Sleeping Policemen

by Dale Bailey

  “You know what that is?” Gutman had supposedly said. “Just this: they never, ever forget.” And then he shot the kid between the eyes, sat down with his scotch on the rocks, and leisurely finished his meal.

  In the silence that followed, something sloughed away inside Nick, some final hope. He felt like a man already dead, a corpse cooling on a table, awaiting the mortician’s loving hand. When Sue touched him, he moaned. His eyes flew open on a void, an endless reach of blue. The cruiser hurled itself across an abyss, a sluggish, brown river curling like a comma below. Beyond it, Knoxville overspread the valley, a faded city of brick, the university nestled in an arm of water with the downtown district beyond, a handful of towers coruscant with morning sun.

  Gone, he thought, all gone. The money and the life the money could buy, freedom from Glory, everything he hoped for, dreamed of, irretrievably lost. Only Sue remained. And now he thought of the previous night, Sue, her copper hair aspill across his chest and his sudden realization: that Fate could snatch her away—she was that fragile, everyone was—and maybe it would snatch her away because of him, because he had dragged her into this. He would have to save her, somehow. He would have to find a way. He would have to bargain with the man named Vergil Gutman. He squeezed Sue’s hand and turned to study their route, the city rising up to meet them as Evans guided the cruiser off the highway. But try as he might, the only thing he could really see was Stark, the little guy in Evans’s tale, his red hair catching the light as he sat down to eat.

  For Nick, maybe the worst thing of all was how much the last mile or so of the trip reminded him of home. He might have grown up here. The peeling clapboard houses with their yellow lawns and cracking, pitted sidewalks looked like Glory. And when Evans spun the cruiser through an automatic gate in a rusting chain-link fence, the decayed industrial park beyond reminded him of the warehouses along the dock, the long summers of work. His muscles burned with ghosts of remembered labor—endless afternoons stripped to the waist beneath the steaming sun, wrestling cases of ice-packed fish into refrigerated eighteen wheelers.

  Two minutes later, Evans hustled him from the back seat into a mostly empty gravel lot. Nick found himself expecting to emerge into sweltering heat, his nostrils wrinkling in anticipation of the sea smell off the Gulf, the stink of rotting fish and sweat. But the air was still and odorless and cold, the sun a bright ember without heat in a solid azure sky. He shuffled his feet to get his blood moving as Finney and Sue climbed out behind him. His head pulsed with every move.

  “Where are we?” Finney asked.

  “Shut up.” Evans nodded at a slate-colored aluminum prefab the size of a football field. Gravel crunched underfoot as they trudged toward it, past scattered vehicles and a few winter-stunted shrubs. The building itself was featureless save for a dented metal door with an open padlock dangling from its hasp. A rusting metal sign had been bolted to the left of the door. It showed a rampant cartoon elephant juggling spools of film with its blunt front legs. Printed below in weathered black letters were the words, PACHYDERM VIDEO SECURITY.

  Nick swallowed hard. He met Finney’s eyes for half a second, but what he saw there—bottomless despair, the vacuous stare of a concentration camp victim beyond caring—terrified him. He stepped away, wheeled to face Evans, and let his eyes slide past him to the gravel parking lot. Beyond a few scattered outbuildings of prefab aluminum, the fence lay in a glittering line, maybe two hundred yards away. On the other side he could see rundown houses and trees, normal life. So close …

  Muscles tightened in his thighs and calves, tension through his shoulders. He found himself measuring the distance between Evans and the nearest of the outbuildings—

  “Steady, Nicky,” Sue whispered. “You have to be steady or we’re done for.” He pressed against her, felt her hand in his, her breath warm at his ear. He exhaled a plume of gray mist.

  Evans brushed past and put his hand on the door knob. “Not a word less you’re spoken to, understand?”

  Nick nodded.

  Evans opened the door and they stepped inside.

  A wave of tropical heat met them, shocking after the chill outside air. Nick dragged a mouthful of the heavy stuff into his lungs, feeling a last icy gust from without before the door slammed behind them. Its hollow boom reverberated endlessly in the small, spare room where they stood. Evans shoved him, and he stumbled forward a step or two on cheap indoor/outdoor carpet that might once have been gray.

  The space had been laid out as a waiting area. Cheap plastic chairs—empty—had been placed along three sides. A scarred metal door with three filing cabinets to either side stood in the fourth wall. Square in the middle of the room sat a beat-up metal office desk, empty but for a telephone and the boots of the balding, acne-scarred man with thick glasses who slouched behind it. He held a newspaper folded into quarters in his lap and chewed thoughtfully at the eraser of a pencil. Without looking up, he said, “Four letter word for semi-aquatic salamander?”

  “Get your feet off the desk, Oscar.”

  Oscar slid the pencil behind his ear. “Get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, Larry? Were your eggs overdone?”

  “Fritos,” Evans said. “I had Fritos for breakfast and so far the day has made me edgy, so get your feet off the desk. All right?”

  Grudgingly, Oscar swung his feet down. He waved the paper. “Who’s this, the three stooges?” His eyes lingered on Sue.

  “Mr. Gutman in?”

  “Tuesday morning, ten-twenty-five, you ever known him not to be? The man’s like clockwork.”

  Evans said nothing.

  “So who’s the chick? Ain’t half-bad for a redhead.”

  “Have a little respect.” Evans turned to Sue. “Keys, Missy?”

  Sue looked puzzled.

  Gently, Evans said, “Car keys. Member that pretty little car a yours?”

  Sue nodded and dug in her purse. She came out with a heavy ring of keys. Evans took them and dropped them jingling on the desk. Oscar stared at them the way he might have stared had Evans vomited there. He lifted his eyebrows.

  “Send somebody out to pick up her car. Blue Mercedes, Georgia plates WGI-323. Place called the Smokin Mountain ten miles west of 321, just outside of Townsend. Road called Blacklick—”

  “Fuck that. Since when do you give me orders?”

  “Look here, Oscar, you think it’s hard to find someone to sit behind this desk?” Evans leaned forward, his enormous bulk looming over the other man. He took the sunglasses off and slid them into a case in his breast pocket, grinned. “Do you?”

  Oscar swallowed hard, shook his head. He pushed his glasses up with one trembling finger.

  “Right.” Evans’s voice was very gentle. “And I’ve told you before about your mouth. Now, get someone to pick up the car, and send a crew with him. Three people had the misfortune to die there this morning, you see, and I’d be pleased if you could get on it before someone finds the mess and starts askin questions. We also got a floater in the quarry outside Ransom, North Carolina. I’ve been very busy. So take care of that, too. Got it?”

  Oscar nodded.

  “Now, if you’ll just let the boss know we’re here, we’ll let you get about your business.”

  Oscar leaned forward and punched a button on the phone. “Trooper Evans to see you, Mr. Gutman.”

  The reply came through the intercom, the words hard-bitten and sharp—

  —Finish her!—

  —sparking a little jolt of recognition along Nick’s spine. “Send him in.”

  Nick shuddered as Oscar jerked a thumb at the door. “You heard the man.”

  Smiling past his toothpick, Evans ushered them around the desk, Finney pale and ghostly looking, then Sue, then Nick. Just before he opened the door, Evans turned and looked back at Oscar, who had already picked up the phone. “Say, Oscar.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The four letter word for a semi-aquatic salamander? That thing’s called a newt.”

  Ni
ck noticed the surveillance camera high up in the far corner of the narrow corridor past the door, and now, his mind spinning back into the waiting area and the parking lot beyond it, he realized what he had been seeing all along without really thinking about it: cameras. Three or four of them at least, two at the entrance to the compound, gazing down from posts atop the chain-link fence, two more affixed to the corners of the prefab building, and yet another one peering down from the corner of the waiting room, its red-eye tireless and unblinking, watching them.

  He licked his lips, and started down the hall past a series of metal doors, Evans propelling him with a thick hand between his shoulder blades. At the far end of the passage stood yet another door, this one made of wood that took a glossy shine. He could see the ghostly reflections of Finney and Sue swimming before him, his own strained face a pale worried blur over Sue’s left shoulder. Bolted to the door at eye level was a black metal plate and on the metal plate two words had been stamped in gray: VERGIL GUTMAN.

  They paused in a knot before the door. Evans shouldered past them, lifted his fist, and knocked. From the other side, Nick heard a muffled invitation. Evans lowered his hand and grasped the heavy brass door knob. Nick watched it turn.

  The door swung open. Suddenly it was hard to breathe.

  Tuesday, 10:31 to 11:02 AM

  Sue gasped.

  Nick recoiled a step, uncertain of his bearings. Evans prodded him, and he stepped forward again, aware of Finney as a gray shadow somewhere to his left, Sue a presence to his right and just ahead of him. The room swam with flickering greenish-blue light, and for a moment Nick’s aching, sleep-deprived mind seemed to spin free of its orbit, to settle into the haunted turquoise depths of Sue’s living room, her slender spine bowed before him, each notch of her spine a stair descending into his heart’s basement. Then Sue reached out for him, steadying him in time and space.

  The room gathered substance around him: vast, shadowy, hushed. The carpet under his feet was lush, thick, gray, the enormous mahogany desk at the far end of the room polished to a mirrored gloss, sparking a memory of a conference room in a high-rent New Orleans office complex, his father supplicant in his wheelchair on one side of a shining table that seemed about a mile wide, a lawyer all smiles on the other side, his manicured hands folded neatly in front of him. The lawsuit would have to be dropped, he had informed them. Turned out, the oil company had been in compliance with OSHA after all.

  How much? Frank Laymon had screamed. How much did they buy you for, you son of a bitch?

  Nick swallowed, felt Sue’s hand bracing him. Evans walked to the desk, pausing between an overstuffed leather chair and a matching loveseat. The man on the other side had his back to them, his enormous bald head sprouting like a monstrous tumor from the back of a black leather desk chair. The phone he held in one hand looked like a child’s toy, a plastic Playskool replica of a real telephone. He held up the other hand, one gigantic leathery finger extended for silence, flickering with reflected luminescence from the bank of video screens which formed the wall behind the desk.

  Nick stared in fascination at the screens, the source of that strange, shifting light. There must have been fifty of them, flickering with dozens of silent images. He recognized closed circuit video feeds from the industrial park—the gate and the building’s exterior; the office where Oscar was passing Sue’s keys to a man in a dark suit; the bare hall just outside the door—and others he thought must be on the grounds: a warehouse stacked with shadowy merchandise, halls and passages. But there were other images, too, satellite and network feeds, he supposed. Oprah and The Price Is Right, Regis and Kelly. On a screen to the right of Vergil Gutman’s massive head, a naked Asian woman was going down on a black man. Just to the left of that, a continuous stock ticker ran beneath a woman at a news desk. The worst screen, however, was high off near the right hand corner; it showed a simple bunker with U-bolts and chains embedded in the concrete, the floor graded toward a drain set dead center.

  Nick caught a swift internal glimpse of Casey Nicole Barrett, a crimson thread of blood unspooling across her girlish breast—and now the image held nothing for him, just the dry despair of self-knowledge.

  The man behind the desk spoke, his voice mellifluous, deep, his words enunciated with clipped precision. “Cost is not an object. I want it. Get it.” He lowered the phone into its cradle gently.

  He sat a moment longer with his back to them, and then he said: “You have them, Lawrence?”

  Evans was a man transformed. The stagey folksiness—pure movie psycho, Nick thought, a mask, nothing more—had dropped away. He stood before the desk like a man at attention, his face in three-quarters profile, the toothpick tucked out of sight. His voice was quiet, accentless. “Yes, sir. They’re right here.”

  The chair spun slowly around.

  Nick felt a burst of hysterical laughter well into his throat as the bizarre suitability of the man’s nickname—

  —the Pachyderm—

  —became evident. A crazy flood of names—Jumbo, Jabba the Hutt, Babar—spilled through his mind, and for a single terrifying moment he knew that the clot of crazed hilarity would burst between his lips and detonate inside the silent, airless room, dooming them all. Then Sue coughed, a single chuff of noise that might have been laughter, might have been merely the sharp intake of horrified breath, might have been nothing at all—and the crisis passed.

  He breathed deeply, noticing now that the air here was odorless, cooler than that in the antechamber, neither hot nor cold, but simply, breathably comfortable, driven by the faraway woosh of central air conditioning.

  And he noticed, too, that the man named Vergil Gutman was a freak. Nick forced himself not to step away, to recoil physically as a wave of atavistic dismay crashed through him. It was not merely that Gutman was overweight—though he was, enormously so, almost as large as the slack-fleshed woman at the Smokin Mountain, a thick slab of fat encased like a sausage in a perfectly tailored dark suit. Nor was it his complexion: his skull clean-shaven or perhaps naturally hairless, the flesh over his left eye whorled and pebbled like the flesh of a newly healed burn victim. Nick could handle all that—could handle even the spongy growth which curved across his left cheek, dripping under his mouth like candle wax and twisting his lower lip into a perpetual sneer.

  No.

  What he could not handle, what he could not bear to look at, were Gutman’s eyes. His eyes, blue as a dream sea on a summer afternoon, and the pale, flawless stretch of his right cheek, and his manicured and perfectly formed right hand, the hand of a pianist, a surgeon. Entranced, Nick watched that hand reach out to the humidor at the edge of the desk and remove a thick cigar. With the other hand—tumorous, the fingers thickened—Gutman produced a silver cigar cutter, a miniature guillotine, its blade suspended above the frame of a perfect circle. He trimmed the cigar and placed the cutter on the desk, its razored edge gleaming in the wash of light from the screens. And Nick, watching the interplay of those hands, Jekyll and Hyde, suddenly understood what so disturbed him: not the wounded complexion of the man on the other side of the desk, but that monster’s normal twin, the sorrowful human eyes peering from that sea of tortured flesh, like the eyes of a drowning man.

  Gutman studied them silently.

  At last, he said, “Please, sit down.” He gestured expansively at the leather furniture. “I am informed you’ve had a difficult morning.”

  They swam forward through that strange, drifting sea of blue light. Nick collapsed beside Sue in the soft leather love seat, abruptly boneless with exhaustion.

  “You must be thirsty. Would you care for a drink?”

  After a moment, Sue said, “Water would be nice. If you have it.”

  “Coke,” Finney said, and Nick said, “Anything’s fine.”

  Gutman said, “And I shall have Glenfiddich and water, if you would be so kind, Lawrence.”

  Evans retreated into a shadowy corner without a word. Ice tinkled, a can opened. Silently, Gutman l
it his cigar with a silver butane lighter, examined it critically, puffed at it until he had it burning to his satisfaction. Nick caught a faint hint of the fragrance—rich and sweet—before that efficient air-conditioning whisked it away.

  Evans appeared with their drinks. He distributed them and disappeared with the tray. A moment later, he returned.

  Nick tasted his Coke, ice-cold, sweet. Even in these circumstances, it tasted better than anything he could ever have imagined. It had been hours—last night at Sue’s—since he had eaten anything. He placed the glass on a little table by the loveseat, trying not to let his hand shake.

  Gutman leaned forward, glancing at Evans, motionless beside the desk. “You understand that we have a problem here. First you run over poor, dear Aubrey, whom I rather liked, though he proved unfaithful in the end. What endless amounts of trouble that caused you will never know. And then you dump Mr. Pomeroy rather unceremoniously into a quarry. I might thank you for that—I found him an unutterable nuisance—but alas I cannot. His abrupt disappearance will no doubt merely entangle me further in unpleasantness. So you have caused me all manner of heartache and worry, and now you present me with still another problem: whatever in the world am I to do with you?”