buffalo, New York.”

  The policeman squinted in the sunrise’s glare. “Paramedics said you knew their job as well as them. Told them what to do a second before they were going to do it.”

  Carroll felt the eyes on the side of his face. He wouldn’t shiver because that might look suspicious, but he needed to shake. From holding it all in. All the shit since the Gulf. He wanted to cry over the men he’d killed mechanically, for a child he’d baby-sat and played countless games with, but the cop might think that suspicious, too. Or worse. Unmanly. “I was in the Army, sir,” Carroll said. “I had some battlefield medic training. I wanted it in case something happened to my medic in the Gulf. I didn’t mean to interfere.”

  “You didn’t. The coroner said the boy’d been dead a couple hours before the mother found him.”

  “I saw the lividity, and he was a little stiff.”

  “But you did CPR anyway?”

  “He’s…He was a little kid. His mom was right there. I had to try.” Jesus, how lame did that sound?

  “Kids are the worst when there’s an accident. Look, son, I have more questions, but the folks inside are in no shape to answer.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll help if I can.”

  “Did you hear anything in the night?”

  “No, sir, not until I heard Cor… Mrs. Parker screaming. I know he’s been climbing out of his crib. After the new baby came, they were going to get him a bed.”

  “Any idea how he got the plastic bag?”

  Carroll shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, aware he still had no underwear.

  “He kept pulling it out of the trash all day yesterday. I took it from him a bunch of times. I thought I’d shoved it all the way to the bottom of the trash can.”

  “I found the trash can overturned on the kitchen floor,” the cop said. “It was plastic and wouldn’t have made much noise. Trash scattered all over. It’s a mystery what appeals to kids. My own would play with the boxes their stuff came in at Christmas more than the toys. That bag was shiny. I guess that was the attraction.”

  When the cop stayed silent, Jay looked at him. The don’t-fuck-with-me cop expression was on his face.

  “The boy, Mr. Parker isn’t the father,” the cop said.

  He suspects Jerry, Carroll thought. “Jared was born after they got married.” That much was true.

  “I got a Navy buddy who married a Filipino girl, and their kids are much lighter than this one.”

  It’s called genetics, Carroll wanted to scream, but he controlled himself. “Yes, sir. They got married in the Philippines, but Corazon’s visa got screwed up. Jerry had to come back without her. Took six months to clear it up, and Jared was born seven months after she got here. Sir, Jerry loved that kid.”

  “Anything going on between you and the mother?”

  Jay had crossed a line and wasn’t proud of it. He took sex whenever it came his way, and he hadn’t refused Corazon. He should have. She was a step away from a whore. She’d advertised herself in a catalog and married the first guy who came along with a U.S. passport. She had used Carroll to piss Jerry off so he’d send her home. It had happened once, and that was one of the reasons he’d moved to Arizona. There’d been a scare when Jerry called to tell him she was pregnant again, but he’d done the math and relaxed.

  None of that was a good enough reason to lie to a cop.

  “Once, sir, a little more than a year ago. Never since.”

  “Did Mr. Parker know?”

  “She told him so he’d send her back, but he didn’t believe her.”

  Carroll read judgement in the cop’s eyes, the kind that wondered what type of man slept with his friend’s wife. Carroll stared at his socks and waited.

  “You got a home to go to, son?”

  Did he? He didn’t want to go back to Arizona where it was as depressed as he was. He didn’t want to go to his father’s. The gun show circuit did slow business over the winter.

  “I’m kinda between jobs, sir.”

  “I think what happened this morning was an accident. No one’s at fault, but you need to let this family grieve. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I know it hurts like hell because you tried to save the boy, but they’re expecting a new baby. They don’t need the baggage you represent. Stay out of their lives for a while. Let them grieve as a family. You have a family, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on back to them for a while.”

  There was nothing for him here. Nothing at home. He wanted to tell the cop that, but it might all come out, that he saw dead Iraqis in his dreams and sometimes when he was awake. He’d get the same reaction from the cop as he would his father: Man up.

  “I’ll go pack my things, sir,” Carroll said.

  The trooper clapped him on the shoulder with a fatherly affection, but Carroll had no doubt he’d wait to make sure he left.

  Inside, Jerry sat alone on the worn sofa, Jared’s favorite stuffed animal in his hands. He looked up at Carroll, his eyes so full of hurt. Guilt almost stopped Carroll’s feet. Normally hyper-alert for noise, a holdover from the Gulf, Carroll had slept like the dead because he’d crashed from a week-long meth high.

  He should have heard Jared tip the trash can over.

  He should have disposed of that fucking bag better.

  He shouldn’t have fucked his best friend’s wife.

  He shouldn’t have failed his best friend’s child.

  Afraid of what inopportune confession might emerge, Carroll murmured, “Jer, I gotta go home,” and walked by.

  He jammed his clothes into his duffels, not taking his usual care to fold them or separate the clean from the soiled. He secured his Glock in his shoulder holster and shrugged into his down jacket. In a hurry to leave, he didn’t bother to shave. He grabbed his duffels and left the house in a blur.

  In his rearview mirror, he watched the cop watch him until he was out of sight. Carroll reached the intersection with a state road, and he waited at the stop sign longer than necessary.

  Which way to go? East toward home? West to Arizona?

  Or south to that place the guy in Las Vegas talked about?

  He’d said to come any time.

  No, he couldn’t go there and explain why he was such a mess. The people at that meeting in Vegas had made it clear what they thought of women like Corazon and children like Jared. Carroll didn’t go in for that white supremacy crap nor the religion they advocated. The patriotism had appealed to him, but, no, there was nothing there for him. Yet.

  He headed south into Illinois and picked up an interstate headed east. He pulled into the first rest stop he came upon to relieve himself and vomit bile in the toilet. That broke the emotional dam, and once back on the road, he began to cry.

  He hoped his tears would blind him enough to wreck, to end his uselessness and the headless Iraqi ghosts, to bring on the permanent gift of dark he’d courted for months.

  54

  Paternalistic Protectiveness

  Mauna Kea Hotel

  Kohala Coast, Hawai’i

 
Alexei Bukharin could see why nothing could tempt his son away from this island: the year-round warmth, beautiful beaches, temperate waters, the physical distance from the mainland where there’d be no excuse for shirking his parental duties.

  However, he was doing well this visit. For now, at least. He and Natalia were the only two people frolicking at the volleyball net on the resort’s private beach. There was laughter, mostly Natalia’s, but on occasion he heard it from his son, a rare expression of joy. Natalia was beating the crap out of him, but she was thirteen and athletic; Peter was thirty-one and mobility-challenged.

  The scars from the numerous operations required to enable Peter to walk again were still visible, though fading. The scars on his psyche, however, were another matter.

  Alexei closed his eyes and let the sunshine further remove him from where he’d been before this holiday trip, a cold, muddy, and bloody Bosnia.* No, that was too depressing. Focus on something more pleasant. He opened his eyes and looked for Mai.

  She had waded waist-deep into Kauna’oa Bay’s waters, her beach wrap twisting about her hips like koi searching for a morsel to eat. A large straw hat covered her head, and her pose was relaxed, a hand on one hip, her gaze across the bay to the dark ocean beyond. She might be relaxed in body, but her head was likely buzzing with thoughts about their primary mission, abandoned for a quick job in Sarajevo and now a family holiday.

  He gave the mission no thought. This view, this place were too beautiful to waste. He settled deeper in the orange cushions of his lounge chair and thought it close enough to noon he could order a sissy frozen drink of some sort. In fact, one of the resort’s staff was heading his way. Perfect timing.

  Except he held a portable phone in his hands.

  Alexei sat up when the young man neared his lounger.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Burke,” he said. “I have a phone call for Lady Fisher.”