Nolen and Molly seemed content to follow me. We creaked forward together.
My memory, as always, continued to torment me. This time with a Tragically Hip tune about fingers and toes. I did a mental version of blocking my ears and singing, “Na-na-na.” If Molly was right, if we did find Dead Jennifer’s thumbs-or her corpse-I would rather attach the experience to something more emotionally appropriate, like some old Sabbath tune. My memories, remember, cling to their original emotional charge. Mashing together recollections from opposite ends of the emotional colour wheel often jars me to the point of becoming nauseous. Imagine a mouthful of shellfish and ice cream.
I’m not sure what drew my eye the first time my flashlight scrolled over the work table. The relative cleanliness, perhaps. Whatever the reason, I found myself turning toward it, stepping across the wobbly backs of several smashed cinder blocks. The table was one of those old metal jobbies you used to find in high school shop classes, the kind designed to protect ducking and covering students in the event of a Commie nuclear attack. The thing was about as big as a snooker table, and probably just as heavy.
The message on its back lent a whine of horror to the silence. Molly’s “Oh, God…” were the only words spoken. Several moments passed before I breathed.
There it was: a cross in the plain fundamentalist style, made of some kind of wood… only turned into a swastika with two thumbs and two toes set at right angles.
We just stood there dumbfounded. I found myself at once knowing they were real and thinking they looked like dollar-store fakes. The nails, especially-like something dripped from a candle.
“He is insane…” Molly finally said, her face as ashen as the digits it regarded.
We all knew who she was talking about.
“No…” I said. “Nill didn’t do this.” I’m not sure where this insight came from, the sudden realization that I knew him-or his type anyway. Nill had taken a long haul from the crack pipe of power. Like Nolen said, the Thirds owned this town. Why remortgage with a risk like this?
“Who then?” Molly cried.
“Someone who thinks he’s selling out.”
That’s the thing about power: it ropes in rationalizations the way shit draws flies. And Albert himself had said white supremacist types had a weakness for whacking each other…
“Caleb?” I asked. Poor bastard. He was one of those guys: no matter where you aimed, you could be sure as shit that he would come stumbling into your sights. I thought of his daughter squirming and kicking in the pool. I thought of the Bonjours’ daughter doing the same in the open air…
“Caleb?” I repeated.
He just stood there, terror in uniform. Molly, who had been aghast moments earlier, now had a covert, concentrated look, like the bitch who had won bingo yet again but was too wary of resentment to openly celebrate.
“I know what we need to fight these guys,” she said in response to my questioning gaze.
“And what’s that?” Nolen asked in a voice that was more than a little panicked. Was he thinking about his daughter swimming beneath Reverend Nill and his crazed eyes? To this day, I wonder.
“Publicity,” she said, and I could see the triumph shining bright in the cracks of her sombre expression. She had found her break and she knew it. Poor Dead Jennifer.
“The national spotlight.” Even for a cynic like me, that was a new one. The National Spotlight. A phrase from salacious crime shows and pompous cultural studies seminars come to the real world-and sounding almost normal.
What a rich and absurd life I lead. Chock full of nuts.
Molly said this and poof, the tension was gone. It’s funny how it works, the way we think in stories even when we find ourselves beyond the narrative pale. Complication had piled onto complication, and we had climbed the crisis summit. Here we were, stranded in the dead of night with assorted body parts in the wrecked heart of an old foundry, and suddenly it all seemed downhill. If it hadn’t been for Nolen and his uniform, I probably would have sparked a joint.
The only wrinkle remaining was that we had accompanied Nolen on this little adventure.
“It would be better,” he said with the blank face of a brain running successive worst-case scenarios, “if you two, ah… let me handle this.”
He was speaking the international language of in-over-their-head amateurs now, a lingo I had learned from my commanding officers during the war.
“Yeah,” I said with a sage nod. “It would probably be better if you discovered this after you dropped us off at the motel.”
Molly had that squint women get when they smell masculine-scented bullshit. Motes of dust settled through the random wag of our flashlight beams. “What are you saying?”
We all get pinched by circumstances like this, times when saving face and necessity collide. Me? I embrace the embarrassment. Say Yeah, so I’m a dickhead-tell me something new. But Nolen was one of those guys who lived in perpetual terror of his weaknesses. The most he could do was stare at Molly with a kind of chagrined helplessness, as if wanting to point out that he was the one dispensing favours here… at first… but…
I decided to spare myself the spectacle. “This Scooby-Doo stuff isn’t what you would call standard operating procedure, Molls. Caleb did us a solid, so now we’re going to do a solid for him in return.”
Nolen shot me a gratified glance.
“But I get to write about this, right?” She had aimed her light directly at Nolen as she said this. Skewered the poor guy.
“Of course, Molls. Only this time you’ll be the anonymous source you quote.”
I knew she would warm to this, and by all appearances she was. The wheels were turning, anyway… maybe a little too much.
We began picking our way back across the factory floor, each of us mortified in our own way, not simply by what we had seen but by how the competing demands of our lives had, well, clouded things. Jennifer Bonjour was dead, for sure this time, and here we stood, negotiating self-promoting details.
Truth be told, I really didn’t have a problem with this. People die. It sucks. It hurts like all hell. And sometimes, when you’re a cop or a journalist or a private dick, it helps. Profiteering is just the nature of the beast.
Life.
We picked our way through dark industrial cavities, each of us muzzled by our own petty concerns. Then something, a sound, scraped out in the blackness. Our heads jerked toward the sound-off to our right. A shadow lurched. Our flashlights caught the rim of some ragged human form…
And Nolen’s automatic cracked through the hollows.
Or something like that happened. Even though I pretty much remember everything I experience of the events I participate in, the truth is, my mind wanders sometimes. If my attention is sketchy, then my memory is sketchy as well.
Fact is, I was wondering whether I could lure Molly away from her laptop and into my bed. I wish I could say I was pondering the origin of multicellular organisms or the tragedy of the atom bomb, but no, it was Molly’s ass, plain and simple.
“No!” Nolen cried out in bad-acid-trip tones. “No-no-no-no-”
I stumbled forward, searching for the source of the rattle and gurgle in the dark before me. My shadow danced in the erratic light thrown by Nolen’s flashlight. My own light swayed and dipped, painting distant brick walls in dim watercolours, striking the jumbled confusion of the floor with electric detail. For some reason I remember the blood as black. I mean, I know it was red-the way blood should be-but I remember it as black.
The guy was laid out on his back doing a kind of tap dance across an ethereal floor. I understood instantly that it had been a head shot, that the poor bastard was dead, and that Chief Caleb Nolen was fucked-not murder fucked, but manslaughter fucked…