The Walking (2 page)

"I'm going with you or without you." "You can't!" "I will."

Cabe walked into the kitchen from outside. what down tiredly in the chair opposite his brother. "What's all this about?"

"Garden wants to scuba dive in the lake. He wants to look-for Daddy."

Cabe sighed. "We all want to know," he said. "You do, too. Admit it." He looked at Garden. "I'm coming with you."

"Cabe--" "It's time."

'The water's muddy," Robert said. "You won't be able to see nuthin'."

Garden licked his lips. "I'll be able to see."

They went out on a Saturday, borrowing a boat from Jim Holman, Garden bringing equipment from school. They were all nervous, and though the night before they had spent hours going over plans for the dive, discussing each possibility, mapping out a strict timetable, they were now almost silent, talking only to ask for equipment or instructions.

Garden went over the side at ten o'clock sharp.

The orders were strict. Since neither his father nor his uncle knew anything about scuba diving, he was on a line, the line connected to a winch. If he did not check in every five. minutes with the prearranged signals, if he did not surface five minutes before the hour limit of his air supply, they were to haul him up.

The two men waited, silently pacing the deck of the boat. The first signal arrived on time. As did the second and the third.

Then he was up. :

Garden pulled himself onto the boat, flipping over the low side wall of the craft, tearing off his face mask and spit ring water out of his mouth. He was breathing heavily, his face was white, and he appeared to be panicked.

"What is it?" Robert demanded, crouching next to his son. "What did you see?"

Garden caught his breath. He looked from his uncle to his father and back again.

"What's happening?" Cabe asked.

Garden closed his eyes. "He's still down there," he said. "And he's walking."

"I knew it." Sanderson kept repeating the words like a litany. "I knew it."

Miles Huerdeen did not look at his client's face. Instead, he focused his attention on the contents of the folder spread out over the top of the desk: photos of Sanderson's wife walking arm in arm with the purchasing agent of his company, credit card carbons from the hotel, a copy of a dinner bill, a list of phone charges for the past two months.

"I knew it."

This was the part of the job Miles hated the most. The investigation itself was always fun, and as long as he didn't think about the consequences, he enjoyed his work. But he did not like to see the pain that was caused his clients by the information he gathered. He hated even being the messenger of that hurt. It was one of the paradoxes of this job that the work which was most rewarding was that which was most devastating to the people who hired him.

He glanced up at Sanderson. He always felt as though he should say something to comfort his clients, to somehow apologize for the facts he presented to them. But instead, he stood the poker-faced, feigning an objectivity he did not feel. " .

Sanders6n looked at him with eyes that were a memory away from tears.

"I knew it."

Miles said nothing, looked down embarrassedly at the desk.

He was relieved when Sanderson finally left.

The detective business was nothing like the way it was portrayed in movies. Miles hadn't really expected it to be, but he hadn't known what to expect when he made the decision to become a private investigator, when he'd forsaken his business classes and enrolled in his first criminology course. He'd known it wasn't going to be Phillip Marlowe time--glamorously seedy office, shady clientele, fast and loose women--but he'd half expected Jim Rockford. Instead, he'd ended up working in an environment not very far removed from the one in which he would have found himself had he continued to major in business.

Only he now made a bell of a lot less money.

At least he was working for a real detective agency, and not an insurance company, as so many of his fellow graduates were doing. He might be entrenched amid the trappings of a corporate world--desk cubicle in a high-rise office, quotas and timetables he had to meet--but sometimes he was allowed to go out in the field, follow people around, take clandestine photos. Sometimes he could pretend he was Phillip Marlowe.

Phillip Marlowe-with medical insurance and a good dental plan.

He filled out the form for billable hours, and sent it in an interoffice envelope along with a labor distribution time sheet to the bookkeeper. There was nothing more he could do here this afternoon, so he decided to leave a little early. He had to stop by the library tonight anyway, which would make up for any work-hour discrepancy.

He waved to Naomi the receptionist as he waited for the elevator. "I'm out of here," he said.

She smiled at him. "You're dust in the wind?"

"I'm a puff of smoke. I'm history. I'm gone."

The elevator arrived, and he gave her a James Dean low sign as the metal doors closed

Outside, the air was cold, or as cold as it got in Southern California. Miles put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. As he walked next door to the parking lot, his breath blew out in puffs of white steam before dissipating in the breeze. It had rained sometime since lunch. He hadn't noticed it while in the office, but now he saw that the streets were slick and cinematically reflective. The water and rain puddles made it seem more Christmassy to him, made the tinsel trees on the lampposts and the small blinking multicolored lights outlining the doors and windows of the buildings seem not quite so inappropriate, lending the entire street a festive holiday air.

He'd been feeling kind of Scroogy about Christmas this year, though he wasn't sure why. Usually Christmas was his favorite season. He loved everything about it: loved heating the same damn Christmas carols played in each store he went inside, loved the repeats of the old television specials, loved buying presents, loved receiving presents.

Most of all, he loved the decorations. Though he did not contradict his friends when they complained that stores put out their decorations too early, that the whole season was far too commercialized, he secretly would have been happy had decorations gone up before Halloween. He saw nothing wrong with making the Christmas season last even longer.

But this year, for some reason, he'd felt a little out of it. Though he'd seen the decorations, heard the music, even started buying some of his presents, it hadn't seemed like Christmas to him. He'd kept waiting for the feeling to kick

Now it had.

He walked between a Mercedes and a BMW to his old Buick, humming

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" under his breath. : :

His father was sleeping on the couch when he arrived home, lying on his side in a modified fetal position, one arm curled under his head like a pillow, the other hanging loosely

over the edge of the sofa. He was snoring softly, a sound barely audible over the voices of the newscasters on the television. Miles stood there for a moment, looking down at his dad. People were supposed to look younger when they slept. They were supposed to look peaceful, innocent, childlike. But his father looked older. Awake, his features reflected his relatively youthful mental state. But asleep, Bob Huerdeen looked every bit of his seventy-one years. His skin, a leathery cross-hatching of lines and wrinkles, sagged shapelessly over his thin cheeks; his discolored scalp could be seen through the thin back-comb of sparse gray hair. The expression on his face was one of resignation and tired defeat.

This was what his dad would look like when he was dead, Miles thought.

In his mind, he saw his father lying in a casket, eyes closed, arms folded across his chest, the expression on his lifeless face the same unhappy one he wore now.

The image disturbed him, and though he had not intended to wake his father up, he walked across the room and turned on the light, noisily announcing his presence with a series of false coughs.

Rubbing his eyes, coughing himself, Bob sat up. He blinked back the light, then glanced over at his son. "Home already?"

"It's after six."

Bob rubbed his yes. "I had that nightmare again."

"What nightmare?"

'The one I told you about."

"You didn't tell me anything."

"I told you last week. The one about the tidal wave." Miles frowned.

"A recurring dream?" "It is now." "Tell me again." shook his head. "I knew you never listened to me." "B'I lbisten. I just forgot."

"I'm in the kitchen, cooking myself breakfast. Pancakes.

I look out the window and I see a tidal wave coming toward me. It's already crashed, and now it's a wall of white water and it's knocking over buildings and houses and everything in its way. I try to run, but it's like my feet are stuck to the floor. I can't move. Then the wave hits, and I'm thrown against the wall, only the wall's no longer there.

Nothing's there, and I'm struggling underwater, trying to hold my breath until I reach the surface, but there is no surface. The wave keeps moving, and I'm trapped inside it, being carried along, tumbling over and over, and I can feel my lungs and stomach start to hurt, and I open my mouth because I can't keep it shut anymore and I have to breathe, and water floods down my throat, and I can feel myself dying.

And then I wake up."

"Wow."

"It seemed damn real, let me tell you. Both times." "Jesus. You ever have a recurring dream before? ""Not that I remember."

Miles smiled. "Maybe we really are going to have a tidal wave or an earthquake or something."

His father chuckled. "Knock that crap off."

But the old man didn't sound as derisive as Miles would have expected, and for some reason he found that unsettling.

After dinner, Miles did the dishes, then told his dad that he had to go to the library and do some research. "You're not doing it online?"

"Sometimes you need an actual book." His father nodded. "Mind if I tag along? .... "No problem," Miles said, but he was surprised. He couldn't remember the last time his dad had been to the library. Hell, he couldn't remember the last time the old man had read a book all the way through. Ever since they'd gotten cable, his father had given up the paperback westerns that had previously occupied his spare time and had not even

bothered to finish the business magnate biography through which he'd been slogging. Now, when he wasn't out playing poker with his buddies or going to senior citizen meetings, his dad lay on the couch watching old B-movies and reruns of forty-year-old TV shows.

Miles picked up his wallet and keys from the breakfront. 'l'here something you need to get?"

"Just thought I'd look around. Can't tell what I might find." .....

"Let's go."

They walked out to the Buick, and for once his dad didn't put up a fight and demand to drive. Thank God. His father's reflexes and road-handling skills had declined precipitously over the past few years, and if there were some way to contact the DMV and get a man's driver's license revoked, Miles would've turned his father in without a second thought. He could only hope that when his father had to get his license renewed next year, he would fail the test.

The library was surprisingly crowded for a weeknight. Students primarily. Most of them Asian. Aside from the occasional runaway, he seldom came into contact with kids these days, and his perception of the younger generation was formed mostly by movies and television.

Which was why it surprised him to see what looked like normal, happy, welladjusted,teenagers laughing quietly, talking together in low voices, and copying notes while sitting around large round tables piled with books.

Perhaps society wasn't doomed after all.

His father immediately wandered away, and Miles headed over to the bank of monitors and keyboards that had replaced the card catalog. It still felt strange to him to be using a computer in a library, and though the machines were part of both his work and his everyday life, he mourned its intrusion into this world. It seemed incongruous to him. And unnecessary. There'd been an article last week in the Los

Angeles Times about magnetic storage media and the rapid pace of technological change. The gist of the article was that storing information on computer discs or CDs required translating technology--a machine to read the encrypted information and translate it into words--and that things were moving so quickly that a lot of information was being saved in dying formats and would be impossible to retrieve even ten years hence. Written words, however, needed no interpretive mechanism, and information stored in books and printed on acid-free paper would remain easily accessible far longer than those using newer storage methods.

Which made him wonder why the library had ever scrapped its card catalog, a series of beautiful oak cabinets that were not only functional but added immeasurably to the library's ambience.

Sighing, Miles sat down on a stool. He had jotted down several keywords, and he went down the list, typing them in and then writing down each book and periodical reference that appeared. He was working on a case for Graham Donaldson, one of his oldest clients, a lawyer who was currently filing a discrimination suit on behalf of an African American man who'd been fired by Thompson Industries. Miles had already gotten some information from an inside source at the corporation, but he wanted to bolster it with some background. None of the information he'd received from the source was admissible in court, but then Graham was gambling that the case wouldn't even reach that stage. Thompson was extraordinarily concerned about its public image, and Graham was counting on a settlement. Just in case, though, he needed some fallback data.

It was amazing how easy it was to dig up background information. People on the outside always thought he spent his time walking city streets, canvassing neighborhoods, interviewing people, paying bribes for info, using hidden mikes and cameras to listen in on conversations. But sometimes a

short trip to the library and a few hours of reading provided him with everything he needed. That wasn't the case here, but he did find two books and one article in a business journal that would prove useful.