Sleeping Policemen (7 page)

Helpless to turn away, mesmerized, Nick felt reality slip, time grown fluid, Finney's living room tainted with the smoky air of the strip joint, the flickering television screen a curtained doorway into a world he had never dared imagine.

He could not—would not—look away.

After a while, both men came. But the film didn't end there. The two men on screen were good.

They kept the girl alive for a long time.

Monday, 10:06 AM to 1:30 PM

Nick slept through his nine o'clock sociology, but forced himself to his 11 o'clock, Twentieth-Century Novel with Dr. Gillespie. He seriously considered ditching the entire day, but after last night, after the
tape
, he ached for routine and order. He and Sue had talked long into the night, falling into a fitful doze just before dawn. His dreams had been a tumble of half-formed images, ogres in masks, girls in pain.

He woke at 10:06, his penis rigid against his stomach, a vision of the writhing girl—

—
Casey, her name was Casey
—

—dissolving in the cool air above him. A disembodied voice uncoiled in the room, the words indecipherable. Nick caught his breath; the sounds carried the same clipped cadence as the voice behind the videotape, the one whose last command—a bark harsh with desire—still reverberated in his head: “
Finish her
!”

He did not think he would ever forget the tape's final moments, the bigger of the two masked men wrenching the girl's head back, his fist knotted in her hair. And the knife. My God, the knife—

Nick swallowed, shuddering.

He took a deep breath, forcing the tape from his mind, and slid out from under Sue's arms. He showered and dressed quickly, grabbed his book bag, and slipped silently out of the apartment, half-jogging the four blocks to campus. Dr. Gillespie was just starting roll as he slid into his seat.

“So,” Dr. Gillespie said, snapping his roll book shut, “we spoke last time of Gatsby's illusions—of the way he disregards the fleetness of time, insisting that you
can
repeat the past.” Dr. Gillespie strode slowly from the lectern, his arms crossed, his head cocked in a professorial attitude. “We saw how Gatsby's entire life—all the opulence and excess—is caught up in his revisioning of Daisy Buchanan, the entire unwieldy scaffold of his aspirations symbolized in the ephemeral shimmer of a distant, green light.” He surveyed the class, his eyes like flint.

“What's your opinion, Mr. Kilpatrick?” Across the room from Nick, a pock-marked boy started from a doze and stammered a series of half-formed thoughts. Nick looked down at his book, bought well-thumbed at a used bookstore in Knoxville.
The Great Gatsby
, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had read almost half of it in a single sitting Saturday afternoon, enjoying it immensely. Carraway's eloquent voice, his controlled measure of life won Nick over immediately. Nick had put the novel aside only when Finney and Tucker barged into his apartment and dragged him away with the promise of flesh and beer. He wished he had stayed and finished the book.

He closed his eyes and Casey filled his mind, her face contorted, her body stretched into impossible positions, pain not nearly a big enough word for what he saw in her eyes.

The tape ended in abrupt darkness, as if the voice behind the camera had yanked a plug. The four of them had sat silently for several minutes. Then Tucker muttered a quiet, “Goddamn.” Wordlessly, Sue stood and stalked away; with a final lingering glance at the television, Nick followed. Finney caught them at the door, his face pale and worried.

“Wait a minute, Nick. We have to talk about this.”

“Not tonight,” Sue said, and for a moment, Nick only stood there, caught between them.

He started to speak, his mouth dry. “Can I—” The question died on his lips as he thought how it would sound, what they might think of him.

“What?” Finney said.

The tape. Can I have the tape?

“Nothing,” he said.

Sue tugged at his sleeve. “Come on.”

They had barely reached Sue's car when the townhouse door swung open once again. “We need to talk about this.”

“Tomorrow,” Nick called over his shoulder.

“Donner's, then. Lunch.”

Later, in bed, Sue said, “Who do you think she was?”

“No idea.” He paused. It was 12:16. “Just a girl, wrong place, wrong time. Someone passing through. Someone they took from some other nowhere.” His voice sounded muffled, as if the dark swallowed the words as they left his mouth.

“Bastards.” Her voice was hard, unrelenting.

“Yeah,” he said, wrapping his arms around her, pressing his lips to her forehead.

“Mr. Kilpatrick, that's quite enough,” Dr. Gillespie said, drawing Nick back into the classroom. “I suggest you spend a little more time with Mr. Fitzgerald tonight.” He returned to the lectern and resumed his discourse. Nick forced himself to listen.

“Gatsby has reinvented himself. Shedding the skin of his old self, James Gatz, a poor boy from nowhere, molting into a dazzling new self. In the same way, he attempts to recreate Daisy, forcing her, ironically, to be forever the woman—the
girl
—he'd known five years previously.” Gillespie paused and stared at the class, his eyes like shards of broken glass.

“Where do we first see Gatsby?”

“At the dock, watching Daisy's mansion across the bay,” Nick said. He'd read a little less than half the novel, but he knew the game. Answer what you do know, quickly, then dodge back into the underbrush. He had no idea what fate awaited Gatsby and Daisy in the deep end of the novel, but he recognized the ominous portents. He wondered if Casey had been in school, and where. His stomach roiled. Again he watched the trickle of blood roll slowly across her breast.

“Very good, Mr. Laymon. Glad you're back with us.” Gillespie paced to the door and back to the lectern. “His arms outstretched, his longing like something palpable. That green light at the end of the Buchanan pier—it becomes symbolic of all that Gatsby dreams of and hopes for and devotes his life to. A green light as vibrant as life itself, as evasive and insubstantial as starlight. A symbol of elusiveness.” Gillespie smiled. “The green light,” he whispered, arms outstretched.

He paused dramatically and then strolled to the far end of the classroom, his words running together in Nick's mind. He thought back to something Sue had said last night. He must have nodded off because the next thing he knew Sue was in mid-sentence and the clock beside his bed read 3:11. Darkness cloaked the room, the moon behind heavy clouds. The clock bathed them in a red glow.

Like radiation, Nick thought.

“—Carrie Witherspoon but everyone called her Spoon because she'd scoop up just about anything.” Sue talked as if in a trance, her voice low and thoughtful. “She wanted to come to the college but couldn't afford it. I think her Mom works somewhere on campus, a janitor or something. Carrie worked down at the Duracell plant, but she spent most of her nights up here on campus. I ran into her a couple of times at the Torkelsons' parties.” Sue shivered.

Nick remembered her, a dark-haired, skinny girl. Not ugly, but not pretty either. A plain girl, just like the ones he'd known in Glory, girls desperate to scale the walls of their claustrophobic lives. All they walked and talked was deliverance—and most of them, including Carrie Witherspoon, attempted to earn it on their backs. Somewhere in the dimly lit recesses of his mind—behind the leering visage of the dead guy, just beyond the yawning maw of Casey's pain—Nick seemed to remember something else about Carrie, something that stirred the campus.

“What about her?” he asked Sue.

“Don't you remember?” Sue sat up and turned toward him. “She disappeared the fall of our sophomore year.” Nick remembered then. “Have you Seen Me?” fliers peppered the campus for a couple of weeks and once her mother—a hulking and bedraggled cafeteria lady, he recalled, not a janitor—showed up at one of the fall parties, asking questions. He could still see the haunted look in her eyes.

After that, nothing, as if Carrie Witherspoon had fallen into an abyss. Everyone assumed she had finally made her escape, fleeing Ransom for better prospects. Nick hadn't thought of her since.

“What if,” Sue said, her voice clipped, as if she measured each word, “she was a number? Number ten or seven or even the very first.” She sounded, just for a second, eerily like the videotape's voice.

A cold rush—colder than that mountain stream—flowed through Nick. Casey filled his head, her face a rictus of terror. What's it like, he thought, to be that scared? Sue lay down beside him and Nick wrapped his arms around her. “Oh, Nicky,” she said, breathing into the cup of his throat. He lay awake for a long time, watching shadows shift in the dark, nebulous phantoms that transmogrified into screaming mouths, the sleek curve of a crumpled fender, the silhouette of a dead man's head.

“Mr. Laymon, have you left us again?”

Nick jerked in his desk, spilling his books to the floor. A wavelet of laughter rippled through the class. Dr. Gillespie closed his eyes and solemnly shook his head.

“As I was saying,” he continued, “Fitzgerald ends the novel indicating that all we can do is believe in the green light, the orgastic—a word F. Scott, a terrible speller, mistakenly coined, by the way—the orgastic future—”

The bell shrilled through his last words, stealing them.

“We'll wrap up next time. Class dismissed.”

Leaving, Nick saw Gillespie gesture to him, but Nick ducked his head and bulled his way into the crowded hallway. Outside, the cold numbing him instantly, Nick headed toward the cafeteria.

Donner's overflowed with students and professors hurrying through lunch. Nick scanned the crowd quickly, but saw none of the others. Something cold unfolded in his stomach.

He pushed through the line, picking up a tuna on rye and an apple. Back in the dining area he still saw no one. It was the bus terminal all over again. Something serpentine stole into his heart.

“Nick! Over here!” Sue stood beside a table in the far back corner, waving. Finney sat beside her, his face stone, a newspaper unfolded in front of him.

Nick walked over and placed his food on the table. He sat between them, pushing his sandwich aside. He picked up the apple and slowly polished it on the tail of his shirt.

“Hey, lover, how was class?” Sue's eyes were clear and bright. Looking closely, though, Nick could see the shadows of last night's fears: dark circles under her eyes, an occasional twitch at the corner of her mouth.

“Okay, I guess.” He looked over at Finney. “Where's Tuck?”

Finney shrugged and pushed the paper toward Nick. “You see this?”

Nick glanced down; it was the
Ransom Daily
, folded open to page four. He shook his head.

Finney jabbed his finger at a small story under the fold. “Body Found,” the headline said in letters like black tumors. The piece had no byline. Nick thought suddenly of the old man outside the bus terminal.
You ain't like them
. He squeezed the apple, refusing the shake in his fingers. He read the article quickly, the words blurring before his eyes. He reread it, forcing the words to take shape, exhorting the piece to make sense.

The body of an unidentified man had been found late yesterday afternoon in the woods on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Sources reported that the incident bore the markings of a hit-and-run accident and that the driver had apparently attempted to hide the body. The U.S. Park Service had also discovered a stolen 1996 Camaro with Tennessee plates abandoned in a scenic overlook less than half a mile away. Because of the possibility of a murder on federal land, the FBI had been asked to participate in the investigation.

Nick read the last line several times. Shit. They were way beyond the deep end,
drowning
. He imagined the warm, dark waters of the Gulf searing his throat, filling his lungs.

“Notice anything?”

Finney's voice brought Nick to the surface. He breathed deeply and met Finney's eyes. “Besides the fact that we're unbelievably fucked?”

Sue reached over and patted his arm. Her touch was the shock of jellyfish. He winced but kept his arm on the table.

“Any mention of Evans?”

Nick scanned the article again. None. His chest tightened; he wanted Sue to take her hand back. Breathing was hard.

“What's his deal, Nick? He came through with his Dick Tracy shit before noon. Rangers discovered the body
late
afternoon.” He spoke in an even voice. “And what is a Tennessee Highway Patrolman doing in Ransom, North
Carolina
?” The last word came out
Cah-o-lina
, the Southern accent Finney had interred long ago slipping from its grave. The two of them stared at each other. Finney's fingers tapped a quick beat on the table. Nick polished his apple.

“We need to think,” Sue said. “We need—”

Reed Tucker appeared between them, breathing heavily, his eyes wild and his usually impeccably swept hair greasy and disheveled. He dragged a chair over from the next table and collapsed into it. Nick noticed he had on the same clothes he'd worn yesterday, the Hilfiger sweatshirt rumpled and stained; he smelled as if he hadn't bothered to shower since the accident.

“You see this?” Tucker slapped a bright blue flier on top of the newspaper. “I found it posted in the Student Center.” He snatched the newspaper from under the flier and fell quiet, studying the article. His leg jittered under the table like a pinned insect.

Finney picked up the blue sheet, examined it, and slid it across to Nick. He read it, aware of Sue looking over his shoulder, her breath moist on his neck. Printed across the top in cold black letters was the word REWARD. Just below was a blurry but recognizable photograph of Casey. She grinned brightly, like a child, warm and safe, centuries from the cold pain of the cinderblock room.