When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  “So where did he get the money he had last week? Did he have some savings?”

  “Savings? OC? He had the clothes he wore and that’s about all he had.”

  “And that’s why it was so surprising that he was buying for the house.”

  “I asked him, but he was…I guess you’d call it being coy. Said he wasn’t allowed to tell. And then he’d wink at me and laugh. I just figured it had something to do with where he’d disappeared to earlier.”

  “Earlier when?” DeMarco asked.

  “He missed coming in three whole days. Nobody knew where he was. That wasn’t like him either. He spent most of every day here. Sometimes I’d let him sleep here.”

  “So he was gone for a while,” DeMarco said, “three days. And then he showed up again with a little money on him?”

  “A little?” she said. “He had this fat roll of paper he kept pulling out of his pants. Held it together with a red rubber band.”

  “Like the one he used for his ponytail.”

  She nodded. “I saw him peel off three fifties before that nephew of his came in and dragged him out again.”

  “You’re talking Benny Szabo, right?”

  “That’s the only nephew of his I know.”

  “And why do you think Benny did that?”

  She shook her head. Patted her pockets. Finally she said, “I guess I left them inside.”

  “Your cigarettes?”

  “I keep trying to quit.”

  “That’s better than not trying.”

  A brief blast of music came from the Marigold, then was quickly extinguished. She looked to the door. “I got to be getting back.” She moved to step past him, but he moved too.

  He said, “Do you have any idea where Benny is now?”

  “No and I hope I never lay eyes on him again. That piece of shit and his uncle… Two more different men you will never meet. OC was the very sweetest man I have ever known. Benny is garbage. If I knew where he was, I’d tell you.”

  “You think he’s responsible, don’t you? For what happened to OC.”

  “I think garbage stinks. Always has and always will.” She pushed past him then and strode away.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” DeMarco said.

  Seventy-Nine

  It’s the little pricks that tickle

  From his car in the lot across from Warehouse Sales, DeMarco phoned Bowen at home. Bowen answered with a “What’s up?”

  “Lots,” DeMarco said, and recounted for him the trip to the railroad bridge, the bloody rock, his back alley convo with Rose from the Marigold.

  “You’ve been a busy boy today.”

  “And we’re not done yet,” DeMarco said. “Can you call Chief Gary up in Scottville and ask him to have Officer Curtin take another look at the security camera footage of Benny? Specifically to see if there might be another person in the car or truck with him.”

  “Don’t you think you would have noticed that already?” Bowen asked.

  “It’s crappy footage. And we weren’t looking for a passenger. We were focused on identifying the driver.”

  “Yeah, okay. I wouldn’t expect any information tonight, though.”

  “I don’t. Just want to get the wheels turning.”

  “I bet those Sharpsville boys are a little red in the face now, huh?”

  “The blood was easy to miss. I just happened to look down at the right time and right place.” He hadn’t mentioned scurrying out from beneath the bridge and stumbling on the rocks, rolling through the weeds. Nor did he plan to. His relationship with Bowen had always been one of friendly jousting, of seeing who could prick the other with the sharpest lance. It made no sense to rearm a defenseless opponent.

  “Well, whatever,” Bowen said. “Did you give Mazzoni a heads-up?”

  “I did. You never need to do that, though, do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s already a head taller than you.”

  “Bite me, DeMarco.”

  “I would, Captain, but I need more of a meal than that. Sleep tight.”

  “I hope Jayme suffocates you with her pillow.”

  DeMarco laughed, stopped what he was about to say, and hung up. He had almost said “Love you, bud” before hanging up. That would have been disastrous. Like handing your opponent a nuclear bomb.

  Eighty

  Going nowhere as fast as you can

  DeMarco fell asleep that night just minutes after Jayme had started to read aloud from Huston’s book. And when he awoke the next morning to find the book closed between them, Jayme still asleep, he could not remember a word of what he’d heard. So he carried the book downstairs with him and left it on the kitchen table, thinking they might read from it at breakfast. For some reason he didn’t want to read it alone, wanted the experience to be just as it had been when they read through Huston’s notebooks to pick out the best passages for the book. They had made a kind of child together through those conspiratorial readings, and he wanted her to feel as much a parent of the finished book as he did.

  Unfortunately Jayme slept late and did not come downstairs until DeMarco had gone ahead and fixed himself and Hero some scrambled eggs, then cleaned up after both of them. He offered to make eggs Benedict for her, though with strip bacon instead of Canadian, but she shook her head no, poured a cup of coffee, and went back upstairs with Hero on her heels. Her eyes, DeMarco had noticed, were bloodshot, her energy low, and he knew that she had spent the morning grieving Emma, and wanted to continue to do so alone.

  And the day passed, one little chore after another. No call came in from Mazzoni announcing a match between the blood on the rock and the ponytailed corpse chilling in the coroner’s basement room. Bowen called in the afternoon to say that Chief Gary’s man had gone cross-eyed going over and over the video footage, but could report only that “it looks like there might be somebody else in the Rogue when it goes west past the gas station the first time. But it’s just a shadow. Might even be Benny’s reflection. Impossible to identify. Sorry.”

  Now that Morrison had been rattled with the news of Emma’s death, Captain Bowen agreed to set up surveillance on the judge’s house, just in case he went running to one of his pals.

  Said that as soon as DeMarco had a game plan for continuing the search for Benny Szabo, he would assign Boyd and anybody else he could spare, and would, if warranted, ask the municipalities to volunteer personnel to round out the team.

  And DeMarco had said, “I want to bring Flores aboard too.”

  “No way!” Bowen exclaimed.

  “Yes, sir,” DeMarco said. “I consider it an imperative. Otherwise she’s going to go under.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you know she won’t?”

  Bowen was adamant until DeMarco reminded him that Flores was no longer under his authority. “She’s part of my team. So it’s my decision to make.”

  “You and your team—” Bowen started, only to be cut off.

  DeMarco kept his voice even and emotionless. “My team and I are not working for you, Captain. Our employer is Emma Barrie. We are happy to cooperate with you, but let’s not forget that my team is in no way obliged to be dictated to by you. You can be a hard-ass about it if you want, threaten us with obstruction or some other charge, but I have never known you to be that kind of cop, Kyle.”

  Bowen took a couple of breaths before responding. “I know you care about her,” he said. “I care about her too. But, Ryan, come on, man, be reasonable. She put herself in harm’s way twice already. Sooner or later she’s going to get herself killed, and probably somebody else with her.”

  “If she were your daughter,” DeMarco said, “would you give her another chance?”

  “She isn’t my daughter. And she isn’t yours either.”

  “Not on paper
she isn’t. But in every other way, you know that she is. Both yours and mine.”

  Another silence from Bowen. Then the captain had said, “You’re giving me more headaches now than you did when you were in uniform.”

  “I consider it one of my principal duties in life, Captain. And certainly the most fun.”

  With nothing else of significance for DeMarco to do, the day crept by slow and long and empty, and felt twice as drawn out as his busy yesterday had been.

  That evening, standing at his bedroom window, DeMarco looked out on the fading light gradually retreating from the street below, easing away as if embarrassed somehow, or guilty of something, or just too tired anymore to give a damn. He and Jayme had set all but one of the investigation’s wheels in motion, yet they were at a standstill. And until Benny Szabo was found, nobody was going anywhere.

  And now, as the sun burned low in the west, DeMarco had nothing much to do but to enjoy the sunset from his south-facing window while Jayme read downstairs. A line of clouds with flat black bottoms lay across the horizon like a long train of flatcars loaded with mounds of fluffy white meringue.

  All day long Jayme had moved from bedroom to living room to the back porch and then inside again, reading and dozing and reading a little more from Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. DeMarco knew well the healing power of solitude and didn’t begrudge her a moment of it. He hoped they would go to bed early and read from Huston’s book together. It would be good to spend some time with his friend again, to hear his comforting voice, and to watch Jayme being comforted as well.

  Across the street, a splash of red caught his eye. A cardinal in his neighbor’s dogwood. How long do cardinals live? He wished he knew. What are their mating habits? What do they eat? He had been seeing the occasional cardinal for as long as he could remember yet he knew nothing about them. Could identify only a small number of bird species. He needed to be more attentive. More knowledgeable. All around him plants and animals were coming into and passing out of his world with barely a thought on his part. And the same would be true of him. He could have died on that dirty asphalt and ten years later be but a dim memory to only a few people. Thirty years down the road, who but Jayme would think of him? Feathers and flesh and hair and organs decompose and disappear every moment of every day. Bones and eventually teeth too turning into powder. The original owner not just irrelevant or merely insignificant but as if he never existed. The dust you brush from your cuff. The dirt you scrape from your shoe.

  It would be sad if that were the way of things, the culmination of every life. He felt sorry for those who went through life believing it. Wondered if any one of them did not in their darkest hours secretly hope and maybe pray that they were wrong. He, who knew in his heart that such a belief was wrong, did not pray. He hadn’t seen a brilliant white light, hadn’t passed through a dark tunnel into a place of all-enveloping love. He hadn’t met God. Nor even Jesus. Who else might be listening to a prayer? He still had no idea to whom that occasional authoritative voice in his head belonged. Maybe it was his own subconscious mind speaking. Or what the New Agers called his higher self. He had given up on trying to ascertain the source. As long as the voice continued to make sense, why not go with it?

  His thoughts were interrupted then by a noisy pickup truck stopping in front of DeMarco’s house, a vehicle black and battered, its running boards all but rusted away, the rusty muffler rattling and roaring with every cough of the engine. The truck did not pull to the curb but simply stopped on the street adjacent to that point where the sidewalk junctioned with the walk leading up to DeMarco’s front door. An old man climbed out, late seventies at least, wearing faded jeans and work boots and an untucked blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He looked like a grizzled Marlboro Man with stage 4 lung cancer. Except for the newsboy hat, red-and-gray herringbone, the short brim pulled down low on his forehead. You don’t see many of those these days, DeMarco thought.

  He watched for a few more moments as the old man shuffled stiffly toward the house, his head lowered and his eyes on the concrete, now with the black pickup truck roaring away, not quickly but loud, the gears grinding. Then DeMarco turned from the window and went downstairs and past Jayme sitting on the sofa reading with Hero at her feet.

  She looked up from her book and raised her eyebrows, and he said, “I just now got this really strong premonition. I think somebody’s going to knock on the door.” He waited in the foyer, his head cocked. Then it happened, four strong, hard-knuckled raps. His eyes widened. “I think I must be psychic.”

  She said, smiling, “I think you must be psycho,” and returned to her book.

  He crossed to pull open the door.

  The old man raised his eyes but not his chin and said, in a deep but muted rasp, “You DeMarco?” His face was as wrinkled as a bloodhound’s but without the flaps and folds of skin, a gaunt, sun-hardened, age-eroded face with deep-set, hooded gray eyes, his close-cut sideburns white, his scruff of whiskers like tiny splinters of glass.

  “Who’s asking?” DeMarco said.

  The man came forward then to squeeze past DeMarco and into the foyer. He smelled of tobacco and Old Spice. “Name’s Szabo,” he whispered as he slid past.

  Eighty-One

  From the mouth of a bad ventriloquist

  DeMarco stepped aside and allowed the man to enter. “That’s some hat you have there.”

  Szabo turned and pushed the door out of DeMarco’s loose grasp until the latch clicked. “My disguise,” he said.

  “Who are you hiding from? Your son?”

  “I ain’t hiding. Just don’t like people knowing my business. Never have.” His lips barely moved when he spoke, and the words came out like polysyllabic grunts emanating deep in his throat.

  “I can appreciate that,” DeMarco told him. “You want to come in and sit down? Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “You could give me a ride back home if you want.”

  “You came here just for that?”

  Szabo leaned into the foyer a little farther, enough to peek around the open archway and into the living room, where both Jayme and Hero had alerted to his presence. He whispered, “You looking for my son, ain’t you?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I might have an idea where he is,” Szabo said. “We can talk about it on the ride home.”

  DeMarco turned to the living room. “I’m going to give Mr. Szabo a ride home,” he told Jayme.

  “Have fun,” she answered, but she wasn’t smiling when she said it, was looking at him with her forehead furrowed, eyes worried.

  To Szabo, DeMarco said, “We’ll go out through the kitchen. The car is out back.”

  “I figured,” Szabo said. He shot a sideways glance Jayme’s way as he followed DeMarco, and at the last moment added a tip of the tiny brim of his hat.

  Eighty-Two

  Never underestimate the power of intention

  DeMarco led Benny Szabo’s father out the back door and down off the porch and into the yard. Szabo cast a disdainful look at the unfinished brick path. “How long you been working on that?” he asked.

  “Too long,” DeMarco said.

  “Pretty obvious from the grass growing up between the bricks. You one of those start stuff but never finish it kind of guys?”

  “I seem to be when it comes to that path.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Memories,” DeMarco said.

  “Huh,” the old man said. “A fucking burden is what they are.”

  DeMarco said nothing. Was matching his gait to the old man’s, knew better than to hurry him. A quiet nervousness had raised goose bumps on DeMarco’s arm; he had been standing at the upstairs window hoping for a break in the case, and now here was Benny Szabo’s long-lost father. In the past when such things happened he would have thought we got lucky, but the truth was th
at they happened frequently, and he no longer believed in luck as an accidental agent of change.

  For every step Szabo took, the old man’s gaze covered another fifty square feet of ground. Now he fixed his eyes on the two sedans and one RV parked at the end of the yard. “You running a used car lot here?” he asked.

  “Just getting started,” DeMarco told him. “Which one do you want to test ride?”

  “How about that big one?”

  “It’s just for show,” DeMarco said. “We’ll take the Accord.”

  But the old man wasn’t finished with the RV yet. He looked it up and down as they approached DeMarco’s car. “Where you all been in it?” he asked. “You and your lady friend.”

  “Been to Kentucky and back.” DeMarco used the remote to unlock his vehicle’s doors. “And we spent a couple of days up in Michigan recently.”

  This got the old man’s attention. “You been to Michigan, huh?”

  At the front of his car, DeMarco split off to cross to the driver’s side. “You like Michigan?”

  “Don’t know nothing about it.”

  “That seems to be a common affliction these days.” DeMarco popped open his car door, climbed in and buckled up. It took another full minute before the old man was seated beside him. DeMarco started the car, and immediately the passenger side seat belt warning beeped.

  “You’ll need to buckle up, Mr. Szabo.”

  “I don’t use those things.” He sat motionless, leaning slightly forward in his seat. “They ain’t good for my back.”

  DeMarco thought for a moment, then decided what the hell, and slipped the gearshift into Reverse.

  At the end of the alley, the seat belt warning still beeping, he asked, “Which way to home?”

  “Don’t that bother you?” the old man asked. “That damn thing beeping all the time?”

  “It will stop as soon as you buckle up.”

  Szabo stared straight ahead. “Up in French Creek Township,” he said. “Ten-Right Road.”