A Thousand Bridges

by Michael McKinney

  There, with the desert in the background, was a beautiful young woman with dark hair, tinted red by the sun. Her olive complexion highlighted the deep green eyes and full mouth and, except for the chipmunk cheeks, she looked a lot like her mother.

  "Candace," I said, looking into that young face that had seen so much grief. Katherine lifted her coffee cup and sipped. I took a step backward with my mind and fell into a powerful vortex.

  In the peculiar fashion of my brain, I stood before a revolving collage of characters and events, flashes of various locations, and snippets of conversation that slowly and painstakingly arranged themselves into a correct chronology as I rejected this and expanded that.

  Ever since I was a child, I've had the ability to find missing articles, not by clairvoyance but because I had the talent for arranging facts and looking into that darkness for gaps others couldn't see. To me they were like missing teeth in an otherwise beautiful smile. By the time I was in high school, kids paid me real money to find things they'd lost and, because of my ability to see these things, the army guessed that I would make a great point man. When I'd survived that, they made me a tunnel rat.

  What I saw at the breakfast table was a board game for lemmings. It was one of those mazes that offered a dozen ways to begin, but they all merged into a single downhill slide into a black hole. I twisted and turned, pulled things from one place and stuck them in another, and still the ending was the same.

  I tried adding new elements as would add a pink queen to a chess game - an unpredictable player that could work for either side. The board was getting cluttered, and it occurred to me that I hadn't reached this deep in a long time. It might not work anymore. Or, it was just possible the process was working fine but I didn't want to believe the conclusions. My mind said I couldn't win.

  "Mac!" Katherine's nervous shout revived me, and I became aware of her anxious eyes. They were locked on mine.

  "What?" I said.

  "What do you mean 'what?'" she said, funny without trying to be funny.

  "Well, then," I said as I realized I'd been off in my own world, "how about huh?"

  She didn't seem to be mad at me anymore, and I was glad. I suppose part of the reason I jumped at her so hard over coffee was that I got my feelings hurt the night before. After my great speech about honesty and truth, I decided not to tell her.

  "I've been trying to talk to you for a couple of minutes," she said. "And you were gone. It scared me."

  "I was thinking," I said.

  "That wasn't thinking," Katherine corrected me, and her eyes were all I could see. "You were in a trance. Mac, you're a little bit frightening."

  "You just raised me from Hell, Katherine," I said. "What did you expect?"

  I pushed back from table. "I want to tell you something. Now that I'm here, I plan to keep going until I get these people, whether you back out or not. And that's exactly what I want you to do if you're not prepared to take this to the end. People are going to get hurt before it's over, and I can't promise it won't be you, or Candace.

  "I will promise you I won't go back to Hell without company," I finished my little speech. I watched her fragile personality bounce again. She rebounded with a smile and a shrug in an attempt to lighten things up.

  "I'd feel a lot better about this if you didn't keep talking about doom," she said.

  "That's my favorite ending," I said. "It's the only way it can work for me. I'm in love with a dead woman, remember?"

  "Yes," she said. She stood up again and walked to the window. Her coffee cup fogged the panes. "I remember."

  FOUR

  Katherine drove back to her room to shower and change, but made me promise to meet her for lunch at the Coffee Cup restaurant beside the interstate. We sat at a table by the window and watched cars and trucks race past. She was in flowers, a white sun dress with red hibiscus and big green leaves that exposed her brown shoulders and colored her cheeks. Her hair was pulled back and held by a red barrette, and her neck was a mile long.

  "Have you thought any more about it?" she asked.

  "You're kidding, right?" I said. A trucker laughed across the counter at a waitress, and she placed a kind hand on his arm, smiling back.

  "Stupid thing to say, huh?" Katherine's voice was lighter and had hope poured over it.

  "I've already started the ball rolling," I said, feeling better myself.

  She raised an eyebrow. "I made a few phone calls to a few friends, Katherine. There are some good people in this town, and they feel bad about what happened to Sheevers - to Patty. There are a couple of people I know who happen to be in positions to notice changes quicker than most. I've asked them to let me know if anything starts coming down."

  "What do you think is going to happen?" She looked worried, and it clashed with the dress. I reached across the table and put my hand on hers.

  "There are a few things I'm sure of," I smiled and patted the hand. "I'm not worried about them, and you shouldn't be, either. After you leave I'm going to start shaking some trees, including the big one Birk lives in. That's not going to make any of them very happy, especially when they see who's doing the shaking.

  I tried to sound confident and loose, and I think I pulled it off. Katherine seemed relaxed as she sipped her Coke, leaving a thin red ring of lipstick on the straw.

  "The first thing I did was call my lawyer. He's a brilliant guy named Mark Thornton, and he'll be in touch with you pretty soon to get your deposition. I don't know why he hangs around this swamp, but he's damned good." Katherine pulled out a notepad and wrote down his name, then put the pen to her lips and rolled it back and forth.

  "He used to be Patty's boyfriend," she said, gazing out the window, then directing that dark gaze at me. "Patty told me what happened, you know?"

  "I'm not surprised," I said. "But he still seems to like me."

  Katherine smiled. I tried to concentrate, knowing she was watching. "The way I have it figured, Bob Birk's first move will be to have Patty's murder case reopened, and he'll pull some strings to have me hauled in as the main suspect. That would pretty much take care of me for the duration, but Mark's going to make a trip to Judge Pollock first and tell him I have some hard facts on Birk involving sex with a minor and he believes Birk will do this as retaliation.

  "Pollock hates Bob Birk, and he's scared he'll make governor, but he's never been able to screw him, so this might give him a chance. It's not that the judge is a great guy. They're more like leaders of rival gangs."

  "This doesn't sound like a sure thing to me, Mac," Katherine said. Her fingers wormed their way between mine and she locked us together. Her hand felt a little like a cold oyster and, even in the bright light of the restaurant, there seemed to be a shadow over her. "Now that I've done it, I'm afraid."

  "This is one of those things you can't turn your back on, Katherine," I said. "It took a lot of courage for you to come this far."

  "That wasn't courage," she said. "It was just more fear. Aren't you afraid of what might happen?"

  "No." Lie number two. "I already have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to do." Number three. I was on a roll.

  "And what is that?" she said.

  "I told you I've already started the process. You never find something out by chasing it around and trying to catch up. It has a head start, and it'll outrun you every time." I felt myself warming to the subject, and it was a good sensation.

  "You have to set a trap for it, then encourage it to fall in. That's what I've done by calling a couple of people, Katherine. I have no idea if I'll hear from any of them, but simply having them there makes changes. The subtle changes in them may encourage others to come to me, to the trap.

  "This time though," I hurried on, thinking as I talked, "it'll be more like an earthquake. Part of what I did with the phone calls this morning was to set a line of human seismographs along a fault line. The next thing I'll try to do is create a little earthquake, then trace the tremors back to the epicenter."

 
I looked at her and saw genuine interest. "It's actually a pretty good analogy. You see, we're starting off with a serious deficit of information. I want to know exactly whose ground shakes the hardest, then I can find out why. That's the reason the early part of this thing has the largest risk. It has to be, because it's a smoke screen, pure and simple."

  I looked around casually to see if anyone was listening. There were a few people scattered through the restaurant, mostly travelers in wrinkled clothing and matted hair. The waitresses were occupied, and it wasn't so busy that our loitering was a bother. Besides, there was still food on our table and a potential tip to be had later. With the skimpy salary these women made, a tip of any size had to be taken into consideration.

  "I want everyone to think I'm building a case against Bob Birk for rape and contributing to the delinquency, because I don't want anyone to know we have an eyewitness to murder. There's always a possibility he's involved somehow, or that he knows who did it. You see, Birk's got his hands in everything and this is all connected, somehow. I don't see it yet, but I have to get to them first. I'll only have one chance.

  "Katherine, you have to put the personal part of yourself aside now and listen. I know how you feel about Birk, but he's not even a gnat compared to the company we're going to keep if we get far enough to find out who killed Candy's friends." And eighteen-wheeler growled through its gears as it climbed the on-ramp.

  There was an honest-to-goodness smile on Katherine's face. It swept across her cheeks like a brush fire, and her eyes sparkled as it turned into a grin. I felt my ears get hot and knew they were turning red. "I have just witnessed the most amazing thing," she said, her voice like music. "I wish you could see it for yourself, Mac - the part that makes you so good at what you do. I've just seen a spark of what Patty used to spend hours talking about."

  "A cheap parlor trick," I mumbled. I thought of how Sheevers and I would spend days driving down bumpy orange clay roads the color of Irish hair, noticing everything and discussing what kind of old farmhouse we'd want, how many animals we'd have. I remembered the time we stopped the car and made love in the daylight like idiots, fully expecting someone to drive by and get offended. But no cars came and I swore to her that I would never love another woman. Then, for some reason, that image was obscured by the thought of a frightened young girl with a gun.

  "I don' t know how, yet," I said to Katherine Furay, "but I'm going to beat them. I'm going to make them pay for what they did."

  "Thanks for making me believe it, Mac," she said.

  We pushed food around on our plates a little longer and wrapped up our non-contract, agreeing that she would go back to Las Vegas and make plans to disappear with Candace when the time came. She wanted to bring her daughter back to hide somewhere close by, and I thought it was a lousy idea, if for no other reason than the chance of exposing Candace to the old crowd, the old memories.

  I was also afraid they'd be discovered by someone in Birk's network. I thought if everything went well I could possibly keep the different elements from knowing how much I had on them until it was too late to stop me, but all I had on my side was surprise. I wasn't sure if that would even be enough for the ante.

  I told Katherine my idea of going to see an old friend of mine although, in the last few years, our friendship had turned more and more into an adversarial relationship. He was an extremely caustic man three decades older than I who had gone from beatnik to magazine publisher in a little over thirty years without changing values once. He had the fractious nature of someone who hated everyone, including me. But, other than that, he was a reasonable man.

  Mel Shiver had once been a fairly important Liberal, and he watched the world change around him, affecting it about as much as a tree stump affects flood waters. He's always been too much a loner to join a group and form a dam and, eventually, the groups began rejecting him as well.

  Still, he published a very good literary quarterly called The Walker's Companion with a kind woman who doubled as his wife. He lived outside Red Oak, a tiny town thirty miles northeast of Palmetto Bay, and he had his own network of information. His 'Baker Street Irregulars' consisted of intellectual flotsam that bobbed carelessly in the wake of the flood.

  I always thought he had too little character to be curmudgeon, so he had to settle for being an ordinary asshole, and I told him so on occasion. Another acquaintance from the Court House Days, he and I had been fighting for years over almost everything - unofficial sparring partners for life. Lately, he'd been mad at me because he wanted me to contribute to his Middle East Peace Fund, and I told him that as far as I was concerned, the Middle East was just the Hatfields and the McCoys on steroids and I thought they were silly. Sometimes I believed what I said, and sometimes I just made things up to make him mad.

  Mel had filed so many freedom-of-information suits over the years that his paperwork was almost invisible to the government, or at least that's what I hoped. Beneath his well-maintained front, he was as completely decent and honorable as anyone I'd ever known, and I planned to dump this whole thing on him, right down to the last detail. Each hour I had to think brought me closer to an inevitable conclusion. I didn't stand a Gregorian's chance in Hell alone, and there were precious few people on the planet that I could trust. Mel Shiver was on the top of my short list.

  I followed Katherine to the airport and waited as she turned in her rental car, then stood with her in the small terminal and argued until her flight arrived. She'd wanted to stay an extra day and go to Mel's with me, and I was afraid someone would see us together and gain a step on us. I finally convinced her my way was better, and she took her place in line at the baggage counter. We said our good-byes and I hurried away, suddenly restless and in a hurry to get started.

  Alone, my bravado abandoned me and I went to the lounge instead of the car. I ordered a drink and took it to a window table where I could see her plane. My thoughts turned against me and the plan began to look like a straw house. I tried to think positively, but my mind returned to the little girl in the dark, a witness to murder so cold it made my stomach muscles draw up. A fourteen year-old girl hiding in the dark with a gun, suddenly outnumbered and at war in her own backyard.

  Then, the inevitable image crept in as I knew it would. When my thoughts turned to Katherine with the mysterious eyes, I saw Patty Sheevers instead, her blouse ripped open and that electric body doughy, white and limp, pocked with grotesque open holes. Her eyes protruded and full of terror, even in death. I heard the ice rattling in my glass and put down the drink.

  If there were any flaws in my hasty plans, if I got reckless and cocky, someone would die. With any luck it would be me, but I don't have that kind of luck. I'm more like Typhoid Mary and the people around me are the ones at risk. I knew Bob Birk kept a few people in the wings who took care of unpleasant things like me, and I knew that somewhere, early on, I would make him mad enough to use them. I hadn't yet come up with a plan to deal with that, and it was just a little problem when you held it up to the big picture.

  At last, the plane rolled out onto the runway, roared a bit, and rose gracefully into a cloudless sky. I gulped the last of my drink and walked quickly from the cool, dark building into the sunlight. I retrieved my clump of keys from a pocketful of change and crossed to a full parking lot, eyeing every stranger's face with suspicion. Katherine had pulled me from under a nice, comfortable rock, and I wanted to shrink from the light.

  When I swung open my car door I heard someone inside the car say, "I thought you'd never get here."

  I yelled something that sounded like, "Yar!" and threw my keys straight into the air before Katherine could say, "Oops."

  I clutched my chest and sat down hard on the vinyl seat, glaring at her for at least a minute before the keys fell back with a clatter on my hood. She covered her mouth with her hands, but I could tell by her eyes what was going on back there. The beautiful jerk was laughing at me. I reached out and grabbed my keys.

  "Jesus Christ!" I sai
d. "Has anyone ever told you that it's hard as hell to get rid of you?"

  I was really humiliated. A full day of acting like Manly Man, and just when I thought I could relax my true self burst forth like pastel fireworks. An idle thought crossed my mind that it might take surgery to get my balls back down into their normal position.

  She tried to talk, but could only say, "Oh.....oh." Then she snorted and buried her face in my sleeve. Thank God I wasn't wearing my heart there, or it would've beaten her to death.

  Katherine finally got it out of her system and flowed backward until she was wedged into the corner made by the seat and the door. Somewhere above, an airplane with one empty seat banked on a cushion of warm Gulf air and turned north toward Atlanta.

  "I'm sorry," she said, not sounding at all as if she meant it. She sniffed and looked out the windshield as she ran a fingertip under one eye, then the other. "I just kept thinking that you'd need me there, you know, to explain everything to your friend."

  "Katherine," I said. "Are you trying to avoid going home?"

  "No," she said, still looking away. "Well, yes. Maybe."

  "Good," I said. "For a minute there I was afraid you were going to be indecisive."

  "It's hard, Mac." She turned to me. "It's like living in a mine field right now. I'm a good mother, but Candy's a grown woman, too, and sometimes the house is just too small. I want to run away, do you know what I mean?"

  "I'd live on the moon if I could find a way to get there," I said. "What about James?"

  "James?" Katherine looked at me, puzzled, then smiled.

  "Oh, I forgot," she said. "I talked to him on the phone last night at your house." She folded her hands in her lap, her lips forming words for a few seconds before she finally spoke.

  "James had been very good to me, Mac," she said softly. "And Candy, too. I've been working in a casino for years, and sometimes it gets wild. I started as a waitress in the lounge, worked up to the blackjack tables, and now I'm in management.