Shadowbahn(13)

? ? ?

When the state attorney general lands by helicopter that afternoon, the sheriff still hears in her head the whistled tune from the Towers that she’s denied since arriving. “My God, what a scene,” the attorney general calls breathlessly from beneath the whap of chopper blades, “you the senior officer in charge of this investigation?”

“Is this an investigation?” she shouts back in his ear as they walk from the noise.

“You’re going in,” he says.

“Sorry?”

“Somebody needs to go in.”

“In where?”

“In those,” he says, pointing at Towers he won’t name that sing a song she won’t acknowledge.





jurisdiction (one)


The sheriff says, “Sir, I’m three and a half months from early retirement.”

“A nice way,” the attorney general answers, “to cap off a career, wouldn’t you say?”

This son of a bitch being funny? she fumes. “Not particularly, no.”

“Your jurisdiction, Sheriff.”

“Actually it’s not been determined that those are in Pennington County at all. Where they’re standing may very well be Lakota land.”

The attorney general’s eyebrows arch. “I don’t even want to hear that. I’m not so sure the tribal council elders want to hear it either. They certainly haven’t laid any claims. In fact those Towers may be the only part of America they haven’t laid claim to in the last couple hundred years. Where are you from?”

Oh, so this is the way you guys do it, she thinks. Louisiana, she almost answers before she says, “I’m from South Dakota, Mr. Attorney General.”

“I mean originally,” as though he cares.

? ? ?

She repeats, “I’m from South Dakota,” and I went to a lot of damned trouble to not be from anywhere else. But now the song in her head grows. “All right”—the attorney general’s tone changes—“now listen. Someone has to go in. We’ve got people thinking they see things, crazy rumors that someone’s up on the ninety-something floor—”

“I’m not going to the ninety-something floor.”

“We could put you on the rooftop—”

She takes the badge off her coat lapel. “No.”

“Like you were saying, Sheriff,” he says coolly, “early retirement.”

“I’ll go in at the bottom,” she says, nodding at the South Tower’s entrance in the distance, “have a look around. Otherwise you can take my early retirement and shove—”

“All right, all right,” waving away her threat. For a moment each regards the other in silence. “I believe,” says the attorney general, with the faintest trace of a smile that the sheriff would love to stick a gun in, “the whole wide world has come to the conclusion that you’re the perfect person for this job.”

“I believe the whole wide world has no idea whatsoever who I am,” she answers.

“Exactly.”





the song in pursuit


A few hours later, as dusk begins to fall, approaching the South Tower from twenty feet the sheriff hears louder than she’s heard for three days the whistling tune. Not only is she closer than she’s been to the Tower from which the song comes, but the surrounding landscape has become more silent than it’s been since the Towers appeared. The strangest, most extraordinary stillness falls on the multitude of what now is an estimated half million who have swarmed to the site in the past week.

? ? ?

Raising a hand to her eyes and squinting in the sun now setting over a distant western ridge, the sheriff stops and looks back over her shoulder at everyone watching her. Even the whir of the helicopters above seems to fall suddenly soundless. If she has lied to everyone about the song she hears in her head, she no longer can lie to herself; if she left behind almost everything about Louisiana, including most of her accent, there remains a Delta blues whistled by her grandfather when she was four, with words that go, although she’s never known them, I can tell the wind is rising, hellhound on my trail.





the song on her trail


But she doesn’t really remember any of this yet. That memory will come crashing back in a few moments inside the South Tower lobby, which appears—in contrast to the distinctly businesslike lobby of the North Tower—like the foyer of a grand theater or cathedral. It has narrowly vertical, high-arched windows and rolling carpet as brilliant red as blood and as perfectly unblemished and untrodden as after its final vacuuming that September day twenty years ago. The golden balcony swoops around the lobby like a semitone or A-sharp.

? ? ?

A score of the Tower’s nearly hundred elevators stretch before her. The sheriff feels silly calling, “Hello?” as though anyone would possibly answer. “Hello?” she calls again, but more quietly. If anyone were up in the Tower, wouldn’t they have migrated to the bottom by now? They wouldn’t remain at the top, would they? “Hello?” for the third and final time, crossing the enormous red lobby toward the song and the frosted radiance that she now can hear and see coming from the final set of elevator doors at the far end.