Langer walked away, disgusted with the media, disgusted with the kind of society that had created the media, and mostly disgusted with himself for letting it get to him.
‘Langer?’
He keyed his shoulder radio and turned his mouth to talk into it. ‘Right here.’
‘We’ve got your deck covered if you want to break for lunch.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Turn around.’
He did, and saw one of the unmarkeds pulling up beside him, Detective Peterson grinning behind the wheel. He’d been assigned as one of the floaters who covered sectors for the rest of them when they took a break. ‘How’re they hanging, guy?’
‘They aren’t hanging. They’re shriveled up and tucked up and hiding from this damn cold.’ He stamped his feet to get the blood moving and looked around. There was more foot traffic now, probably morning shoppers heading back to their cars to miss the afternoon rush hour. ‘It’s getting busy,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll wait awhile till it slows down.’
‘It ain’t gonna slow down. From here on in it’s just busy, busy, busy. Now you got the lunch crowd leaving, and when that’s done the after-school crowd gets here, then the after-work crowd . . .’ Peterson pulled into a handicapped spot and got out of the car. ‘Besides, I think I can handle it. I’m a detective, just like you. Wanna see my badge?’
‘All right, all right.’ Langer smiled a little. ‘But you parked in a handicapped spot.’
‘Up yours, Langer.’ Peterson’s eyes were busy, scanning the area with an acuity that made Langer feel better about heading inside where it was warm. ‘And haven’t you noticed? There are no handicapped people here today. That’s the one and only contingent that had enough brains to stay home.’
At that moment a wheelchair emerged from the walkway to Nordstrom, making him a liar.
Peterson glared at the sad little mini-procession as if they’d intentionally timed their appearance to make him look bad. ‘Okay, I take it back. That makes nobody in this state who had the brains to stay away from here today. There’s about fifty million kids down in Camp Snoopy, can you believe that? You know what it reminds me of? Public hangings. Witch burnings. That place in Rome where everybody went to see gladiators kill each other . . .’
‘The Coliseum,’ Langer said distantly, staring at the occupant of the wheelchair, trapped in a time warp he visited occasionally to torture himself. The woman was carefully bundled up against the cold, bowed over by age, and even from a distance he could see the trademark empty gaze of Alzheimer’s. He shivered inside his coat, looking at that old woman and seeing his mother before the disease had finally relented and let her die last year.
‘Yeah, the Coliseum,’ Peterson was saying. ‘I didn’t think anybody was going to show up here today, and now the mall people say they’ve broken every attendance record in the book. Either all these people are just flat-out stupid, or they’ve got some kind of a bloodlust thing going, like they came here just because they heard something horrible was going to happen. Almost creeps me out more than the killings.’
‘Minnesota nice,’ Langer mumbled, finally tearing his eyes away from the woman in the chair, hating himself for staring.
He’d been on the other end of that morbid, curious stare times beyond counting, whenever he’d wheeled his mother out of the nursing home, patting himself on the back for being such a good son, such a dutiful son, taking his mother to the park or the mall or the McDonald’s on the corner, just as if she were still a real person. He would push the chair and look at the back of her head, which looked pretty much the same as it always had, and pretend that she was still in there.
But the people who looked at the front knew better, and their stares said the awful emperor-has-no-clothes truth – excuse me, sir, but did you know your mother is drooling? urinating? having a bowel movement right here in the middle of McDonald’s? Those noisy, talkative, cruel stares had awakened the coward that had always been in him, and that coward found a million reasons not to visit his mother today, or this week, or this month, until eventually, she curled up like a pea in a pod and died on the night shift when the only nurse was busy.
‘Langer? You okay?’
Oh, Jesus. Stop looking at her.
‘Yeah. Fine.’ He turned to Peterson and startled the man with his pathetic attempt at a smile. ‘Just tired. And cold.’
‘Well, get inside, man. Get something hot to eat.’
‘Right. Thanks.’
If he’d been half a man, half a decent person, he would have gone over to help with the familiar struggle of loading into a car the uncoordinated, unresponsive collection of mindless body parts that Alzheimer’s makes of a perfectly good human being. Lord knew he’d done it enough times to have it down. But the coward still prevailed, and now that he’d finally managed to look away, he found it almost impossible to look back. Just a quick glance as he passed even with the wheelchair, several rows to his right. Just a quick jerk of the eyes to see that all had been accomplished without him.
He trotted across the deck to the mall entrance, and once inside, he covered the considerable distance from Nordstrom to Macy’s very quickly, a man chased by ghosts. By the time he’d passed the shoe department, his mind had quieted enough to prod him gently with what he had really seen in that quick glance back in the parking ramp, in that quick jerk of the eyes. He froze in mid-stride, never feeling the angry shopper who ran into his back, or hearing the muttered expletive.
‘Jesus Christ.’ He said it very quietly, no offense, and then he turned and started running back the way he had come, head turned sideways to shout instructions into the radio for Peterson, sick with the knowledge that the person who had been pushing the wheelchair loaded the old woman into one car, and then got into the one next to it and drove away.
He tried to tell himself it was only a coincidence; just another caretaker beaten down by frustration, finally shrugging off a burden that had become too heavy to carry. But he didn’t believe it.
Langer was running hard, having a hard time dodging all the shoppers, partly because there were so goddamned many of them, partly because his eyes were watering, making it hard to see.
Or maybe he was crying, because sometimes people with Alzheimer’s looked like they were dead, and sometimes people who were dead looked like they had Alzheimer’s.
31
They’d lost daylight savings time last Saturday night, and by 5:30 Halloran’s office was gloomy with that oppressive kind of half-light that settles when the sunlight weakens, like an old light bulb fading away before it blows out completely.
He sighed and snapped on the green-shaded desk lamp, postponing the need for the sterile glare of the overhead fluorescents. He’d never noticed the buzzing until Sharon had mentioned it. Ever since, it had been driving him crazy, especially at times like these, when the day tour had left and the building was quiet.
He perked up at the sound of Bonar’s voice in the outer office, and raised his brows when his friend’s considerable bulk filled the doorway. He’d apparently showered in the locker room downstairs, and had exchanged his uniform for slacks with an honest-to-God crease, a turtleneck sweater, and a sport coat. Halloran could smell Old Spice all the way across the room.
‘You look very handsome.’
‘I already have a date.’
‘You taking Marjorie to dinner?’
‘That was the original plan. Out to dinner, and then back to her place where I suspect I would have been forced to lay waste to the woman.’ He tossed his overcoat on the couch in disgust.