He hadn't expected to get this far this quickly. He set down his pack, and his tambourine wrapped in an old towel, and waited for another ride. After half an hour, sixty-one trucks, and more cars than he felt like counting, a big, new Peterbilt stopped and give him a lift into Lakota.
He studied the city disinterestedly as the truck driver,an old wiry man with a few strands of grey hair sticking out from beneath his baseball cap, made conversation.
Raymond rather liked the ships he saw as they passed near the docks. The driver turned south on I-79 toward Youngstown. Raymond was pleased with the number of parks (nine), though he wished there were more trees in them.
As they passed one, near what the truck driver said was downtown, Raymond noticed a horse-drawn carriage making its way around it. He asked the driver to let him off there, and they exchanged polite goodbyes.
He walked over to one of the concrete benches and sat. In spite of his first impression, he found he wasn't comfortable in the park. It was exactly two city blocks square, with concrete walks and trees arranged just so, and it seemed as if the soil under the grass was hardly a foot deep, carefully built up for the lawn. He closed his eyes and thought of the mountain above Boulder, hard and rocky, yet thick with pines. He listened to conversations of the few birds (six) that remained this late in the season. It was growing cold.He pulled his heavy wool coat of red and black squares closer around him and wondered what to do next.
Mr. DeCruz won't you shake my hand?
Do I look too much better than what you had planned?
I been back since late last fall,
Now who you gonna call?
"BACK IN TOWN"
Nothing was going right today. He hadn't been able to fall asleep, and when he finally had, he tossed through fragmented dreams like clips from cheap horror movies. Giant chickens were scratching on his door. There was a dead dove on his coffee table and he was trying to resuscitate it. Cynthia Kacmarcik dropped in for tea, and his kettle wasn't big enough.When he finally sank deeper into a dreamless sleep,he'd overslept and still awakened with a headache worse than a hangover. Traffic had been awful, and he'd gotten to work before he remembered that he'd given Madam Moria all his cash the night before, so he didn't have a dime on him and no time to go to the bank. And now he was hurrying down the hall,trying to catch the last ten minutes of the morning's roll call, when someone behind him called out, "Oh,Step!"
He turned, feeling at once weary and impatient,Seemed like the whole precinct was calling him Step now. Fuck you very much, Durand. He tried to summon up a smile for the woman pushing a brown envelope into his hands. He couldn't even remember her name. He took the envelope numbly.
"What's this?"
"Oh, just that old case file from New Orleans- I promised Durand I'd have it by this morning, and then I missed him, but he said it was really for you anyway, so I guess I caught the right man after all,right?"
"Huh?" She'd lost him after her first few words,her voice dissolving into a chirpy cheerfulness. New Orleans. Durand. "Sure. Uh, thanks. Thanks."
"No problem, always glad to help a friend. Tell Durand I said hi. He's such a good kid, isn't he?"
"What? Uh, sure."
"Well, you're welcome. I hope it's what you're hoping for. And Step, no offense, but next time you need something, why don't you come yourself? Durand's a good kid, but he wasn't sure of the date, and he could hardly read your handwriting. Said it looked like you wrote it in the middle of the night. It would be easier for me if I got it straight from you. Speeds things up for all of us, right?"
"Aah, right. Yeah. Thanks again. Thanks." He went off down the hallway, muttering to himself. Forget the briefing, he was late anyway and he was sick of hearing about what new indignities the Basher had perpetrated on Exxon stations. He was trying to remember where he had left the scribbled notes from his conversation with Marilyn. Probably folded it up and stuffed it under the clay pencil pot Laurie had made for him when she was in kindergarten. That had always been his private, hands-off spot when he and Ed were partners. But somehow Durand had gotten the notes and gone asking for the files.
Another thing occurred to him: Ed had dropped Cynthia Kacmarcik's name last night, before he had mentioned it, and he was sure he hadn't told Ed the name of the murdered woman. Or had he?
He sat down at his desk and dropped the brown envelope in front of him. Then he slowly reached over and lifted the pencil pot. Nothing there. But maybe he hadn't left it there. Maybe he'd left it right out in the middle of the blotter, and the puppy had decided to be industrious. But forget that for now.
There wasn't much in the envelope. Fresh clean paper with long-dead facts on them. Teletype print, only it wasn't a Teletype anymore, was it? He scanned it hungrily. An August night, a card game that might have been rigged, and a dead man named Timothy DeCruz. And a great description of the killer, and two eye-witnesses, and they'd never managed to catch him. The knife even sounded familiar. There was a coroner's note about the unusual wound it left. But the killer himself had just vanished. Stepovich shuffled through redundant reports, found the eyewitness descriptions and read them slowly. The witnesses hadn't missed much. A knife scar that ran from under the left eye to just in front of the left ear. Discolored patch at left jaw hinge. Broken nose. Slight squint in left eye.
"It's him, isn't it?" Durand asked from behind. Stepovich spun to glare at him. Durand ignored it,reached past him to finger the description clear of the other papers. He picked it up. "It's our gypsy. Step. And the bastard hasn't aged a day since 1935."
"He's not a bastard," Stepovich corrected automatically. "He's a Dove."
A wanted man in New Orleans
Matches my description
Mister druggist please be kind enough
To refill my prescription.
"RED LIGHTS AND NEON"
The Gypsy sat, for a time, in the eye of the storm. He could feel the tension around him-the Wolf beginning another day's hunt, a murderer who trembled with fear and tried not to touch the weapon with which he had killed before, another who rushed, desperate to save a life that had been unknown to him moments before, another who wrestled with temptation without understanding the stakes, another who tried to bring growth out of the pain of loss.
All of these, he knew, were connected to him. And he knew that he could help some of them, if he could only find them, but to find them might mean forgetting why he had sought them. He clung to his memories as a miser to a gold coin, and sat in the eye of the storm, waiting.
Two and a half miles away, a bartender woke up much earlier than he had to, since he wasn't on until the afternoon. He glowered at the clock and lay back thinking for a while. After a time, he decided that he'd procrastinated long enough; he had to either write the letter or not. A few minutes later he got up,showered, dressed, then sat down and wrote a short note to his daughter in which he said nothing about her revelation, but that he hoped to see her over Christmas break, and they could talk then. He put his coat on and walked out to the mailbox with it, before he changed his mind.
The Gypsy sat in the eye of the storm and smiled,though he didn't know why.