Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(4)

But on Saturday night, he had not had an opportunity to reassure himself as to the precise meanings of the new words his protagonist had given him. Now the protagonist was silent, and now Huston was numb with cold and hunger and disbelief, a man in a cave in a situation that could only be fictional, was too horrific to be believed.

The story had changed. No computer, no pen. No ink, no paper.

“Fricatives,” Huston whispered to the tangerine light as it bled through the spruce bows. “Affricates. Diphthongs.”

A click inside his head. A screen shot filling his field of vision. He winced and pulled away, turned his face to the dirt. Image as pain. Memory a thrust and stab, a thousand synchronized blades.

His mind felt like a junkyard choked full of disparate parts. Like a huge jigsaw puzzle somebody had kicked all over the room. Here’s a piece of blue sky. Here’s a piece with the corner of an eye in it. Is this a bird’s wing? Is this brown grass or a strand of silky hair?

Any minute now, he kept telling himself, any minute now, he would manage to push himself up and out of this nightmare. “Wake up!” he scolded himself again and this time shook his head so hard that a pain stabbed into his left eye, sent a surge of nausea tumbling through his stomach. “Wake up, for Chrissakes!”

He remembered going online after dinner, checking the Times’s website. And there it was, there it had been, The Desperate Summer, still number eight after seven weeks. That was real. “Is it better than Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent?” Michiko Kakutani had written. “I think it is.”

He had the actual clipping in a folder in his file cabinet, kept all his clippings there, sometimes took the folder out and read through the clippings just to remind himself that they were real, that he wasn’t dreaming his good fortune. Yes, they were real. Words made real in pulped wood, cotton rag, and ink. Wholly and tangibly real.

The dog says Woof!

The duck says Quack!

Then he saw little Davy again, the baby asleep. He closed his eyes and again heard the baby’s breath, that sweet whisper of life, the rise and fall of the little chest. He felt the knife heavy in his own hand. But was it his hand? How could it have been? Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Who was it that had said that? It was Macbeth, right? Half-mad Macbeth. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind…?

Art thou?

“Art thou?” Huston asked. His body tightened in a spasm of grief, clenched in upon itself, and a stifled moan worked its way up from his chest, a moan as taut as stretched sinew, as sharp as honed steel.

“Please, God,” Thomas Huston groaned into the dirt. “Please, please, please, God. Please just let me wake up.”





Four


The previous summer, a Friday in July. DeMarco had spent the morning at a hearing in the courthouse, where he had testified that a drug-addled wife beater had taken two shots at him, then had thrown down his handgun and invited DeMarco into the house for a glass of iced tea. The man claimed he had never aimed to shoot DeMarco or anybody else, and DeMarco admitted that the nearest of the two bullets had knocked the lid off a garbage can some six and a half feet to his left.

The judge asked, “Are you saying that you never felt your life was in peril?”

“I feel like my life is in peril every time I climb out of bed,” DeMarco answered. “Doesn’t everybody?”

The wife beater was ordered to complete eight weeks of rehab, after which he would serve 120 days for reckless endangerment.

Now, at a few minutes after eleven, DeMarco returned to the barracks with two cups of convenience store coffee—one black, for him, and a hazelnut cappuccino, for his station commander. As usual, DeMarco had to suppress a smile when he walked into the office and found Sergeant Kyle Bowen there behind the long mahogany desk, looking very serious, very busy, and very young.

DeMarco handed him the coffee. “I see it’s bring-your-son-to-work-day again. Daddy taking a pee break?”

Bowen peeled the lid off the cardboard cup and sniffed. “What is this, hazelnut?”

“It’s what you always drink, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to write it down and pin it to your jacket, I swear. Mocha is fine. Vanilla is fine. Plain French roast with two creams and one sugar is fine. Anything is fine except hazelnut. Why do you keep doing this to me?”

“You’re too young to drink coffee. It will stunt your growth.”

Bowen pushed the cup to the outer edge of his desk. “So what did he get?”

“Two months rehab, four months to contemplate the error of his ways.”

“Jesus. Another victory for the criminally insane.”

“But job security for us,” DeMarco said.

Bowen shook his head, tore a sheet of paper off his notepad, and handed it to DeMarco. “How about laying this on Jenny’s desk on your way past?”

“She’s out again?”

“Fourth time in two weeks.”

“Preggers for sure.”

“No doubt.”

“When are you going to tell your wife?”

“Here’s an idea: go get some work done.”

DeMarco smiled and brought the sheet of paper close enough to read. “T. Huston?” he said. “Thomas Huston?”