The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T. J. Martinson

  Just then, the bells above the glass door chirped and a woman walked in, her head casting shoulder to shoulder like she was expecting someone. As the door closed, it ushered in the smell of rain threatening to fall. The woman appeared to be older, midsixties. She moved weightlessly and effortlessly through the space, as though gliding a fraction of an inch above the unvacuumed carpet. Her apple-red, dyed hair fell in neat ringlets to her neck, curling just above the unbuttoned collar of her floral-print blouse. She wore a sequined miniskirt that changed color with every step under the overhead lights, while a cigarette burned in her hand, the smoke wrapping around it like a glove.

  Wren watched the woman walking toward her like a celebrity along some empty red carpet. The woman placed her purse on the counter and rooted inside of it, discarding crumpled receipts, condoms, hard-candy wrappers, and loose change in search of something. She stacked wadded dollar bills alongside emptied gum wrappers, cursing silently, her lips forming four-letter words and releasing them with the crisp menthol that oozed from her mouth.

  Wren cleared her throat. “Can’t smoke in here. Sorry.”

  She nodded and brought the cigarette to her lips and left it there, using both hands to go through the purse.

  “Are you here to bowl?”

  She stopped her digging suddenly, running a hand through her hair, gray at the roots. “What’s the point in buying a cell phone if you can’t ever find it?” She huffed and turned around, looking out over the desolate lanes, her eyes squinting in the smoke. “I haven’t been here in godknows how long. Place has really gone to shit. I used to come in here when I was younger.” She remained looking out at the pins and the blank, suspended screens. The drunken college boys high-fiving for no evident reason. She pointed at a wall behind a pool table. “See the picture hanging there—a mirror, I think it is.”

  “Yes.”

  The woman leaned back onto the counter and craned her head, her chin touching her shoulder.

  “That’s where I got felt-up for the first time. Swear to God it’s true.”

  Wren nodded, with the sudden image of a faceless man, holding a piece of this woman—her breast—disembodied, cradled in his cupped hand.

  “You don’t ever forget it, do you? First hands that aren’t your own, covered in teenage sweat. Wandering over you like you’re some porcelain doll. Like you might break at the slightest touch. It’s only later they learn that you don’t break. That’s where the trouble starts, doesn’t it?” She took a long, long drag, until Wren thought she might suck the whole cigarette down in a single breath, but finally she released. “No, you don’t forget it. And then you come back to where it happened. Years later. And you feel it again. Like you’re walking back to where it all began.” She coughed into an open palm. “It’s fixing to storm outside. Hope you have yourself an umbrella.”

  Wren saw from the corner of her eye the college boys looking at the woman. One of them, the one she knew, pantomimed fellatio with a clutched fist to the delirious amusement of his friend.

  The woman didn’t seem to notice. She looked down at a silver watch, loosely wrapping her toothpick-wrist. “I’m guessing that’s the boss’s office?” she said, pointing to Fester’s closed door with his name printed on a wooden placard.

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Well, back to work, then.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked off sure-footed in her heels, her sequined skirt catching all the light from the room and reflecting it all in a sort of radiance around her. She knocked on Fester’s door and it opened wide enough for her narrow body to pass through before shutting.

  Wren looked down at the pile of old papers and receipts the woman had left on the counter. She withdrew a folded business card. It read: MISS MAY PIECEWORK. A phone number in fine print at the bottom.

  She looked out over the lanes and saw the two college kids in a sort of huddle. They were looking back at Wren. Frozen in laughter, teeth bared to the dim and unchanging lights. She wanted to beat them with a bowling pin, but instead she turned back to her laptop. She studied the image of the ringed finger for a moment, and then she pulled up the Chicago missing persons directory. An array of thumbnailed faces stared back at her. There were hundreds—men, women, children. Even after she filtered her search for women, she wasn’t sure how she should proceed. When she clicked on a picture, there was listed the missing person’s name, their last known location, their birth date, and their physical description. There was nothing about recent engagements.

  A half hour later, Fester’s door opened just wide enough for the woman to emerge. She looked no different than before, but she carried herself with more precision, a certain measure to each step she took atop the geometric carpet.

  As she walked past the counter, she caught sight of the television hanging from its frayed wire. The woman squinted to make out the caption on the news channel: THE KINGFISHER BACK FROM THE DEAD? A group of four commentators gathered around a table appeared to be arguing over the question with considerable enthusiasm.

  The woman touched a hand to her lips, where it remained.

  “Do you want me to turn it up?” Wren asked.

  Her voice seemed to surprise the woman. “No, no,” the woman said in a soft voice that didn’t seem to come from her at all. She laid a hand on the counter as if steadying herself. “I ought to get going before the rain comes.”

  The bell above the door called out and she was gone.

  In her absence, Wren heard footsteps approaching from the other side and she turned to see the college boys standing before her. They both wore polo shirts, pastel shorts, Nike socks, dock shoes. They laid their bowling shoes down on the counter, having finished their game. But they lingered about still, each of them halfheartedly fighting a stupid, drunk grin.

  “You were that girl that was in my Introduction to Informatics class a few years ago, right?” asked the one she knew. As soon as he spoke, his name came back to her immediately: Nikolas Wilson. He had been a sports science major, or some other equally facile discipline, and he must have arrived at Introduction to Informatics as an ill-advised elective course. He didn’t know anything about informatics, but that didn’t stop him from speaking over everyone in the class, including the professor. But so far as Wren could tell, being a man in this world meant you could talk as loudly as you liked about things you didn’t know anything about and the world was more or less obliged to listen, nod, and maybe even agree.

  Wren collected their shoes.

  “Did you hear me?” Nikolas asked with a wolfish grin, leaning across the counter. His hair was buzzed on the sides, but neatly coiffed on top. Or, as Parker called it, “the proto-fascist alt-right haircut du jour.” Nikolas repeated himself, “You were in that class, right? You were some sort of awesome coder or something.”

  She nodded with reluctance. Nikolas’s friend nudged him with an elbow, a peevish sidekick’s grin slopped across his sun-red, liquor-stained face.

  “So can I ask you something?” Nikolas asked. He didn’t wait for a reply, which was just as well. “I heard you dropped out because you ran off with that other girl who was in our class. That one with the weird fucking hair. The real bitchy one. I heard you two moved in together after that semester. Is that true?”

  What was true was that they hadn’t even waited until the end of the semester. Parker had arrived breathless at Wren’s dorm room one night, too excited to even speak. So instead, she’d pointed at her laptop screen. The enigmatic Liber-teens had posted a cipher, an open invitation for anyone who could meander its labyrinth of puzzles involving data encryption, Byzantine art history, Nicomachean ethics, continental philosophy, geopolitics, Russian literature, Japanese popular culture, and chess. There was also what Wren had considered a music appreciation segment in which a song by My Bloody Valentine played through the speakers. It was followed by the question: Did you like that music? Yes or no? They worked through the night, and woke in the morning to separate invitations to join the group und
er the condition of total and complete anonymity. Several days later, after splitting a twelve-pack of PBR and two joints each, they had decided to drop out. Why spend four years preparing for the world, when, with the Liber-teens, they had an opportunity to have a tangible effect on the exact same world? Why study information systems and code from a textbook when the entire world was little more than a series of ones and zeros constantly rearranging?

  And at some point in those indeterminable hours, Parker had turned to Wren, holding out a joint. “This is the Manifest Destiny of the twenty-first century.”

  “A shitty apartment and a bag of weed?” Wren said.

  “And the whole world at your fingertips,” Parker said, reaching out her hand, running her fingers lightly across Wren’s cheek.

  But Wren wasn’t about to tell Nikolas—beer-glazed blue eyes—any of this, so instead she turned around and sprayed the racks of shoes with a disinfectant. A cloud of aerosol billowing into her face. Acerbic, but also halfway sweet.

  “Hey, I asked you a question,” Nikolas said behind her, his voice climbing. “And you should answer. It’s rude otherwise. Did you go become a lesbian with that bitchy girl or not? Were you a lesbian before or did she make you become one?”

  She took a rag to a rack of bowling balls, polishing their surfaces with quick, tight spirals.

  “Jesus, fine,” Nikolas said, each word more slurred than the last. “Ignore me. Just trying to have a friendly conversation. I guess you can chat with that nasty ginger grandma prostitute in here earlier, but you’re too good to talk with me?”

  His friend wasn’t laughing anymore. The humor of the moment was quickly replaced with something else: a sudden and silent stiffness. Wren heard his friend whisper to him that they should leave. But Nikolas pushed him away. He laid his knuckles on the counter and leaned over the wooden countertop, his shoulder pressed into the Bud Light tap handle, releasing a spray of suds.

  She wasn’t looking at him, but she could sense him just the same with a greater clarity than her eyes might otherwise allow. She felt him drawing from his small lexicon for something that would capture whatever fury lay behind his glassy eyes.

  “Lesbo bitch shining bowling balls for minimum wage too good to talk with an old friend,” he pronounced as though reading a newspaper headline, and pushed off the counter, sauntering off in long and leaning strides. His friend turned around apologetically while steadying his drunken counterpart, who kept his eyes trained to her like a guided missile.

  She could see herself through his eyes—a girl in baggy denim jeans, kitchen-scissors haircut, growing smaller and smaller, staring at the earth somewhere below the carpet and concrete and dirt and bedrock until the bell above the door chirped and she disappeared from his line of sight altogether.

  She took her laptop back out and opened an IP-cloaking software and a password decryption algorithm—both of which she and Parker had recently developed—and hacked into Nikolas Wilson’s university bursar account, then withdrew his checking and savings account routing numbers, along with his cell phone number. Three minutes later, his accumulated eleven thousand dollars and fifty-seven cents had been reinvested to a women’s shelter four blocks away. But just for good measure, she also hacked into his iCloud account. From there, she sifted through concert photos—Incubus, the Goo Goo Dolls, Dave Matthews Band, and every other shitty band imaginable—until she found what she was looking for, what she instinctively knew would be there.

  She sent all of Nik’s contacts a blurry picture of his grotesquely discolored genitalia—one of many he had taken, actually—onto which she overlaid a loud, pink-colored text: SHINE MY BALLS?

  When it was over, she wondered if it had been a mistake. He would know it was her, but then again, he had no way of proving it and he wasn’t quite stupid enough to seek revenge. He had deserved what came to him. But whoever the hostages were, they didn’t deserve what could come to them. It was that simple, single difference that meant everything. She turned back to the missing persons directory, staring at the faces that passed her screen.

  7 MAY 1979

  OFFICER GREGORY STETSON was a practical man who prayed to a practical God and set practical goals—marry Mindy, buy a nice house together, have a kid or two, lease a shining American-made car, get a promotion to detective, retire somewhere perpetually warm, and die at an old age surrounded by those he loved. And he saw the world as a practical object willing to dispense with these things if he worked hard enough. The world was his for the taking, so to speak.

  He had met Mindy in a bar a few weeks back. After a few too many drinks, he had decided he was in love with her, the brunette ashing her cigarette on the bar floor. He beat her in a game of darts, talked some shit, and she punched him in the shoulder. Harder than he would have expected. Hard enough that it hurt. He’d told her she had just assaulted a police officer, a man of the law. She held out her hands, stepping closer to him. “Guess you’ll have to handcuff me.” Later that same night, he still felt the shape and kiss of her knuckles on his shoulder as he lay awake next to her in his one-bedroom Woodlawn apartment.

  The radio crackled on his shoulder. “Adam Thirteen, code five.”

  Stetson grabbed the radio before dispatch had even finished the sentence. “Thirteen, code five, go ahead.”

  “Officer located on corner of 51st and 52nd reports finding suspect with outstanding warrant. Requests immediate backup.”

  “Copy and confirm.”

  And then he was not thinking about Mindy anymore, a nice house, an American-made car—all of his attention narrowed like a noose around a single duty. He was a cop. A cop assisting another cop in the city he loved more dearly than he loved life itself. And all things considered, he happened to love life very much.

  Stetson spotted an unmarked cruiser in front of a foreclosed home on 51st. As he exited his patrol car, he found that the officer he was here to assist was in fact a detective. What a detective was doing out here, alone and at this time of night, was beyond him. And Detective Paul Wroblewski, no less.

  Detective Wroblewski had what might charitably be called a “reputation.” Less charitably, Wroblewski was a raging alcoholic, a two-bit homicide detective, and an all-around prickly dick. But a detective is a detective, and a first impression is a first impression, so Stetson held out a hand. Wroblewski regarded Stetson’s hand as though it were a space-object fallen to earth as he reached instead into his pocket for a loose cigarette.

  “Got a call for a code five,” Stetson said, retracting his outstretched hand and thumbing his belt. “Where’s the suspect?”

  Even in the dark of night, Stetson saw that Wroblewski’s eyes were wide and dilated, as though trying to take in the whole world all at once. His lips and fingers quivered as he laid a cigarette gently between them. He was drunk. That much was obvious. But Stetson had seen Wroblewski drunk before—talking at a high volume in the precinct, cursing at anyone that passed him. This was something more than drunk.

  Wroblewski patted his pockets for his matchbook, the cigarette hanging from his mouth. He didn’t seem to remember the cigarette was there, because when he opened his mouth to answer, it fell out onto the sidewalk. He picked it up and withdrew a flap of matches from his breast pocket. With a quivering hand, he tried striking a match, but the flame was dead on arrival.

  “Are you OK, sir?”

  “What’s your name?” Wroblewski asked, a deep rattle in his throat. He threw the bum match to the ground and tried to light another.

  “Officer Stetson.”

  “Officer is a funny first name. You have a Zippo on you, Mr. Officer?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t smoke?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Mm,” Wroblewski hummed, finally getting a good light on a match, the flame contouring the soft and indistinct edges of his alcohol-swollen face. “You should. It helps.”

  “So where’s the code five?” Stetson asked again.

  “Well, Mr. Offi
cer, that’s the thing.” Wroblewski exhaled a plume of smoke. He seemed to relax a touch, stretching his neck to scan the stars. “That’s why I wanted some backup here.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s dead. The code five. Dead as dead.”

  Stetson maintained a professional calm. “You neutralized him?”

  “No, no, no.” Wroblewski waved it off. A heaving drag, exhaling between fits of trembling laughter. “Jesus, neutralize. Listen to yourself.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Honestly, kid? I got no fucking clue. I just want to make sure I’m not losing my damned mind. Thought I’d get a second pair of eyes. But understand, maybe you don’t tell the guys back at the station what you’re about to see. Not yet, OK? Call it liability or whatever-the-hell. Call it a secret we maybe share for the time being. Are we understood?”

  A detective is a detective. Stetson nodded. “Where is he?”

  “This way.” Wroblewski led him through the gate of a chain fence, around the foreclosed home, past dusty and dark windows. Fireflies illuminated the night, appearing and reappearing, a hundred points of scattered light. A charcoal grill lay upended in the backyard, overtaken by a jungle of uncut grass. They entered into a gravel alley at the edge of the lawn. Wroblewski turned in to the alley, a cloud of smoke in his wake, slowing his surprisingly spry step to allow Stetson to catch up.

  “I’ve been trying to run down this guy for a while now,” Wroblewski said over his shoulder in a hushed voice. “One month back, he shoots a gas station employee. Wasn’t fatal, but the employee is all sorts of messed up. Paralyzed, breathing tubes, crying family. A nasty scene.”