Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  He sipped his lukewarm, paper-bag-tasting coffee and watched the last of the sun sliding behind the roof-and-treetops on the western cityscape. Going without sleep had become just part of the job over the years, but that didn’t mean he didn’t get tired. His eyes burned and his body felt like he had suddenly found himself on a planet with heavier gravity, every step a slog. Since last night his only fuel had been crappy coffee and a slice of cold pizza, but he had passed beyond hunger by now.

  A rookie in uniform tramped through the trees to the line of cars where Keenan rested. The detective tried to remember his name.

  “Taking five?” Keenan asked.

  “Maybe ten,” the rookie replied. He seemed troubled and distracted, shifting around as he poured himself a Styrofoam cup of crappy coffee from the little snack table some volunteers had set up. “What about you?”

  “My brain is fried,” Detective Keenan said. “Tired as I am, I might see Bigfoot out there.”

  Instead of the chuckle Keenan had expected, the rookie gave him a dark look. “You’re giving up on the kid?”

  The detective bristled. “Who said anything about giving up?”

  “A lot of the searchers are saying there’s no way he could’ve survived in the storm last night, or he drowned, or whatever,” the rookie said.

  Something about his tone made Keenan take a closer look at the man. His name tag identified him as Marco Torres. Short, muscular, black hair buzzed close to his scalp, he’d been with the Coventry PD just a few months, but apparently he thought that gave him the experience to needle a detective.

  “It’s weird,” Keenan said. “You say that, but it doesn’t sound like you believe it.”

  What it really sounded like, to Keenan, was a test of faith, like Torres had thrown out that comment to see if the detective would agree with him, like a girlfriend commenting on the beauty of another woman just to gauge her guy’s response.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” Officer Torres said, turning away as he sipped his coffee. “I just hope we find him soon, or that he’s got somewhere warm to spend the night. Nobody should have to die alone, out in the cold, especially not a child.”

  Though he agreed, something about the guy’s tone still troubled Keenan,. He studied the rookie from behind, trying to decipher what it was about Torres that set him on edge.

  The sound of tires on gravel made Detective Keenan turn. In the gloaming of the day, light fading, a familiar, unmarked Crown Victoria pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. The engine shut off, ticking as it cooled. Keenan didn’t have to be able to see through the tinted windows to know who was behind the wheel and his belief was confirmed when the door popped open and Lieutenant Duquette emerged. The fiftyish man had a rounded belly, a walrus mustache, and a balding pate, and he wore round little glasses that reminded Keenan of the aging actor in the diabetes commercials that were always on TV.

  “Torres,” Keenan said.

  The rookie turned around just as the lieutenant approached them, hitching up his belt. Lieutenant Duquette glanced at Torres but then turned his entire attention on Keenan.

  “You look like shit, Joe.”

  Keenan nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m not kidding. You’ve been out here too long. It’s taking a toll. You should rein things in a little, go home and get some sleep.”

  “I don’t look much better than this on my best day, Lieutenant.”

  “I’m not asking, Detective.”

  Keenan frowned. He was aware of Officer Torres watching them but this seemed very personal and he had no idea why that might be.

  “What’s changed?” he asked.

  The lieutenant arched an eyebrow. “I don’t take your meaning.”

  “You tried to get me to pull back on the search this morning and here you are, in person. Sorry, but I just want to know if there’s been a break in the case I don’t know about, because it seems to me we’ve still got a missing kid.”

  Lieutenant Duquette shot a glance at Torres. “Give us some breathing room, would you, Officer? But don’t go far. I’ll need you momentarily.”

  “Yes, sir,” Torres replied, taking his coffee off in the direction of the lieutenant’s Crown Vic because his other choices were toward the river or toward the media.

  When Torres had excused himself, the lieutenant took a step closer to Keenan, invading the detective’s personal space with his belly and his ’stache and his bad breath.

  “The Stroud boy must be in the river,” Lieutenant Duquette said. “We’ve gone house to house on all of the adjacent streets, combed the woods, checked the hospitals, put out a call for help through the media … it doesn’t take a detective to realize there’s only one logical explanation.”

  The last bit had been meant as a jab, Keenan knew. He felt it, but didn’t let it show.

  “The divers found nothing,” he said, dumping out the rest of his paper-bag coffee. “There are other possibilities. And there is zero evidence that the kid went into the water. None. Maybe you don’t believe he’s still out there, but I do. Zachary Stroud was injured in the accident and wandered off. Maybe he hit his head and he’s confused. Maybe he asked the wrong person for help and got abducted. Hell, maybe the crash was no accident and the whole thing was set up to snatch the kid.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “But not impossible,” Keenan insisted, his irritation burning some of the exhaustion out of him.

  The lieutenant sighed and it was like the sound of a whale venting from its blowhole. Stroking his mustache, Duquette looked around and then turned back to Keenan, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial tone.

  “The search isn’t coming up with anything, Joe. We’ve done all we can on the ground. The divers will be back in the water tomorrow but we’re cutting back on the man power out here. We’ll keep leading searches for a couple of days on a smaller scale, but if we still haven’t found him by then, the river gets the blame.”

  Detective Keenan knew better than to argue any further. The decision had been made, and as much as he hated it, he understood.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ve got two more days.”

  The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed and he tapped one finger to Keenan’s chest.

  “Go home, Joe. You’re no good to this kid if you can’t even think straight,” the lieutenant said. He turned and called to Torres to return to them. “I’m going to make sure you get home in one piece. I don’t want you behind the wheel on so little sleep.”

  “I’m fine, Lieutenant—”

  “No, Joe. You’re not. You’re going home. Unless you want to tell me what makes you so damned special?”

  “What?” Keenan said, unable to hide his anger. “When have I ever—”

  “Do you honestly think all of these other police officers and the volunteers—some of them firefighters and EMTs and veterans—do you really think they need you here to tell them what to do?”

  Detective Keenan faltered, exhaling, feeling all the anger bleeding out of him. Much as he hated to admit it, the lieutenant had him.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  Lieutenant Duquette nodded, then cleared his throat as he turned back to the rookie.

  “Officer Torres, I’m worried about Detective Keenan falling asleep behind the wheel. Run him home, would you?”

  Minutes later, Keenan sat in the passenger side of his own car as Torres chauffeured him. Another officer would swing by and pick Torres up afterward. The nighttime rushed in around them, somehow managing to make the car’s headlights seem altogether brighter.

  They rode in silence for a while before Torres piped up.

  “Ugly storm coming,” the rookie said. “Weatherman says it could be as bad as the Big One.”

  “So I hear.”

  Silence, save for the purr of the engine and the tires on pavement and the occasional burst of police-radio static.

  “I don’t know how you kept it together after that night,” Torres said, his
voice flat, carefully neutral.

  Detective Keenan turned slowly to look at him.

  Torres flexed his fingers on the steering wheel and shifted in his seat, feeling Keenan’s displeasure.

  “I’m just saying,” Torres went on. “It had to be traumatic for you, those two boys being electrocuted, one of them dying right in front of you. Then the father just vanishes. It has to change you, something like that. I only wondered if it made you care more in a case like this, or care less, and just work harder so you don’t have to add to the guilt you’re already—”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Keenan shouted.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I just heard about—”

  “You’ve been with the department what, six months?”

  Expressionless, Torres gripped the wheel and kept his eyes forward. “Something like that.”

  “And you think you’ve earned the right to ask me questions like that?” Keenan said, fuming, slowing his breathing, trying to get a handle on his anger. His pain. “You don’t know me, Torres. Don’t ever talk to me about the storm again, or about anything I might think or feel. Just do your job and I’ll try my best to keep you from being shot in the back of the head by some meth-head because you’ve got no common sense and you’ve alienated your fellow officers.”

  “Detective, I—”

  “Shut it.”

  Torres complied, but for only a minute or two. When he took the turn onto Detective Keenan’s street, just blocks from his house, the rookie made the mistake of speaking up again.

  “You’re not going to give up, are you?” Torres asked hopefully, as if he’d never asked a more important question in his life. “Just tell me that much.”

  “Hell no,” Keenan said, still fuming. He shook his head in frustration.

  The tires skidded in sand as Torres braked in front of Keenan’s house. Detective Keenan popped the door and got out, sticking out his hands for the keys, which Torres promptly turned over.

  “The higher-ups want us to move on already, but I intend to find that kid,” Keenan said. “Alive.”

  Torres slammed the door to Keenan’s car, then leaned on the roof. For all his deference before, his expression had turned defiant.

  “I only ask because of the bang-up job you’re doing so far,” Torres said, biting off the words. “Your track record of bringing missing kids home alive kind of sucks.”

  Keenan snapped, all rational thought driven out of him. He circled around the front of the car, keys gripped in his right fist, anger boiling in his head and heart.

  “You son of a bitch,” he sneered. “How fucking dare you?”

  He issued no threats. Threats were for people who still saw a path other than violence. In his mind’s eye he could see Torres’s nose broken and bleeding, jaw swollen and teeth missing.

  Torres made no apology. Instead, he scowled and stood there waiting, his own hands curled into fists. Younger and probably faster, the rookie looked formidable. Keenan faked a punch, grabbed his wrist when he tried to block, then head-butted the prick with enough force to make his head ring.

  The rookie reeled away from him, staggered, and went down on one knee. Keenan watched Torres’s gun. He didn’t know the guy, had no idea how far he’d go. Keenan leaned in toward him, still flexing his hands, wanting to do more damage.

  “You don’t know a damn thing about that night.”

  Ready for a fight, knowing the disciplinary action he would face and not caring, Keenan braced himself. But when Torres looked up at him, Keenan saw the one thing for which he wasn’t prepared. The last thing he would have expected.

  Tears.

  “You might be surprised,” Torres said through gritted teeth.

  Keenan took a step back. Before he could figure out how to react, he heard a vehicle approaching and looked up to see a patrol car rolling down the street toward them.

  Torres stood, quickly wiping at his eyes, and it was as if the tears had never been there at all.

  “What do you mean by that?” Keenan asked, as the cruiser pulled to a stop.

  Torres opened the passenger door, turning back to face Keenan.

  “Sorry, Detective,” the rookie said. “My ride’s here.”

  He slumped into the seat and slammed the door. Keenan stood and watched the car pull away, his skull still ringing, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Everyone in Coventry started acting hinky when a big storm was on the way and the one due Wednesday was a monster. How else could he explain the way Torres had talked to him and the violence of his own reprisal? He’d never been a brawler, even when somebody pushed his buttons the way Torres had.

  Maybe Torres had lost someone he loved in what they called the Big One. The killer storm, he thought. The upside was that now he knew there was at least one person as convinced as he was that Zachary Stroud could be found.

  If the kid was out there, even if someone had snatched him up, Detective Keenan would find him.

  Before the next storm rolled in.

  Ella pulled into the driveway and killed the engine quickly, dousing the headlights, surprised to find her heart racing. She smiled to herself in the darkness inside her car, a strange excitement building. It seemed a pitiful thing that this many years into her marriage she ought to feel the sort of uncertainty that gripped her, the exhilaration that came with a moment of daring, a breathtaking venture out on a narrow limb.

  Maybe that’s what’s wrong with us, she thought. Not enough time spent out on a limb. She and TJ had become expert at hiding their emotions instead of laying them bare, and Ella knew that was wrong. Love meant risking your heart, and she had spent too much time over the past few years swathing hers in layers of dissatisfaction and indifference that had more to do with herself than with her husband.

  Ella stepped out of the car and closed the door softly, pressing the button on her key fob to lock it. A wave of reluctance swept over her—what if she made a fool of herself? Her face burned at the mere thought of it. After all the arguments and the nights they’d spent with their backs to each other in their marriage bed—the space between them taking on a weight of its own and growing heavier by the week—the wrong word or the wrong glance could end it. The past day or so, she had felt the ice beginning to thaw between them, but she knew it was a tenuous thing. One more ugly moment might kill the life they’d made together.

  She took a deep breath, then went and unlocked the door. Slipping quietly inside, she paused in the foyer and breathed in the scent of something delicious in the oven. With a curious frown she went through the sitting room and stood in the open kitchen doorway, watching her husband stirring something in a small pot on the stove. Scruffy as ever, he wore a thick green cotton sweater, threadbare blue jeans, and socks with no shoes. In that moment it felt as if ten years had been erased from the calendar and they existed in a simpler time. Nostalgia stabbed her in the heart.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice cracking.

  TJ spun around, startled, and put a hand to his chest. “Jeez!” he said. “What are you trying to do, give me a heart attack?”

  She smiled. “What are you cooking?”

  “That phyllo-wrapped chicken thing with the scallions and the red-pepper sauce. It won’t be ready for a while, though. I didn’t…”

  “Didn’t expect me for at least a couple of hours,” she said. “Were you making this just for yourself?”

  His brow knitted. “Of course not. You haven’t been eating at the restaurant lately and I figured when you came home, you might…” He shook his head. “You know what? Never mind.”

  Ella sighed. “I didn’t mean it like that, sweetie. I swear to God. I just thought maybe somebody had called and tipped you off that I was coming home early.”

  He looked like he might want to continue being angry, to fuel the argument, but instead he turned his back to her and stirred his sauce.

  “What brings you home so early anyway?”

  Heart pounding, she
realized her palms were a little damp and chuckled softly at herself. Fortunately, TJ didn’t hear—the last thing they needed was for him to think she’d been laughing at him.

  She crossed the kitchen and stepped up behind him, hands resting tentatively on his hips before she slid them around to his belly, embracing him and laying her cheek against his back.

  “Us,” she said.

  TJ stiffened but she did not back away, just held on to him and held her breath. After a moment he began to turn and she had to release him so that he could face her.

  “What’s going on, Ella?” he asked, studying her carefully.

  “I left early. Gary’s closing for me. I just…” She dropped her gaze. “I wanted to come home.”

  She hated how fragile she sounded, hated the way she had just exposed herself to him. She knew how easy it was to be injured in a vulnerable moment; she had done it to him often enough.

  TJ said nothing. Long seconds passed until at last she lifted her eyes and found him staring at her with a sadness so profound that it seemed to open a chasm in the floor beneath her.

  “Should I not have come?” she asked, thinking about love and risk again, but not favorably this time. She spun away. “Jesus, should I go back?”

  Tears came to her eyes and she angrily swiped at them. They weren’t born of sadness or even embarrassment, but surrender.

  TJ touched her on the arm. “Honey, listen—”

  She pulled away. “No, it’s okay. I know problems don’t vanish just because we pretend they’re gone. I just thought—”

  “Ella.”

  He spoke her name with a quiet fragility of his own that froze her in place and made her forget whatever words she had intended to speak next.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” he said in that same voice. She did not turn to face him, afraid that the walls between them that had somehow fallen might reappear. “I’m always happy to see you, but I’m much happier when you want to see me. I want to have dinner together, have a glass of wine, talk about how bad business was today. I want desperately to pretend our problems are gone and hope they’ll vanish if we wish hard enough.”