Lionel screamed—“Ah!”—and I jumped. Martha shrieked, turned to him. “Ah!” he said again, but he was laughing and laughing, pounding the table. They had used strips of bacon and two strawberries to build a smile and eyes on Lionel’s pancakes, and he was lifting the features up one by one, de-facing the pancake man. “Ah! My face!”
“Come on, honey,” said Martha, halfhearted, tender. “Be good…”
Lionel ate at last and, having eaten, fell promptly asleep in the car, smudges of maple syrup on both his cheeks. I drove us back to Martha’s car and unbuckled the boy, lifting him up carefully so as not to wake him. Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger’s sentence, a green, impossible vision—the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.
The real world was a trap, though, and I couldn’t escape it. I knew this, and because I knew this I knew where Jackdaw was. I had worked it out. Not on purpose, but that’s how it happens a lot of times—my mind does the work while I’m busy with something else.
I’d always known I would crack it, because I always do, and I had.
“Jimmy?”
I don’t know where the nickname came from. Lionel’s face had appeared at the driver’s-side window, and he was looking right in at me, concerned, peering at my face as if through aquarium glass. “Are you okay?”
I guess maybe I had been moaning or something. I don’t know what all I was doing, but I was doing something. But he said it, like, three more times, instead of good-bye, suddenly racked with anxiety: “Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?”
21.
The rain had started. Fat dark drops, relentless out of a dark sky. I watched it come down from the balcony of the room.
It would have been nice to be able to say Sorry, boss, no idea. I can’t crack it. Move me on, I guess, or make good on your threat and send a van to pack me up and haul my ass back home to Bell’s.
But I knew. Goddamn me, I did.
The photograph was locked away with the rest of the file, but I could see it clear as looking at it: the delicate face, bemused expression, grief-stricken, scared. Oh, Jackdaw; oh, son; oh, poor lonely boy.
The rain was rushing down outside. Making up for all its timidity and teasing over the last few days. Coming down in sheets, in crashing torrents, pounding down onto the parking lot outside. Thunder rippled in a distant corner of the sky.
I took out my cell phone and took off Jim Dirkson’s glasses and folded them arm over arm and put them away, then I settled on the edge of the bed, holding my phone between my hands. One phone call.
The rain was a wall of gray.
This case had been building up in me, pushing against the barricades like rushing water, not only the case but the town, the girl, the memories, all these red-and-black memories, crashing in and pushing in on me since I got here, too. And why were these visions returning now, my old story flashing back to life, coming down out of the gray Indiana sky? Why now? Why—
I told myself I didn’t know, but I did; I had some inkling. I had some idea.
And now all of it would be over. One call to Maryland. Just make the fucking call.
I stood up. The phone was a hard flat square in my hand, a dislocated thing, an alien artifact. It was heavy as a ship’s anchor; it was a barb sunk into the meat of my palm. I imagined what it would feel like to open one of those balcony doors and hurl the thin object out into the rain-flooded parking lot. I imagined it borne away on a rivulet, taken down to the White River, and ending up in the depths of some sewer, some sea. I imagined myself lying on my back, my arms and legs splayed out, carried by the furious current from the blacktop parking lot to the ugliness of 86th Street, making no resistance, until some fierce roll of water turned me over, took me under, swallowed me whole.
What happened when I called would all be according to procedure, specific steps dictated by statute. I would give my considered opinion as to the whereabouts of the missing man, based on the evidence I had accumulated, and then I in the field and Bridge at his desk would collaborate on a plan of capture. Bridge’s office would file notice with his superiors down the hall in Gaithersburg, and when I was directed to do so I would take a field position, and Bridge would initiate the plan we’d agreed upon.
The swarm of white vans, the whoop of sirens, the truncheon and the Taser; then a fugitive court, a commissioner, a court-appointed attorney, a comparison of the runner’s features with the features enumerated by the complainant, the fingerprints run against the fingerprints on file.