On the veranda, men are crawling on top of each other, stumbling back down the stairs in retreat. A pair of blank eyes stares up at me from right at the threshold. I reach out and twist a cocked.45 from his hand. I’m running cold again, my trembling gone. I emerge into the night, stepping over the bodies of the dead and wounded, ignoring the carnage. The landing is slick under my feet. At the top of the stairs, two bloodstained men hold a third between them-silver-haired, in a sodden guayabera. I reach down, taking César by the collar, pressing the borrowed gun into the ear of the carrier on his right.
“Leave him,” I growl.
They spring back, dropping the Jefe against my leg. The one under my muzzle just runs, while the other lets a stray round fly. I snap the.45 toward him and fire. He goes tumbling down the stairs.
Then I start dragging César back, grunting with the effort, my whole body radiating, enflamed. I drag him across the landing, leaving contrails in the blood. I drag him across one of the wounded, who crawls away with a frightening gasp. I drag him across the threshold and into the apartment, kicking the door shut, releasing his shirt.
He sprawls facedown before Keller, who stares at me wide-eyed.
“You’re insane,” he says. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“You’re under arrest,” I say to the silver-haired man. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say-”
“March, what are you doing?”
“This man is under arrest,” I say. “For murder.”
He edges toward me empty-handed. “What are you trying to say? Are you hurt?”
I sink back against the wall, lowering myself onto the floor like a man relaxing into a hot bath, feeling so wet, so utterly poured out as I break the surface.
“This man,” I say, then stop. “This man is guilty of murder. He beat a girl to death at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in the summer of 1986.”
An amplified voice thunders through the alley in syncopated Spanish that I don’t understand. It sounds official, though, and very soothing. Everything feels very soothing. Keller scoots toward me, reaching out, taking the front of my shirt in his hands and ripping it open, letting the two sides drop. His mouth gapes open at what he sees.
“Are you religious?” I ask. “My wife is. Charlotte. Do you think there’s anything out there? Besides the stars, I mean. Or is there nothing but nothing?”
His hands feel warm on my skin. He’s pushing down on me, pushing me back against the wall.
“I don’t think there’s nothing,” I say.
Up close, I can see the waffle texture of the dish towel tied to his neck, damp with his own blood. Big Reg is covered in blood, all over his hands right up to the elbows, and his breath is foul and he’s panting right over my face.
My head lulls and I notice there’s an unfamiliar gun in my hand. I open my fist and let it tip onto the floor. Above me, Reg is saying something and his voice is as loud in my head as the sirens were before, only none of the words make any sense, like he’s forgotten to leave spaces in between. They run together into a melodic jumble. Is Big Reg singing? That can’t be right.
The door opens and there are men in balaclavas with automatic weapons, men shining flashlights everywhere and coming in through the broken windows. Reg pulls back, raising his hands over his head, and the farther away he goes, the fuzzier he gets.
“Reg,” I say.
To my left, there’s a white bird. It shuffles uncertainly across the floor, wings canted outward in an avian shrug. A ridge of yellow feathers stands along the crest of its head. This bird is watching me from the corner of its eye, and then the wings spread wide and the bird flaps its way through the open door and up into the sky. Everyone watches, the people around me smudging as they gaze upward.
The bird, though, I can see clearly, every feather perfectly articulated. As I watch it ascend, I have this funny idea that I’m watching my own soul. Which would mean I have one, or at least I did. And I don’t want it back. Don’t come back. Keep on going until you reach whatever’s up there.
A boy crouches over me, his body dwarfed inside a Kevlar cocoon, a spike of matted hair jutting from his forehead. He puts a cool hand against the side of my face, frowning mightily. When he gets up, he starts to yell, but in a woman’s voice. “We need a doctor here. . doctor, how do you say doctor in Spanish? Now! ” I know this voice. I try to get up.
“Stay there, March. You’re going to be all right. Don’t try to talk. There’s gonna be plenty of talking to do, don’t worry about that. But not now, not yet. You just hang on, you hear? You just hang on.”
“I know you,” I say.
“Don’t try to talk.”
“It’s Jess, isn’t it?” I say. “They told me you were dead.” My lungs inflate with joy. I try to raise a hand and pull her toward me. “They all told me, but I knew. I knew it wasn’t true. Why did they tell me you were dead?”
The boy’s hand is on my forehead now, and there are people above me, doing things to me. I watch them with far-off benevolence. There’s something over my nose and mouth. I feel myself levitating. The ceiling of Keller’s apartment sinks away to reveal a heaven full of stars, a million constellations, all of them swirling in a clockwork dance. And circling in among them, wings outspread, is a white cockatoo, and in my ears the cooing of doves.
Interlude: 1986
“Cheer up, sir. This is what you wanted.”
Crewes stood in my doorway, arms crossed, watching me toy with the plastic alligator, staring pensively at the clock on the wall. More time had passed, and after the first morning neither of us spoke about Magnum or the dead girl again. It was Major Shattuck who issued the orders. The unnamed suspects in the girl’s death had all left the country-they’d been spirited away before Magnum even summoned the MPs-but he had been given assurances (presumably by Magnum) that the incident would be reported to the appropriate authorities in their home country. And that was that. On the sly, Crewes informed me that a little rough justice was in the cards. On the flight home, one particular cabana boy would be making an unexpected snorkel dive in the Gulf.
I pretended to believe him, because it seemed to make him feel better. But I remembered what Magnum had said. Seeing the body, he’d thought, This is the one. There was no way he’d lift a hand against that particular killer. César. He had high hopes for the man back home.
Besides, what I’d said to Magnum the night of the murder was right. He might think César was his puppet, but César had other ideas. The ease with which he’d done the deed, knowing he was under surveillance, knowing I had seen him with the girl, made that perfectly clear.
So the clock ticked down, my enlistment ran out, and before long I was sitting with a plastic gator in my hand, pondering the whole course of my life up to that moment. Ironically, during my whole hitch with the MP battalion, I’d never once considered a future in law enforcement. The uncle who’d raised me was a cop, invalided out in a wheelchair, making his living by running a Richmond Avenue gun shop where he cut all his HPD buddies a good deal. That was never a life that appealed to me.
Now I rarely thought of anything else. That feeling of being in the right, of being the only person left to stand up for the dead-I liked it. It suited me. Though it would be a while before I’d see another corpse, and a long while after that before I’d be responsible for bringing a killer to justice. I had found my purpose.
I made the first phone call from my desk at Ft. Polk, first to my uncle and then to his old commander, who by then was a shift lieutenant in the patrol division. After my discharge, I took some time off, did a little traveling, spent a few weeks on the Gulf with some fishing buddies I’d stayed in touch with off and on since college. Then it was back to Houston, the academy, the badge, and the mean streets.