Pulse

by Michael Harvey

  It was a half mile to the underpass with the whistle of the expressway above it, another quarter mile along a road made of black cinders and bordered by a low seawall winding down to the beach. They didn’t talk, each content to match the other’s stride and let the concussion wash over as a car or truck zipped past. Daniel ducked into the underpass first, leading Grace through the dark passage to a small hut on the other side. M.D.C. used it in the summer to store gear for the nonexistent lifeguards who patrolled the beach.

  The hut was locked up tight, but one of the windows was busted out. Daniel shimmied through and opened the door. A second door cut into the opposite wall fed back to the road and down to the beach. They sat on the floor, with the smell of the ocean all around them. Grace opened her pack and took out some bread, a rind of cheese, and an apple. She sliced the apple with a small knife and cut off a piece of cheese, laying it all on a white towel with a blue stripe down the side. They drank water and ate, neither really wanting to start. When they were done eating, Grace folded up the towel and put all the food away. Then she bent her legs and wrapped her arms around her shins, setting her chin on her knees and staring across at him.

  “What?” Daniel said.

  “What’s in there?” Her eyes moved to the gym bag.

  “A gift.” He pulled the bag over and opened it. Inside were three of Simon’s sketches, rolled up one into the other. He’d left behind seven altogether. The first had brought Daniel here—a perfect rendering of the road and beach that ran just past the hut in which they were sitting. The other six laid out the life of Grace Nguyen, decade by decade. One was a colored pencil sketch of a football game, Grace huddled against Ben, the wind staining her cheeks as the crowd rose and roared around them; next, a chalk pastel of her wedding day, she and Ben cradled in a cocoon of flowers and light; an ink drawing, loose-limbed, of a family around a picnic table, splatters of ice cream and frosting, the sun ripening as they smiled in their youth and celebrated their son’s fifth birthday; back to pencil, this time thicker lead, stronger strokes, catching the sweep of leaves across a college campus as Grace walked with a young woman who was her echo, the only difference the lines around Grace’s eyes and threads of gray in her hair; the fifth was acrylic on paper, a dirt and pebble road spiraling into dusk, a cottage at the end of the path with a single light burning in a window; and the last, just a few elegant lines on vellum, Grace, old, willowy, a shadow walking alone through a graveyard.

  “Simon did them,” Daniel said, and pushed the sketches toward her. He’d only brought the first three. The others he’d burned, except for the map. That he’d left for another.

  “It’s your life,” he said. “Or at least part of it . . .”

  Her eyes flared in the dim light of the hut. “How many?”

  Daniel held up two fingers. “A boy and girl. They’ll be strong and they’ll be good.”

  She nodded.

  “You’ll live long and full with him because he’s true and he loves you.”

  “That’s what the drawings tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe that?”

  It was an impossible question with the cruelest of answers. So Daniel said nothing at all.

  She moved closer, inching imperceptibly along the floor then stopping as if she’d hit a wall. “Tell me about this place.”

  A seagull soared in his head, black eye blinking like the shutter on a camera. Click. A stretch of hard-packed sand. Click. The moving, shifting sea. Click. Daniel’s mother, openmouthed for eternity as the front wheel of her upturned car spun slowly.

  “This was where my mom died. Flipped her car over the wall outside and down onto the beach. I was with her.”

  “In the car?”

  For a moment he thought he might tell her what he’d never told anyone, about being locked in the trunk of a 1958 Buick, listening as his mother was slowly strangled. Then he looked into Grace’s open face and knew that was a conversation that could never be. “The doctors said I should have died. Sometimes I wish I had.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Good.”

  “So why are we here?”

  “I’m here because I have no choice. You’re here for the sketches.” He nodded at the drawings. “Take them and go.”

  “I’ll go when I’m ready.” Defiance packaged in a sad, sweet, braver-than-hell smile.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  After the accident, Daniel’s world consisted of him and Harry. It was a mute existence. Muffled in stone. And then Grace came along.

  “Just thank you.”

  “You think you know how our story ends, Daniel, but maybe you’re wrong.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who are you meeting?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Let me come with. Together we can . . .”

  He reached across and touched a finger to her lips. She kissed it and pressed his palm against the silk of her skin. He remembered their first kiss inside Music City. That was magic and neither of them wanted to ruin everything they had. Not so close to the end. So she got to her feet, tucking a small object in his hand, then packing up the sketches and making her way to the door that led back to the underpass, Ben Jacob, and the rest of her life.

  Daniel stayed where he was, listening to the thump of the ocean and the dying hum in his head. He stood up and walked to the door opposite the one Grace had taken, twisting the knob just as the sky cracked, veins of fire sparking and running wild under a purple skin of sky. He stepped out into a freshening wind and watched a squadron of gray birds with white undersides wheel toward the storm that was slashing a path across the harbor. Daniel started to walk, slowly at first, down the black road toward the beach. In his hand was the object Grace had given him—a small, silver tape recorder. Daniel pressed RECORD and slipped it in his pocket.

  46

  BARKLEY DROVE through what was once Chelsea’s rag shop district. Three years ago it had burned to the stumps, leaving behind cold piles of rubble and choking layers of ash that whipped and swirled across a graveyard of forgotten blocks. The city had begun its rebuild. Like most things in Chelsea, however, it was gonna take a while. Barkley pulled into a lot and watched a half-dozen cats scatter, taking up residence in the grinning husk of a building where they whisked their tails and licked their paws and watched Barkley’s every move. Fair enough.

  He pushed back the Camaro’s bucket seat and summoned his freshly dead partner. It was the flat pint of Jack, however, that answered. He popped the glovie and pulled it out, catching a whiff of himself in the rearview mirror as the bottle lifted and the whiskey tickled his lower lip. Maybe it was how all cops were after a while. Bottles and secrets stashed everywhere, cheap insurance against a colleague or cold comfort when the dead swam up, asking their questions with their dull eyes and freezer-burn smiles. Why should he be any different?

  Barkley cranked down the window and dumped the liquor, tossing the bottle into a field already winking with broken bits of glass. The Fitzsimmons file sat on the floor of the car. He picked it up. His notes on Daniel were clipped to a drawing of the alley where the body was found. The boy had given them Harry’s Cambridge apartment as his address, but the two cops who’d driven him to Boston City had dropped him off at an apartment in Kenmore Square. The address was scribbled in pencil on the second page of Barkley’s notes. 528 COMMONWEALTH AVE. He copied it down and wondered if anyone had heard the shot that took Tommy Dillon’s life. They’d call Katie first thing. She’d play the role of grieving cop widow to a T. Then it would be his turn.

  He slouched down low in the seat. The softening he’d felt standing over Tommy’s body was still there, except now it had become a yielding, a great breaking up inside. The mottled ice that had encased his soul for so long was cracking, an uncharted river feeding up from somewhere, bubbling to the surface in gushes of warm, white water. Barkley had killed his partner because he’d loved him. That was the truth
of it and it filled him to overflow, healing him even as he grieved.

  He risked another look in the rearview mirror. She was there, weighing with her quicksilver eyes. He couldn’t help but grin and Violet Fitzsimmons grinned back, lips frozen in a half curl, eyes flashing one last time before hardening into a pair of pale blue stones. Barkley whipped his head around, quick as that, only to discover the seat empty. If she’d been there, and she had, she was gone now, flown into his heart, mingled in his blood, one with his spirit. He didn’t understand why, couldn’t fathom how, but he didn’t need to. Like his dead partner said—some things just were.

  Barkley cranked the seat forward and started up the car, feeling the steering wheel alive under his hands as he weaved through the tangle of cats and rolled onto the blacktop, nose pointed toward downtown and Kenmore Square.

  * * *

  He pulled up in front of the Rathskeller and slipped a police placard on the dashboard. The two cops who’d driven Daniel said there was only one apartment above the bar. Barkley pushed a buzzer at the top of the steps and got no answer. The door was open so he went inside and walked up a second flight to the front door of the apartment. He knocked once, heavy and hard, then took a step back and put his boot in it, splintering the jamb as the door kicked in.

  The place looked deserted. Barkley walked over to a desk by the window and did a quick check of the drawers. Nothing. Toward the rear of the apartment he found a hallway that led to a small bedroom. This was where Daniel had slept. There was no sign of him, no clothes or other belongings, not a stray wrinkle in the sheets because there were no sheets. Still, Barkley knew this was the boy’s room. And he’d been here not too long ago.

  At the other end of the hall was a pair of doors. The first opened to a room with a large drafting table facing a window. The second door led to another bedroom. Placed neatly on the bed was a pencil sketch. Barkley picked it up and knew two things immediately. Whoever left the drawing had wanted it found. And whoever it was, he’d probably already killed the boy.

  47

  THE ROCK picked up speed as it fell through time and space, soaking up the blood of an English battlefield, men on horses and in the mud, gutted on steel pikes and trampled underfoot, screaming and biting and raging as each whirled down to his death; a plain at Somme, thousands in trenches, the unburied rotting in the long graves they’d dug for themselves as the smell of gunpowder and mustard gas hung and twitched in the air; black smoke and soot from the chimneys of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. The faces of Holodomor and Armenia. Backward the rock spun, even as it spun forward—Genghis Khan taking a million heads a day; more blood, winding rivers dark and clotted on the sandy floor of the Colosseum; a string of crosses on a hill; Cain striking down Abel while a mother birthed a child. All hung in the balance as the rock turned ever faster, forward now, closer, hurtling through the cathedral of the heavens. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Amin. A book depository in Dallas, a balcony in Memphis, a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles.

  Daniel raised his eyes and saw the rock dropping through the massing thunderheads. It turned once more and landed at his feet. He picked it up. Cold to the touch, it carried no judgment, no memory. Just ahead the wind lifted off the water, parting the storm and revealing a man standing with his back to Daniel, shoulders angled, clad in a long duster coat that hugged his body in slick folds. Daniel walked forward, rain slicing, peeling off his old skin, leaving him naked as a newborn. And then the man turned.

  “I’m surprised you picked this place,” Nick Toney said.

  “I didn’t pick anything.”

  “I followed you and the other two in the car. But I already knew where you were headed.” Toney shifted his weight, slipping his hands into the pockets of his coat as the wind skirted the shoreline and the storm circled back out into the harbor. “It’s good you didn’t bring the girl.”

  “She’s gone.”

  “I’d give you my word I won’t harm her, but what’s the point? Better if you just look for yourself.”

  Daniel frowned.

  “You like to look inside people’s skulls. Go ahead. See if I intend to kill her.”

  Daniel licked his lips, tasting pennies at the back of his throat. “You killed my mother.”

  “My wife.”

  “You killed my brother.”

  “My son.”

  “And now you’re here to kill me.”

  Hungry smile. “We’re the only family we have left.”

  Daniel lifted the rock in his hand and felt his father’s mind swing open, sweeping him back into the trunk of the Buick and slamming the lid, fusing the three of them—father, mother, and son—in an endless loop of shame and fear and death. Daniel knew it had always been so and wondered why he’d ever thought it could be different.

  “I only met your brother twice,” Toney said. “The first time was on the day your mother died. She said she never told him who his dad was, but I didn’t believe a word of it. Anyway, I stopped by her place and we made plans for that night. Harry was in the next room, eleven or twelve but already like a little adult, the way he watched me, keeping fucking score. She said she was gonna drop him off with a friend, but the friend didn’t want to take you. So your mom said she’d figure something out. Course she didn’t and there you were sleeping in the backseat of the car when I showed up that night. But it was Harry who bugged me. What the fuck did he hear? What the fuck did he know? It was like a little bird pecking away inside my skull, fucking pebble in my shoe. Still, it didn’t have to be that way.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Next time I saw him was on the day he died, at the diner in Harvard Square. Sure as shit there was that jump in his eye. He didn’t realize it yet, but he would. I could already see that.” Toney grinned. “That’s right, Daniel. I can look inside people’s heads just like you. Where the fuck you think you got it from?”

  “It’s called entanglement.”

  “Call it whatever you want. I could see he’d recognized me at some level and it was just a matter of time before he pieced it together. Once he figured out I was who I was, it was a short step to putting me with her that night. Not a chance I could take.”

  “So you set up the alley?”

  “I hired someone. He hired the black kid who fucked it up.”

  “And you finished it?”

  “Had to. When the cops search my place, they’ll find just enough of my blood to write me off as dead. The guy I hired will take the fall for all of it.”

  “Why did you let me live?”

  “You were what? Seven? Eight? Too young to remember shit. Besides, you never saw me in your mom’s apartment. Never got a look at me when you went in the trunk.”

  “How about later?”

  “You were tough climbing out of that fucking car. Hell, I was proud of you. Then when I finally met you, I figured you might actually go kill the black kid for me. Seemed fitting. Me killing your brother, you helping clean up the mess. So I gave you a nudge. Fed you the address in the Bury and waited.”

  “Maybe I’m not the killer you thought I was.”

  “You’re worse.”

  Daniel felt his fingers tighten and the rock start to hum in his hand. His father could feel it, too.

  “Your mother was a cunt, Daniel. Great piece of ass, but once she got her hooks in, pure fucking cunt.” Toney cocked his head. “You feeling it yet? Want to have a go at the old man? Here, let me help.” He dropped to his knees in the wet sand and made furrows with his fingers. Then he put the slurry to his nose and inhaled, closing his eyes and tipping his face to the sky. “Go ahead, son. Close the circle.”

  Daniel raised the rock over his head and became one with it. Perfect symmetry, perfect balance. Then he brought it down to his side and dropped it on the beach.

  One eye popped open. “No, huh?” Toney climbed to his feet and picked up the rock, weighing it in his hand before hurling it into the surf, where the sea sucked it under. Daniel felt his father’s DNA wrapped insid
e his, and wrapped inside that, rotting at the core of himself, the memory of his mother and all he’d wished he could have done for her, for Harry. He turned off the recorder in his pocket.

  “Don’t put my body in the water.”

  His father pulled a pistol from under his coat, black and huge and gleaming with grease in the winking eye of the storm. He touched it to Daniel’s forehead as Daniel sank to his knees and closed his eyes, waiting for the flat bang that would mark his passage under the archway we all must pass through on our way to whatever waited beyond. When it came, Daniel felt nothing, except the release of his soul and the meaty thump of flesh against earth. He opened his eyes to see his father staring back at him, loose-jawed, dark blood pooling and soaking into the hungry sand from the back of a blown-out skull. Simon stepped around Daniel, picking up Toney’s gun and taking a quick look at his handiwork. Then he came back, crouching between the body and Daniel, touching his cheek.

  “You all right?”

  Daniel nodded. Simon helped him to his feet and they walked a few yards, sitting on the edge of the seawall that marked the beginning of the road that led up to the hut. Daniel felt a shiver in the air and stared at his father’s body, still sprawled where it fell. “I wanted to kill him, but it wasn’t in me.”

  “You had the rock in your hand and chose to drop it. You knelt and pressed your head to the muzzle. That changes everything.”

  “He’s still dead.”

  “And you think it’s murder?”

  “That’s what the police will tell you.”

  “Reality has its own plasticity, Daniel. Warm, alive, capable of being molded and shaped.”

  “This isn’t one of your sketches. And a bullet to the head isn’t some string of numbers on a blackboard.”

  Simon pulled out Toney’s gun and another, carrying both down to the water and throwing them in. He walked back slowly, taking a seat across from Daniel, positioning himself so he was blocking any view of the body. “What is it you’d like to know?”

  “Nothing. Just leave me alone.”