by G. M. Ford
“Perhaps . . . you know, the shock was too much for her.” Her tone of voice said she didn’t believe a word of it.
“What did it look like to you?” Dolan tried.
“Looked like she was furious.”
Dolan thought it over. “Can I see Joseph?” he asked after a moment.
“You’re the cops. You can see whoever you want.”
“Shall we?”
She slid out from behind the counter and led Dolan down the hall to a set of double swinging doors. She backed through the right-hand door and held it open for Mickey, who stepped into the corridor. Construction debris was everywhere in this wing. Plastic sheeting was taped over everything, except the first door on the right, which looked to be an island of tranquility in a sea of chaos.
“We were about to move Joseph upstairs,” she said in a low voice. “That’s what started the whole thing. That’s when Mr. Reeves locked them in.” She leaned closer. “Now we’re afraid to move him at all,” she whispered, as she opened the door.
Dolan stepped over the threshold, into the room. He turned his head back and spoke to the nurse. “Could we . . . maybe . . . just him and I?”
“Sure,” she said. “If you need anything, I’ll be . . .” She pointed down the hall.
He nodded. “Thanks,” he mouthed.
Dolan took another step forward; the door closed behind him.
The kid’s brown eyes were wide open and tracking him like radar as Dolan crossed the room to the bedside. Wasn’t really a kid anymore either. Dolan wondered how spending one’s adolescence in a coma would affect him down the road. All things considered, could well prove to be an improvement, he mused.
He pulled a guest chair up close and sat down.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Michael Dolan.”
Joseph said nothing.
He was nice-looking. Even-featured. Slight but sturdy-looking, with a thick head of curly brown hair that could have used a trim. Somebody had given him a bad shave. Looked like he still had a few rough spots from all the wires and tubes that used to be connected to him.
“You want to see my badge?” Mickey asked.
Joseph smiled and shook his head.
“Were you awake when your mother—your mother and the other woman—?”
Joseph nodded slightly. Looked to be quite an effort.
“They had a fight?” Dolan prompted.
“No,” Joseph said. His voice was raspy and full of phlegm.
“They didn’t have a fight?”
“No,” he croaked.
“What did happen?”
Joseph swallowed several times. “My mother . . .” He cleared his throat, but that just seemed to make speaking more difficult. Sounded like he was gargling.
He pointed at the sink on Dolan’s left.
“The sink?” Dolan tried.
Joseph nodded.
Dolan got to his feet and walked over to the sink. The bowl was clean and dry. The fixtures polished. Dolan dropped to one knee and peered up under the rim. A rust- colored stain ran along the center of the lower edge. Dolan knew dried blood when he saw it. He stood up. “Your mother hit herself on the sink?” he asked Joseph.
The young man nodded.
“Did the other lady—”
“The silver lady,” Joseph whispered.
“Did she push your mother?”
Joseph shook his head again. Adamantly, this time.
Dolan ran through the possibles. “Your mother made some sort of move on the silver lady . . . missed and hit her head on the sink. Is that it?”
Joseph smiled and nodded.
Interesting, Dolan thought to himself. Given a choice of backing up either his mother or the Pressman woman, he’d chosen the latter. Not what Dolan would have expected. Boys and their mommies and all that.
“You remember your accident?” Dolan asked after a quiet moment.
Joseph shook his head. Something about his demeanor, though, gave Dolan pause to wonder if he was telling the truth.
“Well, thanks for the help,” Dolan said. “You get well now.”
Joseph Reeves closed his eyes. Dolan started for the door, stopped in midstride and turned back toward the young man.
“Can I ask you one last thing?” Dolan asked.
The eyes opened.
“The silver lady . . .” He searched for the right words. “When you were . . .” He ran a hand over his face. “Wherever you were before . . .” he started.
Joseph said something unintelligible. Dolan leaned over. “What?”
Joseph closed his eyes. Dolan thought he’d lost him, but suddenly the young man spoke again. “She came to me,” Joseph whispered.
“Came to you where?” Mickey asked.
Dolan could feel the boy’s great fatigue. Joseph closed his eyes and began to snore softly. Dolan waited and then pushed himself to his feet and started across the room. He was reaching for the door handle when Joseph said something that stopped him in his tracks. Joseph said the word “paradise.” That’s all. Just “paradise.”
The snoring got louder as Mickey pulled open the door and stepped into the hall.
No way he was telling Nilsson what the kid said. No friggin way.
“The book was gone,” Grace said. “That’s what was missing. That damn book.” She turned away from the window and began moving quickly toward her mother.
Eve looked up from her reading. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“The diary thing Joseph’s father gave me. I left it on the nightstand by his bed, but this afternoon it was gone.”
Eve dropped her book into her lap and slipped off her glasses. “Didn’t you say it was all burned up?”
Grace nodded. “Partially.”
Eve shrugged. “The nurses probably cleaned it up. Doesn’t sound like the kind of thing they’d want lying around a hospital room.”
“Something about it was very important to Joseph. Nobody was taking that book away, if he had anything to say about it.”
“You’re that certain?”
“Absolutely,” Grace said.
Eve thought it over. “Do you remember any of it?” she asked, after a moment.
Grace shook her head. “All I could read was a word here and part of a sentence there.” She cut the air with the side of her hand. “The rest was all black and warped and stuck together like it had gotten soaked and then dried out.”
“Doesn’t sound like something you’d purposefully do to a book.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“And you’re convinced it had some sort of deep meaning for Joseph.”
“No doubt about it,” Grace said. “The minute I started reading from it, he began to emerge. That book was what brought him back. I could feel it.”
The afternoon fog had rolled in like gauze. The rows of cars loomed like half-erased pencil drawings as Dolan carefully worked his way across the hospital’s north parking lot. He kept his eyes glued to the ground, watching his feet as he picked his way over dividers and curbs and parking stalls, in damn near zero visibility. Way things had been going lately, if he busted a leg, he figured they’d probably just get a gun and put him down.
Dolan was in a full grouse when he finally looked up and saw the outlines in the fog. Denny and Fenene standing by the side of his unmarked Chevy.
“Something?” he asked testily, pulling out the key fob.
“Couple,” Fenene said. “Thought you might want this,” he said, proffering a DVD in a white paper sleeve. “CC camera footage from when the Pressman woman managed to ditch hospital security. Got a real good image of the cab medallion.”
“Get it enhanced a lot sooner if you take it in instead of us,” Denny added.
He was right. Anything submitted to the lab by a couple of uniforms wa
s going directly to the rear of the line. Best if Dolan brought it in on his way home from the hospital. That way he could put the C of D’s name on it and get immediate results.
“Thanks,” Dolan said as he unlocked the car.
“And this,” Denny said, pulling something out from behind his back.
Denny held the bag out away from himself, as if whatever was inside had teeth. He raised the plastic bag to eye level.
Dolan leaned in close. In the limited visibility, Dolan at first imagined it to be a piece of partially burnt tree bark. Then Denny began to rotate the bag.
About halfway around, Dolan could make out the ends of pages, wavy and wrinkled from getting wet.
“What’s it wet from?” Dolan asked.
“Hospital maintenance found it stopping up a toilet in the first floor women’s room,” Fenene said. “Cover’s the only page that’ll move. Joseph Reeves’s name’s on the inside.”
Dolan reached out and took the plastic bag from the officer.
“We’ll let the science geeks have a look at this while they’re working on the cab medallion,” he said.
The officers turned to leave. Dolan set the bag on the roof of the car and pulled out his notebook. “Hey,” he said.
They stopped and turned back his way. “Nice job,” Dolan said. “I’ll make note of it in my report to the C of D. Let me have your badge numbers.”
Dolan took down the numbers and made sure he had their names spelled right. He could hear them chortling to one another as they disappeared into the fog.
Most popular I’ve been for quite some time, he thought to himself as he retrieved the bag from the roof, pulled open the car door, and slid into the driver’s seat.
2
“Mama’s got that loopy look,” Tessa said.
“She stopped taking her medicine,” Maddy said with a sigh.
“We should tell Gus.”
“He already knows,” Maddy said as she tried, once again, to zip her suitcase, and once again got stuck halfway around. “Help me, will you?”
Tessa didn’t move. Just stood there frowning.
Both Royster girls were tall for their age, just as both had the kind of dirty blonde hair that would undoubtedly, in adolescence, morph into a light brown.
“You’re going to get wrinkles if you keep doing that with your face,” her big sister gently chided. “Come on. Sit on this silly thing.”
Tessa walked over and plopped down on the suitcase. Maddy used both hands to pull the zipper around the first corner.
“I want to go to school with you,” Tessa said.
“Gus says we’ve got to go to different schools for a while, so . . .” She dropped her eyes to the zipper and stopped talking. Tessa was a worrier. When she got that way, it didn’t matter what you said, she just got worse, so Maddy didn’t say anything at all.
“So Pappa won’t find us, huh?” Tessa said, after a moment.
Their eyes met. “Yeah,” Maddy said.
Tessa got white and stiff like an icicle and then started to cry. Maddy walked over and gave her a hug. They stood in the middle of the room, their arms locked around one another, for the longest time.
Teddy already knew the answer, but he asked anyway.
“Problem?”
They shrugged in unison. Looked like a friggin conga line doin’ the coochie coochie with their shoulders.
Harvin spoke up first. “We got company again,” he said.
“Where?”
“Far side of both bridges,” Hal said.
Teddy frowned. “I thought they gave up doing that shit.”
Manny piped up. “Same as before. Two guys in each car. Just sittin’ there, not doin’ a friggin thing.”
Teddy checked his watch. He was about to speak when a blast of frigid air raked the back of his neck. He turned in time to see Gus Bradley step into the room, wearing his trademark black serge suit, size sixty-four humongous. Either he owned half a dozen identical suits, or he’d been wearing the same one for the past twenty years. Teddy had never been quite sure and wasn’t about to ask, either.
Gus was a bruiser, a bare-knuckled leg-breaker of great local renown, whose duties were generally confined to past-due collections and other nonlethal muscle work. Mr. K liked to say Gus was the company’s Remorse Manager.
Not lately, though. Lately, Gus was more like a nanny. For reasons known only to little girls, the Royster sisters fell in love with him the first time he’d lumbered into the room. Even stranger, Gus seemed to revel in it. Spent half his time helping with their homework and rolling around the floor with them. Go figure.
And . . . you know . . . as far as Teddy was concerned, if the girls wanted to use Gus as their personal set of monkey bars, so be it. Especially with the mom being such a loose cannon and all. Only thing that woman was missing was a fuse hangin’ out of her ass and somebody with a match. Anything that helped keep the situation under control was fine with Teddy.
“We’ve got forty minutes,” Teddy said. “The Yale Street car gotta be gone in under forty minutes.”
Everybody nodded like bobblehead dolls.
“Same assholes as before?” Teddy asked disgustedly.
Hal nodded. “The usual rent-a-cop outfit. Western Security.”
Ever since Mr. K’d agreed to take care of the Royster family thing for that Pressman broad, Coaltown had been getting a lot of unwanted attention from these Western Security hummers. Teddy guessed that when their high-tech methods for finding the Royster family had drawn a complete blank, they’d focused on the only part of town where their little electronic eyes and ears couldn’t reach. Coaltown. No cameras in Coaltown.
Coaltown was, in fact, a delta island. Four hundred ninety acres of glacial silt surrounded by a rusted-over city, accessible only by a pair of rolling lift bridges at the north and south ends. Couple of centuries back, most of the city’s industrial infrastructure had been located out on Coaltown. Foundries, fabricators, fish-packing plants, a paper mill. You name it. Anything loud, dirty, or smelly had been relegated to the island, where the river winds were pretty much guaranteed to blow the clatter and the stink out into Barnholder Bay.
A declining economy had, over the past couple of decades, rendered Coaltown not much good for anything. Built to the scale of a previous century, its crumbling brick facades and narrow cobblestone lanes did not easily lend themselves to the oversized, containerized nature of twenty-first century commerce.
The only way to make Coaltown viable again would have been to raze it and start from scratch. That’s what the preservationists had wanted, to turn the island into a big ol’ city park, with trails and gardens and a big kiddie pool. Eventually, they collected enough signatures to get the matter on the ballot.
Problem was, not even the most Pollyanna optimist could pretend that the city had that kind of dough, or that bike trails and kiddie pools were high on the city’s overflowing priority list for infrastructure repairs. So, suffice it to say, the city fathers had been overjoyed when Biosystems offered to take a ninety-nine year lease on the property.
Not only did the privatization of Coaltown save the city the cost of both upkeep and services, but, as promised, Biosystems proceeded to build the largest and most sophisticated waste recycling facility in this part of the country. That which they couldn’t recycle, incinerate, or repurpose, they loaded onto barges, towed ten miles offshore, and dropped in the drink. All at no cost to the city.
And then there was the part that didn’t get talked about. At least not out loud. The part about who it was actually owned Biosystems. Who it was had the kind of money and political influence required to actually get something like that done.
Those fervid souls who insisted on having their questions answered found themselves wading through dozens of dummy corporations, limited partnerships, and offshore holding companies,
until they eventually ran aground on something that smelled a whole lot like Vince Keenan. The smart ones let it go at that. The others eventually wished they had.
Since city government wasn’t about to admit to knowingly being in bed with a former crime magnate, they’d just cabbage-faced it. Who? Keenan? Vince Keenan? To my knowledge, Mr. Keenan has never been convicted of anything. Yadda yadda.
Any doubt as to the players was erased when, using the politically correct guise of offering a “Second Chance” to those who had previously strayed from society’s path, Biosystems had proceeded to hire every degenerate slimeball felon within a fifty-mile radius to work the recycling plant. Birds of a feather soon joined the migration. Every bucket of blood bar, small-time grifter, bail jumper, welfare cheat, parole violator—you name it, they all picked up and moved over to Coaltown.
And why wouldn’t they? It was like a get-outta-jail-free card. Long as they confined whatever it was they did to the island, the cops were prepared to turn a blind eye, allowing Coaltown to become a virtual city within a city—a city where the penalty for shitting in your own nest was getting your dead ass floated out with the garbage. At last count, there were seventeen titty bars and no churches on the island. It was one of those symbiotic relationships where things worked out for all concerned.
Teddy looped an arm around Harvin’s shoulders and guided him to the far side of the room. He leaned in close enough to smell fried onions and lowered his voice.
“When I say they gotta go,” Teddy whispered, “I’m not talkin’ cuttin’ the tires, or kicking their ass. Nothing like that. Those assholes probably got a satellite link or some such shit,” he whispered. “Those fuckers gotta not be there. Period. You understand what I’m sayin’? Tell ’em to do what they gotta do.”
Apparently, Harvin did. He raised an eyebrow. The look said, “You sure?” The timeline was bad. They didn’t have enough time for anything cute. Worse yet, this was off-island work. They didn’t do this kind of work anymore.
“Cops don’t like private dicks, either,” Teddy assured him.
Harvin turned his face away.
