Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  “It’s not your fault,” Sergeant Lane said in a way that implied that it was. He stared at a spot just to her left, then snapped out of it. “We’re headed back,” he said. “I decided against using the dogs.” He and Gerraghty took a step away from her, leaning, as if whatever she had was contagious. Lane hesitated, though. “Look,” he said, “it was nothing. A day of planning. A few hours. Nothing.”

  Caroline didn’t answer, and after a moment the sergeant turned again and walked away, joined in mid-stride by Gerraghty, who shuffled in his greasy pants and shirt. Gerraghty loved his undercover street-person outfit. His personality changed when he put on the filthy jeans and black T-shirt, when he let his hair out of its tight ponytail and pulled the loaded pack onto his shoulders. She supposed that was the biggest difference between herself and the other Special Investigations detectives. They loved dressing up, going undercover, fooling people. They liked the change in themselves.

  She had thought she would like it too, although after two years in property crimes, anything had sounded more interesting than chasing down stolen car stereos. But she was simply wired differently than Gerraghty. Drug detectives were as sneaky and duplicitous as the desperate junkies they hounded; it was the reason more than a few lapsed into drug use themselves. Caroline could manage desperate, but she didn’t like the sneakiness, the pretending. More to the point, she didn’t like whatever might be the truth behind the pretending. The baby, for instance: She’d bought the doll for her niece in San Francisco and found the stroller in the property room. Caroline knew it was a bad cover, that it would have an emotional hitch that could distract her from what she was supposed to do. She had figured it would only be an internal ache, though, not this public slapstick.

  Below her, on the steps, the baby stroller sat with its wheels pointed out, like a kid waiting to be scolded. Caroline gave it a nudge with her foot and the carriage turned over and spilled out onto the steps, the doll falling out for the second time today, this time coming up short of the river.

  “Do I arrest you for littering or child abuse?”

  Caroline turned slowly at the sound of his voice and squinted into the sun, which silhouetted Dupree in a way that made Caroline marvel at his impeccable sense of bad timing. “Hello, Sergeant Dupree.”

  He stepped out of the sun and sat on the steps next to her, unable to contain his smile. It was especially jarring, that smile. He was so thin and wiry, his face was so angular, so vertical, that when he smiled, all those anxious, down-turned lines stopped and softened and his lagoon-blue eyes leaped out and she found herself wishing for things she didn’t believe she really wanted.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I know you’ve got something to say. Or didn’t you hear?”

  “Oh, I heard. It’s probably in the guild newsletter by now. Pollard wet his pants when he heard.”

  “Oh, good. That makes it all worthwhile,” Caroline said, “providing some entertainment for the lazy asses in Major Crimes.”

  He leaned forward and looked at her over the rims of his small rectangular glasses. “You know,” he said, “only crazy people blame themselves for stuff like this. Guys who talk to themselves. People with Christ complexes.”

  “I’m not blaming myself. I just feel stupid.”

  “Yeah? You should. It was stupid.” He leaned back and stared out at the still river in front of them. “So forget it.” She glanced up at his profile, knowing that he was aware of her watching him. He had been her first patrol shift supervisor, in David Sector, downtown. Six years earlier, he’d been the first one on the scene the only time she ever fired her gun, when she reported to a domestic and shot and killed a man who was attempting to carve up his wife. There was a shooting review and Caroline had been cleared of any wrong-doing, but she had taken it hard anyway and might even have quit if it hadn’t been for Alan Dupree. Personally, his effect on her made her angry and unsettled because of the irrationality of her attraction. He had an awkward ropiness, was sinewy and balding, like an old movie cowhand. He was flippant in a way that irritated other cops and horrified civilians. He was constantly making inappropriate jokes to cover his anxiety. He didn’t know when to just be quiet. And there were plenty of other reasons that she shouldn’t be attracted to him. He had the tiniest damn feet. She had never trusted men with small feet. And he was married. There was that, too.

  “What I didn’t hear,” he said, “was who called you.”

  “Joel.”

  He paused and she could feel the joke bubble up in him. She waited. Perhaps something about his penchant for working out. Dupree sometimes called Joel “Chippendale,” or simply “Meat.” But more likely, it would be about his age. Joel was twenty-four, twelve years younger than Caroline.

  “He need a ride home from school?”

  Caroline smiled. “That was actually funny. That’s unlike you.”

  He stood then, picked up the doll, and put it back in the stroller, which he righted for her. “In a week,” he said, “patrol will pick up your little drug dealer sniffing glue in a park somewhere. Guys like that always float to the surface.”

  “I suppose.”

  “No supposing. It’ll happen.” Dupree looked over toward the carousel, and for the first time Caroline realized someone was waiting for him. She looked back and saw a guy wearing Dockers, a tie, and a ten-year-old sports coat—the uniform of newspaper reporters, community college professors, and new homicide detectives.

  “Is that Spivey?” Caroline said grimly, forcing herself to smile and wave back. “Tell me that’s not Spivey.”

  “They got me partnered with him for a while. Training him.”

  “Chris Spivey made homicide detective?”

  He shrugged again. “They make monkeys into astronauts.”

  “Actually, I don’t think they do that anymore.” Caroline had requested a transfer to Major Crimes six months earlier and had been told that the only open position was going to be kept dark for at least a year. But apparently it had been given to Spivey.

  “I just train ’em,” Dupree said. “I don’t pick ’em.”

  She turned back to the river.

  “Hey…” He reached out and squeezed her forearm, just above the wrist. “So how’s your mom doing, anyhow?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.” He let go of her arm, nodded, and began walking back toward Spivey.

  Caroline watched him go, then called out. “Say hello to Debbie.”

  Dupree stopped and turned back. “Okay. Say hi to Joel.” He walked away, muttering just loud enough for her to hear, “You know, when he finishes his paper route.”

  When he was gone, Caroline turned back to the river. She picked up the doll and turned it over in her hands. Fifty percent of babies are boys, but most dolls are girls. Ornaments and playthings. Caroline dumped the doll back in the stroller and began pushing it through the park. She checked her watch—almost five—and gave the stroller a big push, then walked to catch up with it, pausing alongside the steady river to replay the blown sting in her mind. Why hadn’t she just let the phone ring? She followed a walking trail up away from the falls and was about to leave the park when she stopped to look back over her shoulder at a stand of thick bushes. A woman in a tight dress and tennis shoes, a secretary walking home, stopped and bent over the stroller.

  “Can I peek?” the woman asked.

  Caroline couldn’t look away from the thick bushes. “No,” she said flatly.

  “Why? Is she asleep?”

  “No,” Caroline said. “Plastic.”

  She left the woman with the stroller and walked toward the thicket, thinking about the second suspect’s khaki pants. She brushed aside the bushes with her arm and then all at once the world exploded around her, Burn and the man in khaki bursting forth from the stand of bushes like birds being flushed. Something, either the force or the surprise, knocked her back, and by the time she regained her balance the two suspects were ten yards away and moving quickly, the man in khaki pulling
Burn by the arm.

  Caroline ran after them, grabbing her cell phone off her hip and trying to punch in the numbers as she ran through the park. She followed the two men past the carousel and along the river, conscious of them pulling away. Caroline dropped her phone, but didn’t turn back for it, just kept running after the men, who crossed a wide footbridge over the still arm of the river and ran deeper into the park.

  Caroline chased them across a parking lot, through an empty daycare playground and down a grass embankment, toward the thundering falls. Caroline knew this part of the park, and she cut behind them through a stand of trees, bursting down the hill as they did, now just a few steps behind. She dropped to a crouch and had her nine-millimeter out smoothly and quickly.

  “Stop! Police!”

  They were on the narrow, cable-suspended footbridge, the falls on their right—water blasting over and around boulders—and the dam downstream on their left. The two men stood smack in the middle of the bridge, too far to make a run to the other shore. They turned slowly. Mist from the waterfall lapped up against their legs as they stood before her, their shoulders heaving from the run. Caroline looked from one to the other and began edging toward them. Her eyes locked with the older man’s sly face and dead eyes. Without moving his head, the man’s eyes shifted to Burn.

  “Lie down! On your stomachs!” Her voice sounded tinny in the crash of the falls and, two hundred yards downstream, the deep rumble of the dam and power plant that marked the end of the upper falls.

  Slowly, Burn lifted his hands in the air. But the older man didn’t budge, didn’t even acknowledge her gun, just stood with his arms at his sides, his jaw set forward, his black eyes boring into hers.

  Caroline stopped walking toward them. There was something eerily familiar in this man’s stare, like some desperate question she remembered hearing before: Is this where we are, you and me? She had the sense that something here was beyond her understanding, that there was more to this situation than these three figures on this narrow bridge. The air was heavy with mist and potential, and Caroline was surprised to hear her own chopped breathing within the roar of the falls.

  “Get! Down!” she yelled again, gesturing at the ground with the gun. Burn nodded and began to lean forward.

  That’s when the older man turned and, without changing his flat expression, put two hands on Burn’s shoulder, and Caroline realized what he was going to do just before he pushed Burn, which he did swiftly and seemingly without thought. Caroline cried out, the sound lost in the howling water as the young man tumbled, arms cartwheeling, over the bridge railing and into the river.

  Caroline ran to the railing. The water beneath the falls was deep and churned with currents and undertows from the white roiling foam. Caroline found herself holding her breath while Burn was under, and when, finally, he surfaced in the darker water, she let out a gasping sigh. In the river, Burn was immediately pulled by the current toward the Monroe Street Dam. The man in khaki began to edge sideways, casually, without hurrying, like someone leaving a picnic. He watched her, his eyes placid and cold. She stared at him in horror and he stopped, turned slowly to the river, seeming to know that her eyes would follow his. He seemed curious to see what she would do with the terrible choice he’d just given her: Arrest the suspect on the bridge or try to save the one in the water.

  There are moments as a cop, Dupree always said, that are sheer paradox, the world upside down. It was one of his many “theories,” the job punctuated by moments that are ludicrous on their face and to which any response is wrong; any reaction to an irrational event is bound to be irrational. Laughing at funerals. Crying at weddings. If you’d been a cop for long, you were always mixing up your laughing and your crying.

  Caroline looked once more at the man in khaki and then went after Burn. She jumped the bridge railing and landed on the high bank, but it was too steep and rocky to negotiate. She watched Burn struggle against the surging flow and tried to gauge the angle he was swimming and the distance to the concrete spillway. He might make it if he didn’t panic. The trick would be to pull himself out of swiftly moving water onto the rocky bank. That, and not looking ahead. Caroline imagined what it would look like from the boy’s vantage point: A hundred yards from where he thrashed, water crested the concrete face of the dam and dropped into nothing. She looked back over her shoulder once, but the man in khaki was gone.

  She climbed the embankment and sprinted through traffic across the busy street and around the old downtown power plant, leaving the riverbank and the boy for a moment. As she ran, she pictured Burn’s file from that morning’s strategy meeting, when they’d planned the simple, one-day undercover sting, part of a larger operation. Short surveillance, watch the kid make a few sales, bring him down during a deal. Suspect’s name: Kevin C. Hatch. Street name: Burn. Nineteen years old. A dealer and pimp with a long juvie sheet: burglary, assault, drugs. Nineteen.

  When she could see down into the river again, Burn was gone. She ran her eyes back and forth over the river and the dam, and finally saw him just upstream, on the same bank she was on, gripping the rock wall that lined the river. Caroline ran down the riverbank, on concrete steps carved into the steep hillside, sprinting them two at a time.

  Lungs aching, she reached the yard of the power plant next to the dam. Fifty yards upstream Burn was clinging to sheer rock, struggling to keep a handhold. The current pulled him away from the bank two or three times before he managed to haul himself up against the jagged river channel; his legs dangled in the water.

  “Wait there!” Caroline called, but her voice was drowned out again, this time by the turbines and the endless sound of water slapping the spillway’s concrete face. She moved toward him, but Burn wouldn’t wait. He was trying to climb the rock wall and had pulled himself completely from the cold river.

  “I’ll get a rope!” Caroline waved her arms and sprinted toward him, but the kid ignored her and continued climbing the rock wall, made slick by the mist from the falls. “Please! Wait there!”

  Three feet above the water, his left foot slipped. He stepped desperately, like kick-starting a motorcycle. For a moment he seemed to right himself, then he was scratching at the wall with one of his hands and he fell back. Caroline watched helplessly as he bumped down the rock wall and into the river, slipping for a moment beneath its surface. He got another handhold briefly, but the water seemed to reach up and grab him by the legs, pulling him away from the rocky shore and into the current.

  Caroline looked desperately around the yard of the power plant for a rope, or even a long stick, but found nothing.

  She jumped a chain-link fence and stepped out onto the deck of the dam’s housing, the turbines rumbling beneath her. Six feet from the concrete spillway, a metal catwalk extended out over the water—four feet above the surging flow. Caroline crept to the end of the catwalk, which extended out over the river like a fire escape. She got down on her hands and knees and reached between the railings. But the catwalk was too high above the river and so she sat, wrapped her legs around the railing, took a breath, and dropped, hanging upside down like a kid on monkey bars, dangling by her knees above the raging flow.

  Dizzied by the speed of the water, stung by its spray, Caroline swung from the catwalk. She fought the urge to pull herself back up. Upstream, just thirty yards away, Burn struggled against the increasing current. He looked over his shoulder and for a moment they made something like eye contact, only more desperate. She nodded once, encouraging, and as he was swept toward her he seemed to understand her ridiculous plan and kicked so that he was almost in line with her, Caroline holding her breath and concentrating on the tentative hold her legs had on the wet catwalk. Below her, the water rose in stinging, white fingers. Hanging there like a trapeze artist, she extended her arms downward, so that her own fingertips dangled just above the rough water.

  Caught in the current and flying toward her, he reached up with his own hands, and for the second time that day, Caroline felt the wo
rld move faster than she could comprehend, felt herself as the only clarity at the center of a great whirling blur.

  His left hand hit hers, a quick slap. She closed her hand and was snapped toward the dam with him, one of her legs coming off the catwalk. And then he was gone, sucked over the face of the dam and ground onto the concrete fifty feet below.

  Caroline cried out, but couldn’t hear herself over the roar of the falls and the dam. She felt the thrum in her hand and tried to figure out if she’d ever had him. The force of his passing caused her to swing from the catwalk by one leg, and even when she stopped swinging Caroline hung there, in the place where the river momentarily flew and was bent and curled by gravity, where the water fell.

  3

  “You know what awful means?” Dupree squinted into the sun.

  Spivey considered for a minute. “Bad?”

  Dupree rolled his eyes and held out a cup for a senior volunteer, who was pouring coffee for the officers searching for Kevin Hatch’s body. “Listen to the word. Awe. And full. Awful. Full of awe. Okay, how about wonderful?”

  Spivey considered again. “Full of wonder?”

  “Right. Full of wonder. Full of awe. You tell me, what’s the difference?” Dupree sipped his coffee and wrinkled his nose. “Awful and wonderful. You see what I’m getting at? It’s a theory of mine. We’re all just fixed points on a circle.” He dumped his coffee in the weeds alongside the road.

  “Give you an example. Guy steps onto his porch and gets shot in the foot by a gangbanger doing a drive-by. He’s a victim, right? Next day, he goes and shoots the guy who shot him. Now he’s a criminal. Next day, the gangbanger’s friend shoots the guy again and kills him. Now he’s a victim again. Victim, criminal, victim. Fixed point on a wheel. Bet no one taught you that in college.”