That number is just not coming up, she said. Not coming up.
The thing is, there had to be a file. If there was a runner, there was a file. The service didn’t freelance. That’s how it worked, by custom and by law. Plantation loses someone, they file with a local magistrate who issues a transcript and requests the participation of federal law enforcement. It’s the judge’s chambers that notifies the marshals. That’s how it works—that’s how it’s been working since 1787.
There had to be a file, but there was no file.
Mr. Bridge knew facts I didn’t know; he always did. That’s how it worked. But I knew with a sudden certainty that behind every fact of this case there was an unknown fact, felt but not seen, like a kidnapper with his rough arm wrapped around a victim’s neck.
Now I could feel it, I could feel the storm rain slick and warm against my skin, and now my heart began to race, now it began to slam, now the adrenaline was galloping along in my veins.
An official case had never been opened. No home-state judge had issued a transcript certifying the claimant’s description. No slave commissioner in the Southern District of Indiana had been put on alert. There was no real hunt. There was no case. There was only a file.
If the marshals weren’t hunting Jackdaw so he could be returned—if we weren’t hunting him so he could be returned—then why were we hunting him? What would happen to Jackdaw when we found him?
That was the easiest question to answer.
I was a monster, but way down underneath I was good. Wasn’t I? Wasn’t I good? Didn’t I have some good part of me, buried deep underground, beneath Jim Dirkson and Kenny Morton and Albie the gardener and whoever and whatever else I was? I was good below it. I was, and I am. Good underground. In the buried parts of me are good things.
A still picture, me and Castle, whispering joy, telling stories, cabin by the northernmost fence, making plans, whispering quiet crazy hopeful.
I started moving quickly. I toweled off the rain I’d let fall onto my head and my face. While the computer was turning on I changed my shirt, then I spent five minutes on basic research, old-fashioned digging, three paragraphs of history, ten minutes of tracing lines on the map with my finger.
Then I gathered up my flashlight and what all else I thought I might need. Bridge wouldn’t be long in knowing what I had done. I could almost hear the stop-start conversation, Bridge and Janice, Jan and Lou: hey, I went ahead and asked Marlena about it for you after all, and…asked her what…what…
As soon as I was ready to go, I got going. I knew where Jackdaw was, and I knew I better get down to him soon.
22.
By the time I got back to Slim’s roadside fiefdom the storm had spent itself and the clouds had cleared away, but somewhere in there it had become nighttime. Darkness giving way to another kind of darkness. The pale face of the moon, a scattering of stars.
The grocery store was closed up and shuttered, and the body shop, too. All right by me. I parked across the street and hustled across the parking lot in the gloom, walked swiftly under the copper arch and down the shadowy little lane, head down, heart beating, man on a mission, going to the creek.
I had barely noticed it before. And if I did, I guess I figured it was drainage: a hole in the foot of a small hill, just barely visible between and behind the cluster of motor homes, dribbling overrun out into the shallow brown creek that wound behind the trailer park.
I moved swiftly past the tin-can palaces with their tribal flags, ignoring the sure, strong sense I had of dozens of eyes watching me, small beady eyes in pink piggy faces, peering from behind slat blinds, staring at my dark body moving unfamiliar and unwelcome through their cloister. Any one of those pigs could come out with a shotgun, and I wondered what I would do, but no one did.
I cleared the trailer park and passed a jumble of picnic benches and playground equipment and stepped carefully down the slope of the ravine and swung the heavy beam of my flashlight along the creek. Now it was clear, with the water swollen by the rains, the direction the brown water was flowing. The black mouth in the base of the shallow hill was an entrance, not an exit. This low little trickle of mud water was a kind of rivulet, a poor cousin of a creek, and this spot behind the motor court is where some long-ago engineer had diverted it.
This creek was called Pogue’s Run. I’d found it on the map. I’d looked up the story. This small waterway was discovered at the turn of the century—the eighteenth turning into the nineteenth—discovered and named and recorded, penciled in on early maps, when the city was not yet a city—when it was a gathering of huts, a stopping place on the way to other places. The small river was inconvenient for the city fathers and the grid they’d drawn. So they did just as Mama Walker said: they ran it underground.