Waiting for shadow, p.8
Waiting for Shadow, page 8
“If not him,” I say, “there are plenty of dogs to choose from, especially in rescue shelters, waiting for a good home.”
“I really like this one,” she says now as if reading my mind. “There are many dogs out there, but once I looked into his eyes and held his face…”
Her voice trails off, and so does my soul. For an instant I’m looking into Shadow’s strong, noble eyes and I’m cupping his face in the palm of my hand.
“You know how it is,” she adds in vague reference to conversations we’ve had about Shadow.
“I sure do.”
“Any word on him?” She doesn’t have to say his name.
I’m about to tell her about the paperwork Charlie Foxtrot down in Lackland when the phone rings. It’s my cellphone, so I have to run into the living room to grab it.
“How may I help you, Officer Linder?” I say, recognizing his number.
“I hope this is a good time?”
“That’s very polite of you, but your aim ain’t particularly good, smacking right into dinner.”
“Wanna call me back?”
I look over at Allison, standing at the kitchen’s doorway. She nods and gives me a go-ahead wave. Then she crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe, ready to take in the show.
I turn around. “I guess now’s as good a time as ever.”
“I may need your help with something.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It doesn’t have to be tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning?”
“Why thank you for giving me a breather.”
“So you can come down tomorrow, say meet me at 9 AM?”
“Am I still on the clock?”
“Of course. I already worked it out with the chief. Make sure to log your mileage, too, so we can reimburse you.”
“OK, you got me mildly interested now.”
“I rather discuss it in person. Short of it is, I’ve been talking to your friend Candice.”
What he’s been doing is getting pumped for information by Candice, but it ain’t my place to say. “Oh, yeah? How’s Candice?”
“She ran a theory of hers by me. Says she’s doing a story on it. Researching it.”
And he’s research target number 1, I don’t say. “What kind of story?”
“She’s got a hunch about Devon Smith, and about how his kids went missing. Again, I don’t want to discuss it on the phone. She says she told you about it.”
Yeah, she sure did, but until I know what she’s told him, I ain’t going to share my side of things. “Sounds like you two have it covered. Where do I come in?”
“I need you and your dog to check something out for me.”
“I best get a good night’s sleep then. I’ll tell Shady to do the same.”
“We’re on then?”
“Tell me time and place.”
He does, and when I hang up my face must have lost a liter of blood because Allison’s asking me what’s wrong.
» Chapter 11 «
Linder and I are squatting atop a hill behind Devon Smith’s villa. That’s what Linder keeps calling it, claiming it features Italian-Tuscan architecture. To me it looks like one big honking place I wouldn’t want to live in for all that square footage I’d have to keep clean not to mention pay taxes on.
Why are we on this hill? According to the Smiths, the trail that climbs up from their back gate up to this hill also winds down to the park where their children went missing. Their boy and girl took this very path to their near demise, God bless them, and now Linder wants me to double-check whether they really came this way.
“Couple of problems with this,” I say a little peeved that I’ve probably come all this way for nothing. Well, maybe not nothing considering the $375 an hour I’ll collect for it, so maybe I should take my time about it, be real methodical like and all.
“OK, like what?” he asks.
“First, it’s been a couple of days. If we don’t find a trace, it may just mean the scent wore off. It don’t linger forever, you know.”
“You said a couple of problems.”
“Sure. The other one goes something like this. Even if we find a scent, we can’t tell when it was laid down. Without that, I don’t know you’re going to make much hay out of that one way or another.”
“So if I were to tell you that before four days ago, the last time the kids went hiking this way was a month ago, what’s the likelihood their scent still being here?”
I shake my head. “Hmm. With the rain storms we had a couple of weeks ago. Zero to null and void.”
“So that leaves us with one problem.”
“OK. It’s still a pretty big one.”
“And one you let me worry about.”
“How exactly do you aim to worry about it?”
“Let’s say that based on a couple of interviews I’ve been conducting around the neighborhood, I have an alternative theory of where the kids entered the park. If we confirm that entry point and rule out this one, we’re onto something.”
“You think Devon Smith had them taken there.”
“Let’s not speculate.”
“Like he drove them there, let them walk around, then had someone grab ‘em and stuff them down a manhole. Please weld the lid while you’re at it.”
“Like I said, let me worry about that.”
He leaves it there, trying to be coy, I suppose, or in charge, or some of both. Part of me wants to get offended at him keeping key information away from me. Then again, maybe this is the way it works. In this dance, I’m the help. I don’t need to get smart on anything that don’t directly have to do with my job. So I let it rest there. Even if I don’t like his smugness about it, I go ahead and let him have his upper hand, play his part as man in the know while I do my thing. It all pays the same, I figure, even if that bit of consolation don’t quite appease me.
I shrug. “Alrighty, then. Let’s get rolling.”
From a small messenger bag he carries at his side, he takes out an evidence bag. He unzips it and takes out the girl’s panties, same ones we used two nights ago. By now the fragrance of it has grown foul. As I show it to Shady, I know she should have no problem latching on to it, but wonder if she’ll be able to make the match.
As we agreed upon our arrival, we won’t climb down to the house. No sense in letting dear Devon know we’re taking a whiff around his house. It’s not a big distance between the hill and the back gate, and if there’s a scent to be picked up, we should find it here the same as we’d pick it up down there.
I let Shady sniff around the trail and even some of the surrounding grass and bushes.
“Nothing,” I tell Linder.
I pull on Shady’s leash and lead her along the winding trail. From time to time I let her explore the surroundings, thinking on a couple of occasions she’s found something, only to realize she’s poking her nose into some hole in search of an underground critter. It goes like this for the next thirty minutes, when we finally arrive at the edge of the park.
“Nothing,” I say again.
“OK, now for door number two.” He points to another entrance into the park. This one adjoins a parking lot. Before we head over there he takes out a map and shows me how if you drive from Devon Smith’s home, that entrance gives you the most direct driving route. Then he traces from the parking lot to the point whether the kids were allegedly last spotted, same place where I started my track two nights before.
I nod, and we start off for the parking lot. Once there, I let Shady do her thing. I take her off leash and let her roam and scan freely.
“Bingo,” I say when she stops and sits. “Sook,” I tell her, and she starts trotting off into the park.
Linder and I jog after her. Soon we traverse familiar ground, going from where we started the track two nights ago, following Shady toward the other park exit.
“We got it, then?” Linder says, out of breath.
“Let’s keep going to make sure.”
Now in a moderate jog, we chase after Shady, going into the neighborhood. As the ground beneath me switches from uneven grass terrain to hard asphalt, my ability to balance improves. She stops at the manhole, looking confused, her prize no longer there.
I grab her by the collar and put her back on leash. “Good job, Shady, girl.” I pet her, my chest swelling with pride, allowing myself to imagine Shadow just did this. I realize then how unfair that is to Shady. She did this on her own. She showed her skill well enough, even if more often than not she lets me down.
Linder’s standing, hands on his hips, elbows out to the side, refilling his lungs. “I wanted to be wrong,” he says in a breathy voice. “I really did.”
“You sure?”
“Candice is a sharp girl, but she comes up with a lot of stories, and she sure likes her conspiracies.”
“She loves her buzz and boom,” I say. “And I reckon conspiracies satisfy her plenty on both counts.”
“Yeah.” He’s looking around the neighborhood, like he’s looking for next steps in one of them cookie-cutter houses. “Thing is, all these houses, and no one saw them stuffing two kids into that hole and welding it shut.”
“That’s pretty much the same problem, whether Devon Smith is involved or not.”
He lowers his voice. “It’s more of a problem for someone else. Dear Devon can pay off people, send them on all expense-paid vacations if he has to.”
“Want to knock on a few doors?”
He smiles. “Look at you, thinking all cop like already.”
He makes a phone call for one of his colleagues to come meet us here. When he arrives, the two of them start going door to door while Shady and I wait in the car. A few minutes later they return with downcast faces.
“All those houses are either empty or have mailboxes stuffed with several days’ worth of mail,” Linder says.
His partner calls in an information request and reads off nine addresses. An hour later, back at the station, we’ll learn all these homes are leased to Energetix employees. Further digging reveals a single shell corporation owns and manages the leases, and that shell corporation links back to an investment and venture capital firm that provided seed money to launch Energetix.
Other than collecting my check for the prior two days’ work, my stay at the police station soon turns into a waste of time. Linder agrees he doesn’t see much sense in me hanging around, and I head out. As I cross the lobby, however, Shady spots and growls at a now familiar female face.
“Candice,” I say under my breath.
“Yeah, nice to see you two, as always.”
“Linder said you were flying back to L.A.”
“Flight got cancelled. Had to rebook for this evening.”
Shady and I keep walking, and Candice follows.
“So I have some free time.”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Not even for lunch?” She lets me go a few steps before adding, “My treat.”
We stop by my car, where I open the back door to let Shady jump in. I toss my backpack into the trunk and turn to face Candice.
“What do you want now?”
“I thought we could follow up on the conversation we had the other day.”
“I think you followed up plenty with your blog posting. For someone who knows how to create the right buzz, that pretty much makes you a buzzard as far as I’m concerned.”
“I didn’t say anything wrong or untruthful, did I? I sure didn’t say anything that painted you in a bad light.”
“No, what you did is go around me and behind my back to pump my friend for information so you could blind-side me with your fancy reportage. You think that’s supposed to impress me, Miss Candice?”
“It’s enhancing your image—”
“You know. Some of us are discrete. We don’t go farting through every digital pipe to spew whether we’re brushing our teeth, clipping our ingrown toenails, or bathing our puppy. We don’t do no selfie an hour, neither.”
“I get that, but—”
“We don’t want the noise. We want to lead quiet lives, minding our business.” I point at her, my index finger coming within an inch of her nose. “We want other people out of our business. It’s called being private, modest, reserved. Maybe you’ve heard of them words.”
“It’s about being real, Jane.”
“You ain’t listening. The real me don’t hang herself out there for everyone to see.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not where life’s brought you, Jane. Hiding under a rock is no longer a viable option for you.”
“Says who? You?”
“You have an opportunity to really break-through. To—”
“I don’t want no opportunity. Not if it means everyone’s gotta know my intimates.”
Candice takes a step back and raises her hands. “OK. Let’s dial it down a bit. Sorry I wanted to take you out to lunch. Consider yourself rain-checked.”
“I don’t need no rain check from you.”
“Sure, whatever. I’m just going to say one more thing, and you really should hear me out.”
“Make it snappy.”
“Coming right up. Short, sweet and tweetable. If you want a life of obscurity, short of achieving it inside a coffin and six feet under, good luck with that.”
She turns and walks away. Inside the SUV, Shady’s whimpering. As I drive off, I suspect Candice stands more correct and accurate regarding my predicament than I care for.
» Chapter 12 «
At nightfall, I’m sitting on my porch with a view of the black eastern horizon. With all lights out inside and outside the house, I aim to show myself and Candice, even if she can’t see me, that yeah, you can reach obscurity no problem, even if my obscurity is of a different kind. Shady’s lying next to me, slumbering. From time to time she raises her head, and when a critter comes too close, scurrying through the prairie grass, she stands up to bark.
“It’s all good, Shady girl.” My caress across her neck and taut back relaxes her, and she plumps down again onto the piece of old bathroom rug I’ve spread for her atop the wooden deck.
With a hand resting on my closed laptop, I ask myself whether I really want to do this.
I do.
I’ve been over this already, haven’t I? I don’t want to relive the pain each time I go through one of my psycho-therapy sessions. Though they make me recount it all, the event, the moment, I have to find a way to deaden the pain their little exercise causes me. Thing is, doing this, flipping the laptop lid, typing it all up once and for all… Will it hurt more? Will it make it more real, to write it all down?
“We’ll have to see.”
Shady raises her head to look up at me. I don’t know whether it’s my whisper or the way the laptop screen’s blue glow breaks the darkness that bids her attention. She holds her head up for a few more seconds before she lies down flat again.
The blank page on my word processor and its solitary blinking cursor stare back at me. They taunt me. Can you do this? Do you dare? Can you turn memory into words, and words into sentences, and sentences to paragraphs, and paragraphs into this twisted essay no one but you will want to read?
Yeah, I can.
My hands hover over the keyboard for a moment, and I start tapping. At first the words come out wrong, awkward. The backspace key gets most of the action. But as my head clears I write it. I tell it all.
How Shadow and I go into that village with an Army platoon.
How we find the place in an uproar, a near all out riot, courtesy of the Marines that got there ahead of us.
How they’ve shot that family, mother, father, their oldest teenage son, the prime suspect in planting IEDs, the ones Shadow and I are supposed to find.
How a little boy comes over and through an interpreter tells me that the little girl and boy from that same family have run away into them mountains up yonder.
I stop there. Do I really want to write what comes next? I’ve never shared it. I’ve always changed this part of the story, just enough to protect the guilty and to shield myself, which might amount to the same thing. Alright, so I’ll write it the way I’ve told it up to now, keep the script consistent with what the therapists and counselors have heard. That’s the point, anyway, to spit out what they expect without having to recall it in full. So I tell it like that.
How the little boy went back to the shot-up family’s hut, returning with a teddy bear.
How this teddy bear is the kind we’d been passing out to build good will.
How I let Shadow smell it, and how he takes us straight to the goat trail that points up to the mountains.
How I tell my CO that finding those kids might restore a smidgeon of good will among the villagers now that we’ve shot up their town.
How the Marines drag their feet with a decision on whether to go out on a search and rescue excursion.
How as nightfall comes, Shadow and I stare up at the mountains knowing we won’t make it up there. Not tonight, not tomorrow. Probably never or not in time for those kids.
How I leave Shadow with my interpreter, and on my way to give them Marines a piece of my mind an IED goes off.
How when I wake up, peering through a haze of drugs and the pain they’re supposed to mask, I learn I’ve lost my two legs.
There it is: 892 words, three pages double-spaced. There they are, the tears that burn through my eyes.
Next to me Shady whimpers, much like Shadow whimpered when he saw his torn asunder handler for the first time. I should probably write that down too, and I do. I add it to my narrative as a heart-string-puller of a finish.
How he wanted to stay by my side to comfort me.
How I would have welcomed his company.
How the powers that be couldn’t see past their regulations to let him come home with me.
I press the Save button and close the lid. Darkness swallows me whole again. Over the next few minutes I even out my breath. Once I think I can start again, I reopen the laptop’s lid and start memorizing the text, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.
