The Depth of Darkness

by L. T. Ryan

  I drank my coffee black while scarfing down two eggs fried in butter to the point where the yolk was intact but no longer runny. A bit of salt added all the flavor I needed. The doorbell rang as my laptop hung on that stupid start up screen. Five-year-old piece of crap. I thought about replacing it with one of those new laptops and giving this one to Ella. Maybe someday. Roof repairs and all were still hanging in the balance.

  “Hi Mom,” I said as I opened the door.

  She had on her blue robe, cinched tight at the waist. I presumed the plastic bag in her hand contained the clothes she intended to wear later that day. She yawned and stepped inside. “Coffee?”

  “Already poured you a cup.”

  “Two sugars and milk?”

  “Two packs of Splenda and half-n-half.”

  “I don’t like that stuff.” She pulled her graying hair back in a ponytail as she walked past me. She smelled of smoke.

  “When did you start smoking again?” I asked.

  She waved me off. “Get off my case.”

  “Someone has to be on it, or you’ll be digging an early grave.”

  She went to the kitchen and sat at the island. I’d set a plate of eggs on it next to her coffee. She held the mug up to her face, then took a sip.

  “Well?” I said.

  “It’ll do.”

  There, I had my mother’s approval and could now go about my day.

  “Is school closed?” she asked.

  “Don’t think so. Let me check.” My laptop was waiting and ready. The school’s website said that school was on. This pleased my mother.

  “Where are you off to?” she asked as I headed toward the door.

  “Hospital.”

  She got a funny look on her face. “Why?”

  “To see Sam.”

  Her expression changed to worry. “Oh, he’s not hurt is he?”

  I shook my head and offered her a slight smile. “Nah, someone else.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “I hope not, Momma.”

  I stepped onto the front porch, stopped to slide the sofa back to its regular place, and picked up the toys and magazines that the circling winds from the day before had strewn about. At that moment I realized that my car was still parked at the Millers’s. I pushed open the door and called for Mom.

  “I need to borrow your car.”

  “No way. I’ve seen cop movies. It’ll come back demolished.”

  “Just for a few hours, Mom. I’ll get Sam to follow me back as soon as we leave the hospital.”

  She shook her head and tossed her keys to me. “Someday you’ll grow up.”

  I ignored the shot and closed the door behind me. Her car was old, but kept up. When I sat down inside of it, it smelled like I was deep within a pine forest. The radio was tuned to the local soul station. Not an easy station to get the dial to pick up as I recalled. I wasn’t in the mood to shake my money maker, so I turned the volume down and drove to the hospital in relative silence. No getting rid of the road noise, though. I rolled the windows down. The wind rush created a sort of white noise that drowned out my thoughts.

  The roads were empty at six a.m. Perhaps parents slept in a little later today, hoping that school would be closed. That would give them a welcome excuse to stay home. Little Billy and Annie can’t be home alone. Not with all the crazies out in the world.

  If they only knew.

  Fifteen minutes after pulling out of my driveway, I found a parking spot at the hospital. I called Sam on my cell and met him at the entrance. We showed our badges at every desk along the way. No one bothered to ask questions, they just said, “Mornin’ officers,” and, “Go right ahead officers.” That’s a right good start to a cop’s day. Better than bullets whizzing by. And water tower ledges.

  I recognized Roy’s room by the empty chair positioned outside the door. That’s where our guy would have been last night. Question was, had he been there when Roy escaped? I peeked through the open doorway and saw Huff standing there, looking out the window.

  “Huff?” I said, stopping inside.

  “Come on in, guys.” He didn’t look back at us. There wasn’t much of a view that I could see, so I had no idea what he was entranced by.

  We stood there a minute or two before Huff finally turned around. He placed his hands on his expanding waist. He hadn’t dressed for the occasion. He wore dark blue sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt with the logo of that rival team just up I-95. He hadn’t shaved all weekend. I bet the hair on his head would have been a mess if he had any.

  “What’d our guy say, Huff?” Sam asked.

  “Said he sat in that chair outside the door all night. He got here at eleven, pulled double duty with Jennings till twelve, then took over. He slept a good six or seven hours he claims, not bothering to watch a single game all day.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “Ramirez,” Huff said. “Know him?”

  I didn’t know any of the new guys these days. “Nah.”

  “Baby-faced kid two months out of the academy. Got a baby on the way, and he wanted the overtime. Didn’t react too well to being placed on admin leave.”

  “Imagine so,” I said. “You believe him?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe. Hospital has security footage, and we’re in the process of procuring that. But most important to me is what the hell happened to Roy Miller.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Huff turned back to the window. He grabbed it and tugged. It slid open with a tiny squeak. “Hear that?”

  “The squeak? Yeah.”

  Huff spun around and nodded. He hiked his thumb over his shoulder a couple times. “Ramirez says he recalled hearing that a half-dozen times or so. When he checked, Roy was sound asleep.”

  “He attribute it to a mouse or something?” Sam asked.

  Huff shrugged.

  “And then he stopped checking,” I said.

  “Yup,” Huff said.

  “How long did he wait to look?”

  “He says right away. Until he stopped.”

  “What’s outside that window?” Sam asked.

  “Have a look,” Huff replied.

  So Sam and I crossed the room and Huff stepped out of our way. I opened the window wide enough for both of us to stick our heads out. Though we were three floors up, a fire escape was bolted to the building. Roy wouldn’t have even had to drop to reach it. All he would have had to do was stick one leg out, then the other, and he’d have been on it.

  “Someone was out here,” Sam said, pointing at the painted black metal platform.

  I nodded. “They opened and closed the window to see how Ramirez would react.”

  Sam turned around and shook his head, pointing past the open doorway. “Well, look at that.”

  Huff and I followed his gaze and his finger. Across the hall was a wall of tempered glass. The kind that gives off a nice reflection.

  I said, “Whoever was out there could see Ramirez’s reaction.”

  Sam took three long steps, placing him near the doorway. He turned and said, “And look, you can’t see out the window from here.”

  “So whoever was out there waited until Ramirez got complacent, and then left the window open.”

  “And Roy Miller climbed out to freedom.”

  “Huff, did anyone try to come by and see Roy at all yesterday?” I asked.

  “We’ll find out,” Huff replied.

  “Come on, Sam,” I said. “I need to drop my Momma’s car off at my house.”

  Chapter 8

  Lil’ Debby Walker hated her nickname. She didn’t mind it so much when she was five, but now that she was nine, she resented the H E double hockey sticks out of it. She wasn’t a darn pastry. Speaking of pastries, the Cheese Wagon came to a stop ten feet in front of her. Since Billy moved away, she was the only one at the bus stop in the morning. Katy rode the bus home, but her mom took her to school.

  The bus driver looked over at her and nodded. She checked the stre
et both ways before crossing to the other side. Good habits ingrained deep. She had lots of them. Her mother told her she was neurotic, whatever that meant. Her brother teased her that she was something called oh sea dee. Gibberish. To her ears, at least.

  So Debby looked left, then right, then left again. She tapped the fingers of her left hand to her thumb twice each. She counted her steps from the curb to the bus. On the seventh step, she stopped and looked down to see where her feet were. If not even with the bus’s front left tire, she’d have to start over again. The bus driver didn’t like it when she did that, but he’s not the one who’d have to live the consequences of her getting this wrong, so she’d start over. The fate of the world could be at stake.

  Lil’ Debby Walker thought so, at least.

  Today her feet lined up perfectly. A smile beamed on her face as she rounded the front of the bus and stopped in front of the open sliding door. Three steps up, one forward, a quick smile for the driver, turn left, then the fourth row on the right. Her seat. Window seat. Lil’ Debby’s seat every year since kindergarten.

  Not today, though. Two boys in the fifth grade had decided to take her not-so-assigned place on the bus.

  “Get up,” she said.

  “Go away,” the brown haired one said.

  She tucked her blond curls behind her ears and slung her backpack over her right shoulder. “Get up or I’ll tell everyone how you wet the bed that weekend my mom watched you. You remember that, don’t you? It was only two months ago.”

  The boy’s friend started laughing, which drew a punch to the shoulder from the brown haired boy.

  “Let her have her stupid seat,” the brown haired boy said, pushing his friend toward the aisle.

  Debby took a step back. She looked over her shoulder and saw the bus driver watching her and laughing to himself. He winked and gave her a quick nod.

  The brown haired boy bumped her with his shoulder as he passed and said, “Stupid little freak.”

  She didn’t care. She had her seat. She’d won, as she often did. While she might be neurotic, or oh sea dee, a stupid little freak, or any other number of things the kids called her, she was also smarter than them all.

  A state certified genius, her mother had said.

  You mean certifiable, her brother had said.

  Oh hush, Ronald. Lil’ Debby’s gonna skip two grades. She might graduate high school before you. Definitely college.

  Ronald had blushed and given her the middle finger when her mom wasn’t looking.

  Debby didn’t like the sound of skipping grades and going to college at the age of fifteen. She wanted nothing to do with it. It had been hard enough for her to make friends with kids her own age. Imagine the way she’d be treated if she jumped from third to fifth grade. The Boy Who Wets His Pants would be relentless toward The Stupid Little Freak. And so would his friends. And probably all the other kids.

  So she begged and pleaded to remain where she was. Her mother agreed, reluctantly, and with the caveat that they’d revisit the subject after the fourth grade. She didn’t know the word caveat, but she got the meaning from context. Surely, at the ripe age of eleven, Debby would be more than mature enough to skip junior high and go right to high school.

  Puh-lease.

  The bus turned right into the next neighborhood. Even at her age, Debby could tell that the houses were nicer. So were the cars. That meant the parents made more money than her mom. Not hard to do, she supposed, considering how little she had. And everything she did have had been given to her second hand.

  Lil’ Debby, charity case.

  Seven kids got on the bus. Six walked past her without so much as a glance. But the seventh stopped, smiled and tossed his bag to her.

  “Hi Beans,” she said.

  Bernard “Beans” Holland hated being called Beans as much as she despised Lil’ Debby. That didn’t stop her from using his nickname loudly and often.

  “Can you at least call me Bernie?” He pushed his thick glasses up his nose and fell onto the seat.

  A cloud of dust shot up and fell back down through the rays of sunlight that slipped in between the giant two story houses.

  “Glad that storm passed,” she said.

  He glanced at her over the rim of his glasses. “We’re talking about the weather now?”

  She gave him a cross look. “What’s that mean?”

  “No idea. Something my mom said to her boyfriend.” Beans grabbed his bag off her lap and pulled out a tube of lotion. He squeezed a dime-sized circle on the back of his hand and rubbed it in.

  Debby held out her hands, palms facing down, in front of him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Can I have some?”

  “You don’t need it.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why.”

  “Just because I’m not black doesn’t mean I don’t like putting your pretty smelling lotion on my hands.”

  “I don’t wear pretty smelling lotion,” he said to a chorus of laughter behind them. “I’ve got dry skin.”

  Debby glanced over her shoulder and narrowed her eyes at the brown-haired boy. A slight shake of her head was all it took to make him stop. And what he did, the others did. She kind of relished the power she now had over him.

  “Here,” Beans said.

  “Why thank you, Bernard,” she said, smiling at him as he handed the tube over. They were two oddball peas that had fallen from their original pods and made one of their own out of the scraps the world threw at them. Without each other, school would have been a miserable experience. Together, they could take on anything and anyone.

  The bus completed its tour through the fancy neighborhood and hit the main road to school. Five to ten minutes, on average, is all they had before being forced to put up with a day confined behind their desks. To Debby, it was so boring. To which her mother would respond, skip those grades and you won’t be bored. On so many levels, Debby was sure that would be the case. Spending half a day crammed inside one’s own locker had to be a rush, right?

  The old stinky Cheese Wagon clanked to a stop in front of the gymnasium. Debby and Beans waited their turn and exited. Once on the sidewalk, they turned right and walked toward the back of the bus, through an invisible cloud of diesel fumes.

  “That stinks,” Beans said.

  “You stink,” Debby said.

  He pulled out his inhaler and took a puff. “It’s not good for my asthma.”

  “You say that about everything.” And he did. Running, jumping, climbing, standing, squatting, peeing (she wasn’t so sure about that one), playing video games. They all gave him asthma attacks.

  “I do not. Those fumes are—” His body lurched forward. His knees and elbows scraped the pavement. His glasses flew through the air and landed a few feet in front of him. The sunlight fractured as it passed through the broken lens and cast several golden beams of light of varying sizes on the ground.

  Debby spun around. The brown haired boy stood there with a broad grin on his face.

  “You ever do that again you little freak, and I’ll beat his four-eyed face into the ground.”

  She dropped her bags and shoved him in the stomach. “Get out of here, piss pants!”

  The boy spat in Beans’s direction, then turned and jogged off. Debby looked around. No one paid any attention to the situation. It didn’t surprise her. To most of the world, she and Beans were invisible. She extended her right arm, then her middle finger and shook it in the boy’s direction.

  “Don’t do that,” Beans said. “You’ll get suspended.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, turning around and offering him her hand. All fingers extended this time. He reached up and she pulled back until he was back on his feet. “Besides, none of them wanted to help, so it was meant for all of them.”

  The school bell rang. Lingering kids ran through any available door.

  “Shoot,” she said.

  “Is that the final bell?” he asked.

&
nbsp; “I think so.”

  “We better go.”

  She scooped up both of their backpacks. It was better for Beans not to run with any extra weight. Together, they raced through the main entrance. Principal Bennett stood outside the office. His perfect brown hair was perfectly brushed back and his beard perfectly manicured. He shook his head, the hair bounced and then settled back down, and he held out his hand in a stop gesture.

  “Please,” Debby said. “Beans… I mean, Bernard had a bad fall. He tripped on the pavement, then he had an asthma attack, and no one would stop and help us. So that’s why we’re late.”

  Principal Bennett cocked his head to the side and leaned forward. His eyes traveled up and down and back up Bean’s short frame. “Mr. Holland, it looks like you should head over to the nurses’ office.” He angled his head in the other direction a couple times. “Ms. Walker, hurry on to class now. If your teacher has an issue with you being tardy, you tell her that you were talking with me, and I’ll be happy to take the matter up with her.”

  This was why Debby liked Principal Bennett. He treated her like an adult, not a kid. He didn’t use little kid words with her. He showed her respect.

  “Yes, sir,” they answered in chorus.

  So Beans headed left and Debby turned right. She hurried to class. The halls were empty. Her footsteps bounced off the walls that surrounded her. She thought she heard her name. When she looked over her shoulder, Beans and Principal Bennett were gone. But a man she did not recognize stood outside of an open closet. He leaned on a broom or mop handle and watched her. She’d heard the phrase “a chill went down my spine” spoken before. She never knew what it meant. Until that moment.

  Room one-twenty-two couldn’t come fast enough. She ran, holding the straps of her backpack tight. She hoped the door would be unlocked when she arrived. If not, she was prepared to scream as loud as she could. That turned out to be unnecessary, though. The handle turned with no resistance. She burst through the open doorway, and slammed the door shut behind her.