The Detective's Garden (16 page)

“I’ve seen him pull it out with his hands,” she said. “He
doesn’t get it.”

“How didn’t I know that?” Dominick said.

King shrugged. “Do you get it?” she asked.

“I do.”

“Me, too.”

Dominick lay back on the bank of the river and ignored the
cold seeping upward from the ground. King leaned against
him. They sat like that for a while. They were only able to stand
the cold spring air as long as the sun shone directly on them.
When a cloud blocked the light, they began to shiver. They got
up, brushed at the backs of their pants. They felt damp. Dom
inick tried to holler, “Clarke,” but it sounded like a dog’s bark.
A funny sound from a man. Beside him, King looked up. Her
face cracked open and she laughed. Dominick cleared his throat
and tried again. “Clarke,” he called, “we’re headed inside. I’m
going to fix something to eat.”

In the small kitchen, he dipped the fish in milk, then in
cornmeal. He heated oil in a pan. He whistled. King snuggled
into a blanket on the couch, watching her dad.

Clarke closed the door gently when he came in. “Smells
good,” he said.

Four days later, Annie brought a space heater, jars of pea
nut butter, raspberry jelly, chocolate donuts, hot dogs, canned
vegetables, noodles, ground beef. The carpet in the trailer ran
from wall to wall in a yellowed beige, matted with dark burns
where the tips of the fibers had melted together into dark glossy
ovals. Strange ovoid footprints. “This place is a pit,” Annie
said. The kids looked around and nodded. The vinyl flooring in
the kitchen peeled upward from the particle board beneath. A
large crack rose upward from the phone jack in the middle of
the living room. The dark brown couch looked like a cigarette
burn. They hadn’t noticed.

Annie stood at the sink and washed the dishes. Glasses
clinked against porcelain. Her eyes narrowed to slits. She turned
her head toward Dominick. “I couldn’t make it over here soon
er,” she said. “There’s been people coming by the house.”

“You being careful?”

“I waited,” she said. “I drove here on back roads. Nobody
followed.”

The entire time Annie was there, the children stayed inside.
She found a vacuum and ran it. She turned on the radio and
listened to a Cubs game. She preheated the oven and made
blueberry muffins and the house warmed up and smelled good.
Her arms reached for the kids every time they walked by. She
touched their shoulders and said, “I can’t stay too long.”

Dominick sat at the head of the table. He said, “Let me make
us all hot dogs.”

“I ought to tell you,” Annie said, “this guy has been to my
house three times.”

“What’s his name?” asked Dominick. He leaned against the
kitchen counter. Light from the window scattered on the glass
of water in his hand.

“Basin. He’s with the FBI.” King and Clarke looked at one
another.

“What’s he look like?”

“Dark hair. Thin but fit. Probably in his fifties.”

“He give you a hard time?”

“He’s nice. He brings me things. He keeps coming back.”

“What’s he bring you?”

“Tickets to see the Rockford Symphony Orchestra at the
Coronado. A key-lime pie. A doily that his mother made.”

“What’s he want from you?

“He thinks I know where you are.”

“Do you?”

“No. I have no idea where you are.”

When King left the trailer again, she slipped away in the
quiet afternoon, wrapped herself in a blue blanket, and floated
the canoe. Yellow daffodils spotted the hills. The wind blew
the water into little white-tipped peaks. Blue crocuses opened
their mouths in the sun. She paddled downstream to the sign
that rose beside the bridge. A bright yellow diamond split by
a red arrow. The dark embankment led up to the Sunoco. She
paddled the canoe to the bank.

A car idled at the top of the embankment, close to the
guardrail. A dark rounded car with daytime running lights. In
the window, a man opened his mouth and spoke soundlessly to
someone invisible in the driver’s seat. He was a thick jowled
man in a dark suit. Heavy eyebrows. He gestured loosely with
his fingers like he was telling a joke. King looked up with her
head angled sideways like someone watching a bird in a tree.
The jowled man glanced once or twice in the direction of the
unseen pay phone. A thin pearlescent scar ran under his chin
as though from cosmetic surgery. The jowled man looked cold
and hard, the kind of man you could trust only in a few ways. In
the way that you could trust a teacher to do, without listening,
whatever he thought was best for you.

King couldn’t go up there. Not now. Not ever.

ANNIE SAWYER’S HOUSE
was a steepled two-sto
ry. Yellow brick. Old and small and charming. She pushed aside
the green curtain of the living room window. A black Chevy
Tahoe idled outside. She shaded her eyes and looked at the tall
healthy man in the driver’s seat. She looked down at her bright
yellow shoes against the old chestnut floor. She smoothed the
hair over her right ear. She looked back up at Charlie Basin and
waved. This was pointless. What was he doing out there?

When he knocked at the door, she left him waiting. She had
been baking bread. She took off her apron and hung it on a
small iron hook. She stopped at a mirror in a gilded frame and
wiped the sleep from her eyes. As she walked through the hall
way her shoes clipped against the tile. She looked out at him
through the small arched window in her front door. He was
smiling broadly. His eyes were crinkled at the edges. He held a
bottle of wine in the crook of his arm.

She opened the door and the air that flooded inside smelled
of hyacinth. His shoes were black and recently shined. He still
wore a suit.

“You’re here again, Charlie,” she said. “You keep coming
back.”

“It’s my job,” Charlie Basin said. “This is for you.” He hitched
the green bottle in his arm. “French,” he said, “a Vouvray.” He
moved so deliberately that Annie supposed he was older than
he looked. His dark eyebrows held small lines of gray.

“Are you married?” Annie asked.

“Thirty-five years,” Charlie said. “Her name’s Rosamund.
She has a cold.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I like spending time with you,” he said. “Seriously.”

“What’s it like to spend all your time looking for some
body?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Same as everybody else, I guess.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“No, not really,” he said. “Can I ask you one or two questions
before I get back in the car?”

“Go ahead.” She leaned against the door frame, her head
cocked to one side.

“He’s somewhere nearby, isn’t he?” he said. “He’s close?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s one that’s got me stumped. What
do you think happened to your brother’s wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you asked him?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“You’re sure?” Charlie said. “She called us, you know.”

“Oh,” Annie said, “she called you?” One foot tapped twice
on the ground.

“She called the local Pennsylvania police. She said he was
hurting his kids.”

“You know where she is?”

“Not exactly,” Charlie said. “She called from Beloit, Wiscon
sin. Not too far from here. We haven’t been able to find her.”

“They weren’t getting along,” she said, “Dom and Sarah.”

“They weren’t, huh? That’s a familiar story.”

“He’s hard to get along with now,” she said. “He wasn’t al
ways.”

“I imagine that’s true,” he said.

“Dominick’s not coming here, Charlie.”

As Charlie walked back across the lawn toward his Subur
ban, he called the FBI headquarters. “Hey, Andy,” Charlie said.
“He’s still here.”

“You got him cornered?”

“Not yet. But I got a feeling it’s going to happen here, in
Illinois.”

“When I hang up,” Andy said, “I’ll round up the Chicago
division and the Rockford field office. Anything in particular
you want me to tell them?”

“It’s not going to go easy, Andy. Make sure they take a close
look at this guy’s file.”

“What you need will be waiting for you,” Andy Fry said.
“I’ll line it up.”

WHEN HAD DOMINICK’S
dreams soured? When
had so many of his dreams turned into a search? At night, he
searched the caves at Tora Bora, peering into dark entrances
blown wide by bunker bombs, and going in to find what had
been the bodies of al-Qaeda fighters, and kicking rotting hunks
of flesh hung with tattered cotton into the hot clean outside,
and looking up at the sawteeth of the White Mountains. This
battle, the Battle of Tora Bora, occurred in the opening days
in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hid
ing in the giant cave complex. Air strikes pounded the hill
side. Soldiers combed the hills. Circling far around Tora Bora,
Dominick’s fire team—Ward and DeJesus and Floyd—passed
through the hilltop village of Maduu. As they approached the
town, they passed through an entire herd of dead sheep and
goats. Dust hung in the air. Warplanes and smart bombs had
flattened the adobe houses. A crowd shrieked and wept outside
the fallen mosque. A silver-bearded man collected body parts,
wrapping them in plastic bags. A leg. A hand. A hunk of meat.
Dominick’s job, his duty, was to show his men how to walk
in the midst of this. How to pass through. Never should he
fail his comrades. He would shoulder his share of the task and
then some. For the most part, he kept his eyes fixed ahead. It
was a small village, it wouldn’t take long. But then his eyes
wandered past the threshold of a crumbling adobe wall. Two
small bodies, children, leaned against the wall, the larger with
the smaller pressed behind. Was the larger one a boy? The hair
was long and dark. Blood had turned the earth beneath them a
darker shade of brown. His throat was missing, carved out. One
of his hands was flung out, missing a finger. Dominick swung
his eyes around, checked the positions of DeJesus and Floyd,
looked ahead on the road. This was Afghanistan, and it was late
November, and the weather was okay for a long hike wearing
a combat uniform and body armor and a helmet. A bright day,
hazy and mild, but on the road Dominick began to shiver. His
jaw chattered and something shook around inside him. It was
rage, sure, but that was just on the surface and he had felt that
before. It was blind, and ugly, too, and violent and free, and
other things, nearly all nameless and bad. His body clenched
and released. He kept his eyes on the ground. There, two steps
ahead of him, a small bleeding finger curled in dirt.

THAT NIGHT, IN
the trailer, Dominick cleaned a
parade of guns. Cold gray metal aligned on the scarred coffee
table. Handle and barrel. This was the only task that had to be
done. This mechanical fulfillment of duty. The arrangement
of time like some pointless game. The tired kids asleep on the
couch. Why had his life been a kind of waiting room? Night
settled around them like a wool shawl. How many times had he
lain flat and held his rifle still atop a roof in Fallujah or outside
the caves at Tora Bora? What had he seen? A man wearing a
green military-style jacket over a long robe dragging unexplod
ed ordinance beside a dirt road, or a group of men laughing and
holding AK-47s and standing near a black-veiled woman tied
to an olive tree, or a boy, no older than Clarke, raising a rifle
scope beneath stalactites of glass in a broken window. Had he
fired at that kid in the window? The lost time had felt purpose
ful then, the air around him charged with the dust of mean
ing. When had the circumference of his life been ruptured?
He picked up a greased gun from the coffee table. Oil dripped
from his fingers. Wasn’t there anything more than this? The
kids’ feet wrapped in white socks. The little house like an oven
or an incubator. The dead metal in his hands so cold it hurt his
chapped skin. The way his body could lift his children so easily
and carry them to bed.