The Night Season

by Chelsea Cain

  “That was in 1973,” Archie said to Susan.

  His phone rang. It was Flannigan. This exercise appeared to be about over anyway. “Excuse me,” he said, picking up the call.

  “Hey,” Archie said to Flannigan. “What’s up?”

  “It’s Carter,” Flannigan said. “That National Guard soldier. He’s dead.”

  “Are you married?” Gloria asked him.

  Archie plugged his free ear and turned away from her. Carter? Dead? They had just seen him, hadn’t they? “What happened?” he asked Flannigan.

  Flannigan sighed. “He wasn’t responding to his radio, so they went looking for him. Found him facedown near the fire station on the east bank. There’s a mark. But not on his hands. It’s on his face.”

  Archie should have closed down the waterfront. Screw the seawall. He should have gotten everyone out of there. Let the whole city flood. It was just property. “I’ll be right down,” Archie said.

  He hung up.

  Susan had paled. “What’s going on?”

  “I will find him,” Archie said on the TV. “I. Will. Find. Him.”

  They had taken separate cars.

  “Carter’s dead,” Archie said. “You should go home.”

  Susan’s brow knitted. She swallowed hard. “I have work to do,” she said. “I need more quotes. I have to fact-check.”

  Archie caught her gaze. “Stay away from the river, okay?”

  She nodded.

  He stood. “I have to go,” he said to Gloria. “Thanks for the tea.” He had yet to take a sip.

  “Are you?” Gloria asked again. “Married?”

  “I’m divorced,” Archie said.

  “Have you ever had an affair?”

  “Only one,” Archie said.

  Gloria lowered her chin girlishly, her white hair falling around her face. “I’ve had more than that,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  42

  Carter had died trying to radio for help. He was facedown on the concrete, one arm outstretched, his walkie-talkie a few feet away where it had landed as he fell. He had probably watched it for a while as his body shut down. Heard the radio calls. Watched the red light blink steadily.

  The river lapped over the bank, sending a current washing over the fire station driveway where Carter lay, and leaving a sticky froth of residual pollution on the pavement. The water had shorted out the walkie-talkie’s batteries. It had still been working when they found him. It was what led the Guard soldiers who went looking for him to the body—they had heard the static of the radio. But it was dead, too, now.

  Rain tickled the back of Archie’s neck. The sky was settling into dusk.

  Carter’s eyes were open. Just slits. His eyelashes were beaded with water.

  Flannigan glanced nervously at the river. “We need to move him out of here,” he said. He was the third person to say it since Archie had arrived. The fire station driveway was twenty feet above the river, protected by a steep foliage-covered bank that dropped to the river below. Today there was no bank. The spindly trees that grew at its top swayed and shimmered, one already snapped in half by the current.

  The river sounded like thunder. Chopper blades beat overhead. And louder than all of that was the squawk of gulls. They danced at the driveway’s edge, taking flight a few feet in the air, but always returning, their eyes on Carter’s body.

  They were hungry.

  “In a minute,” Archie said.

  He squatted next to Carter and examined the pea-sized red lesion that marked his right cheekbone. The lesion was bigger than the others, but it was also on a more sensitive area. The killer had gotten the others to handle the blue-ring somehow. But not Carter. Carter had the thing thrown at him.

  A film of water and foam washed over the pavement, causing the fingers of Carter’s outstretched hand to move slightly.

  Carter had been found within the same time frame of being poisoned that Henry had been. But Henry was still alive, for now, and Carter wasn’t.

  Archie glanced around the wet pavement. There was nothing there. Any potential evidence had been lifted and taken by the river. The kid’s face was all over the news. Something would turn up. He’d been out in public. At Oaks Park. People had seen him. Someone would spot him now.

  “Hey.” Robbins stepped up beside Archie, the Tyvek suit he’d put on over the one he’d worn to the press conference already streaked with rain. “We need to move him out of here.”

  “Okay,” Archie said.

  Archie’s phone rang. He let it ring a few times before he checked the caller ID, but he snapped it to his cheek the second he saw who it was.

  “It’s me,” Claire said. “You need to get to the hospital.”

  CHAPTER

  43

  Susan stared at her laptop screen. Now that she had her laptop, she didn’t need Archie’s computer, so she’d decided to work in the conference room. She could spread out in there, and the chairs were more comfortable. Also, she’d managed to find a leftover burrito in the fridge, which didn’t seem to be working anyway.

  She’d updated the editor at the Times about Carter. They were sending the paper’s Northwest Bureau chief down from Seattle. The story was now too big for a stringer, he said.

  The cursor in front of her blinked. Crap. She couldn’t even figure out how to finish the story she’d pitched. She’d never sweated over thirty column inches so hard in her life.

  Heil came in, saw Susan, and stopped.

  “You’re still here?” he asked.

  “You’re still here, too,” she pointed out.

  His forehead creased. “I work here,” he said.

  Good point. “I’m almost done,” she said. He was wearing a jacket. Not the police windbreaker this time—a black jacket that zipped up the front. “Are you going home?” she asked.

  “I finally got in touch with some local aquarium supply shop employees.” He held up a list. “Aquarium nerds. I’ve got interviews with five of them.”

  She saw the bottom address. Division and Twentieth. “That’s on my way home,” she said. “Want me to do it?”

  Heil glanced at the list in his hand. “You can read that from there?”

  “You write big, like a girl.”

  He smirked and pocketed the list. “Go to the Academy,” he said. “Work patrol. Make detective. And then call me.” He walked to the fridge and opened it. After a few seconds he said, “Did you eat my burrito?”

  Susan cringed. The foil was still in front of her. “I didn’t know that belonged to anyone,” she said.

  “It was in a bag with my name on it,” Heil said. “Written big. Like a girl.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “I’ll get something while I’m out,” Heil said with a sigh. “Something’s got to be open.” He turned and walked to the door, and then turned back.

  “You okay?” he said. “About Carter?”

  “Sure,” Susan said, turning away so he couldn’t see her face. “It’s not like I knew him.”

  Heil left, and she tried to get back to her story, but her mind kept returning to Carter. The Times wanted news. A National Guard soldier murdered. But it didn’t do him justice.

  She opened Safari and went to eBay to check on the key. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular. It was just something to do. But as soon as the key appeared on her screen, she unplugged her laptop and went searching for Ngyun.

  She found him at his desk typing a message on an octopus fan chat board.

  “That key on eBay?” she said, turning her laptop so he could see the screen. “Someone just bid ten dollars for it.”

  He took her laptop and set it on his desk, and she came around behind his chair and looked over his shoulder.

  “Doesn’t really mean anything,” Ngyun said. “Except he really wants the key.”

  “Check out the user name,” Susan said, pointing at the screen.

  Vanport48.

  “He’s willing to spend ten bucks on
an old key,” Ngyun said. “I think it’s clear he’s interested in Vanport.”

  “Can you find out who it is?” she asked.

  “Like contact eBay and have them tell me the guy’s real name and contact info?” Ngyun said.

  “Exactly,” Susan said.

  “Nope.”

  “Really?” Susan said.

  “Not without a warrant,” Ngyun said. “And reckless financial decisions aren’t probable cause.”

  “I thought the government had access to all our online accounts.”

  “Homeland Security, maybe,” Ngyun said. “Not us. And you’re not supposed to know about that.”

  She saw his eyes flick back to his own monitor.

  “Come on,” Susan said. “There’s something you can do.”

  Ngyun hesitated. “Okay,” he said. “A lot of people have a user name and stick with it for all their accounts. I, for instance, am huggybearxp for almost everything not work-related. This guy probably uses Vanport48 for other things. I can keep an eye out for it. If I see him in any of the cephalopod-related chat rooms, we might have probable cause.” He started typing on his keyboard. The noise his fingers made tapping the keys sounded a lot like rain. “I rock at this,” he said.

  Susan was satisfied.

  She took her laptop back to the conference room, plugged it back in, and resumed staring. Carter was dead. And now he just lay there on the page. She had written that he’d been instrumental in the river rescue, that he’d recovered the body of Dennis Keller. But his personality was missing. Then something occurred to her.

  After a few minutes of browsing, she had what she needed. “Alex Paul Carter grew up in Pendleton, Oregon, where he was a lifeguard, varsity swimmer, and Boy Scout. He won a gold belt buckle for calf roping at the State 4-H rodeo competition.”

  She stared at the screen some more.

  Then she clicked send, packed up, and headed home.

  CHAPTER

  44

  “There,” Claire said. “See?”

  Archie had seen it. Henry’s eyelids had fluttered. Claire reached for Archie’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

  Henry had been breathing on his own for almost thirty minutes.

  The oxygen mask was gone, and Archie could see Henry’s face again. His chin and scalp were prickly where salt-and-pepper hair the color of his mustache had grown out to stubble, but his color was better. His blood pressure was up. He looked like he was alive.

  Claire let go of Archie’s hand, picked a scab of dried saliva from the corner of Henry’s mouth, and flicked it on the floor.

  The room seemed weirdly quiet without the sound of the artificial respirator.

  The doctors and nurses were in and out at a regular clip. Everyone was smiley.

  Henry’s eyes fluttered again.

  “There,” Claire said.

  Her face lit up every time it happened.

  Henry’s neurologist swept into the room for the fourth time in ten minutes. She was Indian and wore her thick black hair in a braid that hung against the back of her white lab coat. She glanced at the monitor.

  “He fluttered again,” Claire said.

  The neurologist smiled. “That’s a good sign,” she said, and she typed something into Henry’s chart and left.

  “She doesn’t think he’ll wake up,” Claire said.

  “He’ll wake up.”

  Claire rocked her head back and gazed at the ceiling. “I shouldn’t have called you,” she said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “This is important.”

  She blinked at the ceiling for a long moment and then looked at Archie. “Go,” she said. “Try to find that kid.”

  Archie hesitated.

  “Go,” Claire said.

  Archie stood up. “Call me if anything changes?”

  “Yep.”

  He reached his hand out and laid it on Henry’s chest. The cloth of the hospital shirt felt insubstantial. Archie coughed and lifted his hand to his mouth. “Okay,” he said.

  He turned and made it a few steps.

  “Archie?” Claire said.

  “Another flutter?”

  “No,” she said.

  He turned. Claire was standing now, both hands over her mouth, eyes shiny with tears.

  Henry’s eyes were open.

  Archie hurried back to the bedside beside Claire.

  Henry’s lids were heavy, his eyes slits. But they were open.

  The neurologist appeared, briskly ushering Claire and Archie toward the foot of the bed.

  She whipped an ophthalmoscope out of her lab coat pocket and shone it back and forth between Henry’s eyes.

  “Henry?” she said in a loud clear voice. “Can you hear me?”

  Claire gripped Archie’s arm.

  Henry squinted at the light. “Yeah,” he croaked.

  “Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” said Claire. She let go of Archie, squeezed around the doctor, and took one of Henry’s hands in hers.

  Henry gazed up at her and smiled. “Hey, baby,” he whispered.

  Claire laid her head gently on Henry’s chest. Tears streamed from her eyes and her shoulders shook, but the grin on her face was luminous.

  “Do you know your last name?” the doctor asked.

  “Sobol,” Henry rasped.

  “Do you know who the president is?”

  Henry touched the back of Claire’s neck with his hand.

  “Gary Hart.”

  The doctor stiffened.

  He coughed. “Kidding.”

  “I need to talk to him,” Archie said.

  The doctor raised a hand. “Not now,” she said.

  “Archie?” Henry said, lifting his head to look around the room.

  “Do you remember what happened?” Archie asked.

  “He’s not going to remember anything,” the doctor said. “His brain has been through a terrific trauma.”

  Henry lifted his hand from Claire’s neck and made a beckoning motion at Archie.

  Archie inched forward, past the neurologist, and leaned in as close as he could.

  Claire didn’t move.

  A stain from her tears spread on the thin cotton of Henry’s hospital gown.

  Henry’s voice was barely more than a rasp. “White male. Early forties. Rubber waders. He had a kid with him.”

  CHAPTER

  45

  The defroster in Susan’s Saab didn’t work, so she had the windows rolled down to keep the windshield from fogging up. Rain slapped her in the face. She hunched forward over the steering wheel and squinted in an attempt to make out shapes in the darkness ahead.

  The traffic lights on Division Street were all out. Some of the streetlights had blown. Even with the porch lights and house lights, it was hard to see the street. Susan slowed as she crossed the railroad tracks. She didn’t see any other cars on the road. Apparently everyone was taking this curfew thing pretty seriously.

  Her radio was blasting. A DJ broke in with a news update. The serial killer had claimed another victim. Sauvie Island was flooding. The port was flooding. Swan Island was flooding. The Willamette was expected to crest later that night. Susan changed the station.

  She didn’t realize how deep the water was until she was in it.

  It had pooled in the intersection, creating a vast black swamp. The water surged around her tires and she could feel the pressure of it pressing against the car. “Fuck,” she said. She put the car in reverse and turned around to back up. But the engine stalled.

  Her heart skipped a beat as she turned the ignition key once, twice, three times.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no, no.”

  Not even a sputter.

  She sat up a little in her seat and peered over the hood of her car. The headlights were still on, skimming the surface of the water, illuminating the rain. Then they went out.

  The radio stopped.

  It was dark and still and quiet. And the car started to slide. It happened slowly at first, an almost im
perceptible shift, something more like vertigo than actual motion. Then it fishtailed.

  Susan didn’t have time to react. Not that there was anything she could do. She just held on and braced for impact.

  It didn’t come.

  She unclenched her eyes and looked around.

  She was still in the intersection, only now she was facing up Twelfth Avenue. The car had stopped moving. The car had stopped moving?

  Yes.

  She looked out the window. She was still in the water. It was all around her. She tried the handle, half expecting the pressure of the water to pin it closed, but it opened, skimming over the top of the water. She grabbed her purse off the passenger seat and stepped out of the car. The water was maybe five inches deep, above her ankle. She could feel its chill through the rubber of her boots.

  She already had her phone out when she turned and saw her car moving again. It floated peacefully for a moment, before scraping along a parked pickup truck and coming to rest nuzzled against it.

  Susan dialed 911.

  All the operators were busy.

  “You’re kidding me,” Susan said.

  They were probably up to their eyeballs with calls. Flooding. Mudslides. Traffic accidents. Citizens concerned about their neighbor’s aquarium.

  She called Archie. He didn’t pick up.

  She looked up and down Division Street, and then up and down Twelfth Avenue. She didn’t see any headlights coming.

  At least her car was out of the path of traffic.

  She wrote a note on a page from her notebook and tore it out. My car hit your pickup truck, read the note. Sorry. She added her name and cell number. She waded over to the pickup and tucked it under the windshield wiper. The paper was already wet enough that the ink was bleeding.

  She was across the intersection when she realized that her laptop was in the backseat of the car. She decided to leave it. She was twenty-three blocks from home, and she didn’t want it getting rained on.

  She put her hood up and started walking.

  It wasn’t that far. They were short blocks. And she remembered that Heil was going to an address around here. She decided to take Division most of the way, and keep an eye out for his car. She had to walk through deep puddles on the sidewalk in places, but she had her rainbow boots on. And it was relatively warm out. That was the bright side—if all this was coming down as snow, Portland might be even more screwed. After a few blocks she’d worked up enough body heat that she had to unzip her raincoat.