The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  I drove with the windows down, and the humid, sinewy heat fisted down my throat and fattened the ugly thing that pulsed under my sternum like a feeding leech.

  The Bridgetown Grill was hotter still, flaring with the spit and sizzle of Jamaican cooking in the open kitchen that ran the length of the narrow gallery painted with palm trees and crowded by fast-talking dental hygienists whose glasses kept steaming up, and by white rastas whose dreads drabbled through their blackened fish and hot sauce unnoticed. Benny, skinny as a rail, was already eating, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like the red bauble on a blood pressure monitor.

  “Jamaican jerk chicken,” he said by way of greeting.

  I beckoned the waiter and ordered the first thing I saw on the menu. “Tell me about Honeycutt.”

  “Gee, and how are you, too, Torvingen? I gut NCIC in fifty minutes flat and get out here in fifteen more and all the thanks I get is—”

  “Honeycutt.”

  “Shot clean as a whistle in the back of the head in the men’s bathroom at Kennedy with a .38 at about three-thirty p.m. on May eighth. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. Best for last: he hadn’t even cleared customs and immigration.”

  “Someone with access knew his schedule.” Someone with access to privileged information; who could get inside international airport security.

  My food arrived just as Benny finished his. He looked from his empty plate to my full one. I pushed it at him. “Help yourself.”

  “Not hungry?” He was already cutting the fish into bite-sized pieces, the better to shovel it down in record speed. “By the way, that coke from the Inman Park arson that you were interested in? It’s gone. Um, that’s good.”

  I felt as though someone were squeezing my head. “When?”

  “Not sure. Oh, this fish is delicious!”

  “Then when did the department find out?”

  “Well, they haven’t, yet. But I like to check on things that interest me. Sort of look at them, like trophies. Well, not look at them exactly, just sort of test them. Every now and again. So I went to check on the coke—and it’s gone. Well, not gone. Changed. The bags are the same, and the seals, but it’s not the same coke. It’s not coke at all, anymore.”

  “But it was before?”

  “It was what the lab report said: ninety-nine percent pure Colombian coke. It’s not now, though.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just, well, you know, tested it.”

  “Before and after?”

  “I just took a bit. Really. Just a bit, to see. It’s not like it’s a habit or anything.”

  “Never mind that. You’re sure, absolutely sure that what came in was pure, but that what is there now is not?”

  “Yes.”

  He’d never swear to it in court—why should he lose his job and risk prosecution?—but I didn’t need a court. The leech under my sternum swelled. I stood.

  My phone rang. “Torvingen.”

  “Aud?” It was Annie. “Aud, you’d better get here. She’s rejecting.”

  Annie was waiting for me outside ICU. “The doctor says she isn’t rejecting. They say she has to have another operation. No one will explain.” Her once-round cheeks sagged, and she looked like a sad caricature of the Annie Miclasz I had met just a few weeks ago.

  “Is she in the theatre now?”

  “No, they’re about to prep her.”

  “If she’s not rejecting, why are they going to operate?”

  “The liver’s stopped working, and her kidney. And she’s got an infection. But I thought she was getting better. I don’t understand it. She woke up, and—”

  “She woke up?” I went utterly still.

  “Just for a minute. I’m sure.”

  “I have to see her.” Before they prepped her and she ran away again into coma.

  “I’ll go get coffee and be back in fifteen minutes.”

  “If you see the doctor, send him to me.”

  In ICU everything—the walls, floors, bed linen, even Julia’s bedspread—was white, against which crystal red and green lights blinked on and off, slowly, like lizards’ eyes. The air was full of the hiss and suck of oxygen, the peristaltic pulse of IV units squeezing god knows what into her veins, the hum of a dozen machines.

  Julia’s hand in mine was mustard yellow, like her arm, like her face. I lifted it to my face. It smelled strange, of drugs and pain. The scent of one who has met that cheating Viking with the great ham hands. One who has played and lost.

  “Your nails need trimming,” I told her.

  Hiss, suck, blink.

  “They must have grown a quarter of an inch in the last few days.” I sounded like a fool. “Julia, I want you to listen to me. You’re ill, but you mustn’t give up. I want you to start thinking about what you want to do when you get out of here. Have I told you about Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast? There’s a ruin there that dates from the twelfth century, very haunting, very gothic, but the first abbey there was founded in the seventh century by Hilda. There’s a power there. You wouldn’t think to look at it from the outside. But then you cross the track and walk over some turf, and…ah, Julia, it’s suddenly there before you, and it’s as though the breath of the earth drives up through the soles of your shoes and into your bones. I want to hold your hand, this hand, and watch your face when you step onto the turf at Whitby Abbey.”

  Hiss, suck, blink.

  “Or we could take a boat to the Lofoten Islands in late June when even at two in the morning the sea is silver, like ghost water, and you can read the newspaper without a light. Or if you’d rather go in autumn, we could make troll cream from whortleberries.”

  I told her about crushing the berries, about whipping up egg whites, folding the one into the other; how it would feel in her mouth.

  Hiss, suck, blink.

  “But it might take a while before you can travel far, so before we sail to Lofoten, before you see Whitby, I’ll show you Northwoods Lake Court. As I promised.”

  I had also promised I would keep her safe. I touched her cheek, very gently, with my fingertips. Dry now, but still soft. Her eyelids flickered.

  “Fuck,” she whispered.

  “Julia?” I touched her cheek again. “Julia?”

  “Fuck. It hurts.”

  “I’m here. I’m right here,” I said, squeezing her hand with both mine, then stroking her hair from her forehead.

  Her eyes opened. The whites were pink, but her irises were brilliant as a clear evening sky. She blinked quickly, like a camera shutter. “I’m here,” I said again.

  “I’m dying, aren’t I?” Her voice was light and dry, an insect running over a newspaper.

  “You’ve had a liver transplant. It’s not going too well. They’re going to operate again this afternoon.”

  “Promise me you…”

  She shut her eyes.

  “Julia?”

  She tried to lift her hand. I lifted it for her, put it against my cheek. “When we met,” she whispered, “you were frozen inside. Empty. Now you’re not. Don’t go back. Even if I die. Stay in the world.”

  I could not imagine a world without Julia. “You will not die.”

  She opened her eyes. This time she didn’t blink. “My mother…she’s not always brave. I hate machines. Don’t let machines keep me alive. Don’t let them.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Stay in the world, Aud. Stay alive inside. Promise me. Stay alive.”

  I whipped through the night as the ice crept through my veins. I stopped once at a strip mall, where I called Denneny’s office number, disconnecting as soon as he picked up. Then I filled my spare can with gas and bought some gloves. My mouth tasted of copper and blood.

  At Cheshire Bridge Road I cruised the sex bars until I found the car I wanted, a dark, late-model Volvo with multiple airbags and antilock brakes. This time I parked in the lot of another bar and walked back. A quick thrust with a shim and I was inside.

  I understand Denneny
. He works late because he has nothing to go home to and when he looks inside himself, there is nobody there. I parked a block down the road from the precinct house, adjusted my headrest for maximum safety, and waited. I watched the stars. Tonight I didn’t recognize any of them; they were cold and alien. I thought of abbeys on headlands, of Norwegian islands in a sea breeze, of Northwoods Lake Court, where the air would be utterly still but for the creak of tree frogs and the endless patter of fountains. Then for a while I thought of nothing.

  He emerged just after eleven p.m. I let his Lexus get a block ahead before I pulled out.

  When we first met, he had lived in Candler Park. When he made captain he moved to Morningside, a neighbourhood where all the houses were built of dusty rose brick on winding little streets and fronted by velvety, floodlit lawns. No doubt he had thought he would soon be promoted up to commander and the giddy heights of the Prado mansions.

  At an intersection I tightened my seat belt and turned my lights off before following him up a long, empty hill. He had been driving the same route for eight years and took it faster than was really safe in the dark. Half a mile from the top of the hill, the road would take a wide curving left, then a sudden right alongside one of those pretty rose-coloured walls. His speed picked up. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty.

  He took the long left curve without slowing down, as I’d known he would. Time for me and the Viking to play one last round. I smiled, shifted, and punched the gas. The nose of the Volvo touched his right rear bumper just as he would have been thinking of feathering the brakes and threading the wheel through his hands to take the car to the right.

  Brake lights flared and stained the night red. I eased my foot down a little more. Tires squealed, metal screeched. My heart was an anvil. The Lexus wobbled, then slewed, then seemed to straighten. I hummed to myself as I floored the gas and drove him into the wall at sixty miles an hour.

  The noise was huge and seemed to last forever and then the night turned white as airbags bloomed and the cars bounced and my head walloped back into the head restraint. The wound along my shoulder pulled at the stitches. Nothing I hadn’t anticipated. I slashed the airbags and kicked my way out of the Volvo. The night smelled of honeysuckle and gas and hot rubber and seemed to turn very slowly.

  His airbags had inflated, too, and like a good policeman he had been wearing his seat belt, but the impact had been a surprise, and he was still stunned. I pulled open his door, felt around his belt for his cuffs and gun. I shot the bag, then clipped his hands to the wheel.

  “I never liked you, Denneny, but I trusted you. You had rules. What happened? Was it the death of your dreams or that of your wife? Nothing to work for, no one to go home to, nothing inside. Nothing except your rules. You should have clung to them, Denneny, they might have saved you.”

  Metal ticked. Somewhere an owl screeched.

  “You know why I’m here, don’t you?”

  He turned his head slowly. Blood trickled from his left nostril. I pulled back the hammer.

  “Don’t you.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  “Good.” And I shot him in the abdomen.

  The frame of the Volvo had buckled a little with the impact and it took me a moment to get the trunk open. My head hurt. When I got back with the gas can, he had started to go into shock.

  I unscrewed the cap and laid it carefully on the grass verge. I sloshed gas inside the car, over his body. Judging by the way he squealed and thrashed, it stung on that wound.

  “I was stupid, Denneny. Who warned me off this case in the first place? Why would someone leave all that coke at the scene of a crime unless they could get it back from the evidence locker whenever they wanted? I should have known, but I trusted you. Trusted your rules. But you broke all those rules, for money. When did you stop caring, Denneny?”

  The can was heavy; my shoulder burned.

  “Who could have called Lyon Art to get the information about Olsen Glass? Who took his holidays in California, where Michael Honeycutt used to work? Who knew where to find three men who would kill for money?” He choked on the gas. “Who might be expected to find out Honeycutt was laundering cartel drug money? So simple. All I had to do was put it all together, Denneny, but I didn’t. I didn’t ask that last question: who was the only person—the only one, Denneny—that I trusted to help me with this?”

  I should have remembered: the Viking never plays by the rules.

  “Did you laugh when you pulled the strings? Did you think I was funny, running around like a dumb but faithful dog, bringing you bones? No, because nothing amuses you anymore, does it? And nothing annoys you. Nothing fills you with joy. It’s all gone. You’re dead inside. Empty.”

  I stepped back and looked at him. Drenched to his skin. I tore off his shirt and twisted it, then knotted it into something I could throw. My head pounded, and when I bent down for the gas can the grass verge swooped. The cap got cross-threaded when I tried to screw it back on. I had to take it off and start again. I carried it back to the Volvo and returned with matches.

  I tossed his gun into the backseat, then pulled a penny from my pocket. It was warm in my hand; bright and sharp. I held it up between finger and thumb. In the headlights it could have been gold. “All for this, Denneny. All for money.” I put it back in my pocket. My fare for the ferryman, not his.

  I stepped back and struck a match. It burned electric blue at the centre but its wavering tip was the yellow of every torch ever used to light a pyre, that most human of fires that roars against the night to keep the ice from our hearts. I touched the match to the shirt, which I whirled over my head until it was a great orange wheel. I threw it into the car.

  At Little Five Points, the night was full of the noise and laughter of people who don’t know that the trolls always get you in the end, who when they look up at the night do not understand that the beauty of the bright stars turning overhead, though vast, was created by a universe utterly indifferent to their fate. These young, healthy innocents understand only enough to be a little afraid, so they fill themselves with pot and beer and in the light of a myriad cafés listen to inept street players trying to drive back the dark.

  I walked into Borealis. The tables seemed to get in my way, and the chairs were not where they should have been. Don’t let machines keep me alive, she had said. Don’t let them. And I had promised.

  “Aud! What in the world is the matter?” Over his shoulder, he called, “Two lattés over here, Jonie, please. Sit, Aud. Sit, for the love of god.” He led me to a corner table. “What is that terrible smell? Gas, is it? You’ve been in some accident? No? Well, never mind. You’ll live. How’s Julia?”

  Julia, with the indigo eyes and the laugh like Armagnac. Julia, who had thought she was ready. I took the penny from my pocket. Fare for the ferryman. But Stay in the world, she had said. I spun the penny on the table and, while it turned, stared past him, past the innocents with their light and their noise, and out into the night.

  “She died.”

  She died, but Stay in the world, Aud, she’d said. Stay alive inside. Promise me. I closed my fist around the spinning penny. Just a coin. The world fractured; meltwater ran down my face.

  About the Author

  NICOLA GRIFFITH is a native of Leeds, England. At eighteen she moved to Hull, where she taught women’s self-defense—to groups as diverse as the Equal Opportunities Training Unit and the Union of Catholic Mothers. She was also the lead singer/songwriter for the all-woman band, Jane’s Plane. She is the author of Ammonite and Slow River, and the editor of the Bending the Landscape series. Ms Griffith currently lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge. Her homepage may be found at http://www.nicolagriffith.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Copyright

  THE BLUE PLACE. Copyright © 1998 by Nicola Griffith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the requ
ired fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061856181

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six