Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  I got the feeling that whoever had done this—and it was obviously not the cops, or, if cops, seriously bent cops—had been rushed. Maybe not amateurs, maybe seriously rushed pros. That didn’t make me feel any better.

  Then I had a sick paranoid thought to add to all the others. What if all of this was my doing? I had no memory. It could as easily have been me as anyone else. If it had been, what had I been looking for?

  Presuming that there was something to find, I proceeded to toss the place myself. I hoped desperately for some clues to who I was, to who searched this room, to what had happened to me....

  I checked the doors and windows first and found something truly strange. White crumbs were ground into the carpet by the front door, as if someone had stepped on a cracker. By the window that faced the garage I found another cracker, white, about the size of a Ritz. It lay on the sill where the window opened, and I had to reach behind the chair to retrieve it. When I saw the image of the Lamb embossed on the surface of the thin wafer, I realized what it was.

  I held in my hand a holy wafer. Someone, probably myself, had placed the Eucharist across the entrances into this room.

  “Why?” I asked. My voice felt hoarse from lack of use. I backed from the window, confused and fearful. Looking at the wafer in my hand, I heard a voice out of my memory—

  “...it is something evil. It is evil and I fear for my daughter’s soul...”

  There was little in the room that gave me any clue to who I was. There was much, however, that implied what I did for a living.

  In the closet I found a camcorder, a high-end model with interchangeable lenses; next to it an empty tape case for videos. With the camcorder was a voice-activated microcassette recorder. Again, an empty tape case for the cassettes. I found a very expensive pair of binoculars.

  And in the bottom of the closet was a briefcase, aluminum and covered by a matte-black vinyl veneer. It weighed more than it should have. When I placed it on the bed, the mattress sagged. The latches had combination locks set to 537.

  When I tried the latches, it opened. Whoever had opened this last hadn’t bothered to relock the case. I suspected that my visitors hadn’t cared after they’d finessed the combination.

  Inside the case, resting on a foam rubber cushion, was a two-thousand-dollar monster: a Desert Eagle and two boxes of shells to go with it.

  Its presence scared me more than the missing thirty-eight. The revolver was a reasonable weapon, but a fifty-caliber Desert Eagle is bigger than any handgun had a right to be. It’d throw a magnum bullet through someone, through the guy behind him, through the wall, and crack the engine block on the car parked outside. No one had any business carrying this thing outside a combat zone.

  Scarier still was the way my hands knew the weapon, checking the slide and the magazine. The gun was fully loaded, and so new it shone. In the closet hung a shoulder holster that could fit it and an extra magazine.

  I would have preferred some form of photo identification.

  But in the remainder of the room I found no papers, no keys, no wallet, no checkbook. The closest I came to my identity was in the drawer of the nightstand. Three hundred dollars in cash was weighted down by an expensive-looking watch. I picked up the watch. It was shiny, and old enough to show some wear. On the back was an engraving, “Happy Birthday. Love, Gail.”

  Something clogged my throat. It came from the same blank place where the anger and the fear had been coming from.

  “Gail?” I whispered, not enjoying the sound of my voice.

  I put the watch on my wrist. I wondered why I had left it here. Fear of losing it, maybe?

  When I lifted the stack of crumpled twenties out of the drawer, something clattered back into the drawer. I picked up a wedding band.

  “... Kate, I’m worried about you and Gail—”

  A sigh comes from the other end of the phone. “You’re always worried about Gail. That’s what your work does to you.”

  “This is different—”

  “It’s always different. I’m not like you, I can’t live in fear all the time. That’s why I left you.... ”

  The memory burned, but even so, I tried to hold on to it. I couldn’t and I felt sick and ashamed that I couldn’t. I had a family somewhere, and I was certain that I had done evil by them.

  I sat on the bed, staring at the night table, trying to remember anything. But forcing did me little good. I sighed and looked at the phone.

  For once I seemed to have some luck. The message light was on, I had some voice-mail waiting for me. I picked up the receiver and punched up my messages, hoping for some sort of revelation.

  The first message was a voice that was achingly familiar though I had no memory of ever hearing it.

  “Okay, Kane, you owe me. I got the information on Childe you wanted. Call my beeper, 216-3839. Not my apartment or the station. You better get this cleared up before Internal Affairs eats me alive for not handing you over.”

  Internal Affairs? That implied police, and that I was dealing with a cop who was risking something by talking to me. Was I wanted for something?

  But I had a name now. Somehow that lifted some of the weight off of my soul.

  The second voice was still familiar, but I had a more ambivalent feeling about it.

  “It’s Bowie. We gotta talk. Not over the phone. Meet me at the Arabica tonight, seven. There’s talk on Coventry that you’ve got to hear.”

  The voice sounded frantic, but I didn’t understand anything he said. Arabica and Coventry were just words to me, though my traitor memory decided to give me an image of the speaker. I saw a thin man in a leather jacket wearing a jet-black ponytail.

  The next message was a repeat of the first caller.

  “It’s Sam again. Where the fuck are you? Call me.”

  Now I had a name for my policeman friend. I tried to remember him, but my memory seemed to resist it. I couldn’t force a memory, they only seemed to come when I wasn’t prepared for them.

  The next message was like a fist in the gut.

  “Dad?” A young woman’s voice on the verge of breaking into tears. “Sam gave me this number. Please, talk to me. You’re hiding because you think you’re responsible for what happened to Mom. Call me. Damn it, I love you. I love you....”

  “Gail,” I whispered into the phone.

  Kate my wife. Gail my daughter. That, my memory would give me. I could feel that something bad had happened, but what I didn’t know. I sat there, stomach boiling, wishing that Gail had left her number.

  But that would be something I was supposed to know.

  The messages ended, and I slammed the receiver down on to the cradle.

  I called Sam’s beeper, left my name, and waited.

  He called back within ten minutes. I grabbed the receiver before the first ring faded.

  “Hello?” I said, my voice wrapped in an asphyxiating uncertainty.

  “God damn it, Kane! Where the fuck have you been?” It was the same voice that had left the message. Sam’s voice.

  “Sam?” I said uncertainly.

  “Yes. What the hell were you thinking, falling off the Earth like that? You want everyone to think you’re dead? Please, at least tell me you’ve called Gail.”

  “I got her message. I had—”

  “Christ, and you’re just letting her worry about you? After what happened to Kate?”

  A flash of a memory hit me, a bad one—blood-red and violent. I saw torn, ragged flesh. I remembered the sickening reek of disinfectant that just failed to cover the smell of blood, the almost subliminal smell of death.

  Lo! Death has reared himself a throne....

  “Kane? Are you there? Hello?”

  I choked back something. The receiver shook in my hand. Why can’t I remember?

  “I had an accident,” I said. “I’ve had some problems.” It was an effort to get the words out.

  Sam’s voice changed. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I think so
meone tried to kill me.”

  The response was silence.

  “Hello,” I said. It was beginning to sink in that here was someone who knew me, someone who might tell me what happened.

  “Who?” Sam said, earnestness replacing the anger in his voice. “Was it Childe?”

  Childe. That name again. “I don’t know. I can’t remember—” I hesitated. Something inside me didn’t want to admit how badly off I was. “We need to meet.”

  “Where?”

  My mind was a blank. I tried to force an image of a place to meet, but forcing my past to the surface was like trying to build a snowman out of water. No memory would come when I wanted a memory.

  On impulse I parroted one of the other messages, “How about the Arabica?”

  “Which one? Shaker Square, University Circle, Coventry—”

  “Coventry,” I said. Perhaps I could find Bowie.

  “When?” Sam asked.

  “Give me three hours or so.”

  “Okay, 10:30.”

  I nodded. There was some hope that I would find out what the hell was going on.

  “Are you all right? Do I need to send help out there?” Sam asked.

  “No, I’ll be fine.” I said it even though I didn’t believe it. “Do me a favor and call Gail and tell her that I’m okay?”

  “Sure, but why don’t you—”

  “Tell her I love her,” I said, and hung up the phone, my hand shaking. Somehow, memory or not, I had meant it.

  What had happened to my wife? Presumably I was going to find out. However, from the wisps of memory I was getting, I was not sure that I wanted to know.

  I needed to find this Arabica before 10:30. I looked at my watch and saw that it was pretty late already. I needed to get going if I was going to find Sam.

  I walked up to the window and drew the shades aside. The night was ink-black with solid clouds. The street lamps were globed by halos of wind-whipped snow. It was as if the day had never happened, as if the sun were gone for good.

  I looked down and saw the Chevette was still snowed in. It seemed to be my car, but did I want to use it?

  I drew the shade and decided to call a taxi.

  3

  There were a few things I needed to check with the manager here, before I left. I stepped outside and tried not to think of the Eucharist crumbs that dusted the doorway. The idea that I might have been the one to grind the wafer underfoot made me uncomfortable.

  The denim jacket I’d found wasn’t up to the weather. The wind cut under it, and the snow abrading it made an audible patter. I counted my blessings. I’d been lucky I’d packed more than one jacket. I had, in fact, packed a hell of a lot.

  All the signs seemed to indicate that I was running from something, something that had caught up with me at least once. Which made me feel more than lucky that this jacket was large enough to hide the Eagle and its holster.

  I trudged through a growing snowstorm to the front of the motel and entered the manager’s office. The woman behind the counter was easily sixty-five, wore thick glasses, and had hair the color of FD&C Red # 5. She glanced up at me, then went back to reading the book in her lap.

  I walked up to the desk and cleared my throat.

  “Can I help you?” she asked in a bored voice.

  I opened my mouth, and for a moment I had difficulty speaking. I was suddenly overly conscious of a lot of things: the buzz of the unnaturally white fluorescents, the weight of the gun in my armpit, the smell of stale coffee from a mug on a counter, melting snow dripping down my neck....

  The sense of hyperawareness passed. “I need to check how long my room’s paid for.”

  The woman gave a hostile sigh and put the book face down on the counter, cracking the spine. She looked up, her eyes magnified grotesquely by the glasses she wore.

  “We don’t give refunds for—”

  “Yes?” I said. Her distorted gaze had made me realize that I’d still been wearing my sunglasses. I’d been taking them off when she paused.

  “Yes?” I repeated. I was becoming uncomfortably aware that she was staring into my eyes. It was an intense and disturbing contact that made me wonder what she was looking at. Somehow I gained a very deep feeling of how boring she found her job, of how lost she felt here. Somehow I knew this woman regretted missing the chance to be something other than she was. The wave of empathy was like a blow.

  I was drawn, leaning forward. Something pushed at me, something that wasn’t a memory. Something more like an instinct.

  She interrupted me by saying, finally, “What can I help you with?”

  Her entire manner had changed, she wasn’t looking through me any more. I could swear that what I saw in her eyes was lust, a lust that didn’t make me nearly as uncomfortable as it should have.

  “I’m in room 223. I need to know how long I’m paid up for.”

  “Yes, certainly.” The hesitation in the way she breathed as she spoke made my interpretation of her expression unmistakable. So much so that I felt immense relief when she broke eye contact to rummage in a card file next to the phones.

  “Do you have a phone book I could use?”

  “By the pay phone, dear.”

  I glanced around the office looking for the pay phone. I found it back in the hall I’d come through. I left her to search in her files while I stepped outside. The hall was little more than an air lock, with glass doors to the outside and the office. The only things in it were the pay phone and a pair of newspaper machines.

  For a few moments I stood there and tried to regain my composure. I was washed by a sense of disorientation. Rationally, I knew that all I had seen and felt about the woman behind the desk had been manufactured by my own mind, but I had to tell myself that none of it was real.

  The roiling in my gut was real, though. The feeling of need inside me, a reciprocal and distorted version of what I thought I saw in the woman, that was real. The fact that I stood there with muscles tensed to where they felt as if they’d tear from the bone, that was real, too.

  For the first time I truly considered the possibility that I might be psychotic.

  My absent memory provided a fragment of a poem;

  From childhood’s hour I have not been

  As others were—have not seen

  As others saw—could not bring

  My passions from a common spring—

  The sense of being totally alone gripped me again. I clutched the sides of one of the newspaper machines and forced myself to take deep breaths. If nothing else, the effort and concentration that took calmed me. When I felt as if I had rejoined the real world, I picked up the Yellow Pages.

  As I called the cab, I started watching outside. Once I’d calmed down my inner world, I began thinking about the threats that might exist in the outer. There were people out there who had left me for dead, and I was beginning to feel much too overexposed behind this wide expanse of glass.

  The stretch of Route 322 that I could see was all snow-cloaked shadows. I saw nothing threatening until I’d hung up the phone.

  It was a small thing, off in the distance. Out there, by the side of the road, I saw the glow of someone lighting a cigarette. It was far enough away that it shouldn’t have concerned me. Except that spot of road had an overview of the motel’s entrance, the parking lot, and the door to my room.

  I didn’t stare. If that distant smoker was watching me, he had a very good view right now, as well-lighted as I was. I didn’t want to tip off the guy that I’d seen him, not until I had some idea who he was. For all I knew he could be a cop, or my imagination could be running away with me.

  I returned the Yellow Pages, and pulled out the White Pages to try to find an address for an “Arabica,” whatever that was. The listing said it was a coffee house, but I couldn’t find an address for “Coventry.” I had to hope the cabby would know what I was talking about.

  I walked back into the manager’s office, avoiding obvious glances outside. “Four days, dear,” said
the woman behind the counter. I jumped at the sound.

  “You’re paid through Wednesday,” she finished.

  I realized that I didn’t know what day of the week it was. “Wednesday? Morning or evening?”

  She returned to her book, but she kept staring at me over the spine. “Morning. Checkout time is at 10:30.”

  It was Saturday.

  The taxi took twenty minutes to show up. Despite the snow, I waited for it outside. I didn’t want to spend the time in the office alone with that woman. When the cab came, I was covered with snow, and almost used to the cold.

  It was ten minutes toward the city before I was positive the taxi was being shadowed. It wasn’t easy for me to make the car. This stretch of highway was without streetlights, and the snow was getting worse. Most of the time the only visible signs of the car were the twin cones of headlamp-stirred snow.

  However, not all pairs of headlights are created equal, and my tail was marked by a clump of ice by the right edge of the bumper that warped the lower right corner of its headlight. The car faded behind us two or three times as the cab made its way deeper into the snowbound Cleveland suburbs. But each time headlights reappeared behind us, it was the same car.

  I resisted the impulse to have the cab pull over, or to change my destination. I wanted to keep track of these guys as much as they seemed to want to keep track of me.

  I wondered if they were the same people who had tried to kill me. That didn’t make sense. By all rights, the people who dumped me in the sewer should think I was dead.

  I was beginning to have problems with the idea that someone had tried to kill me. If all the blood that had frozen on me was my own, where was the injury that had bled so much? All I had to go on, really, was a gut feeling that didn’t even have a memory to support it. From the evidence, it could have been me killing someone and wandering into the sewers to escape....

  By the time the cab passed the border into Cleveland Heights, Route 322 had turned into Mayfield and we had passed deep into well-lit suburbia. The general lack of traffic made it hard for my tail to hide. They made a valiant effort, but they only had one car, so no matter what they did, I could eventually pick them out.