“Come before his presence with singing.”
She hoped this didn’t indicate that her caller thought of himself as God; she really didn’t have time to get involved with a psychiatric hold. The paperwork alone would sink her little boat. Damn it, she wasn’t even on call today. “So where are you located?”
“Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”
Her cop’s mind snagged for a moment on the word “pain” before it moved on to the possibility that “tell my story” might be where the man’s emphasis lay. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think…” She stopped, only half-hearing the sounds coming down the line: the faint crackle; the build and fade of a diesel engine in the background; the voice of a child giving forth a long, unintelligible Spanish monologue. When she was a child, not much older than the owner of that piping voice, she’d had an aunt who lost both sons to a drunk driver and who responded to her agony by joining a church. The aunt’s church was one of those that lived and breathed the Bible, that consulted Proverbs and Job for advice and to make sense of daily life, that referenced any decision, from ethical action to what to have for breakfast, by summoning a verse. Some verses were strikingly apt – the Bible is, after all, a large and diverse book – but for other references, meaning was stretched past the snapping point, leaving the aunt and her audience staring at one another, dumbfounded. Rather as she felt with this man on the telephone, in fact. “Are you by any chance talking about Felicia? The elementary school?”
“My library was dukedom large enough,” he responded, with faint stress on the second word.
“You’re at the Felicia library?”
“I give you a wise and understanding heart,” the Englishman said, in an approving voice that made her feel oddly warm.
“Okay, it’ll take me maybe fifteen, twenty minutes to get there. Will you wait for me?”
The phone went dead, which she guessed meant yes.
She sat for a minute, tapping her middle fingernail on the desk, wondering what the hell she’d just been listening to. There remained the tiny, faraway sense of familiarity in the back of her mind, but for the life of her, she couldn’t tease it forward. Something years back and not here, but an echo… The Bible, snippets of poetry, Shakespeare – she’d caught both Hamlet and The Tempest there – it was an odd conversational form, to be sure. But conversation it appeared to be, albeit of a convoluted and inadequate style. She felt a stir of interest at this welcome distraction from frustration – and then caught herself.
She had to be careful. This thespian-voiced Englishman could be some honest-to-God nutcase setting a trap for a cop. A small backwater town like Rio Linda might not shelter as many purely vicious individuals as a big city, but that didn’t rule viciousness out.
When in doubt, take backup.
And always be in doubt.
Mendez closed the Escobedo file on her computer and hunted down the location of the number the Englishman had been calling from. Yes, a public phone, located at the little Felicia Public Library, as he’d said. Or sort of said.
She shut down the computer and began shoveling the stray papers back into their file. “Scarlotti!” she shouted.
“Yeah?” came the formal answer.
“Yes, Sergeant Mendez,” she muttered, locking up her desk.
“What?”
“Nothing. Who’s on patrol down in Felicia?”
“What, you mean now?”
She looked at him from the doorway where she was standing, adjusting her gun for comfort.
“Yes, I mean now,” she told him.
“Um, let me see.” He pawed through the mess before him, came up with the right piece of paper, and read from it. “Torres and Wong.”
“Patch me through to them, will you?”
It took him only two tries to do so, and when she had Jaime Torres on the line, she asked if the two patrolmen could swing by the front of the library in fifteen minutes, just to provide a little backup, in case.
There was a pause before the puzzled voice responded, “That’s where we are now.”
“What, at the library? Why?”
“Someone called in a report of a suspected terrorist in Arab robes hanging around out front.”
“An Arab terrorist? In Felicia, for God’s sake? Hey – I don’t suppose it’s a guy with an English accent?”
“Don’t know about the accent. We just pulled up, but there’s an older white-haired male sitting on the bench near the phones. He’s got a knapsack on the ground next to him, but I’d have to say he looks more like a monk than an Arab. Doesn’t have a turban or anything.”
“Look, would you mind not approaching him until I get there? Unless he’s actively causing problems, that is. I’m just at the station.”
“Sure, he’s just sitting there, looking pretty harmless. You want us to watch him from the car or from the café across the street? There’s a clear line of surveillance from there.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and take your break, sit where you can keep an eye on him? I’ll be there in twelve minutes if I make both signals.”
“Take your time. Wong’s got the prostrate trouble – he’s happy to piss for a while.”
The line cut off but not before she heard the beginnings of an outraged partner’s voice. She smiled, figuring that Wong had no “prostrate trouble” at all but that Torres had heard that Detective Mendez was unattached again, and was pulling his unmarried partner’s leg.
The Felicia library was a tiny building with a few thousand books, two computer terminals, and one part-time librarian. It survived on the goodwill of a small army of largely Hispanic volunteers and had to argue its budget to the city almost every year. But since the Felicia District of Rio Linda, surrounded by fields of strawberries and lettuce, was the kind of neighborhood where few houses had computers (or books, for that matter), and the only other forms of entertainment in walking distance were the roadside bar a mile south and the dusty general store/café across from the library, it made the Felicia Public Library the place to go for homework, after-school gatherings, job searches, ESL classes, and visiting-nurse clinics. It also made for some great numbers to show the state auditors, and the low-income patrons had justified a regular trickle of state and federal grants. Without a doubt, the people here adored the place and kept it both busy and spotless.
Which might explain why some concerned patron had called in a stranger hanging around the public phone out front. As Mendez pulled into the pitted surface of the small parking area, a young mother and her two young kids were coming out the door, and all three patrons gave the man a wary look. He lifted one hand, two fingers pointing skyward like a benediction; when the woman came down the steps, she was smiling.
Mendez got out of her car and could understand why the woman had smiled. The figure in the brown robe – which was no more Arab than the shirt and khaki pants she was wearing – resembled a tall, thin, brown-clad Father Christmas, down to the twinkle in his eye. There was, as Torres had told her, a battered blue nylon backpack tucked under the front edge of the bench, and a walking stick, tall as a man, leaning against the far armrest. His skin was weathered, although he was clearly Anglo. A pair of nearly white running shoes peeked out from the hem of his robe.
The man saw her, and he made her instantly for a cop, but he watched her watching him with no indication of the wary or defiant manner that brought a cop’s reflexes to attention. She half-turned to look over her shoulder, wondering if Torres and Wong had been paying as much attention as the skinny Father Christmas had.
In perhaps thirty seconds, the two uniforms came out of the onetime garage that was now plastered with neatly painted signs advertising strong hot coffee, breakfast burritos all day, and menudo thursdays. The two men hitched up their heavy belts as they crossed the deserted side street, not needing to look for traffic. They joined her at the car, taking their eyes off the man for only the brief moment necessary to greet her.