by Tim Johnston
“Well, what if I’d whipped out a gun right there, boss? What would you have thought?”
The boy stared ahead into the diving flakes.
“Damn,” said Lester. “You’d think you’d be happy I pulled that gun when I did.”
The sound of sirens reached them from some uncertain direction. Lester looked around window to window until the sirens began to fade. His eyes fell again to the girl’s thighs. Pale flesh rolling slightly with the drift of the truck. The high black hemline of skirt.
“What are you doing?” said the boy.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t even think it.”
“I wasn’t thinking a damn thing, boss. Jesus. You think I’d do something like that?”
The boy got a cigarette in his lips and lit it and held the smoke in his mouth, fighting the instinct to inhale.
“On the other hand,” said Lester. “A person might wonder what you were doing back there in the first place, boss. What’d you go looking for that got you into that fix?”
Before the boy could respond there was a sudden blooming of red and blue, and the sirens wailed up again and the cruisers multiplied all around them and the boy pulled carefully to the shoulder under the highway overpass.
The cab was shot through with the white light of the cruisers’ spots, and in that brilliance the cab’s dome light when it came on made no impression at all, and so the boy didn’t know that a door had opened until he turned to tell Reed Lester not to say or do a goddam thing, and found him gone. The door still swaying on its hinges, men shouting out there in the lights. Engines raced and tires spun and some of the colored lights went strobing away down the road.
All around him, officers crouched behind their doors with guns drawn and they were shouting at him. He looked again at his open passenger’s door and saw the ice scraper where Lester had left it on the floorboard and, beside it, something else, half stowed under the seat and pulsing blue and red with the cruiser lights. He stared at it for a long moment. Then he looked straight ahead and raised his hands and spread his fingers, as if to designate the number 10. Up ahead, beyond the cruisers and their lights, less than a hundred yards from where he sat, there hung in the snowfall a lambent blue sign with the silvered words SISTERS OF MERCY.
34
Hold up, he says, and she stops and waits for him to come up beside her, no sound in the world but the soft whupping of his snowshoes.
He thumbs the pack from his shoulders and brings out two plastic bottles of water and they uncap them and drink, the water gurgling its way around clots of ice in the necks. She caps the bottle and unzips her jacket and fits the bottle into the pocket near her breast, and then rezips the jacket.
He watches her do this. And watches her after it’s done.
It’s too cold to drink, she explains.
He lifts his bottle again and then returns it to the pack, and she says: What else you got in there?
Granola bars. A couple of Snickers. Are you hungry?
I’ll take a Snickers, I guess. What else?
Nothing else. Nothing else to eat.
Tissue?
What?
Did you bring tissue?
Like Kleenex?
Like anything. She stares at him, into the yellow lenses, until he understands.
I have a small pack of Kleenex, that’s all.
Can I borrow it?
Of course. He digs into one jacket pocket and then another until he finds the small package.
She slips it into her jacket pocket with the Snickers, then she turns and begins to walk back the way they came, in her own tracks, downslope.
Where you going? he says after a moment.
She doesn’t look back. She points ahead to a squat, solitary spruce, wide and thick and hung with snow as if snow is its blossom and its only purpose. She missteps, totters on the snowshoes, rights herself.
Careful, he says, and she gives him the thumbs-up over her shoulder.
From the far side of the spruce she looks back through the snowy boughs, and the cold runs into her heart to see him standing dark against the snow just as she left him, far closer than she thought he would be. As if the distance she crossed to the spruce was an imaginary distance. Or as if he has moved as she moved but without sound and without tracks or effort.
She falters and then finds her voice: I can see you watching me.
I can’t see a thing, he says, and she knows it’s true.
She bends to tighten the bindings over her boots. I can see you watching, she says again. He doesn’t move. Standing there. I can’t go with you staring, she says, and at last, with an air of parental exasperation, he turns his back to her.
She takes a side step in the snow, downslope. She thinks she’s made no sound but can’t be sure because of the bloodbeat in her ears. She stands a moment in the stopped time and stopped breath and stopped heart of the starting blocks—Breathe, Courtland—and then she takes another step, and another, keeping the tree between herself and the Monkey, and when she is twenty paces from the spruce she turns and she begins to descend the mountain in great, soundless, weightless strides.
35
All that followed that long night and into the morning was a perverse waking dream that would not end but only taunted him with the taste of ending, with scraps of near sleep wrenched from him at the last second and replaced by more noise and more walking and another bare room or the same bare room with the same man or men across a steel table or different men but always the same questions and the same hard light and the only break in it all, the one brief escape, was a real dream that rose up during a lapse in procedure, some miscue among his keepers that left him alone long enough to sleep, and in his sleep he climbed a path in the woods in the dark, making his way by the progress of the animal he followed, a dog or wolf of such whiteness it raised shadows from the things it passed, the trees and stones. Then the woods cracked with thunder and he jolted awake to the iron bars and the concrete and to the backlit man telling him to get up, and he was led in handcuffs once more down the corridor into the bare room.
The man at the table did not look up but sat studying the pages of a file that lay open before him while the man who brought the boy removed his cuffs and wordlessly left, pulling the steel door shut behind him.
The man at the table wore no jacket, only a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrists and at the collar, his tie well-knotted and pristine. The leather straps of his gun holster had a defining effect on the shirt, suggesting the good health and fitness of the torso beneath it. He had a full head of short black hair razor-line-parted on one side, and his jaw was blued with stubble. He wore a gold wedding band.
This man at last looked at the boy. Searching his eyes as if he might see there what none of the men before him had thought even to look for. Whatever he saw he dropped his gaze and let it rest on the boy’s denim jacket, buttoned nearly to the throat. They had taken his white T-shirt with its catalog of bloodstains.
He looked again into the boy’s eyes and said: “Sean, my name is Detective Luske. I’m with the Omaha PD Sexual Assault Unit. Would you like some water?”
“All right.”
The detective filled a paper cup from a dispenser in the corner and set it in front of the boy and sat down again.
“Sean. As you know, since you say you saw it in progress, that girl you had with you in that truck last night was raped. By at least one assailant. Maybe as many as three. Now, she was inebriated and she was passed out for much of it, but I’ve talked to her and she believes she can identify those boys who were sitting with her inside the Paradise Lounge, if not necessarily those who raped her. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What I want to do, Sean, is I want to bring another officer in here and take a sample from you. Would you agree to letting me do that?”
“What kind of sample?”
“A DNA sample. From th
e inside of your cheek. Your mouth. It takes about two seconds. Would you agree to letting me do that?”
“I won’t try to stop it.”
“That’s not good enough. I can’t take the sample without your consent unless I get a warrant. But it will look better for you if you give your consent.”
“You mean verbally?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I give my consent.”
Luske sat back and the door opened and a tall thin woman stepped in. She wore a white medical smock and white latex examination gloves. A silver badge swung from her neck on a lanyard. She asked the boy to open his mouth and she scraped at the inside of his cheek with a plastic wand and he smelled her latex gloves and remembered the doctor at the hospital, the Chinese man with his needle light, and the woman placed the wand carefully inside a plastic tube and capped the tube and went away again.
“How long will it take?” said the boy.
“How long will what take?”
“The test.”
“That has no bearing on this investigation, Sean. The test is for the State, for its case, should it decide to bring one.”
The boy sat, hands on the table.
The detective picked up his pencil and began drumming the eraser on the table. The boy watched him.
“I don’t suppose I can smoke,” he said, and Luske shook his head and said, “There’s no smoking in this building,” and he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket draped over the chairback. He held the boy’s pack across the table and the boy pulled a cigarette free and the detective lit it with the boy’s lighter. He watched the boy draw in the smoke and blow it toward the ceiling.
“Sean,” said Luske. “Tell me why you went into that alley.”
“I had a feeling,” the boy said, once again.
“A sexual feeling?”
“No, just a feeling. I heard some people leaving when I was in the bathroom but when I went outside for a smoke I saw by the tracks that they’d pulled into that alley. And I thought something was wrong about that and I had an idea what it was.”
“Why didn’t you go back inside and call the police? Or tell one of the staff at the restaurant?”
“It was just a feeling. I wasn’t positive until I got back there.”
“All right. So you went back inside the Paradise Lounge and you got this—what was it, the handle of a plunger? You didn’t go to your truck and get your hammer?”
“No, he’d have seen me.”
“Who?”
“The one at the corner keeping watch. The big one with Valentine on his shirt.”
“All right. So you walk to the corner and you and this boy have words and then you strike him with the handle from the plunger.”
“After I saw what was going on in the alley, yes.” He recounted again his hitting the second boy and trying to keep the girl from sliding off the tailgate and being put in a choke hold by the first boy and being struck with the stick by the second boy.
“Where did he hit you?”
“In the alley.”
“Where on your person.”
“Same as I did him. Across the ass.”
“Across the bare buttocks.”
“Yes.”
“Why were your buttocks bare?”
The boy regarded the ash on his cigarette. He readied to tap it into his palm but the detective told him to tap it on the floor and he did.
“Why were your buttocks bare, Sean?”
“Because he’d pulled down my jeans. The smaller guy. While the big one held me.”
“Then what happened, after he struck you.”
“Nothing. That’s when Reed Lester showed up.”
“Nothing more happened to you sexually?”
“No.”
“All right.” The detective scratched the side of his nose. “What made Reed Lester go back there?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
“Do you have an opinion?”
“I think he got to thinking I’d taken off without him.”
“With his backpack in the truck?”
The boy shrugged.
“Where did you first meet him, Reed Lester?”
“On the side of the road. He was walking and he helped me change a flat so I gave him a lift.”
“You never met him before that?”
“No.”
“You didn’t spend any time with him in Lincoln?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know he was wanted on sexual assault charges in Lincoln?”
“How would I?”
“He might’ve told you. Two guys in a bar, drinking and jawing . . .”
The boy shook his head. “He said something about a fight in a bar with a writer over a Cuban girl.”
“A fight in a bar with a writer over a Cuban girl?” The detective stared at him. “This was a forty-five-year-old woman he attacked, in a parking lot. One of his professors. There wasn’t any Cuban girl.”
The boy drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke and waited.
“You didn’t know he had a gun either, I suppose,” said Luske.
“Not till he pulled it in that alley.”
“So you two didn’t get to talking, inside the Paradise Lounge, and decide to go on back there together with that gun and that stick and maybe finish what those boys started?”
“No. It happened like I told you.”
The detective watched him, then he read the paper in front of him and underscored something with his pencil.
“All right. So now you’ve got those two boys at gunpoint and the girl is lying there unconscious. Why didn’t you call the police at that point?”
“I don’t know. I thought they’d take too long. She was bleeding and I wanted to get her to the hospital.”
“Reed Lester and his gun didn’t factor into your decision?”
“No. I didn’t care about him or his gun.”
“How do you think the gun ended up with you, in the truck, and not with him?”
“He left it there when he ran off.”
“Some friend, huh.”
“He wasn’t a friend. I just met him that day.”
“Tell me about the hammer.”
“It’s an Estwing, twenty ounces. It belongs to my father.”
“How did it get blood on it.”
“I had to kill a dog by the side of the road.”
“You had to kill a dog by the side of the road.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because it was hurt and there wasn’t any help for it. Somebody had run over it.”
“So you hit it with the hammer and killed it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Reed Lester was there at the time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why didn’t he use the gun? Or let you use it?”
“That’s what I asked him later.”
“What did he say?”
“He said something about not wanting to scare me off.”
The detective stood and refilled the boy’s cup of water and filled a cup for himself.
“Sean. What were that girl’s panties doing in your jacket pocket?”
“I guess I put them there.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. I must’ve seen them lying in the snow and thought they were hers and she would probably want them back. I don’t know.”
“I’ve been doing this work for ten years, Sean, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve found the panties, or the underpants, of the victim either on the perpetrator or in his home. He doesn’t seem able to help himself. He’s gotta have that trophy. That memento.”
The boy drew on his cigarette and exhaled and waited.
The detective watched him.
“So you get a flat tire. You pick up a fugitive from the law. You have to kill a dog with a hammer. And you get pulled over with a raped girl and a gun in a tru
ck that isn’t registered to you. That’s what I’d call a bad day, Sean.”
The boy nodded. “I’ve had worse.”
“I know you have. I know about your sister. I know how you got that limp.”
“You know about her, huh?”
“I know what happened to the two of you up there in the mountains, yes.”
“Then you know more than me. You know more than the entire state of Colorado and the FBI.”
They stared at each other. The detective tapped the eraser of his pencil on the top sheet of the file and the sound seemed to remind him that it was there. He looked down and turned the page over and turned it back. At length he said: “Here’s what we do know, Sean, all right? Here’s what our investigation knows as fact. It knows that on the night of the assault you were pulled over in a truck that was not registered in your name. It knows an eyewitness can place you at the scene of the assault. It knows that you were pulled over with the victim in the cab of the truck, constituting possible kidnapping. It knows there was a gun in the cab of the truck, constituting possible kidnapping at gunpoint. It knows that in the bed of the truck was a backpack belonging to a man wanted on sexual assault charges in another county. It knows there was a hammer in a tool bag with blood on it. It knows that the victim was bleeding and that you had fresh blood on your T-shirt. It knows that the girl was wearing no underpants and that there was a pair of girl’s underpants in your jacket pocket. Lastly it knows that there is no one, including the girl herself, to corroborate your statement that you did not rape her but instead tried to help her.”
Luske folded his hands again over the file. The boy met and held his gaze.
“Sean.”
“Yes.”
“You’re eighteen, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you do understand your rights?”
“I think so.”
“You understand that the State will appoint a lawyer to you if you ask for one.”
“Yes.”
“Why haven’t you asked for one?”
“Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”
The detective’s face darkened. “The State will decide that, not you. Do you understand? The State will not give one cartwheeling fuck about you. When it decides to prosecute you, all the innocence in the world won’t help you. At that point you are a piece of dumb meat in the jurisprudence system and the jurisprudence system, Sean, will take away your life.”
