Middle of Nowhere

by Ridley Pearson

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  wood shingle and asphalt roof, her houseboat had a red enamel wood stove and a sea kayak tied up to the deck outside her living-room window. There were ten other such homes on her pier, five to a side, a half dozen piers running up the lake’s shoreline, little henhouses of mailboxes out on the road where the mailman knew each resident by name. Community still meant something here. The hippie feel of the past twenty years was giving way to Microsoft geeks who looked stupid smoking their cigars while sucking down microbrewery beer on warm summer nights, with the city’s killer skyline forming a stage set in the near distance. An animosity existed surrounding the influx of the chip set, despite the lift it had given the economy. But the quaintness of her houseboat remained: small spaces, carefully decorated so as not to clutter, a faint trace of cinnamon incense, the sound of lake water lapping at the sides. If she ever sold, she’d be able to retire.

  “Listen, I appreciate the gesture,” he said, “but we can’t do this.”

  “Sure we can,” she replied, retrieving a pillow from her loft bedroom. Boldt lacked the strength to fight. He wanted sleep.

  “I need sleep,” he complained.

  “You need a bath and some tea. The sleep will come of its own accord.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I’m always right,” she said. “You just don’t always choose to listen.”

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  M

  He awoke to the smell of tea and bagels, Daphne at work in the houseboat’s small galley. She wore Lycra that fit her like plastic wrap. It was better than a sunrise, which he’d missed by an hour or more. He didn’t want to dress himself in the soiled and bloodied clothing from his beating. Anticipating this, she had left him an Owen Adler navy blue polo shirt, complete with the alligator, a pair of underwear and a pair of athletic socks. He didn’t ask any questions. Their engagement had failed twice—enough said. He showered, barely moving beneath the hot, hot water. There seemed to be pieces of him missing, others that shouted at full volume. He only heard things from half his head.

  When he reached the galley, feeling refreshed but bludgeoned, he found a buttered bagel next to a jar of raspberry jam and a note that showed a stick figure running. He ate outside, alone with a view of the morning activity on the lake—a seaplane landing in a gray-green knife stroke on the water’s still surface; ducks flying in unison and veering north over Gasworks Park with its eerie skyline of pipes, reminding him of a refinery. He felt incredibly grateful to be alive. Odd that he had that dog to thank, that dog he had hated so much. He took a bite of the bagel. It hurt his ear to chew. He searched the fridge for applesauce or yogurt—

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  something that didn’t require any chewing. He found something with “live culture.” The thought disturbed him. The city ran wild with crime while his coworkers willingly stayed home awaiting policy change. He couldn’t see the sense in that, just as he couldn’t understand why a trio of muggers would start working on him with a baseball bat. Unless they had found his badge and suddenly panicked or filled with hate over his being a cop. Hate corrupted even the best-intentioned mugger. Hate corrupted everything in its path. And he felt filled with it all of a sudden, and not a verifiable target in sight.

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  “Where’s Maria Sanchez gone?” Boldt asked the attending nurse at the nurses’ station. He’d arrived to find her room unguarded and empty. He felt as if the floor had fallen out from under him. The nurse checked the computer, and it troubled him that she wouldn’t know this off the top of her head.

  “She was transferred out of ICU to the third floor. Room three seventeen.”

  “Then she’s better?” Boldt said hopefully, recalling that on his last visit she had definitely slipped backward.

  “The move would indicate she’s stable,” the nurse corrected.

  “Any movement . . . other than the eyes?”

  “You’ll have to discuss that with her physician,” she advised.

  Boldt rode the elevator, as he had coming in. For a man who normally took the stairs, this felt wrong, even privately humiliating. He shuffled down the hospital corridor, painfully aware that he probably looked too much like an old man. His father had raised him to believe there was no way around pain, only through it. Right now he was even aspirin free. He pushed his limbs 108

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  to move, his ribs to tolerate breathing, his head to survive the throbbing. He’d told Liz that he’d been mugged, his money and badge wallet stolen, that the ugly dog next door had probably saved his life. He’d been roughed up before in service to the city; thankfully Liz didn’t berate him for electing to keep working. She wanted to see him. He promised to make that happen. She didn’t know that the muggers had used the term “K-9” and that one of the three had intended to do a Mark McGwire on his head. No one knew—not even Daphne, exactly—that a part of him suspected the attack was a Krishevski telegram, like those strippers that knock on your front door and flash you on your fiftieth birthday. A Krishevski invitation to get a bad case of the flu. He needed a second opinion. M

  He checked in with the new security man outside the door and confirmed Sanchez’s guest list, discovering that LaMoia visited at least once a day, usually well past the posted visiting hours, typically for long stints. He could imagine the man in the dark of the room, alone in a chair as Sanchez slept. Others would find this image of LaMoia inconceivable, but Boldt knew the man as few others did. The blinds were pulled, casting the overly sterile room in a haze. The room’s television was tuned to a public access channel that ran ads while nasal-sounding classical music played from a small speaker strapped to her bed. He recalled the head-M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E 109

  phones in her bedroom, and thought he should bring her something better: Hamilton, Peterson, Monk or Gatemouth Brown.

  “Stable,” he recalled the nurse explaining. Of course she was stable, he thought—they had her head bolted inside a contraption that looked like it was part of a medieval torture chamber. She couldn’t move. Just to look at her brought a queasiness to his stomach. He recalled a slightly younger Maria Sanchez standing at his front door, there to baby-sit the kids for the first time—alive, bright-eyed, but cautious and uncomfortable at the same time. Not wanting to mix the personal with the professional, but unable to resist the idea of being with kids. He suspected that was why she hadn’t hung around for too long—their shields had gotten in the way. It certainly hadn’t been out of any lack of rapport with the kids—they had loved her from the start. And that won any parent’s heart, including his. Boldt had liked her right away. Had talked her up around the shop from that night forward. Had tried to open some doors for her, the way he once had for Gaynes. Maybe he’d had something to do with her moving quickly to plainclothes, maybe not. It no longer mattered. He felt anger over her present condition. He seethed.

  Those eyes flashed out of the darkness. Open. Awake.

  “Hey,” Boldt said, caught a little off guard to be in the room alone with her.

  She blinked.

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  “More questions. You up to it?” He half hoped she might refuse him. He felt at odds with himself over using this woman as a witness. Eyes-right.

  “Maybe tough questions,” he cautioned. She shut her eyes and reopened them. Eyes-right.

  “Okay.”

  Boldt approached the overhead television and turned down its volume. Sanchez locked her eyes in a stare that reached past him. Not eyes-right, a “yes,” nor eyes-left, a “no.” Not a look that penetrated through him—thankfully. Her stare finally turned him around to face a chair. He pulled the chair up to the bed, now nearly eye-to-eye with her. She was tired of being looked down upon.

  “Better?” he inquired.

  Eyes-right. “Yes.”

&
nbsp; But it struck him as more than an answer, for her eyes were soft and caring, filled with emotion he’d not seen since the first of their visits together. He remembered those same eyes from when they had first fallen upon his own children—they seemed to hold something very different now.

  “Any better? Are you feeling any better?” No answer. She just stared. He wondered if she could feel any physical sensations at all. He agonized, right along with her.

  “If I don’t look right, if I don’t sound myself, it’s because I’m not. I was mugged last night.”

  Her eyes seemed to focus and harden, but her face didn’t change—it couldn’t. That struck Boldt as the M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  worst prison of all. “And what I’m thinking, Maria—

  Officer Sanchez,” he corrected, “is not something a peace officer wants to think. Not ever. So my apologies up front, but I need to ask you this, because we share these assaults now, you and I. Mine was headed badly—

  very badly indeed—until a neighbor’s dog broke it off. So I’m counting myself on the lucky side.” Boldt continued, “There are two possibilities. One is that I was mugged, although I’ve got to tell you: we haven’t seen a mugging in my neighborhood in seventeen years. The recent muggings we’ve been seeing in the other parts of the city—and we’ve been seeing a lot of them in the past week—have been downtown in parking lots and garages, at sports events, movie theaters, convenience stores—out in public. They haven’t been in people’s backyards. We had a burglary where a woman was knocked downstairs, but that hardly qualifies.”

  “The other possibility,” Boldt continued, “is what you might call involuntary Flu. Certain people might have thought that I was acting a little too healthy and disrupting the current efforts of some of our brothers in blue. They sent me a brick through my window as a warning and I ignored it. I stayed on the job and got assaulted in my own yard. And now I can’t hear very well out of my right ear and it hurts to breathe. So what I’m wondering. . . .Before your assault, had you received a brick or any kind of warning, anything at all, suggesting you cool it for a while?”

  “No,” she replied, with her eyes.

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  just had to ask. “Maria, did you know the person who did this to you?”

  “No,” she signaled.

  “If you were afraid at first, afraid because you suspected a fellow officer, afraid of Matthews and me because we carry badges and you didn’t know who to trust, I’m hoping now—now that you know what happened to me—that now you can trust me. So my first question is whether you believe you were attacked by someone who came to rob you, by a burglar.”

  She stared over at Boldt for a long time, her head gripped mechanically. Her eyelids fluttered shut and opened. “Yes,” came her answer. But her eyelids closed again and reopened with eyes-left. “No.”

  “You’re unsure. Is that right?”

  “Yes.” Her efforts were labored.

  He scribbled a question mark in his notebook alongside the question.

  “You were working a burglary before the assault. Brooks-Gilman over in Queen Anne. It was assigned after the sickout. Do you remember the case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think your assault had anything to do with that burglary investigation?”

  “Yes. No.” Maybe.

  “So let me ask you: Do you think your assault had anything to do with your work?”

  She closed her eyes and held them shut.

  “Maria?” Boldt’s heart beat faster. He repeated her name. He said, “Is it possible that your assault had M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  something—anything—to do with, or was a result of, your police work?”

  “Yes.” Then, “No.” Maybe.

  “You’re doing well, Maria,” Boldt said. “Can we keep going?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then.” He glanced through the pages of his notebook and moved a question forward onto his list. A part of him didn’t want to keep going. A part of him just wanted to leave this poor woman alone, to deal with, what for her, were more urgent problems. Why, he wondered, did he feel so pressed to squeeze something out of her right now?

  “Is it safe to say that you believe your assault may have been at the hands of a fellow officer?”

  Her eyelids fluttered shut. When they reopened, her eyes were locked onto Boldt’s, and he began to feel all watery and weak inside. She wasn’t going to commit to that, not yet. She was still as terrified of the idea as he was. Cop on cop. Strike or not, it seemed inconceivable. She wasn’t looking directly at him anymore. Now her eyes were fixed below the horizon of his gaze. Something else. Lower. He looked around the room for what held her attention. Seeing nothing that made sense, he wondered about her stare. Did she just want him to stop? Had he and his questions pushed her further toward frustration? Was he just giving her another problem to handle?

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  ing you so hard.” He continued to try to figure out what it was—if it was anything—that had caught and held her attention, but he could see that her eyes had become more frantic, jumping to make contact with him and then dropping back down, locked onto whatever it was. She’s telling me something, he realized, feeling a tension in the air, still searching. The floor. . . . The wall behind him. . . . His own right hand. . . . His keys. . . . Liz had pointed out that he had a nervous habit of constantly fiddling with his keys. He barely even realized he was doing it. It was just something to do. Motion. Like a smoker rolling the ash of a burning cigarette.

  He drew the keys out of the pocket and Maria’s eyelids fluttered shut and opened, eyes-right. “Yes!”

  those eyes shouted, now focused onto him with a burning intensity.

  “What about the keys?” he asked with growing excitement. She didn’t answer, her gaze still fixed on the keys and key chain.

  “My keys?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Now her eyes seared him. His own eyes stung.

  “Your keys?”

  “Yes.”

  The mechanical efforts of the respirator moved in time with her chest as it rose and fell with ungainly symmetry, its exhale a long, peaceful, artificial sigh.

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  to make sense of it. He held his up, until they rang like tiny chimes and sparkled in the glare of the tube lights. Again, her eyes lit up with anticipation and even fright. She didn’t need to tell him anything more—keys were somehow significant in what she was trying to communicate. He asked her directly, “Are the keys important?”

  “Yes.”

  “You left your garage. You were headed to the back door, and you had your keys.”

  She closed her eyes—he thought in frustration—

  and held them shut. When she reopened them, they bore into him.

  “I’m off track,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she answered, the effort draining her. He sensed her fatigue, which she was fighting desperately. They both knew he was losing her. She closed her eyes to rest, this time for longer.

  “Your keys,” he repeated, feeling he was working her too hard.

  She struggled to open her eyes. “Yes.”

  “The robberies? The burglar made copies of the keys? Something like that?” And then he thought he knew where she was headed. “Whoever did this was in- side your house. He’d gotten your keys somehow—and he was inside waiting for you?”

  “No.” Her frustration seethed from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. The great detective can’t string three useful questions together. He felt impotent.

  “Damn it all!” he muttered.

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br />   Her eyes fluttered, sagged shut, and failed to reopen.

  “Maria? Maria?” he gently tested. It took him a moment to realize the interview was over. Maria had fallen asleep.

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  “I’m not sure I see the point of this,” Daphne said, hurrying down the hallway toward Property. Boldt had rousted her out of her office.

  “The point is,” Boldt said, pain ringing through him, “her keys are important. How, I’m not sure. You’re lead on her case, which means I don’t get her keys out of Property without your signature.”

  She held a door for him. He said, “I’m beginning to believe my assault and hers are linked: that’s what led me back to her hospital room. Now this—these keys, I’ve got to face facts: People don’t get mugged in my neighborhood, Daffy.”

  “I know that. So if they weren’t muggers, who were they?”

  “Maybe we don’t want to find out.”

  “The cop in me doesn’t want to believe any cop would do this to another cop. Not ever.”

  “You think I like it?” Boldt asked.

  “The psychologist—she’s a different story,” she went on. “There’s resentment here. Frustration on the part of the Fluers. Venting those pent-up emotions is a natural progression, a natural expression.”

  “But the sickout is working.”

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  She agreed. “To us it is, because we’re worn out by it. But to those cops now on the outside?” she questioned. “To them—and to the public too—we’re wounded, we’re down on one knee, but we’re not on the mat. We’re not raising white flags. That could be the source of a lot of anger.”

  “Violence?” he asked her.

  She shrugged and reluctantly nodded. “I’d rate it as a possibility,” she confirmed. “But for the record: I’d put Maria’s assault down as a burglary gone bad; your little skirmish, I’m not so sure.”

  “So we listen to the victim and we chase the evidence,” he reminded her. Boldt’s law of investigation. In the Sanchez case, chasing the evidence now meant a certain set of keys.