“I won’t.”
“Stay in the world, Aud. Stay alive inside. Promise me. Stay alive.”
I whipped through the night as the ice crept through my veins. I stopped once at a strip mall, where I called Denneny’s office number, disconnecting as soon as he picked up. Then I filled my spare can with gas and bought some gloves. My mouth tasted of copper and blood.
At Cheshire Bridge Road I cruised the sex bars until I found the car I wanted, a dark, late-model Volvo with multiple airbags and antilock brakes. This time I parked in the lot of another bar and walked back. A quick thrust with a shim and I was inside.
I understand Denneny. He works late because he has nothing to go home to and when he looks inside himself, there is nobody there. I parked a block down the road from the precinct house, adjusted my headrest for maximum safety, and waited. I watched the stars. Tonight I didn’t recognize any of them; they were cold and alien. I thought of abbeys on headlands, of Norwegian islands in a sea breeze, of Northwoods Lake Court, where the air would be utterly still but for the creak of tree frogs and the endless patter of fountains. Then for a while I thought of nothing.
He emerged just after eleven p.m. I let his Lexus get a block ahead before I pulled out.
When we first met, he had lived in Candler Park. When he made captain he moved to Morningside, a neighbourhood where all the houses were built of dusty rose brick on winding little streets and fronted by velvety, floodlit lawns. No doubt he had thought he would soon be promoted up to commander and the giddy heights of the Prado mansions.
At an intersection I tightened my seat belt and turned my lights off before following him up a long, empty hill. He had been driving the same route for eight years and took it faster than was really safe in the dark. Half a mile from the top of the hill, the road would take a wide curving left, then a sudden right alongside one of those pretty rose-coloured walls. His speed picked up. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty.
He took the long left curve without slowing down, as I’d known he would. Time for me and the Viking to play one last round. I smiled, shifted, and punched the gas. The nose of the Volvo touched his right rear bumper just as he would have been thinking of feathering the brakes and threading the wheel through his hands to take the car to the right.
Brake lights flared and stained the night red. I eased my foot down a little more. Tires squealed, metal screeched. My heart was an anvil. The Lexus wobbled, then slewed, then seemed to straighten. I hummed to myself as I floored the gas and drove him into the wall at sixty miles an hour.
The noise was huge and seemed to last forever and then the night turned white as airbags bloomed and the cars bounced and my head walloped back into the head restraint. The wound along my shoulder pulled at the stitches. Nothing I hadn’t anticipated. I slashed the airbags and kicked my way out of the Volvo. The night smelled of honeysuckle and gas and hot rubber and seemed to turn very slowly.
His airbags had inflated, too, and like a good policeman he had been wearing his seat belt, but the impact had been a surprise, and he was still stunned. I pulled open his door, felt around his belt for his cuffs and gun. I shot the bag, then clipped his hands to the wheel.
“I never liked you, Denneny, but I trusted you. You had rules. What happened? Was it the death of your dreams or that of your wife? Nothing to work for, no one to go home to, nothing inside. Nothing except your rules. You should have clung to them, Denneny, they might have saved you.”
Metal ticked. Somewhere an owl screeched.
“You know why I’m here, don’t you?”
He turned his head slowly. Blood trickled from his left nostril. I pulled back the hammer.
“Don’t you.”
He closed his eyes and nodded.
“Good.” And I shot him in the abdomen.
The frame of the Volvo had buckled a little with the impact and it took me a moment to get the trunk open. My head hurt. When I got back with the gas can, he had started to go into shock.
I unscrewed the cap and laid it carefully on the grass verge. I sloshed gas inside the car, over his body. Judging by the way he squealed and thrashed, it stung on that wound.
“I was stupid, Denneny. Who warned me off this case in the first place? Why would someone leave all that coke at the scene of a crime unless they could get it back from the evidence locker whenever they wanted? I should have known, but I trusted you. Trusted your rules. But you broke all those rules, for money. When did you stop caring, Denneny?”
The can was heavy; my shoulder burned.
“Who could have called Lyon Art to get the information about Olsen Glass? Who took his holidays in California, where Michael Honeycutt used to work? Who knew where to find three men who would kill for money?” He choked on the gas. “Who might be expected to find out Honeycutt was laundering cartel drug money? So simple. All I had to do was put it all together, Denneny, but I didn’t. I didn’t ask that last question: who was the only person—the only one, Denneny—that I trusted to help me with this?”
I should have remembered: the Viking never plays by the rules.
“Did you laugh when you pulled the strings? Did you think I was funny, running around like a dumb but faithful dog, bringing you bones? No, because nothing amuses you anymore, does it? And nothing annoys you. Nothing fills you with joy. It’s all gone. You’re dead inside. Empty.”
I stepped back and looked at him. Drenched to his skin. I tore off his shirt and twisted it, then knotted it into something I could throw. My head pounded, and when I bent down for the gas can the grass verge swooped. The cap got cross-threaded when I tried to screw it back on. I had to take it off and start again. I carried it back to the Volvo and returned with matches.
I tossed his gun into the backseat, then pulled a penny from my pocket. It was warm in my hand; bright and sharp. I held it up between finger and thumb. In the headlights it could have been gold. “All for this, Denneny. All for money.” I put it back in my pocket. My fare for the ferryman, not his.
I stepped back and struck a match. It burned electric blue at the centre but its wavering tip was the yellow of every torch ever used to light a pyre, that most human of fires that roars against the night to keep the ice from our hearts. I touched the match to the shirt, which I whirled over my head until it was a great orange wheel. I threw it into the car.
At Little Five Points, the night was full of the noise and laughter of people who don’t know that the trolls always get you in the end, who when they look up at the night do not understand that the beauty of the bright stars turning overhead, though vast, was created by a universe utterly indifferent to their fate. These young, healthy innocents understand only enough to be a little afraid, so they fill themselves with pot and beer and in the light of a myriad cafés listen to inept street players trying to drive back the dark.
I walked into Borealis. The tables seemed to get in my way, and the chairs were not where they should have been. Don’t let machines keep me alive, she had said. Don’t let them. And I had promised.
“Aud! What in the world is the matter?” Over his shoulder, he called, “Two lattés over here, Jonie, please. Sit, Aud. Sit, for the love of god.” He led me to a corner table. “What is that terrible smell? Gas, is it? You’ve been in some accident? No? Well, never mind. You’ll live. How’s Julia?”
Julia, with the indigo eyes and the laugh like Armagnac. Julia, who had thought she was ready. I took the penny from my pocket. Fare for the ferryman. But Stay in the world, she had said. I spun the penny on the table and, while it turned, stared past him, past the innocents with their light and their noise, and out into the night.