The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T. J. Martinson

  The after-work crowd began shuffling in, ravenous and wild-eyed from long staring contests with computer monitors, their necks stiff from nodding in agreement with one another from across some oblong cherrywood table.

  He envied them. When Marcus had returned from the north suburbs to the city for college, he found that nearly everyone he encountered carried with them a certain confidence of place that he himself no longer possessed. At best he could only ever mimic the effortless poise of a man smoking a cigarette out in the deep-bone cold of Chicago. He felt like every other living being out there in the expansive beyond, every wino passed out slumped in corners and every car passing by on the freeways, could see that he was too soft for the hard texture of this city. A tourist in citizen’s clothes. Their eyes traced him and held him and disregarded him all in a single, weary blink.

  He kept his eyes trained on the door, waiting for Peter, and when an ambling man with a heavy limp stopped next to the table, he did not immediately register his presence.

  “Marcus,” the man said.

  Marcus looked up and couldn’t catch the disbelieving sigh that crept from his mouth. Time had twisted Peter into a boardwalk caricature of himself. His once pin-straight posture had atrophied into a hunch, a sort of permanent shrug. His short, graying hair was retreating up his scalp. Fresh razor scars pockmarked his neck, his jawline. He wore a dirty brown turtleneck to cover what he could. It was Peter, Marcus knew, but not Peter as he had known him. This was someone else entirely, at least in appearance.

  And Marcus feared Peter was thinking the same about him.

  “Peter.” Marcus swallowed, tried to offer a smile. “It’s good to see you. It’s been a minute.”

  Peter said, “You look more than a little shocked.”

  Marcus was relieved to hear that Peter’s voice still possessed a childlike inflection, amazed to hear multisyllable words escaping his mouth.

  “I didn’t recognize you at first. That’s all. Please, take a seat.”

  Peter lowered himself—slowly, gently—in the booth across from Marcus. Peter sighed once he was seated, slicking a few stray hairs from his forehead. “I’m not maybe as nimble as you remember.” He patted his leg, as though this were the only surprise. “I normally use a cane. I would have used it to come here, but I’m self-conscious of it, I guess. It makes me feel conspicuous.”

  “Why would I care if you have a cane?”

  “I’m fine without it for the most part. I just ignore the stares. Limping man on the sidewalk.”

  “I hardly noticed it.”

  “The thing I always liked about you, Marcus, is that you never lied to me. Don’t start now.”

  “So then what happened?” Marcus pointed at Peter’s leg.

  “Had an accident some years ago,” he said, his eyes shifting throughout the diner, taking it in piece by piece. “Doctors said I wouldn’t ever walk again.”

  “And here you are.”

  “And here I am,” he agreed, with a wavering smile. “To hell with those white coats.”

  Marcus noticed the measured space between them, comfortable and halfway familiar, the glossed table reflecting their changed faces.

  “I was in a body cast for weeks.” He removed his silverware from its napkin and studied the spoon as though it were an unearthed artifact. “I couldn’t so much as turn my head. I had to lie there staring up. Only thing in sight was the crack along my hospital ceiling.” Peter laughed. “It’s really not all that funny, but to this day, I have dreams where I’m laying there in the hospital bed and the crack widens. Like I’m underground, frozen, and I can’t move. It just all falls, the floor gives way, and then I wake up. Sweating and screaming and tumbling.”

  “I’m so sorry, Peter. That sounds horrible.”

  He shrugged it off. “It’s better now. You survive these things.”

  “What are you up to these days?”

  Peter hesitated and then smiled. “I’m a valet at a hotel garage. Parking cars that cost more than what I make in two years. Not exactly the dream, but it’s something.”

  “Something’s better than nothing.” Marcus cringed at his platitude, but Peter didn’t seem to be listening anyway. His roving eyes landed on his hands, where he tore at the straw wrapper with obsessive dedication. Marcus was glad to see that the years had not succeeded in changing this small part of Peter. The sudden singularity of focus, the dedicated thrust of attention into whatever task he had assigned undue meaning.

  “How about you, Marcus? How are you?”

  “I’m doing pretty well. I retired a few years ago—I don’t know if you know that or not.”

  “I know,” Peter said. “I noticed when your name stopped popping up in the Inquisitor. I canceled my subscription shortly after. It’s just not the same as what it used to be. But you probably know that already. How’s retirement?”

  “It’s a nice change of pace. I’m getting a lot of reading done. My kids bring the grandkids by about once a month or so. Other than that, I work in my garden. I relax.”

  “Really?”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to imagine you relaxing, especially in a garden. I can’t quite picture it.”

  Marcus smiled. “Relaxing may not be the right word for it. I guess I just try to take it easy these days. My wife passed a couple years ago, so things are quiet around the Waters residence. I try to respect that quiet with my own sort of quiet.”

  “But you also wrote the book, of course,” Peter said. “The Kingfisher book.”

  “I did.” Marcus nodded slowly, reminding himself that Peter was not the sort to offer condolences, even for a deceased spouse. “I sent you a letter, tried to get ahold of you for an interview, but I couldn’t seem to get in touch. I at least would have liked to send you a copy.”

  “I read it,” Peter said, still picking at the straw wrapper.

  “Are you going to make me ask you what you thought?”

  “It was good, Marcus.” His eyes fixed on the small, balled-up particulates of the wrapper. “It was really good. I read it once and then again. Felt like I was back there. Back then. Felt like nothing had ever happened. Years hollowed out in the pages. Really good.”

  A grin flickered like a candle flame across Peter’s face. Marcus was glad to see the effort at least, even if Peter was full of shit, which Marcus was almost certain he was.

  “You don’t have to say that if you don’t mean it. I wouldn’t care. You can tell me what you really think.”

  “I thought it had its issues.”

  Marcus was surprised at how much he did, in fact, care. “Like what?”

  “I think your nostalgia for those years painted the Kingfisher a simple sort of way.”

  “I’m not nostalgic—”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Marcus. You accomplished what you set out to do. You covered how the Kingfisher did a whole lot of good for this city, lowering the crime rate and all. But he wasn’t perfect. You know that as well as I do. He was—well—he was complicated.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “For one thing, he killed some criminals who would have otherwise gotten five or ten years in prison.”

  “I mentioned that in the book.”

  “I know you did. But you didn’t contextualize it.” Peter began to animate, looking more and more like the Peter Marcus he had once known. “The fascinating thing about the Kingfisher was that he was fallible and made mistakes. No one knew why he was doing what he did. You made him out to be a superhero, but superheroes are horribly boring. Superheroes have unassailable motives. They fight unquestionably evil villains. They always win.” Peter’s thought seemed to drift away, but he snapped to attention. “No, the Kingfisher wasn’t a superhero. He was much more than that. He was a mystery.”

  “I never once called him a superhero. I never used that word.”

  “You didn’t, no.” Peter paused, deflating with a breath. “But then again, you didn’t have to.”

  The w
aitress came to the table and poured two coffees. Marcus placed his hand atop the mug and let the heat soak into his palm. “Why’d you call me today, Peter?”

  Peter sighed. He shifted nervously in his seat and swept the pieces of wrapper into his hand and held them there. “I saw the video.”

  “You and the rest of the world.”

  “What the hell is happening, Marcus?” Peter shook his head, a vacancy in his eyes. “It feels like I woke up to a nightmare. A nightmare thirty years old.”

  “I know the feeling. I even got called down to the police department this morning. Doesn’t seem real.”

  “Why’d they call you down there?”

  “Police Chief Stetson wanted to talk. That’s all. He asked me if I knew anything and if I’d ever heard of that particular conspiracy. That the police helped fake the Kingfisher’s death and whatnot.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you think? It was the first time I’ve heard anything like that. Total lunacy.”

  Peter nodded, his hands wrapped around his mug. “Lunacy is the right word for it. Anyone who knows anything about the Kingfisher knows that he’s long gone.”

  “But now I have a policeman in my driveway, because they’re worried I may be in danger. Just to come here I had to assure them I was coming back soon. And the cop had to stay there, seeing as how news vans are rolling up and down my street.” Marcus felt the words burn as they came rapidly off his tongue. “There are journalists calling me nonstop. They all want to know if I think he could still be alive, and I can hear in their voice that they want him to still be alive. Not because they care about the Kingfisher, but because it would be a guaranteed three days’ worth of material. They’re not even asking about the hostages or the man who died. They just want to talk about the Kingfisher. They want to talk about the gunman. They’ll squeeze every last ounce of intrigue from the story and then move on. It didn’t used to be like that, you know. We saw things to the end. We covered the whole story.” He stabbed his fingertip on the placemat as a punctuation mark.

  Marcus felt embarrassed at this show of emotion, so he tried to smile, to play it all off. “It’s just crazy,” he said, shrugging. “It’s making me crazy, too, I guess.”

  Peter stared into his coffee. “I just don’t get it, Marcus. What’s happening out there is evil. Pure evil. Makes me wish he really were still around. We could use him now more than ever. Even if it were just for a day.”

  They were quiet for a few moments. Uncomfortably so. Peter turned in his seat to follow Marcus’s gaze outside, where storm clouds began to gather, the street shaded an industrial monochrome, gunmetal gray. Toxins, pollutants, and vapor rising off the lake.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t just want to meet with me to tell me you saw the video,” Marcus said, cutting through whatever pretense still lingered between them. “So what’s on your mind?”

  Peter took a long drink of his coffee, some inner struggle playing out in a series of palsied twitches across his face. “That hostage in the video, Marcus. That hostage.”

  “What about him?”

  “I know you interviewed him for the book.” Peter said with glassy, downcast eyes. “Walter Williams.”

  Marcus lowered his voice and leaned across the table. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I was the one that told Walter to call you. Three years ago or whenever it was, I was the one that gave him your number, Marcus.”

  “How did you know Walter?” Marcus stared back at him, struggling to make sense. “How did you even know I was writing the book?”

  Peter sat back in his seat, crossed his arms, and then promptly unfolded them. He looked around at the other diners and then back at Marcus. “I got your letter a few years ago. About the book, the interview you wanted. I’m sorry I didn’t respond. I just—I didn’t want to get back into all that. I just didn’t want to. I hope you can understand.” He paused, took a deep breath. “But back then, back when I was still chasing the Kingfisher and taking those photographs, I showed up on a scene and met Walter Williams. It was after the same incident you wrote about for your book.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  But Peter continued. “Walter was the one who called the station after the Kingfisher beat the hell out of his boss—I don’t remember the guy’s name. Some major distributor operating nearly everything south of Halsted. But when the call came through dispatch, I caught it on my police scanner. I was down there in just a couple minutes. It wasn’t far from where I was living.”

  “And you talked to Walter?”

  “Just”—Peter held out a hand, which trembled like a tuning fork—“just listen, OK? When I arrived on the scene, I came through a busted back door just as the other guys were making scarce before the cops came. But Walter—he was sitting on the kitchen floor, keeping his boss’s pulse, trying to keep him conscious. The kitchen was wrecked. Bullet casings everywhere. The kitchen table broken. I asked Walter what the hell had happened. I don’t know why, but he started to tell me the whole thing. Like he was in a confessional or something. I tried to ask him some questions about it, and he gave me a few answers, but he was focused on keeping his boss alive.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about that night after it happened? I would have been able to write a story on it then.”

  “Walter asked me not to tell anybody. He begged me not to take pictures and not to tell anyone about it. I told him I wouldn’t, and I guess I meant it. I couldn’t bring myself to take a single photo.”

  “Why?”

  Peter shrugged, looking over his shoulder at the wall. He bit his lip and then turned back. “He was scared, Marcus. Even after it was over. He was scared like I’ve never seen anyone be scared.”

  “Of what?”

  Peter opened his hands, shrugged. “Anything, everything. He was probably worried that night would catch up to him one way or another. And now I guess it did.”

  Marcus rested his head in his hands. He imagined Walter Williams, standing in a bullet-stained room speaking with Peter Richards—the both of them thirty years younger. Marcus imagined the look on Walter’s stunned face as it might have appeared to Peter, and it was the same face he had seen on the video. Vacant, sweating, pleading, and knowing. And perhaps Walter had known, those thirty years ago. Perhaps that night—staring down the barrel of Lawrence Tressy’s gun, standing just feet away from the Kingfisher—he anticipated his death so thoroughly he caught an actual glimpse. Tied to a chair, staring into a camera, screaming into a rope between his teeth. Perhaps he had seen it and immediately dismissed it, because what else could he do?

  “But here’s the thing.” Peter blinked rapidly, withdrawing deeper and deeper into memory. “I ran into him some years later. Walter. He was working at the hospital I was at after my accident. He’d cleaned himself up, gotten a nursing degree. Took me a while on the pain medication, but I eventually recognized him from that night. And he said he recognized me, too. We got to talking. Sort of like old friends. It sounds weird, but that’s how it felt. Like we’d been through something together, the two of us.” He wiped the corner of his eye with his thumb, catching a tear that hadn’t fallen.

  “Did you talk about that night with him?”

  “Not really. He didn’t like talking about it. We mostly talked about other things. Little things. He liked football, always wanted to talk about the Bears. He’d bring me milkshakes after his shift and we’d sit in that room. Me, staring up at the ceiling, and Walter feeding me a milkshake through a straw.” Peter paused, his voice drifting, sliding from his teeth. “So when I got your letter a few years ago, I got ahold of Walter. I told him to call you and give you the details about that night. Figured I owed you that much.”

  “He didn’t mention you when he and I met.”

  “I asked him not to. I’m sorry, Marcus, but I really just didn’t want any part in all that. I hope you understand.”

  Marcus struggled to comprehend everything he was
hearing. But what he struggled with the most was that Peter had been avoiding participating in the book. Of all the people Marcus had planned to interview a few years ago, he had assumed Peter would have been the most eager to tell his story.

  “Anyway,” Peter said, a rattle in his throat. He cleared it. “When I saw the video this morning, I knew right away this is all my fault. I shouldn’t have told Walter to call you. I shouldn’t have done that. It was stupid, Marcus.” His voice was rising steadily, enough to attract the attention of nearby diners. “It was so fucking stupid. If I hadn’t showed up that night or if I hadn’t told him to call you maybe none of this would have happened.” His eyes were blurry beneath a cloud of stagnant tears.

  “This is not your fault,” Marcus said sternly. “Forget the hypotheticals, Peter. They don’t matter. You didn’t do anything wrong. You couldn’t have known.”

  Peter reached for a coffee-stained napkin and brought it to his eyes. “You asked me why I wanted to meet with you,” he said, steadying his voice. “I didn’t ask you here to talk about Walter. I would have just carried that guilt to my grave. But I’m worried about someone else who might be in danger. Someone that the Kingfisher may have saved.”

  “One of the other runners from that night? I’ve been worried about them, too.”

  Peter shook his head. “No, someone else. Someone who may have been very close to the Kingfisher.”

  “What do you mean ‘close’? Who is it?”

  “I’d rather show you.”

  “Show me?”

  “Yeah. Do you mind taking a walk?”

  “To where?”

  “It isn’t terribly far from here,” Peter said, turning over his shoulder and looking out the window where the slate-gray clouds gathered like shadows. Thunder rolled outside. A lazy, lasting drawl across the misty hologram of a heavily trafficked street. “Did you bring an umbrella?”

  * * *

  Luckily, Marcus had brought an umbrella. He and Peter shared it as they exited the diner to the street, where a ghosting rain fell in intermittent sweeps.