Acceleration

by Graham McNamee

  SEVENTEEN

  I meet up with Vinny in a little downtown park. Calling it a park is being generous. It's more like a putting green with a few trees and a small fountain.

  I spot him leaning against a tree.

  “Hey, Duncan. I’m starving. You buying?”

  “Yeah, I'll add it to your tab.”

  Parked on the street nearby is a fast-food truck with FRANCO'S LUNCHOPOLIS painted on the side. We go and grab some pizza slices and Cokes.

  “You’re a cheap date,” Vin tells me. “There's no way you’re getting to third base on a slice.”

  I point to a sliver of shade under a tree. We go sit and eat. I use my napkin to soak up the grease off my slice.

  “This isn’t a meal, it's a death wish,” I say. “Should come with a defibrillator.”

  Vinny shrugs. “Live fast. Eat junk. Leave a bloated corpse.”

  I glance over at the fountain, where a blond girl runs squealing through the ankle-deep water. Her skinny little arms are burning pink in the sun.

  “So, how long's your lunch?” Vinny says.

  “An hour.”

  “Why did you call me down here?” he asks. Then in mock panic he says: “We’re not breaking up, are we?”

  I smile and swig some Coke.

  “Remember back a few months, I told you about those dreams I was having?”

  “The ones about Jennifer Lopez?” he says.

  I wipe the moisture from the sweaty pop can off on my jeans. “The ones about the girl who drowned.”

  Vin groans. “Why do you have to talk about that? Can’t you just let it fade?”

  “They started up again.”

  “Why?”

  I don’t answer, watching the girl in the fountain pick up the change people have tossed in. There's a moment of silence as Vinny pulls a long string of cheese off his slice and feeds it into his mouth.

  “That girl,” he says, swallowing. “She went out too deep, got a cramp or whatever, and went under. It sucks. It's tragic. But it's not on you, man. You can’t save the world. Gotta get that idea out of your head. That's why Kimmy dumped you. You couldn’t let it go.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “What's that in the bag?” Vin asks, his voice sounding a little funny, like he already knows what's in there.

  I take the diary out and set it on the grass between us.

  “I thought we agreed you were going to turn that in,” he says.

  “I tried.”

  “How do you try? You just hand it to them, and then it's their problem.”

  “I showed it to these cops down at the fifty-second division, told them what it was and everything.”

  “And?”

  “And … I don’t know. They didn’t believe me, or didn’t care. They thought I was pulling something, or they didn’t think it was real. But this one cop just left it lying there on the counter while she went and helped somebody else. Anybody could have picked it up and walked off.”

  “So what are you going to do with it now?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I think maybe there's a reason I found it.”

  “Not that again,” he says, shaking his head at me.

  “Look, maybe if we track this guy down, then we'll have something to take to the cops. Something they'll pay attention to.”

  “ ‘We’? Did I hear ‘we’?”

  “The way I see it, I’ve got the looks, but you’ve got the brains. I'll make a deal with you—we locate this sick nut and then we turn the diary over to the cops. It's not like I’m saying we have to take him down ourselves.”

  Vinny closes his eyes and holds his cold Coke against his forehead. He lets out a long breath.

  “This is all about that drowned girl, isn’t it,” he says quietly. “You think because you couldn’t save her—you’re getting, what, a second chance?”

  I wipe my greasy hands off on the grass.

  “I need this,” I say, knowing how weird that sounds.

  In the fountain, the girl is still splashing away, looking impossibly happy with the handful of change she's found.

  I tell Vin a little bit of what happened to me at the pool, how I freaked out, what I saw.

  “I just need to do something,” I say.

  He's quiet for the longest time.

  “Okay,” he says finally. “But man, I hope you’re right about this.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Strange dream. I find myself underwater, and all around it's dead black. I could be blind, it's so dark. My skin tightens against the touch of the cold water surrounding me. I’m sinking slowly into a big nothing. But I’m not scared. I can breathe even though I’m submerged, like I belong down here, like this is where I live. I was born to swim.

  There's a low buzz coming through the dark, like the sound motorboats make when you hear them underwater. It grows louder the farther I sink. Maybe the boat's getting closer, going to pass by way up above. But the sound, when I focus on it, isn’t coming from the surface. It's rising from below me, down where I’m headed. I drift deeper and deeper.

  There's a blue light emerging now from the blackness. I watch it take shape with the dumb fascination I get in dreams sometimes, when I see something I recognize but can’t put a word to it.

  The buzz gets louder, and now I can see my hands and legs in the murky light. I hit bottom with a jolt, falling to my knees. As I get up, the thick muck sucks at my hands and feet, like it wants to pull me even deeper.

  Now I see the source of the light. Subway—the word finally comes to me. The blue glow is coming from inside a subway car, sunk down here at the bottom.

  I swim over, and finding an open door, I go inside. The pole I grab on to is slick with mossy seaweed. The fluorescent lights overhead sputter, making shadows dance down the length of the car. In the flickering, I see a figure up ahead, in that single seat beside the driver's compartment. Everything is blue in the glow. Her head is down, her long hair suspended above her and moving with the slight current.

  I know her. I don’t need to see the face. I remember it blushing a pale limp blue on that scorching day last summer, pulled from the deep water of Lake Ontario. But somehow she's still down here. Like this is where she lives. Like me.

  Moving from pole to slippery pole, I pull myself along until I’m hanging in front of her.

  “I’m sorry,” I try to say, but the words have no sound, swallowed by the water. So I can only float there before her bowed head, giving her mute Sorry's.

  The current shifts, brushing a freezing draft of water against me. Looking down the blue-lit car, I see a shadow step in through the open doors at the other end. Even in the fluorescent glow the dark figure shows no features. It eats the light. The shadow doesn’t swim but walks toward us as if the underwater rules of floating and suspension don’t apply to it.

  The sudden freeze in the water only adds to my panic at the sight of this thing coming for us. Reaching out, I touch the hand resting in the girl's lap. It feels soft, boneless. Her eyes peer up at me through the floating hair—eyes without hope.

  “We have to go.” I mouth the words, gesturing with my head to the nearest doors.

  “Not my stop,” I read on her lips.

  As the shadow grows closer, the temperature drops, and the water pressure here at the bottom triples in a second, squeezing my chest, making every breath an effort. With the cold sinking into my bones, and the ink-black form moving closer to take possession of the girl, I lunge at her, grabbing a limp arm to pull her out of her seat and drag her to safety. But the arm feels like it's made of rubber. Slippery as a fish, it escapes my hand.

  “He's going to kill you!” I try shouting, as if the volume will make the words get through the liquid any easier. But her head bows even lower.

  The pressure becomes a cold fist wrapped around my chest. When I look away from her, I see the shadow has stopped an arm's length away.

  Too late. Always too late.

  “Who are you?” I tr
y to shout with what might be my last breath.

  The black head studies me with its eyeless face, like it's wondering what kind of creature it's found here at the bottom. With one hand it makes a shooing motion at me, as if I’m an insect. The force of that little gesture throws me back through the water with the impact of a tidal wave into the end door that would connect to the next car if there was one.

  Paralyzed by the water pressure, I’m forced to watch as the shadow reaches out to lift the girl's head. Her eyes are on me now, waiting for the pain. The ink-black fingers run over her mouth, and then one hand grips her lower lip while the other holds the upper.

  And with one quick motion the hands pull apart, peeling her face off. Fast, like he's gutting a fish.

  I wake with vomit rising in my throat. Jumping up in bed, my whole body clenched with panic, I clamp one hand over my mouth and fight with all my strength to force the bile back down. It must be a full minute before I breathe again, acid burning in my throat.

  I’m freezing and sweating, weak from sleep but riding a fading rush of adrenaline. Stumbling over to the window, I lean there, sucking in the humid night air. I have to hold myself up on the window ledge, my legs are shivering so bad.

  I can’t stop seeing her, those eyes watching me even after her face is gone.

  I can’t do this! Can’t do this anymore! There's no way I’m going to find him.

  The night sky is gray with reflected city light. The stars are lost in the haze. In the distance, I can pick out the lights from other apartments where people are spending a sleepless night. Two and a half million people in the city of Toronto. And one psycho hunting.

  There's just no way.

  NINETEEN

  I have no idea what I’m going to say, but I dial the number anyway. I get Kim's voice mail.

  “You got something to say?” her recording goes. “Well, it better be good.” She dissolves into laughter at the end. Then comes the beep.

  God, I hate these things. Talking to dead air.

  “Hey, Kim. It's me. Duncan—in case you’ve forgotten the sound of my voice.”

  No. That's no good. Sounds way too bitter. After a couple of seconds of silence there's a beep and a computer voice says: “Press one if you’re satisfied with your message. Press two if you want to re-record your message.”

  I hit two. “Message erased. Please re-record your message.”

  I wish it was as easy to go back and erase a few more things I’ve said to her.

  Beep.

  “Hi, Kim. It's Duncan. I was just thinking of you. And, um, wanted to see if you’re okay. I know—same old me, trying to keep you out of danger. Anyway, I’m doing good. Well, maybe not so good. Maybe really bad. But that's not why I’m calling. I only wanted to hear your voice. It's like…remember that thing you told me from Winnie-the-Pooh, you know, where Piglet reaches out and pokes Pooh and Pooh says, ‘Why did you do that?’ And Piglet says, ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’ Which is why I’m calling, I guess. To poke you.”

  I don’t know what else to say. The machine cuts me off anyway, giving me my options.

  I try to picture her listening to this. I can’t see it doing any good. What's changed? I’m still a basket case. She's still out there, taking risks, living her life.

  I press two.

  Message erased.

  TWENTY

  Before last week, my job seemed like a major waste of time. Today, with a clock ticking down somewhere, with a life ticking down, the job is agony. Right now, in the tunnels above my head, he might be riding the subway, hunting for the perfect girl to be his first victim.

  Roach even has his own secret recipe for something like chloroform to knock them out. Following his script, he'll grab them off the street at night, load them in the backseat of his grandmother's old car, and drive them home.

  Once he's done with his prep work, getting their schedules down and scouting their neighborhoods, he'll set his trap.

  And here I am packing junk for the YMCA sale.

  Jacob, who doesn’t really care if I’m breathing so long as I’m on time to do the running, spoke more than a syllable to me today.

  “Boxes have to be full and ready for noon Thursday,” he said. That was my morning hello from him.

  “Why noon?” I asked—not because I care, but if we’re going to be locked up together for the next month and a half, it might be good to crack the ice that runs in his veins.

  “Noon's when the truck comes to haul this debris over to the Y,” he said, then went back to his paper.

  I filled a cup at the cooler. “So you been down here long?” I asked.

  Jacob frowned, glancing up at the clock.

  “I mean working here in the lost and found?” I added.

  “Three years.”

  “Doesn’t bother you? No windows, no air, no sun?”

  He sniffed but didn’t brush me off, actually thought for a second. “Who needs a window? What's there to see?”

  “I don’t know, anything. A tree maybe?”

  “I’m going to sit and stare at a tree all day?”

  “Some sun,” I tried. “Air. Some fresh air would be nice.”

  He scratched one hairy ear, like my talking was irritating it. “Sun gives you cancer. And fresh air or stale air, it all breathes the same.”

  I don’t know why I even tried. I folded the paper cup in my hand and tossed it in the trash. “I'll get started on those boxes.”

  And that's where I am now, checking a thousand little Post-it notes for expiration dates. Here's a baseball cap with a fake turd glued to the visor, and the slogan IT HAPPENS. How could someone leave this behind? Must be a family heirloom. That and the cap from Hooters, which has something else sticking up from its visor.

  The one thing keeping me from cracking is that now I’ve got Vinny on the case with me. We checked out a stack of true-crime books yesterday, and it's his job to read them and find something useful. He's kind of a speed reader, and he's got tons of free time.

  Don’t think about time, I tell myself. Because no matter how many books we read, it's still running out.

  The phone rings up front.

  Using my pen, I hold up some extra-large thong underwear. We’re talking a King Kong thong. Wondering how you lose your underwear on public transit, a mystery for the ages, I have to break away from the Kong thong when Jacob dings for me. I drop the underwear in the garbage and make a mental note to burn the pen.

  When I get to the counter, Jacob grunts and gestures to the phone. I pick it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Duncan, it's me.”

  “Vinny. How’d you get this number?”

  Down the counter, Jacob turns up his radio to drown me out.

  “It's not like you’re working in the Pentagon. I just looked it up.”

  “So what's going on?”

  “I’ve been doing some research on that, um, problem we were talking about.”

  “Vin, this phone isn’t bugged. You can talk normal.”

  Jacob edges the volume up some more. I stick a finger in my ear.

  “My mom's in the next room,” Vinny explains.

  “Ah. How about we meet after I get off work?”

  The old fart squeezes another few decibels out of his little radio. I scowl over at him.

  “Where?” Vinny says.

  We’re having fries and shakes under an umbrella table outside the Barn. Vinny's filling me in on what he's found out.

  “The FBI profilers say serial killers, you know, when they’re starting out, aren’t real sophisticated. Their first murders are done on impulse, not thought out all the way. And…” He pauses to chew a fry. “They’re done close to home.”

  “How does that help?” I ask. “I can’t just wait till he offs one of these women to track him down.”

  A lot of what the books talk about deals with using crime-scene evidence and the state of the corpse to profile the killer. Right now, there is no crime scene. And
I want to keep it that way.

  “Yeah,” Vinny says. “But look at the pets he tortured, and the fires. Those are like his warm-ups for the big show. They cover a span of about ten years. The earliest ones would have been done close to home, in what the pros call the comfort zone.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “So we’ve got the newspaper clippings from his little scrapbook.”

  I pull the straw from my shake and lick it clean, thinking. Then I use it to point at Vinny.

  “What about those cats he killed and strung up? Did they give addresses where that happened?”

  “They name a few streets up in Wilson Heights,” Vin says. “There was a string of animal mutilations in the same area during the same time period. Busy guy.”

  Somewhere close by a heat bug starts up its electric whine. I stir my shake, staring off down the street to where the heat rising from the tar makes the air all wavy.

  “And we’ve also got the diary entries about the fires he set,” Vinny says. “He kept all the details: dates, addresses. Everything.”

  “How close do you think that'll get us to him?”

  “Hopefully we can narrow him down to a few blocks. Maybe a neighborhood.”

  “Mr. Psycho's neighborhood,” I say. “Where exactly does that get us, though? I mean, we can’t really go canvassing house to house.”

  “Hey, man. Baby steps. I’ve only been working on this a day and a half. This is some crazy crap, eh?”

  “Yeah. A big steaming pile of it,” I say.

  “Me and you going after this guy—it's like the Hardy Boys meet Hannibal Lecter.”