‘I never worked a case like that.’
‘It must be the same. How could it be so much the same but different? It was this kind of car or that, whatever. You weren’t there. I was there.’
He had been certain, but now he admitted to himself that it had been years, and this would not have been the first time that he had misremembered or transposed details between cases. Yet, he kept referencing his memory, and the only vehicle he found there that had been driven in a demon-possessed state was a Mercury. ‘You don’t remember anything else?’ Ellis asked. ‘At all? About the convertible?’
‘You can’t help,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘You could get them to drop it all. You could talk to the family.’
‘With due respect, you ever wonder if Mike’s just feeding you a line?’
She opened her eyes and gazed at him with liquid, hopeless hate. And then Ellis felt a meaty hand on his neck. ‘What’s that?’ Mike said into his ear. ‘Say that again?’ He sounded sad.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellis said.
‘That’s all right. I heard you.’ Mike pulled out his chair and sat. ‘I’m just doing the best I can, like you, right? Like anyone. Right? That’s OK. It’s all good.’ He peered at Lucy. ‘So you’ll talk to him, but you won’t talk to me?’ He laughed. To Ellis he said, ‘I’m in the doghouse.’
Lucy said, ‘Mike’s a good man.’
‘Really, everything’s beautiful,’ Mike said.
Ellis sensed the edge of a vortex. ‘I have to go,’ he said, standing.
Lucy had her gaze fixed hard on him, but Mike said, ‘See you round,’ and then Lucy’s expression suddenly turned melancholy. ‘Luck finding your friend,’ she said. Looking at Mike she said, ‘If everything were beautiful, then it wouldn’t be so hard, I don’t think.’
Ellis started shouldering by people. In the parking lot he ran, and in the minivan he reversed and turned and accelerated. A mile down the road he stopped on the shoulder and sat in the dark. He watched the mirror as if Mike’s white shirt might reappear.
Eventually he convinced himself that the important thing was that someone had seen Boggs. He switched on the dome light, spread the map over the steering wheel, and looked at the line of the road he was on and its route south, the branchings of that line, the branchings of those branchings. Occasionally a car came up with a whisper and a light that slowly filled the minivan, then flashed past, replaced by dwindling red tail lamps and the yammering of insects.
He felt his eyes with his fingers and weighed his exhaustion and his options. He was very tired and the beer had fogged him. He decided he had to try to sleep a little. He drove back through the intersection and into the park, turned into the boat-ramp area, eased into a swathe of tall grasses at one side. A wind thrashed the tops of the trees, the lake made a great open space where moonlight sparked on the waves. He reclined his seat and crossed his hands over his stomach.
The noises of the insects were apocalyptic. The day had been hot but now a chill settled into him. Despite exhaustion, he slept poorly. The figure in the road – James Dell – approached out of the darkness and made noises of impact as he broke at the knee and then came down on the hood with a leg up in the air, and he thought also of the sheet-obscured figure on the bed, the noise of the breath in the respirator, the wife’s hand that had gripped his own.
He opened his eyes and watched the vague, irresolvable shapes of the trees, then stirred and looked at his watch. 3:11. He groped in his pocket, brought out his phone and called Boggs. Four rings, a click, and the quality of the quiet on the phone changed. Ellis waited.
‘Hello?’
‘Boggs.’
‘Who is this?’
‘You know who this is.’
‘Well, to hell with you, too,’ Boggs said. ‘It is the middle of the night.’
For perhaps an entire minute neither of them said anything. Finally, Ellis said, ‘Boggs, I’m really sorry.’
‘Great apology. Good job.’
‘Whatever you want me to say, I’ll say.’ Another silence, and in the darkness Ellis had a sensation of the minivan floating, as if the lake had risen to bear him away. ‘Heather says you’re talking about killing yourself.’
‘Do you know,’ Boggs asked, ‘why I answered the phone when I saw that it was you calling?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
‘But here we are,’ Ellis said.
‘Do we have to talk about who is and who is not going to kill themselves?’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘I don’t think I want to talk at all.’
‘But you answered the phone.’
‘I can’t explain it.’
‘Where are you? Let me come see you.’
‘I’ve got hold of some conclusions, Ellis. I won’t say it was a lifting of a darkness, but more like reaching the end of a road and saying, “Now I see, this road doesn’t go through. It ends.”’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that, but I’d like to.’
‘Please, don’t talk that way. Have some dignity. And maybe the road ran off the top of a cliff. Maybe it ran smack into the sea. Maybe it was a road done up in gold brick and candy and banners and whiskey bottles, and when I say it ended, maybe I mean that I woke up.’
Ellis smiled. ‘Maybe you’re talking nonsense.’
‘Maybe. It’s late. I can’t seem to sleep. Here’s what it is. I feel as if I’m trapped by the action of some huge machine, a complicated arrangement of motors, gears, shafts, all turning and grinding, and what’s worse is that the machine is me, and its design is my own, which caused me to give you your job, to give you my wife, and finally to give you even my own job. To give you, basically, my life.’
‘I’m not going to take your job, Boggs. I don’t want your job -’ Ellis stopped. Having said this, he regretted how it implied the truth of the rest. He said, ‘That guy I hit isn’t doing well.’
‘I’m surprised he’s alive.’
And again neither spoke. It seemed a mutual feeling might begin to seep into these intervals, but Ellis detected none. ‘I talked to this couple tonight,’ he said. ‘They met in a car accident.’
‘That’s lovely. You ever talk to Heather about your brother’s accident?’
‘Not really. Why?’
‘That’s what I thought. I thought it was a little curious.’
The comment made Ellis wary. He said, ‘That accident with the driver who was possessed by demons – what was he driving?’
‘Something big. I don’t remember.’
‘Come on.’
‘Really, I don’t,’ Boggs said. ‘Why?’
‘Tell me where you are.’
‘No.’
‘I know that you drove to the lake. Then you turned south. Didn’t you?’
Boggs said nothing.
‘Possessed by demons?’ Ellis asked.
‘Righto,’ Boggs said. ‘They’re everywhere.’
And the line died. Ellis looked at the phone until the screen’s backlight went dark. He reclined in the seat. Heather had interpreted the comment about the lake through her frame of reference, but if Boggs’s interest was actually the accident site, then the correct frame of reference was the one Ellis knew.
The feeling of sleep never came, but suddenly he woke to a sky stained crimson.
He unfolded his map again and contemplated it. He recalled an accident that they had worked on a couple hundred miles or so to the south of here. Another somewhat to the east of that. Another south of that. Touring accident sites. Over the years, once or twice, Boggs had mentioned the idea.
Waterfront cottages. A solitary and vast weeping willow. The cars on the road had their lights on, then one by one they switched off as the sky’s first dark blush retreated before a more forceful blue. Ellis pulled over for gasoline, a bottle of orange soda and a package of Pop Tarts. The stop, although short, sparked an anxious guilt – if Boggs was on the road, he was gaining distance.
He skirted the lake southward, along a two-lane highway through dull, weathered towns like wrack along the shore. Marinas full of idle white boats. A gift shop advertising seashells far from the sea. Outspread water the colour of rolled iron. In the distance dark clouds dangled wraiths of rainfall. Moving away from the lake he crossed a terrain of flat reedy marshes where only the road seemed solid. At a light he waited behind an SUV and watched through its rear window a small screen that played a cartoon that involved many computer-animated insects. He merged onto an interstate and passed between broad ditches and lines of wire fencing while further out stretched cornfields and here and there a house and sometimes a road running parallel to the interstate, a car there moving in near synchronisation with himself. The mile markers fled by. A white pickup tailed him for thirty miles, then he glanced in the mirror, and it was gone. He watched for Boggs’s car, not only among the vehicles around himself but also in the traffic across the median. But traffic went by constantly and fast, his thoughts wandered, and he caught himself staring at the lane ahead. A black tyre mark arced toward the median. Another extended straight ahead, stuttered, then stopped. Another showed the doubled wheels of a semi.