Sleeping Policemen (3 page)

Sunday, 3 AM to 12 Noon

Ended up Nick didn't tell Sue about the strip club. But he did tell her about the body.

They'd driven home quickly, each nursing a warming beer, Finney tight-lipped and Tucker, for a change, blessedly quiet. No one talked. Nick watched the black silhouette of the mountains glide by. The three times cars passed them, headlights filling the Acura with a ghostly light, his blood turned icy and his hands closed into fists. None of them was the behemoth Cadillac.

At just past three the Ransom sign loomed out of the dark:
RANSOM, NC–HOME OF RANSOM COLLEGE SINCE
1838. Five minutes later Finney whipped the car through the wrought iron gates of College Park Townhouses and into the single car garage beside the apartment he and Tucker shared. Finney cut the lights and engine. They sat in silence, listening to the engine tick. The cold crept into the car.

“Fuck this.” Tucker climbed out, dropping his half-empty Bud. The can rolled under the car, spitting foam.

Finney and Nick got out, Finney punching his key ring to lock the doors and set the alarm. Tucker flicked on the overhead light. They stood in the small garage, looking at each other, the silence like something waiting. Nick, after what seemed a long time, walked to the front of the car. Even in the light you could hardly tell. Besides the shattered blinker and the crumpled fender, Nick found a hairline crack running drunkenly across the right headlight. Nothing dramatic though. No bloody pieces of scalp or tatters of clothing. Looking closer, he could make out a small crease running from the corner of the hood to the middle, maybe the length of a man's arm.

“Not bad,” Tucker said from behind him. He ran a finger along the crease. “Could have been a dog, a fence post, some drunk at the strip club.”

But it wasn't, Nick thought. It was a
man
. He could see the sharp, Aryan features of the dead guy, could feel his head bearing into the pit of his stomach as he lifted him. He stepped around Tucker and Finney and walked outside. The air felt like fire in his lungs. It always caught him by surprise, nothing like the warm, briny air of the Louisiana Delta. He breathed deeply and looked up at the sky, bright with stars. His head filled with a kaleidoscope of tumbling images: his father's mangled legs, the husk of his mother's cancer-riddled body, the shuddering sensation as the Acura sped over a body at sixty miles an hour.

A blare of music—R.E.M.? Smashing Pumpkins?—broke the pristine night.

The Torkelsons.

Nick glanced at the townhouse three doors down from Finney's. It was dark save for a dim light visible through the kitchen window. A beat-up pickup and a Lexus sat curbside. The Torkelson twins, identical behemoth blond boys, ran a perpetual party. They were in their sixth year at Ransom, both Criminal Justice majors without even remote dreams of graduating. They kept a keg on tap in the fridge and smoked the best dope on campus. Their father, a broker in Pittsburgh, paid their damage deposits, booze bills, and tuition without blinking an eye.
He'll pay
anything
to keep us from coming home
, Jarrod Torkelson—or maybe it was Joel—had once drunkenly confided to Nick.

The music vanished as abruptly as it had come. A loud crash followed, glass shattering.

Then silence.

Nick pressed the wad of cash in his jacket pocket. He stamped his feet, still damp from the stream, and startled his blood into flowing again.

“You okay, Nicky?” Finney stood behind him, hands in his pockets. Even at three in the morning, even with a dead man's sweat barely dry on his hands, Finney looked composed. Something in Nick hated him for that.

“Where's Tuck?”

“Inside. Says he's got that Western Civ final to study for tomorrow.”

Nick snorted. It was a week before finals and Tucker had made his eight o'clock four times at most.

“You going to Sue's?”

Nick glanced up sharply, words dying unspoken on his lips:
If I don't, will you?

A flashbulb seemed to detonate inside his mind. For half a moment he could see nothing but the image that had haunted him for weeks now: Sue, her legs flung wide, Finney laboring between them—

Then, mercifully, it faded.

Finney held his gaze.

Nick looked away, studying the gradually curving street. Just beyond the bend he could make out Sue's townhouse. It was dark, the curtains drawn. College Park was a block and a half of manicured mini-lawns and thin, color-coordinated townhouses. Rent ran close to a thousand a month.

“No,” he said finally. “I've got to read half
The Great Gatsby
before Monday. I need to get some sleep.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Finney turned toward the townhouse; then, hesitating almost imperceptibly, he looked back at Nick. “You going to be all right, man?”

“Right as rain.” Nick forced a grin and thought about how the blood had looked black in the dead guy's hair.

“We'll get together sometime tomorrow and sort this shit out.”

“Whatever you say, Finney.”

Nick lived in the Fort, formerly the site of a Civil War stockade, now a student ghetto of Victorian houses subdivided into cramped nautiluses of apartments. He shared an efficiency with about a thousand roaches on the second floor of a moldering heap of dry rot and gingerbread. Paper-thin walls let in the cold, the toilet ran incessantly, a mop handle propped up the kitchen sink. The back door opened onto a thirty-foot drop, the porch beyond as irretrievably disappeared as the Confederate fort itself—burned up piecemeal by decades of drunken college students, or so Nick had heard. The fireplace had been walled up years ago, and even if it hadn't been, he would never have dared use it: the place was a firetrap, pure and simple. At two hundred a month, he felt like he was being gouged.

No road connected the two neighborhoods, but generations of party-searching students had worn a meandering umbilicus through an intervening patch of undergrowth and the drainage ditch beyond. The rank smell of the ditch always reminded Nick of coming home—of the cracked, heat-baked streets of Glory, Louisiana, and the stinking grime his father used to drag back from the rigs, an oily sheen of black dirt that mired itself in the creases of his palms and the crow's feet that fanned from his eyes. Nick could never have confessed it, but that was how he thought of the ditch: a boundary, a borderland between the world he had known as a kid and the charmed universe Finney and Sue inhabited by default.

Sue and Finney. Finney and Sue.

It still stunned him how quickly he had become enmeshed in their lives, how inextricably his hopes and dreams had become bound up in these glittering people he had known less than a year. He had seen them on campus—two glistening and immaculate spheres as remote as the ones Dr. Landon raved about when she described the Ptolemaic view of the universe—but he hadn't actually met them until last spring. First Sue, then Finney, the twin poles of his new existence.

He'd met Sue in a British novel class. He sat beside her, but he might as well have been on the other side of the world for all she cared—until he'd saved her from Dr. Gillespie, who had a reputation for deconstructing unprepared students. They were halfway through
Heart of Darkness
when Gillespie asked Sue a question. She began by calling Marlow “Martin.” Gillespie froze in mid-pace, then slowly turned to face her, his eyes as cold and gray as the Gulf of Mexico in December. He paused, then said, each word painfully articulated, “Tell us, Miss Thompson, about Conrad's notion of the hollow man.”

Sue stammered and searched the corners of the room. She later told Nick that she hadn't bothered to read any of the novels. But Gillespie had no intention of backing off. He smelled blood. Her eyes, wide and desperate, lit on Nick, and before he could clamp his teeth together, the words were out:

“Hollow men—”

The class turned toward him as one.

“Ah, Mr. Laymon fancies himself a knight in shining armor. Please, Mr. Laymon, don't let
me
stop you.”

“They're the ones who haven't been, um, morally tested. They've never been challenged. Neither Kurtz nor Marlow is a hollow man. They've both been tested. But, um, only Marlow passes—he doesn't succumb to the savagery.”

Gillespie nodded and resumed his lecture. Nick leaned over to Sue and whispered, “The horror, the horror!” She smiled at him blankly. A week later she asked him to help her study for the midterm. Things moved fast after that.

Sue wore the ambiance of money like perfume. Her family in Savannah had made its fortune in cotton and textiles. Her father owned mills by droves. Nick had a hard time with the money, the way Sue constantly picked up checks. He had puffed up the first time, demanding she turn over their thirty-dollar bar tab. She called it redneck hubris, laughing as she paid the bill. He had learned to live with that—that and half a dozen other eccentricities, the ying and yang of her personality. Her appetites, say, insatiable and experimental when she showed up at Nick's place two and three times a week, using the key he'd had made for her barely a month after the British novel midterm. Or the dark side of those same uninhibited desires: the nights when she didn't answer her phone for hours on end, the occasional whiff of a strange cologne, the unfamiliar cigarette butt stubbed out in the ashtray of her Mercedes. Most of all, he'd learned to live with those haunting images, his best friend laboring between his best girl's thighs. For how could he confront them?

After all, it was Sue who had introduced him to Finney. They had been dating for maybe a month when she took him to a keg party at the Torkelsons'. Reed Tucker had been funneling on the back patio, far beyond conversation by the time Sue and Nick arrived. They found Finney in the kitchen, center of his own private universe the way he always was. Sue drifted off after a while—something else Nick had learned to live with—but Nick and Finney stuck together for the rest of the night.

A lot of that evening was kind of fuzzy in retrospect—Nick had been hitting the Torkelsons' keg pretty hard—but he could remember like yesterday when Finney recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin on a bet. Their eyes had met across the room as Finney began—

“
Pater noster.
”

—and Nick had felt a pulse of energy leap between them, shared recognition of a secret kinship: a sense of common interests, a faint disdain for the sweaty, beer-soaked frat boys and party girls crowded around the keg. When Finney finished, the room dissolved into heated debate. Turned out nobody knew Latin well enough to say who had won. Nick didn't have an opinion—he wouldn't know Latin from pig Latin—but Finney finally collected. The two of them spent the rest of the night talking. Finney told him that he was majoring in Classical Studies, a subject Nick thought had died in prep school about a hundred years ago. But they discovered a shared passion for contemporary fiction, and spent the rest of the night hunkered over the keg, discussing Iain Banks, Cormac McCarthy, and, as sunlight blooded the sky, Donna Tartt.

Not long after that, one of the twins started stuffing firecrackers into empty beer cans and lobbing them into the center of the room. The explosions were tremendous, loud as shotgun blasts—a classic Torkelson conclusion to another night of binge drinking—and after that things broke up fast.

Nick and Finney found Tucker passed out in a congealed puddle of vomit, and together they hauled him down the street to bed. Finney told him that Tuck had grown up down the street from him and that they had roomed in College Park since their sophomore year. “He's a good guy, really,” Finny explained. “He just needs someone to look after him.”

That had been the beginning of something else, too: the barely suppressed resentment Reed Tucker had borne toward Nick during all the long months since.

It must have rankled, Nick supposed, being crowded out of your best friend's life. Sometimes Nick pitied Tuck, but he wasn't about to relinquish Finney or Sue for the sake of some spoiled asshole who had the good fortune to arrive on the scene before him. Besides, even if he wanted to, he didn't know if he could.

For the first time in a life too much like clawing his way barehanded up a naked cliff face, Nick felt like he had arrived at a niche where he might like to stay awhile. Maybe the money would give him the leverage to do just that.

He paused in the foyer of his apartment house to count it. In the flicker of a dying fluorescent light, he pulled off the thick rubber band and spread the bills. They were all hundreds, most of them the new ones. The bigger Franklin looked more distinguished, somehow more stately. Nick's heart sped and his mouth went dry. He'd never held so much money; hell, he'd never
seen
so much. He fingered through the fan, almost a hundred bills, nearly ten thousand dollars.

In the same moment, he saw Glory receding in his mind's rearview mirror. Cancer had eaten his mother when he was only six. After that he'd become a punching bag for his brothers, one of those inflatable kinds, the ones that keep coming back for more. Peace came when Jake and Sam left to work the rigs, and Nick had lost himself in books. Then his father came home from the Gulf, condemned for life to a wheelchair.

Grades had saved Nick. Now, in an accident that felt like the rumble of a sleeping policeman, he allowed himself to see further down the road from Glory. The money meant grad school. He'd sent out half a dozen applications, all to state schools,
affordable
programs. With this he could make it into Chapel Hill or Vanderbilt. His thoughts clouded suddenly with an image of the dead guy's face. He snapped the rubber band around the money and stuffed it back into his pocket; he turned and ran up the stairs to his apartment.

Nick unlocked his door and stepped into his room, already stripping to his boxers. He opened the small freezer in his refrigerator, the light turning the apartment shadowy and mysterious, and placed the money underneath a bag of frozen green beans. He stuffed the bloodstained T-shirt into the trash. He emptied his jean pockets and put his wallet and keys beside the dish drain; he placed the bus station locker key beside them. At the kitchen sink he scrubbed furiously at his face and chest. Toweling dry, he turned to his bed on the far side of the room. The red glow of his alarm clock read 3:57.