Unseaming (22 page)

Kyle groaned, temples throbbing again, as more slides shoved unnaturally into his mind, detailing scenes that hadn’t happened yet. He saw himself swipe the cards in the gutter aside with his foot, make a gap in his own name, walk through it. He saw himself standing in the alley, placing the shoe in the figure’s proffered hand.

He wanted to run back to the truck, to grab a weapon, any weapon, but he was in fact walking forward. He tried directing his feet to back up, to turn around, but forming those thoughts hurt like hell and instead he took another step closer. And another.

The figure paused, waiting. Kyle couldn’t make out a face.

He wasn’t sure when he started babbling, though he listened to his own words with growing panic, because his mouth moved, his lungs worked, of their own accord. “You picked the perfect place to hide, Jeremy. You did. No one wants to admit this place even exists. It’s like the biggest open secret in the world. It’s where the disposable people go to be disposed. But you’re not disposable. You’re not dead. Why are you letting an innocent man rot in jail? He didn’t do anything to you. It doesn’t make sense.”

He fumbled with the high-top, tumbling it back and forth in his hands. The words kept spilling as if reeled out of his throat on fishing line. “This shoe. My son would love it. I know he would. It’s too bad you don’t have the match anymore. It’s his size. Crazy, that you and he wear the same shoe size. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About what I’d do if you were him.

“My ex won’t let me see Aaron anymore. Maybe she’s smart, because this whole city’s against me, and the alcohol, it’s not enough to help me anymore. But my boy. He’s like me. He’d want to know what’s going on here. He’s a good boy. He’s smart. Smart enough to look at my example and run the other way.”

At last he could sort a face out from the dark. Without a doubt the allegedly murdered Jeremy Sellars stood before him, buzz-cut hair, chin scarred by a moped wreck. The bone ridges in his face jutted out sharp as axe blades. The boy hadn’t eaten in a long time.

Jeremy’s chest heaved as he breathed. A smell wafted from him, like oil from a hot engine. His feet were bare and the weeks unshod had deformed them somehow. They reminded Kyle of socks pulled on with the heels misaligned.

Despite his pounding skull, he found focus. “You let an innocent man go to prison. A man too mentally ill to defend himself. Why did you do that?” He stepped closer. He gripped the shoe by its toe, an awkward impromptu club. “You revealed yourself to me. Only to me. Tell me why.”

No answer.

“I ruined my life.” His voice rose as his rage gathered steam. “Because of you. Because of what you did to Audie Long. To an innocent!” He dropped the shoe, grabbed Jeremy by the shoulders and shook him with all the fury he could muster. “Why?!?”

At first he thought the sleeves of the boy’s jacket had torn off in his hands. He didn’t understand what he was holding, why the boy’s head both tilted and stood straight, until Jeremy shrugged and shifted his arms and let the rest of his skin fall away. It lay in a puddle around the ankles of a wet and glistening mannequin. Veins pulsed in the membranes stretched between its ribs.

Kyle again heard the cops’ crude laughter.

He punched the thing in its blank face—and screamed at the chemical burn that seared his knuckles, like he’d punched roofing tar coated with battery acid.

The courtyard erupted with bird cries and the sound of many claws scrabbling. A blast of skull-breaking pain threatened to buckle Kyle to the ground, but he fought it, stayed upright.

More noise behind. He turned his yammering head, beheld others like the thing in the alley, squeezing up from the storm drain like cockroaches, three, four, a dozen.

Even more were coming out of the courtyard, creeping into the alley behind the thing that had posed as Jeremy.

Kyle stared wide-eyed at its faceless visage, and white hot agony split his brainpan. More scenes shoved into his head, one after the other, and he finally understood it was the creature that was putting them there, that rifled through his memories, made him move in ways he didn’t want to.

Now, it showed him the future.

At first light, crows and pigeons swarmed from the Boneyard, massed in the gutter, pecked at his name, flew off with the little white cards like so many breadcrumbs, removing every trace.

The morning sun glinted off the chrome of his truck as its engine finally died. A public works employee dragged the abandoned vehicle onto a tow truck bed, bore it off to the city impound to rust unclaimed.

Sunlight shone low through the city hall windows as the city manager and police chief shook hands and nodded in satisfaction. Uniformed officers, all faces Kyle knew, arrived in the newsroom. Towering Tom watched as they emptied Kyle’s desk, packed everything into evidence crates.

Penny, looking the best he’d seen in years in a smart skirt and short business jacket, perched cross-legged on the desk in the prosecutor’s office. Her shoulders relaxed as the jarhead put a hand on the small of her back, let the other slide from hip to breast as they kissed.

Aaron paused on the greenway during his walk home from school to tighten the buckles on brand new black high-tops. His father’s absence did nothing to dull the spring in his step.

Two big men wrestled a third through a doorway into Boneyard shadow. Roache, his hands cuffed behind his back, his sin, trying to warn Kyle away.
You don’t fuck with that. Ever. Especially if someone’s supposed to die.
One of his fellow men in blue pinned him against a wall while the other pressed the barrel of a Taurus 9 mm right against the back of his head, and things formed of shadow and hunger shuffled forward.

Audie Long shuddered on the metal cot in his fourth floor jail cell, the crescent moon blotted out as a face made from black void peered through the window slats.

“Lies,” Kyle sobbed. “Oh, God.”

He cursed his luck, his lot, his utter lack of foresight, that placed his voice so far from anyone who might hear it, that left his weapons in the truck, that left so much distance to cover. That left him so outnumbered.

I tried to be your voice
, he said, to Audie, to Jeremy, to the names in his crime reporter diary. The way his brain burned, he couldn’t tell whether he spoke the words aloud. The pain in his head fused in an unyielding wall, and yet he turned to the creature that had duped him, closed his hands around its throat.

Not all the screams were his.

Tarissa had seen enough newspapers on the rack in her father’s store that she knew who she didn’t want to be. The weeping girl behind the witness stand, contorted face wailing from the front page at every casually curious passerby.

She watched the trial from the front bench, sandwiched between her grandmother and the grim-looking little woman who worked as victim witness coordinator for the prosecutor’s office. A TV cameraman and a newspaper photographer stood side by side across from her in their designated corner beside the judge’s chair. Most of the time they kept their lenses aimed at Ballinger, the man who killed her mother and father, as he glowered at each witness who took the stand. Sometimes, she’d catch him staring right at her, expression a harrowing blank. Sometimes she’d notice the cameras turned her way. She let nothing slip. Not a flinch, no tears, not even a frown.

That poker face, that’s what the city saw as the trial coverage unfolded. Black curly hair kept in a neat ponytail, a cream button down, the best her parents could afford, dark eyes focused on the testifying policeman. Only she could see the white hot pillar of anger inside when she regarded those pictures.

So much to be angry about. That this awful man with his bestial underbite drifted in straight from Interstate 484 and chose her parents’ store for the holdup. That he thought her mother and father’s lives a fair trade for the $20 and change he took. That he dared to take the stand on his own behalf and claim her father threatened him, got in his face yelling and forced him to respond in self-defense. Then when her mother tried to duck behind the counter he thought she was going for a gun, he said. Lie after lie after lie.

Tarissa watched the jurors’ faces as Ballinger spoke, amazed none of them laughed at these vile tall tales. She feared to contemplate what might happen if even one of them believed the bastard.

But her fury stretched in another direction. The customers who witnessed the slaying all gave similar accounts, that Ballinger pulled the gun, told her dad to empty the fucking register, and instead of complying, like he’d told her to do a thousand times, he smiled and waved like it was no big deal, said, “Hey, put that away. Just tell us what you want.” That he came out from behind the counter, with her mother whispering “No, Zach, no,” and actually tried to take the gun away, like the whole situation was a joke. If he’d just done what he’d always told Tarissa to do if a stickup happened, he would be alive now. So would Mom.

The prosecutor called her name. Wanted her to tell the jury what it felt like when they called her to the principal’s office, where the officers were gathered to deliver the news that she’d been made an orphan. It’s okay to cry, the prosecutor had told her. It might even help.

But she wasn’t going to shed tears. Not for the camera. Not for Ballinger.

She ignored the murderer’s unblinking stare as she answered the prosecutor’s questions. A camera shutter clicked as she talked. A woman on the jury sniffled, eyes moist, perhaps soaking in on some alternate channel the emotions that Tarissa bottled up.

Then came the defense attorney’s turn. Bald, pot-bellied and sweaty, Ballinger’s counsel had no intention of picking on a grieving thirteen-year-old in front of a jury. “No questions, Your Honor.”

But as he sat down, Ballinger cleared his throat. His lawyer waved, No, shut up, but the defendant talked anyway. “Young lady, I just wanted to say, I really am sorry for your loss. I didn’t want any of this to happen. I didn’t. But I did want to offer you my condolences.”

His words were horrible enough, but as he spoke them something inexplicable happened. She heard a different sound underneath, underscoring each syllable.

She had nothing in her experience to compare the sound to, no way to classify it. She could only frame it in terms of the pictures that formed as the noise tore her mind open. A dead body dried to paper in a pit of scorching sand. A crack in the floor of the ocean where no lava burned, no sea worms bred, colder than absolute zero. A space outside the universe where no light would ever reach.

The camera captured the look on her face as Ballinger addressed her: wide-eyed, open-mouthed terror.

Never in the city’s history had a jury taken less than an hour to sentence a man to death.

Back in the conference room, the prosecutor, a beautiful but stern Asian woman, told Tarissa that the look on her face alone had won the case. As if she’d somehow planned it.

Perhaps in response to Tarissa’s bewildered stare, the attorney put her hand over Tarissa’s on the table and said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all this. And I’m so, so sorry for your loss.”

Tarissa screamed. Because she heard the sound again, grinding underneath the prosecutor’s words.

Tarissa’s grandmother hugged her harder than she ever had in both their lives. “Oh Lord, child, what’s wrong, what’s wrong,” a comforting litany, not a question. As the prosecutor stammered, Grandma said, “Why don’t you just leave us alone for a little bit.”

Once they were alone in the room, Tarissa finally let those tears flow. “I heard—” she tried to say. “I heard—”

“Shh. You don’t need to explain. You don’t need to worry ’bout nothing.”

* * *

She moved in with her grandmother.

Grandma Davis’s house was older than her parents’ had been, bigger and more decrepit. Tarissa’s grandmother dwelled in every corner of this rambling den, a sweet-tempered badger who marked her territory with odd groupings of porcelain saltshakers, from apple-cheeked Dutch children to Heckle and Jeckle.