Whisper to Me(121)

I leaned against a car and took out my phone as if it had just rung; I don’t really know what I thought I was doing. Trying to act inconspicuous, I guess, since my pulse was an engine, two stroke, rattling in my veins. I held the phone to my ear and kind of half turned around, and that was when I saw the car turn, leaving the stop sign where it had been pulled up. Onto the beach road. The road where Paris had gone missing.

KRS1-GH7 said the license plate.

I felt the breath catch in my throat.

Why?

What did that mean to me?

“The song,” said the voice. “The song that Julie had stuck in her head.”

“What?”

“The song,” said the voice.

“What song? When?”

“When you went to the apartment the day after … you know. When Julie was telling Horowitz what happened.”

I thought back to the conversation with Julie. What was the song she’d had in her head? An earworm—that was what people called it, wasn’t it? It had been triggered by seeing Brian’s cop car turning up …

That was it. “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police … woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police …”

It was a stupidly catchy song. And now it was going around in my head, again and again. Impossible to make it stop, once you thought of it. I was only half-aware of it though; it was playing in the background of my thoughts.

Oh, I thought.

Oh, ****.

I should have gotten it quicker. I mean, old-school hip-hop was my thing. Before the voice anyway, it was my thing. Because of Travis and the other kids who used to hang out at the restaurant.

“KRS1,” I said, to the voice. “That’s what Julie saw. That license plate. That’s what put the song in her head.”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Julie had been pissed with herself; guilty about the earworm, I remembered. She thought it was bad that when Paris was being … whatever happened to her … that she had this old rap song going around in her mind. “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police.” She had thought it was random, had been angry with her own distracted mind, the disrespect of it.

But it hadn’t been random. When I asked her about the license plate, what was it she said? That there was something “on the tip of her tongue.” Something bothering her. But she didn’t know what it was. Except that her subconscious knew. Her subconscious knew what she had seen, what the link was.

KRS-One, the rapper from the nineties. Whose biggest hit was a song called … yes … “The Sound of da Police.”

****, it was so clear now. Julie had seen the Jeep driving away, and on some level, she had registered the license plate.

KRS1-GH7.

And seeing that—that coincidental conjunction of numbers and letters—followed by the sound of an actual police siren, had got KRS-One’s most famous song playing on her mental stereo.

Holy ****. This was the car Julie had seen. This was the actual car.

Without any moment in between, any transition, at least that I was aware of, I was running, following the car.

“It’s turning,” said the voice.

“I see that,” I said.

Sure enough, the black car was pulling into the driveway of a house just in front of me. My scribbled map was in my inner eye, like a pilot’s heads-up display, superimposed on the real street, and I realized that this house, this place where the black Jeep was parking, was maybe two or three houses south of the one Paris had gone into.

And so already I was thinking … I was thinking, It’s just a neighbor …

But it was like that thought was a thorn I wanted to pull out, something I wanted gone; I still moved, I was still running, the main control for my mind had been wrested from me, the copilot had taken over, and wanted to see who was in that Jeep.

I mean, I’d told Dwight about the SRT8. And he would have passed on the information, and the police would be looking into it. Horowitz probably, and his team. But they were looking in the wrong place, weren’t they? Checking out the demolition company, probably running the backgrounds of every employee, when they weren’t investigating Paris’s dad.

“It’s just a neighbor,” said the voice. “Julie saw the car turn because they were leaving the house. That’s all.”

“Shut up,” I said.

I got to the driveway as a woman got out of the driver’s seat of the car.

“A woman,” said the voice.

“I can see that,” I said. I stopped, out of breath. I wasn’t used to exercise.

The woman was staring at me. I’m not good at judging the age of adults. I guess she was in her thirties? No makeup, hair pulled back. Tight yoga leggings and a zipped-up body warmer. I assumed she had been at the gym. She looked hard. Wiry. Like she spent too much time there.

“You think this is the killer?” said the voice. “Really?”

I scanned from her to the car. There was no one else in it.

“Uh … can I help you?” she said. Blond eyebrows tight together. Concerned.

“I …”

“Yes?”

I breathed deep. I suddenly felt like this was a big mistake. A feeling that was familiar to me.

“Is your husband home?” I said. I had seen the ring on her finger.