Dead Air

by David A. Poulsen

  “What does that mean, exactly? I looked it up when you first mentioned it was a possibility, and I know it’s an inflammation of the inner walls of the gastrointestinal tract and there’s no known cause. And that’s about the extent of my knowledge.”

  Jill nodded and Kyla set her plate down, and hugged her knees as she listened.

  “That’s right,” Jill said. “And there’s no cure, either, although there’s been a lot of progress in controlling the symptoms. There can be a fair amount of pain, diarrhea, sometimes vomiting, and often weight loss.”

  I fought the urge to glance at Kyla to see how much the latter symptom had affected her. I knew she’d lost weight; it seemed to me quite a lot of weight, and I wondered if she’d gain some of it back, lose more, or what. I waited for the answer and it came quickly.

  “That’s kind of the bad news,” Jill went on. “The good news is that we can do a lot ourselves — plenty of exercise, proper diet, hydration, sleep — just a healthy lifestyle generally. Plus there are medications that can help keep things under control.”

  I looked at Kyla. “Exercise. So baseball is still okay?”

  She grinned at me. “Uh-huh. But I might have to quit smoking.”

  She had me for a second and the look on my face must have given me away because both she and her mother burst out laughing.

  “Okay, you two, ha-ha. But what I want to know is what I can do. Besides not buying cigarettes.”

  “Can I answer that, Mom?”

  Jill looked at her daughter and nodded. Kyla turned serious. “Mom and I already talked about this. There are going to be times when I feel kind of crappy like I did last week. When that happens I know it’s not going to be fun, but there are going to be lots of times when I feel good, too.”

  “I read about that,” I told her. “That it’s kind of up and down with periods of flare-ups and then remission. The idea is to keep the flare-up times short and the remission times long.”

  “Right, but the one thing I don’t want is to be treated like a sick person. I want to be as normal as I can and for everybody to treat me that way.”

  She fixed me with a look.

  I nodded. “Fair enough.” I knew that acting as if everything was fine would be the hard part for me, but I would do my damnedest to comply with her wishes.

  “So that means when we go to Chuck E. Cheese’s I can still whip you at every game in the place.”

  “You wish.” She laughed.

  No one spoke again for a few moments and finally Kyla stood up. “Think I’ll go to bed and read for a while, okay?”

  “Of course it’s okay,” Jill said. “I’ll come in a few minutes to give you a hug.”

  “I’d like mine now,” I said, and she gave me a strong squeeze before heading off down the hall.

  Jill and I drank our coffee without saying anything. At last I looked at her. “How are you doing?” I said.

  And for the first time that I’d seen, tears formed and slipped slowly down the face I loved. I put my coffee down, moved closer, and held her.

  “Adam, I was so scared.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. But really, this isn’t so bad, is it?”

  I was saying it to her but I was also saying it, at least partly, for me.

  “The worst part was not knowing,” she said. “Now that we do know and there are things we can do, we’ll be okay. It might take a little while, but we’ll be okay. She’s amazing. All I have to do is be half as strong as she is.”

  “Me too,” I said. “And I will be. We will be.”

  FOURTEEN

  The drive home was slow and circuitous. It felt good just to drive, watch night fall over the city, and listen to Joni Mitchell. Finally I swung into Bridgeland and rolled around behind my building to the house a couple of doors down where I a rented parking space. I didn’t always use it, but there wasn’t room on the street, so this time I did.

  Maybe it was the pleasant evening air or maybe it was that my mind was still focused on Kyla and how the months ahead would unfold, but whatever it was, I never saw or heard the guy. The first I knew he was there was the cold metal pressed hard against the back of my neck. And though I’d never had a gun barrel jammed against me before, there was no doubt in my mind that’s what it was.

  “You make one goddamn sound, you son of a bitch, and it’s the last one you’ll ever make,” a voice I didn’t know growled into my ear.

  I could feel his breath as he spoke.

  I tried for calm, with limited success. “Wallet, back left pants pocket,” I said. “Take it and I don’t turn around until you’re gone.”

  The words were greeted with a derisive laugh. “I don’t want your fuckin’ money, you piece of shit. On your stomach.”

  I was aware how quiet everything was. Even his voice, vicious in its rage, was hushed.

  “What do you —”

  “On your stomach,” the voice hissed.

  I dropped to my knees, leaned forward, my arms in pushup position, hands pressed into the gravel surface of the lane. I felt his knee press the middle of my back, hurting like hell, squeezing the air out of me.

  “It’s been a long time,” the voice said, “a long, long time. But your time’s up, asshole.”

  I was trying to think, to force my mind off the pain in my back and make sense of what he was saying. I told myself if this was the person who killed Hugg, I’d prob­ably already be dead. Who, then?

  “Look, whatever it is you want, why don’t you just tell me and —”

  “The first thing I want is for you to shut up! You got nothin’ to say that I wanna hear. But I got a few things to say to you.”

  I didn’t answer, thought it best to listen.

  “You thought you had it made after all this time.” The knee pressed still harder and I groaned. He paid no attention. “That nobody was even looking for you. Wrong again, low-life fuck, wrong again. Just like you were wrong checking back in at the old haunt, stopping by to reminisce about what you did, thinking who the hell would be around to see or care after all this time. Well, that’s where you fucked up. There’s one guy still watching, waiting for you to come back. And here you are. And here I am.”

  My mind was racing, trying to think of something I’d written that could have brought on this level of anger. Some story that involved my damaging someone’s reputation. Doing enough harm to bring about this? I tried to make sense of his words, which was made all the more difficult by the fact that I was having trouble breathing, and the pain of his knee pressing down on my back was beyond excruciating. That nobody was even looking for you.

  “What are you … talking about?”

  The blow was fast and hard, his fist striking just above my ear. “I told you I didn’t want to hear you talk,” the voice snarled. “Do it again and this gun butt will leave a dent in the side of your skull.”

  The only good thing was that his shift in weight, made in order to be able to hit me, eased for the moment the pressure on my back. I gulped air and tried not to think about the pain in my back and now my head. I had to concentrate, had to get some kind of read on why this was happening.

  “How old are you, asshole?”

  “What … I’m thirty-eight.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, then, “Makes you fifteen then.”

  Fifteen. What, fifteen years old? Fifteen when I did what? I tried to think. Okay fifteen, I was fifteen in 1991.

  If I could get him to tell me his name, maybe I could make some sense of what was happening, And why. But I knew asking would likely get me another blow to the head, this time with the pistol. I had a crazy thought — or maybe not so crazy. What he’d said … well, there was one thing, one case he could be talking about. If I was wrong … I tried to push that thought out of my head.

  I tried to turn my face toward him. He gra
bbed my hair and pulled back hard. This was only going to get worse. I had to do something.

  “Kendall Mark.” My words weren’t much more than a whisper as I fought the pain of my head being pulled back.

  There was a pause; maybe he even let up just a little.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Kendall Mark. Are you Kendall?”

  He let go of my hair and kneeled harder on me again, his face close to my ear.

  “Where’d you get that name, asshole?”

  “If this is about the Faith Unruh case, I know you worked on it, maybe you still are. I am too. Mike Cobb and me. You know Mike Cobb.”

  If I was wrong and this wasn’t Mark, or even if it was and he was too far gone to remember Cobb or to get past his wanting to get revenge on the killer, even if he had the wrong guy, then …

  “Cobb.”

  “Yeah, Mike Cobb.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “At the house she was found?”

  “Yeah, the house she was found. I’ve seen you drive by there a few times. In the alley, too.”

  “I told you. Cobb and I work together on a few things. I’d heard about the murder of Faith Unruh and Cobb and I talked about it — that’s where I heard your name. Look, if you ease off on my back a little I can tell you exactly what I was doing there.”

  “That’s not how it works, prick. You tell me first. If I believe you, then I ease off. And if I don’t …”

  He didn’t finish, but I felt the pressure lessen again, just a little, but it helped. At least I could breathe and talk a little easier.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I have driven by her house and the house where her body was found. My girlfriend and her daughter live not far from there, and when I’m heading over there for a visit, I’ll sometimes go by the places where Faith …” As I was saying it I realized that what I was telling him might not make sense to him. I wasn’t even sure it made sense to me.

  “I … I just wanted to get the feel of the place, where she lived … where she died. I’m not sure why. I guess I thought maybe doing that would help me to understand what happened, maybe get some kind of idea about the kind of person who murdered her. I don’t know if that sounds weird, but —”

  “Sit up.” I felt him move off me.

  “What?”

  “Sit up. Slow, then turn around and face me. Stay sitting.”

  I moved slowly, partly because I didn’t want to do anything to set him off again. And partly because I was hurting in several places. I pulled myself up, turned, and stayed sitting on the gravel, looking at the man I thought was Kendall Mark.

  He was standing, but when I turned to face him, he sat down opposite me. If I hadn’t been so damn sore and still more than a little scared, I might have laughed at the bizarre scene — two men sitting in the dirt and gravel of a back alley in the semi-dark of a moonlit night.

  What wasn’t funny is that the man opposite me was holding a gun, and that gun, while it was no longer pressed against my neck, was aimed at my chest.

  Kendall Mark, if that’s who he was, was black. Cobb hadn’t mentioned that, but there would have no particular reason that he would. This man was big, even sitting cross-legged on the ground. I guessed over six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. Not much of it looked like fat and his face lacked the fullness of guys who were just beefy.

  “Start talking again,” he said. “Tell me more about you and Cobb and we’ll see if I believe you. You better hope I do.”

  I took a breath and nodded that I understood the meaning of what he’d just said. “I got to know Mike Cobb a few years ago when I hired him to try to find the person who killed my wife; it was arson. Then we worked together again last winter on a different case, but along with it we found the arsonist. There was a car wreck and she was killed.”

  “The arsonist was a ‘she?’”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded and I took another breath, still struggling to breathe normally after having a very large guy kneeling on my back for what seemed like forever.

  “Then a couple of weeks ago, Mike recruited me to help with another case. A media guy was stabbed and we’re working to clear the guy who was charged with it.”

  “That just happened a few days ago. You said a couple of weeks. I told you not to lie to me.” He raised the gun and pointed it at me. “Big mistake.”

  I put my hands up. “Hold on a second. “It was a couple of weeks ago. We were already working with the accused. Mike had been hired as a bodyguard for a radio talk-show host named Buckley-Rand Larmer and asked me to check out some stuff on Larmer. While that was going on, the other guy was murdered and the cops arrested and charged Larmer.”

  He lowered the gun, but not much.

  “And what does that have to do with Faith Unruh? And this part better be damn believable.”

  “I heard about Faith’s murder not that long ago. I talked to Cobb about it, figuring he might know something. I guess the thing just bothered me a lot, maybe because the woman I’m seeing has a daughter just about Faith’s age. Or maybe it was just the horror of what happened. And like I said, I don’t know why I’ve been going by there. I know it’s next to impossible that I’ll figure anything out, but I can’t get it out of my mind. I’m drawn to it, I guess, maybe in the same way you are.”

  “Drawn to it,” he repeated.

  “I don’t know if that’s the best choice of words, but —”

  He cut me off. “You don’t look like a cop, private or otherwise. Rent-a-cop maybe. Give you a uniform and you could guard warehouses and shit. That’s the job you look like you could do.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not a cop at all. My name’s Adam Cullen. I’m a journalist. It just turns out that Cobb has needed some of the things I’m able to do to help him with a couple of cases.”

  “Journalist. You think there’s a story in the Faith Unruh murder?”

  I wasn’t sure what the right answer to that question was. I decided to go for candor … and hope I was right.

  “I don’t know. Maybe, if I thought it might help after all this time to get people thinking about it again. But I don’t really know.”

  He looked hard at me. I figured he was making up his mind about me. And I thought again about what Cobb had said about Kendall Mark’s pretty much losing it after trying unsuccessfully to find Faith Unruh’s killer. This man didn’t look out of control. He looked determined and he looked angry, maybe even troubled. But he didn’t look like he was about to freak out and shoot me just because I was there. At least, that’s what I wanted to believe.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said, rubbing my left hand over the fully formed lump where he’d hit me.

  “What question?”

  “Your name. I asked you if you were Kendall Mark.”

  A scowl that looked pretty much permanent creased his features, but his head moved up and down a degree or two. “I don’t use it anymore.”

  “The name?”

  Another small nod. “Yeah. Changed it to Marlon Kennedy a few years ago. Not legally — just changed enough things to make me Marlon Kennedy and for Kendall Mark to go away.”

  “You must be watching Faith’s house and the other house almost all the time to know I’ve been there.”

  He lowered the gun a little. “I can give you exact times you arrived and when you left, whether you drove or were on foot, what you were wearing. I’ve got it all.”

  “How can you be watching all the time?”

  “Surveillance. I’ve been watching those two places for almost twenty years. Got cameras on both places, and I’m watching a lot of the time. Figured the killer would come back there someday … to look around or gloat or just see what it looked like after all this time. And when he did, I’d be ready. I wanted you to be that bastard. I
wanted that bad.”

  I nodded. “I understand.” What I didn’t understand was what could bring someone to watch a place all that time.

  “How are you able to do that? I mean how do you live?”

  “You mean a job? Part-time. I mow the grass and tend the flowers at a couple of parks not far from there. Nobody pays attention to a guy looking after a park. I’ve seen a couple of people over the years who might have known me if they’d actually looked at me. I work mornings seven to noon. Gives me the rest of the day and night … to check my tapes. And watch.”

  “When do you sleep?”

  “When I can. Bought a house across the street from the Unruh house. Got a good view of the backyard where they found her from my back bedroom window. And I can see the Unruh house from my living-room window. I drink a lot of coffee and I watch.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  We sat in silence for a couple of minutes.

  “Let me see your wallet,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your wallet. Let me see it.”

  I pulled it out and tossed it to him. He looked at my driver’s licence, leafed through it for a minute or so, I figured to verify I was who I said I was. Then he tossed it back to me.

  “So what now?” I said.

  “I keep watching.”

  “Listen, Marlon … Is that what I call you? Marlon?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t matter.”

  “I was thinking that if we could talk sometime, maybe share information, not that I have a lot, but maybe in talking we might think of something that’s been missed or overlooked.”

  “That isn’t very likely.”

  “No,” I agreed, deciding not to push it.

  “But maybe we’ll talk sometime. Give me your phone number. “

  I found a receipt in my wallet and a pen in my pants pocket, then wrote out my cellphone number and passed it to him.”