Blood on the Tracks (3 page)

C
HAPTER
3

The United States rail system has 140,000 miles of track. About half of these tracks are un-signaled, meaning conductors operate using written instructions and their watches. Operating a train in this so-called dark territory means driving blind with no way to detect other trains, misaligned switches, broken rails, or runaway rail cars. Any one of which might kill you.

—Sydney Parnell, ANTH 2800, The Nature of Language

Back in my vehicle, I let Clyde into the front seat and watched as the medical examiner backed her van into the driveway. A small crowd of neighbors had gathered. It was a mixed crowd—mostly elderly couples and very young families, with a handful of middle-aged yuppies whose money had been gentrifying some of the nearby neighborhoods. I wondered if this murder would drive them away, send them reeling back to the suburbs or the safety of their downtown high-rises.

I called my captain and told him about Elise Hensley’s death, that it had been ugly, and that I had been requested at the scene because of the hobo code.

“The victim was Nik’s niece,” I said, finishing.

“Goddamn.” The meat of his fist connected with something. His desk, or maybe a wall. “I’ll go with you to break the news to Nik.”

Deputy Chief John Mauer—we called him Captain—came to Denver from Chicago. A decent man and a good chief. But we hadn’t been stitched together at the hip like a lot of the railroad families, and Nik was private. The last thing he’d want was for Mauer to witness the first raw slap of his grief.

“It’s probably better if I go by myself, sir.”

“Don’t need a Chicago boy tagging along. Right. Give Lasko my sympathies. Tell him anything he needs, I’m here. I’ll cover your shift and let the rest of the agents know. Fuck, this is the worst.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

I hung up thinking Mauer had just gone up in my estimation.

Nik Lasko lived in the Royer district, a low-rent urban blot where a lot of railroading families had addresses when they weren’t out on the line. My family had moved away from here eighteen years ago, when I was nine, after my dad had a falling-out with some of the union guys. When my dad walked out six months after that and my mom went to prison a year later, Nik took me under his wing—a long-ago promise he’d made to my parents. So Grams and I came back often, alighting like migrating geese for birthdays and anniversaries. Royer was the home that sang in my blood. My dad had been born and raised here, the son of a dispatcher and a brakeman; I had been suckled on the stench of diesel and the clatter of wheels, brought up on tales of union strikes and derailments and—to my childhood terror—stories of ghosts that followed the railmen home from distant lands. Ghosts that lingered in attics and cellars haunted the smoky confines of Joe’s Tavern and stirred a cold wind in the alleyways.

The houses in Royer were older than my neighborhood, boxed in on two sides by warehouses and boom-then-bust factories. On the third side was I-70, swollen with traffic. Maybe everyone here slept better than my family did—surrounded by kin, lulled to sleep by the river-roar motion of wheels. No matter that some of those wheels glided on pavement instead of iron; they heeded the call to move, always move, rocking us to sleep with dreams of the white-line fever.

Royer had donated sons and daughters to the wars, more than its share. From Korea and ’Nam to the Gulf War and Operation Enduring Freedom. Probably back to the great wars, when a lot of these folks fled here from the poverty of Appalachia. Faded, weather-blotched ribbons fluttered in front yards as I drove past, and the cars on the street sported yellow ribbon decals and bumper stickers exhorting everyone to
Support Our Troops
.

I slowed as I turned onto Navajo Street. Five boys and a single, fierce-faced girl played soccer in the street leading to Nik’s cul-de-sac. Beat-up orange cones served as goals; the curbs worked as the outside lines. The kids’ faces were vaguely familiar from one of Nik’s block parties. For all I knew, I was going to deliver bad news about someone they were related to—there was a good chance Elise was an aunt or cousin or a years-back babysitter. They glared at me as I drove past. With the exception of Nik, in Royer the law was an authority recognized only as an object of contempt. But the girl saw Clyde sitting in the passenger seat, and her face fell into an openmouthed gape of longing. I made a mental note to stop and let her meet him on the way out.

I parked in the driveway and stared at the single-story house with its recently painted green shutters and the white siding Nik had installed last summer with the help of his son and some local boys. A sturdy picket fence lined the front yard, and an American flag filled half the front window.

The Ford’s engine ticked as I shut it off, pinging in the cold air. From the backyard, Nik’s Doberman, Harvey, barked a couple of halfhearted woofs then lapsed into silence.

I draped my arms over the steering wheel and closed my eyes.

Nik was fifty-nine, but he hadn’t slowed much with age. Still strong as a bull and with the same calm stubbornness. Grams had raised me, but Nik had shaped my life. He’d mentored me through boyfriends and algebra, through stolen cigarettes and faithless friends and my disillusionment with community college. He’d tried to talk me out of enlisting and, when I signed up anyway, he’d tried to listen when I came back broken.

That was hard for him. Nik was more of a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of guy when it came to dealing with tough times and dark thoughts. After my tours, he bought me whiskey down at Joe’s Tavern and told me we all had ghosts to carry. I wanted to ask him if his ghosts sat at his kitchen table or followed him around at work. But I didn’t want him thinking I was certifiable. I drank my whiskey and kept my mouth shut. Nik went on to say that the anger and the memory problems and the nightmares would eventually stop, and that it was best not to talk about them because that gave them weight. “Weight with a capital
W
,” he’d told me. “The hardest pounds you’ll ever work to shed.” Nik had been a grunt in ’Nam; he knew what he was talking about. So I listened and learned, did my best to be as stoic as he was. When I told him I wanted to be a railroad cop, one of the first women to do so, he’d clapped my back, and we’d switched from Johnnie Walker to Macallan.

In the Ford, I lifted my head. In a few short minutes, Nik would have Weight again.

A sudden gust rocked the truck like a reminder that I couldn’t wait forever. Clyde gave a delicate, inquiring bark. I opened my eyes and scratched behind his ears.

“Right, boy. No time like the present.”

Nik was waiting for us at the door. He’d been smiling as we came up the walk, but when I didn’t smile back, his expression went flat.

“This can’t be good,” he said.

I looked down. Someone had scratched a line through the word
Welcome
in the doormat, slicing right through the plastic. Nearby were the remnants of a swastika someone had spray-painted on the concrete.

“What the hell?” I asked.

“Punks. Hit a bunch of the houses here.”

I looked up and caught his eyes. “Nik, it’s—”

But he shook his head. “Let’s do this right, whatever it is. Come inside, Sydney Rose.”

He led Clyde and me to the kitchen and poured coffee without my asking. He put nondairy creamer on the old pine table next to the sugar bowl, then sat across from me and shook a couple of antacid tablets out of a bottle. He’d obviously just begun his day: the coffee was fresh and his hair was wet from the shower. He had a piece of tissue stuck on his cheek where he’d cut himself shaving. Nik still used a straight razor, or so his wife had told me. “The man shaves like he’s making penance,” Ellen Ann had said. “I offered to buy him a horsehair shirt, but he said he’d make do with the razor.”

I nodded at the tissue, tried to make my voice light. “You still haven’t gotten the hang of that?”

“Hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.”

More Weight.

Clyde tolerated Nik petting him for a minute, then took up a post at the back door. Nik’s Doberman barked once through the door, Clyde growled, and they were done with the territory thing.

“How’s school going?” Nik asked.

I accepted the delay. “We’re still on winter break. Just picked up my books for this semester.”

“Good. That’s good. Don’t quit, Sydney Rose.”

“No.” I stirred sugar into my coffee. “I needed this. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

He didn’t meet my gaze, so I gave him some time. I looked around the tidy little kitchen with its rooster-themed wallpaper and blue countertops. I’d sat in this kitchen, at this table, hundreds of times. Doing homework, eating Ellen Ann’s Appalachian stew, filling out the paperwork for my Marine enlistment. Often other people were here, too, railroad employees come around to ask Nik’s advice or sample Ellen Ann’s cooking or just shoot the breeze. Sometimes Grams came with me to chop vegetables or knead bread dough so that she and Ellen Ann could talk.

The wooden pendulum clock on the wall filled the silence with its thick, syrupy voice.
Tick . . . tock . . . tick . . . tock.

I’d traded words with Elise now and again at this table. But there was a gap of almost seven years between us, and we had little interest in each other. She was still just a big-eyed, scrape-kneed kid in a training bra when I left for Iraq.

I glanced out the window over the sink, into the dead yard with its scattershot rim of dormant poplars. Overhead, the sky was washed lead. A jet stitched a line down the middle.

Nik cleared his throat. “I figured the railroad would be downsizing.”

“What? Oh. Nik, it’s not your job. We all have our jobs. Our jobs are fine.”

His hands went still, wrapped around his coffee mug. “Tell me.”

My courage failed. I opened my mouth. Closed it.

“Sydney Rose.” His voice held a warning.

“It’s Elise.”

“She hurt?”

“Worse.”

“An accident?”

“Homicide called me.”

He made a small noise that seemed to originate in his chest and swell through his throat. His eyelids lowered slowly over the blue irises and lifted just as slowly. As if he were moving from the first act of his life to whatever might lie beyond.

“Wait,” he said.

He got up, opened the cupboard over the refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He poured a generous amount into his half-empty coffee cup. When he raised the bottle again, I hesitated only a moment before pushing my cup toward him.

He poured almost as much in mine.

We drank in silence for a few minutes, the whiskey lighting a welcome fire I’d managed to avoid for two weeks now.

Do you drink more than one alcoholic beverage a day?
the VA questionnaire asked.

On my good days.

Do you take street drugs or abuse prescription meds?

Not as often as I should.

“Where is Ellen Ann?” I asked.

“With her sister. Spent the night. They do a sleepover the last Friday of every month, like they were still girls. Watch movies, eat popcorn.” He drained his cup and poured more whiskey in, not bothering with the coffee. When he moved to pour more for me, I waved him away.

He set the bottle down and rubbed his hand hard over his face. “I’ve been worried about Elise. Letting all those tramps into her home. Welcoming them like they were good men who just needed a taste of God to set them straight. I told her. Goddammit, I told her.”

He sank his face into his hands.

I knew better than to touch him. I waited him out while he gathered himself into that tight, controlled place where he spent so much of his life. I waited and listened to the clock until I thought its steady tick would drive me mad.

Finally he looked up.

“What happened to her? Tell me everything.”

I told him. Some of it. About Cohen’s phone call and going to Elise’s and the hobo sign scrawled on her wall. But not all of it. He didn’t need to know what some madman had done to his girl.

When I finished, he stood and cleared our coffee cups, rinsing them before setting them in the sink. He cranked the window open a couple of inches to let in some air, then stood for a long time, gripping the edge of the counter and staring out the glass.

“I am so sorry, Nik.”

“You let them move her?”

“The medical examiner was ready.” Nik said nothing, and I got defensive. “Wasn’t my call.”

“So you didn’t think to pick up the phone and say, ‘Nik, get your ass down here right now’ and give me the chance to see her?” His voice cracked. “Didn’t give me the chance to know exactly what was done to her, what she suffered?”

“It’s not how you want to remember her.”

He slammed the sideboard. “Damn it, Sydney Rose, she’s
family
. It isn’t about what I want. It’s about what she deserves. We
do
for each other.”

I flashed to what Detective Cohen had said before he took me in to see Elise. How patronizing I’d found him and how angry his words had made me, even though I now realized his intentions were good. “I should have called.”