City of Ports

by Jeff Deck

  Everyone’s reactions are off. Everyone around me is holding secrets. I can count myself among them, of course, but I’d still rather we were all showing our hands.

  “I don’t know if you’d call it a spell,” Neria says. A bit uncomfortably. Not a natural wizard, this one. “A ritual, definitely. But it’s not just—there are three parts, okay? There’s something you need to say. Something you need to do with your body. And some kind of stuff you need that gets consumed during the ritual. There’s a three-part ritual for every Port, or at least that’s what Graham told us.”

  “Port?” I say.

  “Uh, gate,” she says. “You know . . .”

  “Wait. ‘Every’ Port. There’s more than one?!”

  Jeong nudges me. “Let’s stay on track. So tell us, Miss Francoeur: what to say, what to do, and what to get.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she cries out. “I mean, yeah, you can pick up coal anyplace, and it’s easy to walk in a triangle, though you’d need to do it backwards to close the gate. I think. It’s the vocal part that’s tricky. I only heard Graham do it, and I seriously doubt I can get the sounds exactly right. I’m just . . . fuck!”

  She sobs. “I wish I’d never—wish I’d never met him. If I’d only been in a different class that semester, it would’ve never happened. Goddamn it.”

  “It’s okay,” Jeong soothes her. “Just try your best to remember the, uh, sounds, all right? We know you’re under a lot of pressure here. This thing is dangerous, though, and we appreciate anything you can give us to help us get rid of it.”

  His calm, gentle approach works wonders on Neria. So that’s what people skills look like. Her ragged breathing slows and she says, “Okay, I’m going to do my best. What I heard Graham say, or, uh, do, was, like . . .”

  She makes a noise in her throat. An ugly noise, from a pretty girl. It’s kind of like Krek-kurk-rahk-urkurukka.

  “Hmm,” I say. “Wow. We’re going to need some practice, I think.”

  Jeong tilts his head. “Me first.” And he gives it a shot. It sounds like krikka-urkra-kukkuruk. It’s an equally awful sound.

  “I guess?”

  It’s so awful that I have to try it too. “Kurek, urkarak, kuka—racha!”

  At this point we’re all smiling—Jeong because he’s an easy-humored guy, and me and Neria in spite of ourselves. Neria says, “Jesus, you’re not even trying, lady.”

  “Sorry. Give it to me again.”

  She does. For the next few minutes we run through the unholy syllables, but they seem to be changing slightly every time. I don’t think we’re really getting it, but I say with an encouraging nod, “Good. Thanks.”

  “Keep practicing, guys,” she says. “Just maybe not at the gym or the grocery store, okay?” She giggles and then quickly covers her mouth, as if she’s shocked herself.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay to laugh at the horrible and the ridiculous. Cops do it all the time. They have to. It doesn’t mean you’re taking the situation lightly, or that you don’t care.”

  “Thanks,” says Neria. She takes a breath. “So, this is gonna seem silly too. But can you walk in the path of a triangle backwards? It’s probably not as easy as it sounds.”

  The room is too small to practice this part, but Jeong is determined anyway. He makes Neria get up and then shoves the desk and chairs against the wall. With Neria and me basically flattened against the wall too, Jeong can just barely describe a triangular shape by walking—forward. When he tries going backward, he stumbles over his own feet on the turn.

  I laugh. Then I think of the pyramid shape of the temple, and the rough triangle of the hideous, obsidian slug statue. And the mosaic of the flying beasts that surrounded the burning hole (the Port?). It occurs to me, then, that the sounds we’ve been practicing with Neria aren’t far off from the sounds I heard the beasts making. Which makes Jeong’s pratfalls seem a lot less funny.

  “Okay, give me one more chance,” Jeong says. “I feel like I’m trying out for the circus.”

  That’s when the door opens and two of my former colleagues—Ulrich and Daniels—crowd the doorway with guns drawn. They’re trained on me, not Ethan or Neria.

  “Get down on the fucking floor, shithead!” Ulrich screams.

  Not again.

  9

  The next few minutes pass in a blur. Angry, tense, scared faces surround me as I’m put into handcuffs and hustled away. My old colleagues were pretty pissed at me before. Now they look like I just suffocated their mothers and shit in their cereal.

  Ben Ulrich and Burt Daniels bring me to the holding area door. They check their guns into the lockboxes so I can’t make a grab for them, and Ulrich scans his ID card. Inside the holding area, Daniels takes my belt and shoelaces, his normally kind face locked in a grimace. His eyes meet mine with a silent question. Since I have no idea why I’m being detained, there’s no way I can tell what the question is. I just shake my head. No is a reliable answer, I’ve found.

  They lead me to one of the cells. It’s a small, windowless cinder block room, painted a cheerful yellow, with a narrow shelf (“cot” would be too kind a word to describe it) and a steel sink/toilet combo. A camera in the corner of the ceiling watches me.

  Door slams. I am alone.

  They think I’m a monster now. Not just a crazy bitch. And I don’t know why. Though I need to know why more than anything I’ve ever needed to know before.

  It’s a disorienting feeling to look at this cell from the inside.

  My old colleagues ignore my shouted questions through the heavy door. And my curses (for it’s the perfect time to lapse back into hurling oaths like a Navy man, don’t you know?). They leave me in the cell alone for . . . well, I’m not quite sure how long. I don’t have a watch, or my phone.

  I can take comfort in the fact that they’re only allowed to keep me here overnight (though my next stop would be the county jail in Brentwood). In the meantime I’ve got a stretch of time all to myself to think about what’s happened.

  It must have been something more than just snooping around and impersonating an officer. More than just finding a body and failing to report it, more than just stalking and trying to make a citizen’s arrest in Prescott Park. Maybe: murder.

  Do they think I killed Graham Tsoukalas? And/or whoever the body on the island was?

  They can’t both be Graham. Neria’s indirect words on the matter, her straining allusions, come back to me now. She acknowledged that I found the body in the dumpster. But she insisted, in contradiction to what I’d seen with my own eyes, that that person had not been Graham. And that the corpse on the island was Graham.

  Maybe Graham had a twin. They were both dead. No. I’d been to the Tsoukalas house. I would have seen pictures of twins in the house. Mrs. Tsoukalas would have made some reference to Graham’s twin brother. No, the twin theory was bullshit.

  They can’t both be Graham. The one I’d found, the Graham I found, had been missing the one detail that Anonymous Caller insisted on: the wrist implant. (And the only apparent link to you.) Say it wasn’t cut out by a medical professional with superhuman powers of incision; say it was never there in the first place. That isn’t just a minor detail out of place. That’s a huge blow to the concept of the body being Graham.

  Neria can’t be wrong about Graham. She can’t have mixed him up with someone else. She took him inside her, for God’s sake.

  So let’s say who I saw really wasn’t Graham. Maybe a cousin with similar features, someone the Tsoukalases didn’t yet realize is missing too. Or maybe some kind of freaky doppelgänger from the other side of the world. Greece, perhaps. They say that somewhere in the world, everyone has a twin, someone completely unrelated to them but alike in every way. Isn’t that what they say?

  Do you have a twin somewhere? Could I find her?

  I rub my temples. I feel a hundred years old. I’m so tired right now, I feel like I might actually be able to catch a wink or two on that hideous shelf
that only wishes it’s a cot. Maybe I should give it a shot, as long as I’m trapped here.

  I walk over to it, sit down, and experimentally lie back. I swear I can feel bugs crawling on me.

  Anger simmers and keeps me awake. Just who the hell is Anonymous Caller? How dare he get me into all of this in the first place? For a moment, I wonder if the voice was Wallace. No: too different. The voice on the phone was higher, less sure of itself. Even from my limited experience with Wallace, I could tell his voice is both deeper and more confident.

  Anonymous Caller said Graham was “our” friend. He’d spoken as a “we.” Maybe he’d been a mouthpiece for the Tenacious Trainers themselves, fellow wearers of the wrist devices. But who was he, specifically?

  I come back to the doppelgänger idea. I chew on it, examine it from all angles, the dog on the hunt even while trapped in her kennel. And then I sit up straight. I think I’ve got this figured out. As crazy as it seems, I think I’ve got a handle on it.

  I’m just drifting off on these thoughts when someone bangs on the little window in the door. It’s Agent Ethan Jeong. He enters the cell with a black woman in glasses. She’s wearing a smart gray pantsuit and holding a briefcase.

  “Allard,” Ethan says. “Meet your new lawyer, Barb Okefor.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” says Barb, unconvincingly.

  I force a grin. “Thank you. Please explain why the fuck I need a lawyer in the first place?”

  “There’s been a murder,” Jeong says. “Er, another one.”

  “In Prescott Park. Right around the l-last time you were there, Ms. Allard.” Barb is clutching the briefcase. She can’t manage to smile at me. Am I already a lost cause in her mind? A loss in the columns of her career before the case even begins? “Do you know the name Eric Kuhn?”

  My mind reels. Of course I know the name. It’s the Portsmouth Porthole reporter who delighted in dragging my name through the mud on a regular basis, for months on end. His stories feasted first on the grisly murder of my fiancée, then on my antics and ultimate disgrace. There was a time—let’s call it the pre-Kathryn era, because it really does feel like a different, distinct period to me—when I wished he was dead, almost every day.

  But I didn’t really mean it, and I certainly don’t feel that way now. Kuhn was just doing his job. He covered major stories for the newspaper; of course he had to report on every insane thing that I was doing. Some other reporter would have done so if he didn’t.

  “Shit,” I say. “Yeah. How did he die?”

  “Someone bashed his head over and over again against that whale statue in the park,” Jeong says. “A witness says—that it was you. Described you to a tee: short Indian-American woman, long black hair, blue scarf, leather jacket, blue jeans. Witness checked his smartphone when calling the police, named the exact time.”

  My eyes widen. I have this mental image of myself in a mindless rage—like the old Allard, devoid of conscious intelligence, with nothing but emotion at the controls—killing the newspaper reporter in exactly the same unfortunate method Jeong described. Shoving his head into the hard granite of the sculpture over and over again.

  What if back in the Sheafe Warehouse, after that unknown assailant attacked me, I got up and . . . sleepkilled?

  No! What the fuck, that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

  “So why do you believe it wasn’t me?” I say.

  “Because by that time of night,” Jeong says, “you didn’t have those clothes anymore. You were buck naked except for my coat.”

  The lawyer, Barb, looks from him to me uncertainly, uncomfortably. I wonder where Jeong found her. “Maybe we shouldn’t be having this conversation here,” she says. “Ms. Allard will need to know all of this later on, of course, but I’d prefer that we speak to my client about these matters in a confidential setting.”

  “Fuck,” I say, and then I say it again, shaking my head. Something clicks in my tired, cobwebby brain. What are the odds another short South Asian-looking woman would show up around that time, in my own clothes that fit her perfectly, and go on a murderous rampage?

  At least it confirms the theory I was just cooking up in my lonely cell. It’s a frame job, but I’m now thinking it’s not exactly an intentional one. More of a consequence of my own blundering actions. In a way, I really did kill Eric Kuhn. Just not in the way the police think.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” I say.

  “I don’t know that that’s going to be easy,” says Barb Okefor. “The Portsmouth PD doesn’t have much evidence against you right now, but they’re looking to change that in a hurry. They want to get you moved over to county in a matter of hours. And I don’t know how your bail prospects are looking.”

  I press my face against the wall. I’m uncomfortable relying on this lawyer for help since she was handpicked, apparently, by my friends in the FBI. I’d rather not get indebted to them. But I ask, “What can I do to help expedite the process of getting me the hell out of here?”

  “Lean on your old co-workers here,” Jeong says. “Surely you didn’t make enemies of every single one of them? Have one of them be your character witness and talk to the rest. Someone who can convince them, your old chief in particular, that this witness’s testimony against you is patently ridiculous. That you may be many things but you are not a murderer.”

  Barb swings her briefcase against the sleeping shelf, gently. A kind of nervous tic. “And you need to give us the names of anyone who can serve as a character witness for you outside this department, as well. You need all your allies in a row, Ms. Allard. Think quickly.”

  I sigh. “Officer Fragonard was my friend, once upon a time. Those days are long past, but—she’s got a real internal code of honor. She’s the real deal. If there’s corruption in this department, it’s never touched her and it will never touch her.”

  “Now, alleging corruption and police misconduct is an entirely separate matter, one that you most likely do not want to delve into given your past record—” Barb says.

  “Can it with the legal maneuvering,” Jeong interrupts her, not unkindly. “Come on, Barb. The lady’s had a hell of a night. She’s free to speak her mind right now without us assessing its worthiness as a legal defense.”

  “This is not the ideal venue for baseless accusations,” Barb insists. She looks around nervously, as if she’s just waiting for a nearby cop to tell on me. Chief Akerman, that crazy bitch is still saying mean things about us! Can you keep her on a timeout forever?

  Now, as far as other people in the greater Portsmouth area who’d be willing to stick up for me . . . it’s not a super long list. There’s Zeke Briard, but he’s a slimeball, and if he allowed his true nature to show in court even a little bit, he’d negate his usefulness as a character witness. My parents are too subjective, and anyway, they live back in Manchester—their word would be worth nothing. Then another person does pop into my mind.

  “Solomon Shrive,” I say. “Young guy who’s working at the Friendly Toast. I saved his life with Narcan. His shift’s probably over by now, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have much trouble tracking him down. He lives downtown. I’ll give you the address.”

  “Shrive?” Jeong says. “That’s the witness to the murder.”

  Oh shit. Everything whirs in my head, trying to make sense. I wish I could get at least a few minutes of sleep. I’m almost ready to tell both of them to go away just so I can do that. But I summon my last drops of energy and say, “We can use this. Sol’s my friend—he’ll jump on any explanation you can provide for what he saw.”

  He looks thoughtful. “I could bully my way into talking to him.”

  Out of nowhere, an alarm blares. Inside the police station, not outside. I’ve never heard this alarm before, but I know what it means.

  “What’s going on?” Barb says, directing the question at me.

  I shrug. But I have the notion this is what it sounds like during wartime. When an enemy attacks you on your own turf.

  Now
I hear gunfire from somewhere else in the station. My heart races. I think my theory’s just been confirmed, but I really wish I was wrong.

  Milly Fragonard bursts into the holding area. “We’re under attack!” she shouts, and she jabs her finger at me. “What in God’s name is going on? Is this your terrorist friends?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s me.”

  10

  They stare at me blankly, but of course there’s no time to explain. I just say to Milly, “Can I get the hell out of here?”

  I can see Milly waver. On the one hand, she can’t see a path to forgive me for what I did to this department, including her. On the other hand, some psycho is attacking the police station. Leaving me shut up and defenseless in a cell isn’t exactly the Girl Scout thing to do.

  She swings the cell door open wider and jerks her thumb for me to walk out. I do so. My legs feel unsteady and weak, but I’m free. Agent Jeong gives me a dark grin. The lawyer Barb Okefor, on the other hand, isn’t pleased to see me on this side of the cell. She hunches behind her briefcase as if it’s a capable shield, just waiting for me to live up to my reputation. One crazy bitch, coming right up.

  “When we get out of here, I’ll need a gun,” I shout at Milly over the continuous noise of the alarm.

  The smile she throws me is cold and ferocious. “Oh, no. No effing way. I’m sorry, Allard, but those days are done for you.”

  We come out of the holding area. The next burst of gunfire sounds close, ricocheting down the hall. A man lets out an agonized scream.

  Jeong grabs two guns from the lockbox next to the door. He’s got a Springfield 1911-A1—nice piece. He tosses me the other. It’s a 9 mm Glock 26. “Here, buddy,” he says, “it’s a spare.”