The Detective's Garden (21 page)

When King dreamed, she sometimes believed she was
awake. At other times, she mistook the long night walk for a
dream. They walked in a dark line, the taller figures that King
could barely see in front of her in the dark. The earth felt as soft
and smooth as skin beneath her feet. Sometimes she walked in
the middle. Sometimes in the rear. Never in the front, not once.
She counted each of them again and again, afraid she would
get lost. One, two, three. One, two, three. She couldn’t tell the
shadow of her father from the shadow of her brother. “Clarke?”
she whispered. Fir branches arched down and traced the curve
of her chin with cold needles. Small four-legged animals scat
tered at their approach and pale gleaming eyes leered at them
from the undergrowth. “Shhh,” one of them said. Her father or
her brother? One, two, three. Her legs felt leaden and her eyes
closed and she stumbled and a hand caught her by the shoulder.
The tails of the coat on the shadow in front of her flapped like
small wings. The air smelled of fertilizer. The ground hard
ened beneath her feet, then softened again and then filled with
ankle-sized stones. One, two, three. She reached her hands up
to squeeze her own cheeks. Something wet squelched beneath
her feet. One, two, three, four. One figure ahead of her and two
behind. One, two, three, four. Her mouth went dry. Her lips
stuck to her gums. She whispered, “Who’s there?”

On the third night of the walk, a squad car’s headlights
flashed across the figures hurrying over the road. A moment
before there had been darkness. Ahead of them sat a copse of
trees where they meant to camp. Their boots felt heavy. They
were tired. Dominick wasn’t paying enough attention. The
headlights burned toward them, the whine of the engine rising
and the small pair of lights growing larger like some hostile
eventuality. Clarke felt his bladder tighten. Something icy and
hot prickled across his skin. Dominick pulled the Beretta from
beneath his belt. He stood at the side of the road. He looked
straight at the oncoming lights. He did not turn to his kids.
“Run,” he said, and they stumbled forward with the light hot
on their backs. They passed a brown road sign that read malta,
illinois 5 miles. The squad car’s brakes squealed. Clarke and
King threw themselves onto their hands and knees in a drain
age ditch. They crabbed in the mud until they looked back
toward their father.

The state police car was white with a long yellow stripe
down its side. Dust billowed in the beams of the headlamps. A
single officer in a brown shirt fumbled with his gun and opened
his door and leaned out and barked, “Don’t move!” The fear was
a shadow on his face. His eyes were open very wide. They could
see him shake.

Their father called, “Let’s talk about it.” He had his gun
trained loosely at the officer. He stood with one shoulder to
ward the car as though to offer a smaller target.

“Put down the gun,” the officer said. His voice quavered.
He had a bristly mustache and close-cropped black hair that
showed his white scalp. Clarke looked at his father’s face. There
was nothing. No fear. No satisfaction. Nothing. A slight tight
ening of his father’s eyes as though he squinted at something
in the distance. Curled calmly inside himself, he looked carved
from stone.

“There’s no way I’m going to put my gun down,” Dominick
said. He took two steps forward. His voice carried quietly. “Lis
ten,” he said, “listen. …”

“Put the weapon down!”

“I don’t want to kill you in front of my children.”

CHARLIE BASIN FELT
his stomach drop as his
Suburban rose and fell over a small hill. There wasn’t much else
for him to do, so he’d joined the manhunt. Useless hours spent
covering useless ground. All these farm roads looked the same.
The fields running flat out in front of him. Miles of combed
earth. Concrete silos at random intervals. A few old farmhouses
with bowed roofs. How could anyone tell where they were go
ing? Maybe the Sawyers were lost.

Charlie held his phone in his hand. What was this that he
felt? A familiar sense of distance from everyone he knew. Was
this a kind of strength or just loneliness? He let his hand dial
his older child’s number. The assistant district attorney. Os
well. His son shaped like a crane.

“Hey,” Charlie said, “can you make a trip out to see your
sister?”

“What for?”

“What do you mean ‘what for’?” Charlie said. “She’s in the
hospital.”

“I meant that maybe you should go down there yourself.”

“I already tried that. She doesn’t want to see me,” Charlie
said. “She’s pissed at me. Are you mad at me?”

“Not really, Dad. What’s she mad about?”

“I don’t know. Have I been distant?”

“Where are you, Dad?” Oswell asked.

“This road doesn’t seem to have a name,” Charlie said. “I’m
in Illinois.”

“You’re still looking for the two kids and their father?”

“Oz, when I’m done with this, you think you could take a
week off work?”

“What for?”

“Come up to Maine with me and Charlene,” Charlie said.
“Sit by the ocean. I’m thinking about buying a place.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. He paused. “These people. I think
they’ve taken to the ground.”

“Who?”

“This family that I’m chasing down.”

“Are you getting any closer?”

“Not five miles from where I am right now, we found a sto
len Dodge Ram out of New York State. It was probably theirs.
They’re on foot. They can’t get far.”

DOMINICK HANDCUFFED THE
officer to a
thin tree trunk in the copse of saplings. When he pulled
the wrists together, he thought of a line of insurgents he’d
pushed ahead by their arms, their wrists bound by flex cuffs,
past rolls of razor wire into the yard of a detention facili
ty, where lines of detainees prayed, folded over their knees
with their heads pressed against the dry dirt. Where had
that been? Somewhere outside Mosul? Dominick pushed the
officer until he sat on the ground. He put his mouth close
to his ear. “You look like a nice guy,” Dominick said. “Ev
erything’s going to be fine.” His kids looted the police car
for a bag of apple crullers and a pack of peppermint chewing
gum and a cell phone. Clarke picked up the officer’s cell
phone and dialed the number on his arm. The phone rang
ten times. Eleven. Twelve. King held out the pack of gum
and put her head back against the seat rest and looked at
Clarke with her mouth slightly open.

“Hello?” Elsie said. Her voice sounded like linen run through
the wash. Her voice was thick with sleep. Clarke imagined her
hair twisted into its thick untidy strands.

“Elsie, it’s me,” Clarke said.

“Clarke?”

“Uh-huh. Can you come pick me up?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m not sure. Do you know a town called Malta?”

“Sort of. There’s not much there.”

“Meet us on the western edge.”

“Now?”

“Right now. Really fast. We tied up a cop.”

“I’m coming,” she said. “Wherever you’re headed, I want to
go with.”

They left the officer handcuffed to the tree. Clarke put a
bottle of water in one of his hands. Dominick drove the police
car. He drove fast, with the lights off, toward the town of Malta
while, in the passenger seat, Clarke sputtered about Elsie. His
fists were clenched. “I want you to drop us off in Malta,” he
said. Spit flew off his lips in little arcs. He expected his father
to argue, to stop him, to say there was no way. “Elsie will pick
me and King up,” he said.

“You won’t have long,” Dominick said. “If she’s not fast
enough, I’ll get you another car.”

Clarke sat quiet. Why didn’t his father argue? Clarke’s
arm muscles clenched tight. He tried to let them relax before
speaking again. The eastern edge of the horizon had begun to
lighten. King sat in the back of the car with their bags piled
around her. Her fingers laced through the grillwork between
the front and rear seats. She said, “I’ve never been in a police
car before.”

Clarke slapped the dash with one hand. “I’m taking King,
and I’m leaving,” he said. His voice shook.

“Of course you are,” Dominick said. “That’s just what you
need to do.”

Dominick’s face looked slack, almost stunned. No one spoke.
The squad car’s wheels ground against the concrete.

“Did I mess up, Clarke?” Dominick said. “Should I turn my
self in?”

“Don’t do it,” King said.

“No?” Dominick said.

Inside the shell of the police car, their ears played tricks on
them. They shushed one another, cocked their heads to one side
and listened for sirens. Then one nodded his head and said, “I
don’t hear anything,” and another, “Me, neither,” and another,
“I think we’re okay.”

In Malta, Dominick turned south on the westernmost road,
North 2nd Street, passed over a railroad crossing, and pulled
the squad car into a red-and-white four-bay shed not far from
a granary. He parked the car beside a huge yellow plow. Clarke
pulled the bags from the backseat and piled them on the
ground. The branches of the trees just across the street were
tipped with budding leaves. Who among them first cocked
their head to the side when the sirens began to swirl to the
north? The father? The daughter? The son? Which of them
led and which followed? Who listened the hardest? Who first
felt their chest tighten with the sense that someone had come
to pull them inexorably apart? Who first reached out to touch
whom?

“Get out of here now, Dad,” Clarke said. He pointed toward
the stolen cruiser. “You have to go!”

“Go?” Dominick said. “Go where?”

They huddled together for a minute before Clarke walked
past the shed and looked up the street. He waved his hands
above his head. “She’s here,” Clarke yelled. “Elsie’s here!” He
sounded like he could hardly believe it himself. He was up
standing on his toes and leaning in her direction.

CHARLIE BASIN’S PHONE
rang. He was north
of Rockford, Illinois, among soy fields and silos. Maybe it was
Charlene. Was she trying to get hold of him, to draw a line
between their lives? Maybe his wife had told her about the tire
iron. When he answered, a voice he didn’t know said, “Lieu
tenant Crosser here. We got an officer found your family.”

“Where?” Charlie said.

“Off Route 38.”

“He’s got them?” Charlie said. He slowed the car, did a
U-turn, and turned south.

“Afraid not,” said the lieutenant. “They tied him up, took
his car. He’s a good man.”

“You send people after?”

“Everything we’ve got.”

“I’m on the wrong side of town,” Charlie said. “I’ll need a
chopper to meet me.”

“Done.”

“What’s the name of the officer who saw them?”

“That’d be Bill Hackenberg.”

“Patch me through to him, Lieutenant.”

Charlie gunned the car forward, racing toward the police he
licopter that rose to meet him. The phone was pressed between
his cheek and shoulder. He waited.

A quiet voice, almost a whisper. “This is Bill Hackenberg,
sir.”

“Hey, Bill, I’m not going to chew you out for this. But I’d
like to know what happened.”

“It’s pretty simple, sir. They tied me up, then stole my
squad car.”

“Tied you up with what?” Charlie said.