A short burst of siren startles Punter, and he twists around in his seat to see a police cruiser idling its engine behind him, its driver’s-side window rolled down. The cop inside is around Punter’s age, his hair starting to gray at the temples but the rest of him young and healthy-looking. Hanging his left arm out the window and drumming his fingers against the side of the cruiser, the cop yells something, but Punter can’t hear him through the closed windows, not with all the other voices surrounding him.
Punter opens his mouth, then closes it without saying anything. He shakes his head and locks his driver’s-side door, suddenly afraid that the cop means to drag him from the car, to put hands on him as other cops did when he was a kid. He looks up from the lock to see the cop walking toward his car. The cop raps on Punter’s window and waits for him to roll it down. He stares at Punter, who tries to look away, inadvertently letting his eyes fall on another group of teenage girls.
The cop says, You need to move your car. This is a fire lane.
Punter tries to nod but finds himself shaking his head instead. He whispers that he’ll leave, that he’s leaving. The cop says, I can’t hear you. What did you say?
Punter turns the key, sighing when the engine turns over. He says, I’m going right now. He says it as loud as he can, his vocal cords choked and rusty.
There are too many girls walking in front of him for Punter to pull forward, so he has to wait as the cop gets back in his own car. Eventually the cop puts the cruiser in reverse, letting him pass. Punter drives slowly out of the parking lot and onto the city streets, keeping the car slow, keeping it straight between the lines. Afraid that the cop might follow him, Punter sticks to the main roads and other well-populated areas, but he gets lost anyway. These aren’t places he usually goes. A half-hour passes and then another. Punter’s throat is raw from smoking. His eyes ache from staring into the rearview mirror, and his hands shake so hard he feels they might never stop.
At home, Punter finds the girl’s parents in the phonebook, writes down their address. He knows now that he has to be more careful, that if he isn’t then someone will come looking for him too. He lies down on the couch to wait for dark, falls asleep with the television tuned to daytime dramas and court shows. He dreams about finding the murderer, about hauling him into the police station in chains. He sees himself avenging the girl with a smoking pistol, emptying round after round into this faceless person, unknown but certainly out there, surely as marked by his crime as Punter was.
When he wakes up, the television is still on, broadcasting game shows full of questions Punter isn’t prepared to answer. He gets up and goes into the bathroom, the pain in his guts doubling him over on the toilet. When he’s finished, he takes a long, gulping drink from the faucet, then goes out into the living room to gather his notebook, his binoculars, his knife.
In the garage, he tries to pull up the girl’s lank top, to get to the skin hidden underneath, but it’s frozen to her. He can’t tell if the sound it makes is the ripping of ice or skin. He tries touching her through her clothes, but she’s too far gone, distant with cold. He shuts the freezer door and leaves her in the dark again but not before he explains what he’s doing for her, not before he promises to find the person who hurt her, to hurt this person himself.
Her parents’ house is out in the country, at the end of a long tree-lined driveway. Punter drives past, then leaves his car parked down the road and walks back with the binoculars around his neck. Moving through the shadows of the trees, he finds a spot a hundred yards from the house, then scans the lighted windows for movement until he finds the three figures sitting in the living room on the first floor. He recognizes her parents from the television, sees that the third person is a boy around the same age as the drowned girl. Punter watches him the closest, trying to decide if this is the girl’s boyfriend. The boy is all movement, his hands gesturing with every word he speaks. He could be laughing or crying or screaming, and from this distance Punter wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. He watches as the parents embrace the boy, then hurries back through the woods as soon as he sees headlights blink on in front of the house.
He makes it to his own car just as the boy’s convertible pulls out onto the road. Punter starts the engine and follows the convertible through town, past the gas station and the downtown shopping, then into another neighborhood where the houses are smaller and more run-down. He’s never been here before, but he knows the plastics plant is close, that many of his old coworkers live nearby. He watches the boy park in front of a small white house, watches through the binoculars as the boy climbs the steps to the porch and rings the doorbell. The boy does not go in, but Punter’s view is still obscured by the open door. Whatever happens only takes a few minutes, and then the boy is back in his car. The boy sits on the side of the road for a long time, smoking. Punter smokes too. He imagines getting out of the car and going up to the boy, imagines questioning him about the night of the murder. He knows he should, knows being a detective means taking risks, but he can’t do it. When the boy leaves, Punter just lets him go, then drives past the white house with his foot off the gas pedal, idling at a crawl. He doesn’t see anything he understands, but this is not exactly new.
Back at the pond, the only evidence he gathers is that he was there himself. His tire tracks are the only ones backing up to the pond, his footprints the only marks along the shore. Whoever else was there before him has received an alibi through Punter’s own clumsiness. He knows how this will look, so he finds a long branch with its leaves intact and uses it to rake out the sand, erasing the worst of his tracks. When he’s done, he stares out over the dark water, trying to remember what it felt like to hold her in his arms, to feel her body soft and pliable before surrendering her to the freezer.
He wonders if it was a mistake to bring her up from beneath the water. Maybe he should have done the opposite, stayed under the waves with her until his own lungs filled with the same watery weight, until he was trapped beside her. Their bodies would not have lasted. The fish and waves would have dismantled their shells, and then Punter could have shown her the good person he’s always believed himself to be, trapped underneath all the sticky rot.
For dinner he cooks two more steaks. All the venison the girl displaced is going bad in his aged refrigerator, and already the steaks are browned and bruised. To be safe, he fries them hard as leather. He has to chew the venison until his jaws ache and his teeth feel loose, but he finishes every bite, not leaving behind even the slightest scrap of fat.
Watching the late night news, Punter can tell that without any new evidence, the story is losing steam. The girl gets only a minute of coverage, the reporter reiterating facts Punter has known for days now. He stares at her picture again, at how her smile once made her whole face seem alive.
He knows he doesn’t have much time. He crawls toward the television on his hands and knees, placing his hand on her image just as it fades away. He turns around, sits with his back against the television screen. Behind him there is satellite footage of a tornado or a hurricane or a flood. Of destruction seen from afar.
Punter wakes up choking in the dark, his throat closed off with something, phlegm or pus or he doesn’t know what. He grabs a handkerchief from his bed stand and spits over and over until he clears away the worst of it. He gets up to flip the light switch, but the light doesn’t turn on. He tries it again and then once more. He realizes how quiet the house is, how without the steady clacking of his wall clock the only sound in his bedroom is his thudding heart. He leaves the bedroom, walks into the kitchen. The oven’s digital clock stares at him like an empty black eye, while the refrigerator waits, silent and still.