by Saul Black
‘I want not to do anyone any harm,’ Valerie said, at last.
Blasko sat back in his chair and looked at her.
‘Especially you. I just—’
‘I’ll consider myself warned.’
Which silenced both of them again. It was impossible, Valerie thought. He might think he wasn’t still angry with her – he might think a part of him didn’t still fucking hate her – but he was kidding himself. For all the breeziness he was still enough of the mess she’d made of him. This is wrong, she told herself. This is so wrong. You might as well tell him now and get it over with.
But even thinking it stirred her excitement. Life coming back into her life.
‘You haven’t told me what you’re working on,’ she said. Stalling.
He dipped his finger into his glass, stirred the ice cubes. Weighing up, Valerie knew, whether to accept that they’d veered away from the question of what they were going to do. She realised too that he’d come here not entirely knowing what he wanted. Aside from wanting to go to bed with her. That didn’t change. In spite of everything, being near each other was enough to establish sexual necessity. Even now (as soon as she let her mind go that way) the thought of his hands on her, the image of straddling him and easing herself down onto his cock – started the familiar sweet ache between her legs. It was a delight, the irreverent reliability of their lust. She remembered lying with him in bed after the fourth or tenth or twentieth time they’d made love, thinking: This is wealth. We’re millionaires with this. At which the stubborn cosmic dramatist in her had whispered: Yeah, but it will all have to paid for, someday.
And it had been.
‘Nothing that wouldn’t spoil the ass-burger story,’ he said.
She understood. Tech forensics was, broadly, either financial crime or child pornography. She’d seen some of the images. Used to be you needed to be physically present at a murder scene to see the worst of the dark side. Now you could see it on your laptop, while drinking a beer or talking to your mom on the phone. She wondered what it had done to him. What it was doing. The disinterested lidless eyeball was intrigued. I shouldn’t have been a cop, she thought. I should’ve been a fucking scientist.
‘Do you know how it felt when I knew I’d be coming back here?’ he said.
‘How did it feel?’
‘Inevitable.’ He paused. ‘Like a guilty verdict.’
His phone rang.
‘Goddammit,’ he said, when he hung up.
‘You have to go.’
‘Yeah.’
Saved by the bell. Temporarily.
Valerie would rather have stayed where she was and let him go back without her, but she needed her car. And in any case, stay where she was and do what? End up with another Callum? The Case had taken her to the place where any conscious activity not devoted to The Case was immoral. She thought of all the hours she’d spent with the files and photographs. The risible phrase ‘off-duty’. There were more off-duty hours waiting for her, an army of them, drumming their fingers.
They drove back in silence, the city’s lights sliding over them, the car’s interior rich with the impasse of desire and fear. Valerie knew the only way she’d find out how she’d react to him kissing her was if he kissed her. Part of her wanted it, to be forced into letting her body decide.
Bullshit. She knew what her body would decide. She just didn’t know what decisions the rest of her would make, afterwards.
When they pulled up at the station lot he killed the engine and the two of them sat there, staring out of the windshield. Somewhere along the way he’d switched his phone to silent. She could hear it vibrating in his jacket pocket.
‘So?’ he said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you know what I was thinking about back there in the bar.’
‘Yes.’
Pause.
‘It’s what I was thinking about, too.’
But not only that.
‘I’ll come by and see you later,’ he said – then when he saw her about to reply: ‘Don’t say anything. Just don’t answer the door if you don’t want to.’
Oh, God.
She was shaking her head. But she didn’t say anything. It was terrible how the flash of desire had brought the three years of loneliness upon her. It was terrible the way the naturalness of being with him just declared itself, beyond argument. The human heart was a room of terrible things.
He didn’t kiss her. The vibrating phone, amongst other things, said not yet. Instead they got out. He took her hand, briefly. Their mutual visibility was shocking. Then he turned and hurried away into the station. Valerie, thrilled and appalled at herself, headed to her car.
She’d got in and fastened her seat belt when she noticed, four cars down in the opposite row, Carla York’s black Jeep Cherokee. With Carla in it. She was sitting in the driver’s seat with her head leaning against the window, staring straight ahead. Her posture said she either didn’t know she was being observed – or didn’t care. Her mouth looked slack. Her whole face’s tightness was weirdly compromised.
Valerie sat and watched. It seemed odd to her that Carla hadn’t seen her. She would have heard the car door, surely. Didn’t you automatically look up?
Carla lifted a crumpled tissue and blew her nose. Sniffed.
Crying? Jesus.
On the one hand, so what? Carla was law enforcement. No less likely to have the odd private meltdown than anyone else in the game. On the other, it shocked Valerie to see the prim package unravelled. It was poignant and obscene.
More out of curiosity than sympathy (let’s be honest with ourselves, Valerie) she got out of her car and walked down to Carla’s. Halfway there, Carla looked up and saw her. Valerie expected her to be startled, to be embarrassed, to attempt the hasty facial reboot. But Carla just watched her approach without expression, then rolled down the driver’s window. Her nose was red. It was that sort of face, Valerie now realised, ravaged by the shedding of even two or three tears.
‘Hey,’ Valerie said. ‘You OK?’
Carla smiled. As at the minor nature of whatever had upset her. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. Just one of those days.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Really, it’s nothing. I’m just…’ She didn’t finish. Instead shook her head and forced a laugh. She shifted her purse from her lap to the passenger seat, where her overcoat was slung over a slew of papers, a Chronicle, a couple of envelopes. The rest of the Cherokee’s interior was immaculate. ‘I’m fine.’ Then, as a shorthand token dismissal Valerie knew she wasn’t meant to take seriously: ‘Time of the month.’
As in, whatever it is, I’m not discussing it.
‘OK,’ Valerie said.
Carla sniffed, shook herself, sat up straight and put her left hand on the wheel. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘that was a great job with the zoo footage. I meant to say so earlier. I know everyone else had given up on it.’
‘I’d given up on it myself. It was just an alternative to counting sheep.’
Carla nodded. ‘I get it,’ she said. ‘But still.’
A few moments of neither of them knowing what to say. Long enough for Valerie to be slightly fascinated by the part of herself that still couldn’t quite like Carla. Even now, having seen her vulnerable, something in her refused.
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re OK,’ she said.
Carla reached for her seat belt. ‘I’m fine. And thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Back in her car Valerie made an effort not to look towards Carla’s. But Carla was still parked when she drove out of the lot. She was on her cell phone. She raised her hand to Valerie without a pause in her conversation.
THIRTY-THREE
Xander wasn’t feeling well. The truth was he’d been feeling rough since they’d crossed into California. There was the need to correct the fuck-up in Colorado (the dead woman without the jug pressed on his brain like a tumour; why, why, why in God’s name had he let Paulie talk him into that?
) but now it was as if his body were rebelling against the mistake as well, in spite of the little bitch he’d just grabbed. She’d just been there. A gift. The seconds it had taken him had been clean and quick and full of certainty. Sometimes it came together like that, in a kind of sweet rush, as if he weren’t doing something new but recognising something he’d done before, in a previous life or vivid dream. The empty road and the trees and her bare throat with the sunlight on it. It all gathered in his hands and face and then he was doing it and every movement was perfect and everything happened exactly as he knew it would. The exact opposite, in fact, of the mess in Colorado. He lay on the RV’s bed-couch, shivering a little. His head was warm. His limbs were starting to ache. He’d heard if you crossed too many time zones or changed climates too often you got sick, but he’d never really believed it. Maybe there was something to it after all. Snow in Colorado. Sun in California. All the weather he’d passed through over the days and weeks and months was busy in his body, trying to sort itself out. He knew Paulie wanted to trade places with him because of his busted knee. Tough shit. Paulie would just have to grin and fucking bear it.
He should sleep. How long since he’d slept? He didn’t know. Too long. There were the other times, when it didn’t feel like sleep, but he never felt rested afterwards anyway, those times when he went back to being Leon and Mama Jean’s house formed dense and electric around him. Those times were more exhausting than being awake in the regular world. When he’d finished doing what he had to do all of that would stop. Imagine that! A time when the world just stayed the world, and Mama Jean’s house never crammed up around him and Mama Jean herself would have nothing left to say. He’d be able to do anything, uninterrupted: watch TV, lie around drinking beer, swim in the ocean, eat his dinner.
Shivering, he turned onto his side and drew his knees up.
THIRTY-FOUR
Back at the computer forensics lab Nick Blaskovitch worked for an hour on the latest material from the Lawson case, but he knew he wasn’t concentrating.
Valerie.
He hadn’t lied. It had felt inevitable. When it had become obvious that his father wasn’t going to recover and the future’s options had begun vaguely stacking up, he’d lived a double inner life. On the surface a range of schemes and alternatives. Underneath, the certainty that he would go back to San Francisco and Valerie would still be there and there would be no stopping himself. There was barely even a concession to the possibility that she would have found someone else. And when he did make the concession his response to it was simple: he would take her away from whoever she’d found. Because whoever the poor bastard was and whatever she had with him it wouldn’t be what they had had.
What they had had. Recognition. Instant and ridiculous. Attraction, sure – he had the rare gift among men of knowing some women found him very attractive (he wasn’t personally vain, but he had an ease in his own skin he was wise enough to know was a kind of power), and Valerie had the sub-surface sexuality the right guys would know was worth seeking out – but the feeling of inevitability had caught both of them by delicious surprise. Half a dozen conversations. A drink after work. The heat of her standing next to him at the bar. They hadn’t even discussed where the evening was going. Just got into a cab and within twenty minutes were in her apartment, kissing. The first touch – his hands on her waist – was a simple homecoming. After sex they lay on her bed like starfish. The impulse was to laugh. It was hilarious how good it had been. They didn’t even congratulate themselves. Just accepted that they had come into their vast, unearned inheritance.
If some other guy were telling him all this about someone – some (dear God) Love of His Life Story in a bar – Nick knew he’d dismiss it. He’d feel sorry for him, this hypothetical loser. He knew he was, on the face of it, being ridiculous. Nor had quite all the damage she’d done healed. When he’d walked in on her and Carter at the apartment she’d been sitting astride the guy, his hands on her ass, the groove of her lovely back wet with sweat from the dirty work she’d put in. Nick had stood there and stared for what had felt like a long time, feeling the world changing. When you imagined these moments you saw yourself exploding into action – violence, rage, grief, madness. But in fact you just stood there, a spectator at your own crucifixion. The perverse part of you was relieved that the world had been once and for all proved to be a place of emptiness and betrayal and shit. It absolved you of having to hope.
It ought to have finished her for him.
But it hadn’t.
The trouble was he’d understood why she’d done it. She’d turned and looked at him over her bare shoulder and her face had been like a calm scream. Even in that moment he’d known the understanding would eventually let him forgive her. Understanding was a twisted gift love gave you. Understanding had said, even as he was turning and walking out the door: You’ll find room for this. The hatred will burn out. It’ll still be her.
And three years later, it was still her.
The events and decisions that had brought him back to San Francisco had been a gentle, irresistible choreography. He’d made the arrangements with a feeling of surrender, but with quietly building excitement, too. Now that he’d done it, now that he was here, there was both deflation (the scale of the imaginative lead-up guaranteed it) and a deep vindication: because it hadn’t changed for her, either. He’d seen the recognition in her face the first moment she’d looked up at him from her desk.
He got up, now, from his own cluttered desk, and stretched. It was ten after ten. Another hour’s work then he’d go back to his place, shower, change, drive around to Valerie’s and ring the buzzer for her apartment. If she answered, she answered. If she didn’t…
Fuck that. She’d answer. It was foregone. It was in her when they’d said goodbye in the parking garage. In her hand. In her eyes. In the space between them where the current of life flowed.
He took a bathroom break and returned to his office to find a sealed Manila envelope on his desk.
It was addressed in plain marker in small, neat capitals: NICHOLAS BLASKOVITCH.
He opened it.
A filled-in form. Photocopied. He registered the word ‘clinic’.
But that wasn’t what first caught his eye. What caught his eye was a bright yellow Post-it stuck to the top right corner of the single sheet. The same tidy caps, smaller.
BABY KILLER, it said. NOTE THE DATE.
Cop reflexes were, mutedly, firing. A part of him was thinking: latex gloves, prints, wait. Someone had just been in here and left this. Who? But by now he’d noticed the content of one of the filled-in boxes:
PATIENT DETAILS
SURNAME: HART
FIRST NAME: VALERIE
APPOINTMENT DATE: 06.23.10
SURGEON: DR PAIGE
PROCEDURE: MVA
*
The ‘appointment date’ and ‘procedure’ entries had been highlighted in pink. MVA. What the fuck was MVA? Nick groped, mentally, while his eyes scanned, and the phrase ‘baby killer’ carried on detonating.
The Bryte Clinic. 2303 Fell Street, San Francisco, CA 94118.
He didn’t recognise it.
He Googled ‘MVA procedure’, though the wiser part of him turned what he read into déjà vu.
Up to 15 weeks’ gestation, suction-aspiration or vacuum aspiration are the most common surgical methods of induced abortion. Manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) consists of removing the fetus or embryo, placenta, and membranes by suction using a manual syringe, while electric vacuum aspiration (EVA) uses an electric pump. These techniques differ in the mechanism used to apply suction, in how early in pregnancy they can be used, and in whether cervical dilation is necessary. MVA, also known as ‘mini-suction’ and ‘menstrual extraction’, can be used in very early pregnancy, and does not require cervical dilation.
Note the date.
06.23.10.
Three years ago. Less than two months after he’d left her.
THIRTY-FIVE
Cl
audia woke an indeterminate time later lying on her back in what felt like complete blackness.
The first sensation was the desperate need to pee.
Three or four slight movements revealed her situation.
The worst situation.
She’d been bound and gagged.
And put in a box.
And buried alive.
Three, four, five seconds of blank denial. Not even the sound of her own breath, since shock held it.
Then an explosion of panic, her bound limbs trying to flail, knees and elbows and head thumping the flanks of the casket and her bladder emptying and no no God no please no and the reality like a demon in there with her saying yes yes yes, this is it, this is what’s happening, this is what’s happening.
Her mind was nothing, just a scream. Her actual scream was a hot rasp in her throat, since the gag in her mouth locked it in.
Buried alive. Buried alive. Buried—
A jolt.
And what the shock and panic had hidden: the hum of an engine.
She was moving.
She was in a vehicle. The RV.
Which meant she wasn’t underground. Which lifted the mass of dead earth off her. Thank God. Thank—
The relief died. She wasn’t underground yet.
Another explosion of panic, another timeless chaos of thrashing, her heart pounding in her throat, her head swollen with blood. She was suffocating. Suffocation was a corpse jammed on top of her, covering her, eyes, nose, ears, mouth. No matter what, she had to get out. No matter what ‘out’ would mean. No matter what. She screamed again.
The vehicle slowed. Stopped.
Oh God oh God oh God—
A dozen pencils of light by her feet.
Air holes.
They didn’t want her dead.
