Shutter Island(18)

The operator nodded and turned his back to them, put the headphones back on.

Outside, the air felt like trapped breath.

“What do they do if you don’t check in?” Cawley asked.

“The field office?” Teddy said. “They mark it in their nightly reports. Usually twenty-four hours before they start to worry.”

Cawley nodded. “Maybe this’ll blow over by then.”

“Over?” Teddy said. “It hasn’t even started yet.”

Cawley shrugged and began walking toward the gate. “I’ll be having drinks and maybe a cigar or two at my house. Nine o’clock, if you and your partner feel like dropping by.”

“Oh,” Teddy said. “Can we talk then?”

Cawley stopped, looked back at him. The dark trees on the other side of the wall had begun to sway and whisper.

“We’ve been talking, Marshal.”



CHUCK AND TEDDY walked the dark grounds, feeling the storm in the air swelling hot around them, as if the world were pregnant, distended.

“This is bullshit,” Teddy said.

“Yup.”

“Rotten to the fucking core.”

“I was Baptist, I’d give you an ’Amen, brother.’”

“Brother?”

“How they talk down there. I did a year in Mississippi.”

“Yeah?”

“Amen, brother.”

Teddy bummed another cigarette off Chuck and lit it.

Chuck said, “You call the field office?”

Teddy shook his head. “Cawley said the switchboard’s down.” He raised his hand. “The storm, you know.”

Chuck spit tobacco off his tongue. “Storm? Where?”

Teddy said, “But you can feel it coming.” He looked at the dark sky. “Though, not to where it’s taking out their central com’.”

“Central com’,” Chuck said. “You leave the army yet or you still waiting for your D papers?”

“Switchboard,” Teddy said, waving his cigarette at it. “Whatever we’re calling it. And their radio too.”

“Their fucking radio?” Chuck’s eyes bloomed wide. “The radio, boss?”

Teddy nodded. “Pretty bleak, yeah. They got us locked down on an island looking for a woman who escaped from a locked room…”

“Past four manned checkpoints.”

“And a room full of attendants playing poker.”

“Scaled a ten-foot brick wall.”

“With electric wire up top.”

“Swam eleven miles—”

“—against an irate current—”

“—to shore. Irate. I like that. Cold too. What’s it, maybe fifty-five degrees in that water?”

“Sixty, tops. Night, though?”

“Back to fifty-five.” Chuck nodded. “Teddy, this whole thing, you know?”

Teddy said, “And the missing Dr. Sheehan.”

Chuck said, “Struck you as odd too, huh? I wasn’t sure. Didn’t seem you tore Cawley’s asshole quite wide enough, boss.”

Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and…

“…if we’re the cover story?” Chuck was saying.

“What?”

“What if we’re the cover story?” Chuck said. “What if we were brought here to help them cross ts and dot is?”

“Clarity, Watson.”

Another smile. “All right, boss, try and keep up.”

“I will, I will.”

“Let’s say a certain doctor has an infatuation with a certain patient.”

“Miss Solando.”

“You saw the picture.”

“She is attractive.”

“Attractive. Teddy, she’s a pinup in a GI’s locker. So she works our boy, Sheehan…You seeing it now?”

Teddy flicked his cigarette into the wind, watching the coals splatter and ignite in the breeze, then streak back past him and Chuck. “And Sheehan gets hooked, decides he can’t live without her.”

“The operating word being live. As a free couple in the real world.”

“So they amscray. Off the island.”

“Could be at a Fats Domino show as we speak.”

Teddy stopped at the far end of the staff dormitories, faced the orange wall. “But why not call in the dogs?”

“Well, they did,” Chuck said. “Protocol. They had to bring in someone, and in the case of an escape from a place like this, they call in us. But if they’re covering up staff involvement, then we’re just here to substantiate their story—that they did everything by the book.”

“Okay,” Teddy said. “But why cover for Sheehan?”

Chuck propped the sole of his shoe against the wall, flexing his knee as he lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. Haven’t thought that through yet.”

“If Sheehan did take her out of here, he greased some palms.”

“Had to.”

“A lot of them.”

“A few attendants, anyway. A guard or two.”