The Incident Under the Overpass

by Anne McClane

  The incident. She separated herself from thoughts of their most recent night together, and remembered Nathan’s deepening trouble. That finally wiped the grin off her face. Lacey thought of Detective Aucoin. She had been waiting to hear from him—he had said something about possibly needing a description of the Weasel. But there had been no word, and Lacey had been too busy to follow up of her own accord.

  Lacey resolved to call him today and tell him about her upcoming departure. Jimmy and Helga had left yesterday. Helga was bonded through her company, but Lacey wasn’t sure how that worked or if it had anything to do with her being able to leave town.

  She would collect her thoughts before calling the detective.

  Lacey grabbed a notepad, placed it next to her monitor, and squinted at the glare. The sun had caught a corner of the picture window, sending a high-intensity laser beam directly to her desktop. She looked into Trip’s empty office. Cool and shady.

  He had been in the office earlier, and she didn’t expect to see him again today.

  She grabbed the notepad and Detective Aucoin’s card and sat at Trip’s massive desk. She made a list of the questions she wanted to ask. Then she made a list of items she’d need to buy this weekend. Next was a list of utilities and services at the house she’d need to set up for autopay. Lacey was about two-thirds of the way through a list of essentials to pack when she heard the front door open.

  Crap! What is Trip doing back so soon? she thought. She jumped up and grabbed her things, returning everything on his desk to its proper order. She went to one of the bookshelves and pretended to take inventory.

  When he didn’t bellow his usual greeting or come straight to his office, she turned and looked out to see someone who brought an instant wave of nausea to her insides.

  The Weasel stood, unsteady, waving a gun at the vicinity of her head.

  She cursed herself for not activating the lock on the office door. She had even set a reminder to do it. Your lack of focus is going to get you killed, she thought.

  “Grab your things like you were going to leave the office at the end of the day,” he said. The words flowed out in a garbled heap.

  “What?” Lacey asked. An automatic response. She touched her forehead where he had hit her with the door.

  “Get. Your. Shit. Close up so no one will wonder where you are.”

  An animal stink permeated the air. Sweat and stomach acid and bad breath. Lacey swallowed.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. She struggled to keep her tone even. Speak to him like an animal, a voice inside her head told her.

  “To finish a job. You’re the bait. Hurry it up. Now.” He was agitated, thumping his free hand against the side of his leg.

  “Okay. Okay. I can’t leave my phone in here; my boss will know something’s wrong.”

  She held her hands up and pointed toward Trip’s office. Her phone—and Detective Aucoin’s card—were on the bookshelf.

  “Fine. Just hurry the fuck up! Wait.” He held the gun up and approached. The stench was overpowering. “Need to make sure you don’t try anything.”

  The Weasel held the gun inches from the back of her head as she grabbed the phone and palmed the card.

  Lacey gripped the steering wheel harder, trying to stop her hands from shaking. The Weasel had forced her to drive wherever it was he intended.

  Maybe he’s smarter than he looks, she thought. Makes me drive, so I can’t use my phone.

  She took a deep breath and instantly regretted it. I know something’s wrong with me. I should be afraid for my life, but I’m more concerned with how I’m going to get the smell of this man out of my car.

  Something told her to stop talking to herself and start talking out loud. “Where are we going?” she asked. She had an idea of where.

  “It’s close. Just follow my directions.”

  She thought of faking some kind of car trouble, but they approached their destination before she could work out any reasonable scheme.

  He instructed her to parallel park next to an enormous pothole. Her phone was in the loose pocket of her linen jacket. If she could get three seconds out of the Weasel’s sight, she could dial Detective Aucoin. She was afraid she wouldn’t have time to explain everything if she dialed 9-1-1.

  He grabbed her arm, keeping the gun out of sight but jammed into her ribs. Her heart sank when she saw the wooden shingle on the building across the street: LaSalle Title.

  A clear and pleasant bell tinkled when the Weasel pushed Lacey through the front door. The reception desk was empty.

  Thank God, Lacey thought. She turned her head to the Weasel and was thinking of something to say to persuade him to leave, for them to leave together, when she heard a voice from the back of the office.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Nathan. He was already out of his office and in the hallway. “Sorry, our receptionist just stepped…”

  Nathan stood frozen in the hallway. Lacey read the look on his face, and it scared her more than being kidnapped at gunpoint.

  “Keep steppin’,” the Weasel said. His voice was low and surprisingly calm.

  Nathan walked out into the foyer.

  “You can let her go,” he said. “I’m coming.”

  “No!” the Weasel said, his foot tapping. “You’re both in this now. I have a job to finish.”

  “What job?” Nathan asked, his voice raised. He was stalling.

  “What the fuck do you mean, what job?” The Weasel gripped Lacey’s arm tighter and pointed the gun at Nathan. “The job you keep fucking up!”

  “C’mon, man, think about it. It’s broad daylight,” Nathan said.

  Beads of some kind of amphetamine-fueled sweat formed at the Weasel’s hairline.

  “There are neighbors all around here,” Nathan continued. “We can leave here together.”

  The Weasel looked like he was trying to think. The strain threatened to overwhelm him. A tremor formed in the hand holding the gun.

  A floorboard creaked at the back of the office. Nathan closed his eyes and sighed.

  “What the fuck was that?” the Weasel said. “Who is that?”

  Lawrence LaSalle had stepped out into the hallway. He saw, or maybe smelled, the Weasel, and bolted back into his office and closed the door. The sound of something heavy being pulled across the floor echoed through the building.

  The Weasel hadn’t factored in another potential witness in his addled brain. He bolted down the hallway, past Nathan. Nathan tried to get his hands on him, but he slid right through them, like a wily rodent escaping into the underbrush. The Weasel slammed the full force of his underweight body against LaSalle’s door. It budged an inch.

  Nathan grabbed him by the shoulders, and he swung around, gun still in his hand, now pointed squarely at Nathan’s head. Nathan held up his hands and backed off.

  “Who is that in there?” the Weasel said. His eyes were rings of black against a blood-splattered canvas.

  “It’s no one,” Nathan said. “He didn’t see you. It’s not important.”

  “Fuck that! I’m trying to cover my tracks, here, and finish the job.”

  He kept the gun trained on Nathan, and butted himself backward against the door. Each attempt brought the screech of metal against wood.

  Through the door, they could hear LaSalle talking to someone, his voice panicked. Nathan knew it wasn’t the police.

  The Weasel knew no such thing, and his fear fueled him.

  “What do you mean, the job’s been canceled?” LaSalle said. The desperation in his voice strengthened Nathan’s resolve.

  The Weasel turned his head, and Nathan looked at Lacey, still in the entry foyer. She was concentrating on her phone. He nodded vehemently toward the door. Now was her chance; the Weasel had his hands full.

  Lacey looked up at him. Still maneuvering her phone, she backed up and quietly stepped out the door. No one heard the bell over the commotion in the hallway.

  Outside his father-in-law’s door,
Nathan’s standoff with the Weasel was about to end. Inside, LaSalle wasn’t speaking anymore.

  The Weasel opened the barricaded door just enough to wedge his body through. Nathan followed. Lawrence LaSalle was sitting at his desk, both hands holding a gun, pointed at the intruders.

  “Fuck!” the Weasel exploded. He spun around, wielding his gun in a circle.

  “Where’s the girl? Fuck!”

  After two-and-a-half turns, Nathan bodychecked the Weasel, hoping that his equilibrium was off kilter. The Weasel went down, finger on the trigger.

  Nathan saw the discharge from the gun before he heard the retort. He lurched forward as he watched the next two seconds unfold in slow motion. The gun dropped to the floor. Nathan pinned the Weasel on his side, and the gun his father-in-law held fell from his grip.

  LaSalle looked down, bewildered. He held his palms to his stomach, then held them up to his face. They were a brilliant, slimy red.

  He looked at Nathan. Nathan kicked the Weasel’s gun behind the desk and released him.

  The Weasel scrambled through the door. Nathan went to his father-in-law. He felt a rush to his head when he saw the amount of blood.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” LaSalle said.

  Nathan picked up the handset on LaSalle’s desk and dialed 9-1-1. He heard a siren not far away.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “I’m calling for help right now.”

  The door to the office pushed open further, and Lacey came through, a wild abandon driving her. Two simultaneous feelings stopped her just inside. She steadied herself against the doorframe.

  First, relief. Nathan was standing, alive, apparently intact.

  Second, déjà vu. She had seen most of this before; the man at his desk, the office. Before, when she and Nathan had been together.

  “I heard the gunshot,” she said, her voice cracking.

  She sensed the man at the desk was losing consciousness. She choked her emotions, put them out of her way. She went to the man without thinking, a heat rising inside of her. The man did not move when she put her hands on him.

  He looked her in the eyes as he started to slip sideways. He was confused.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said to Lacey.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll try to help you.”

  Lacey pushed her sleeves up, frustrated. Nothing felt right. She didn’t know what to do. How had she known what to do the other times?

  Nathan was on the phone with 9-1-1, also frustrated. She looked up at him.

  “Nothing’s happening!”

  “We have a medical emergency,” Nathan shouted. “A man has been shot.”

  Lacey pulled one of her hands away from the injured man and held the back of it against her forehead. It was cold. There wasn’t even a bead of sweat along her hairline.

  “Nathan, it’s not working! Why isn’t it working?”

  LaSalle slumped over the side of his chair, eyes open, nonresponsive.

  Lacey put both hands on his bloody stomach, thinking at least she could apply pressure. He didn’t move, and it didn’t feel like a body. It felt like a lump of runny clay.

  She looked back at Nathan, a slight shake to her head. He put the phone down, grabbed her hands, and pulled her upright.

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” he said.

  A chorus of sirens grew louder, then stopped.

  33

  Lacey sat in a small room on a decaying sofa in the Second District police station on Magazine.

  Nathan had been put in handcuffs and taken ahead of her. She rode with Detective Aucoin, who’d set her aside and told her to sit tight. She saw Nathan from across a hallway being led to a room. She turned her head to avert his stare.

  She thought of the dead man, Nathan’s father-in-law. She was convinced that Nathan had told her the truth—that the gun had gone off while it had still been in the Weasel’s hands. But the only people who could say for sure were either dead, or in police custody.

  The room was closing in on Lacey. She got up from the sofa and peeked through the blinds of the room’s one window. It offered a view of the station’s interior. For some reason, Lacey thought of the officer on the lakefront, the day Fox had died. The kind woman with the bright eyes. She had brought Lacey back from the brink once before. Lacey looked for her now, hoping she was available to do it again.

  The door opened. Lacey looked up, expecting to see Detective Aucoin or some other police officer. Instead, there was a familiar shaved head and stocky form clothed in functional attire. She felt an instant of strange comfort at the sight of those perfunctory pockets.

  “Eli,” she said. No other words would come.

  “How are you, Lacey?” He took a chair opposite her sofa.

  “I’m not good,” she said. “Why—how—are you here?”

  “I’m here for you,” he said. “The how is inconsequential.”

  She stared at him.

  “We’re going to be working together,” he said. He pulled his phone from a pocket in his cargo shorts and set it on his oak-limb of a thigh.

  “We are?”

  “Yes.”

  Lacey’s mind flew in a thousand different directions.

  “I will be in San Luis Obispo, working on the same production as you,” he said after a pause.

  “Oh.” Her thoughts funneled to a different concern. “Do you know anything about what just happened?” she asked. “Do you think it’s going to keep me from being able to leave New Orleans?”

  “One of the things you’re going to learn,” he said, “is about being present. Leaving for San Luis Obispo is not the present. What is the present?”

  Lacey bristled at his tone and looked up at a stained ceiling tile. “A dank room, waiting to give a statement about a death I just witnessed?”

  “Better,” he said.

  “Glad you think so.”

  Eli glanced down at his phone.

  “There was an earthquake in Papua New Guinea,” he said. “There’s a tsunami warning for a good portion of Australia.”

  Lacey struggled to make sense of anything coming out of Eli’s mouth.

  “Oh,” she said. “That happened just now?”

  “Yes. The present.”

  “Um, okay. Do you know someone there?”

  He didn’t answer right away. His intense hawk eyes peered at her, his lazy right eye staring behind her. Doesn’t everyone know someone in Papua New Guinea? Lacey imagined him saying.

  “No,” he finally said.

  He glanced down at his phone again, picked it up, and scrolled through something.

  Guilt and misery sat like a fifty-pound weight on Lacey’s chest. Eli’s obtuse conversation didn’t help. She struggled to breathe.

  “Do you realize that not even Jesus could heal everyone?” he said.

  Lacey felt her throat close. “What?”

  “Considering he lived for thirty-three years—according to biblical lore—yet death and disease continued around him. It’s not as if the march of life ceased while he was on Earth.”

  Lacey placed her palm against her sternum and pressed. “Eli, what are you talking about?”

  “Lacey, when we first met, I told you to pay attention. Have you done this?”

  She felt a wave of electricity wash over her head. It made her nauseated. “Yes,” she answered, her voice a notch above a whisper. “Yes. And things have happened, and I don’t understand any of it.”

  “That’s a false statement. You’re beginning to understand it.” Eli gripped his phone and stood. He moved to the side of the sofa and braced one arm against the wall.

  Lacey didn’t turn. She stared at an abandoned coffee cup across the room.

  “Not everyone is meant to be healed,” he said to the side of her face. “Have you wondered whether you could have saved Fox if you had reached him sooner? Or been with him when he had the heart attack?”

  Lacey jerked her head to him
. “How do you know that? How do you know about Fox?”

  Eli was placid. His floating eye tracked off to the right. “I pay attention.”

  Lacey stopped herself from following the gaze of his eye. She was afraid she might see Fox’s ghost standing there.

  “I know I didn’t have this ability then,” Lacey said, calmer. “But if I did, could I? Do you know what I can do? Could I have saved Fox?”

  Eli took a deep breath. He had the expression of a PhD student trying to explain particle physics to a room full of second-graders.

  “Lacey, I can’t tell you that. I can’t see that way. But I can tell you this: some things, some threads, are meant to manifest. Your greatest challenge will be identifying those threads, and releasing those you were never meant to touch.”

  Lacey blew out a breath. It didn’t help. Her eyes filled.

  Is everything I’ve done so far wrong? she thought.

  “You misunderstand me,” Eli said. She whipped her head back to him.

  “Your power won’t work on those whose threads are complete. Whose ‘time has come,’ might be another way to phrase it,” he continued. “It will be hard for you to accept that.”

  “So the man today, the man who died,” she said, “there was nothing I could do about it?”

  “I wasn’t there, Lacey, I don’t know. But if you tried, and nothing happened, you should take it as an article of faith that you were never meant to have anything to do with his life.”

  A gurgle escaped Lacey’s throat. “An article of faith?” she asked.

  “Faith is just one of infinite variables at play here. It’s one I know you can relate to.”

  They both turned to the door. Words were being exchanged just outside, not loud enough to be discernible. Lacey recognized Detective Aucoin’s blustery cadence.

  Eli continued, unfazed. “Pay attention to this, Lacey: Faith is only one variable, and the one I know the least about. There are other elements involved—the actions and reactions of time, space, and the physical world—this is where my expertise lies.”