Finders Keepers (5 page)

Yeah, it might take a while, but he would take what happened tonight in stride.

Breaking the silence, Mitch said, “Oh, shit,” and pointed across a field bordered by a forested rise. There, just visible above the tree line, orange light flickered against the night sky.

Steve said, “What is it?”

“Fire,” Mitch said. “Looks like a big one.” He flicked on the siren. “Better call it in.”

Steve did as he was told.

* * *

Kate was in her mother’s arms, shivery with fear, a high crowing sound coming from deep in her throat, and over it, her mother’s voice in her four-year-old ear, “It’s okay, honey, everything’s going to be fine, just breathe in the steam.” They were in the bathroom at home, the hot taps roaring in the sink and tub, her mother’s cool skin pressed against her own and they were rocking, rocking, and the steam was reaching inside, coaxing open the hole, allowing her to breathe…

“Mom,” Kate moaned, “oh, Mom…”

Now she was standing in sunlight in her Sunday best, a pretty blond girl of six-and-a-half, the weight of her father’s hand on one slender shoulder, the bony curve of her aunt Lee’s hip against the other. There was a carpet of grass, fake grass humped over a mound of raw earth, and a shiny wooden box sinking into a hole with neatly-squared walls. Her mother was in that box, and when Kate leaned forward to see how deep the hole was she saw her own small face reflected down there in a puddle of standing water. As the box sank deeper and the priest’s voice chanted incomprehensibly, Kate felt something slam shut inside her…

In the limo Kate gasped, catching her head as it drifted back, trying to shake off the almost euphoric numbness that had come over her, this seductive detachment that had the scent of death to it. It was like dreaming only more vivid, an eerie, image-filled calm that seemed to free her, the cold no longer reaching her, fear melting away. Even now, fighting it, it seemed easier to just let it come…

Kate shook her head, filling her lungs with winter air, inducing a brief spasm of coughing that brought water to her eyes. She called out to her father again, wondering in the damnable silence how much time had gone by, if the ambulance was on its way or had she dreamt that part of it, too? Imagined it in this strange, enveloping fog? She picked up the phone again, stabbed the power button, but the thing was dead.

Death.
She’d been thinking of Aunt Lee—the memory so vivid—feeling the slickness of her aunt’s funeral dress against her bare arm, smelling her sachet over the damp aroma of cut grass and freshly spaded earth. Seeing the sun reflected in the polished mahogany of her mother’s casket, an intense smudge of light, painful to look at.

She raised her uninjured hand to probe the gash at her hairline, the hard crust of blood, frozen before it got a chance to congeal. She pressed her thumb into it, hoping for a bright flare of pain, anything to snap her out of it. But there was only numbness followed by a faint trickle of warmth, the wound starting to bleed again.

Aunt Lee had been a rock during those trying days, leaving her own family to fend for themselves while Kate made those first reluctant adjustments to her mother’s death. Soaking Kate’s tears into her blouse, sitting with her in silence, cramped into Kate’s tree house in the big oak behind the house, where she chose to do her grieving, surrounded by artifacts of a life that had included her mother: a stack of her favorite photographs bound with elastics; one of her mother’s cameras, an old Leica she’d once told Kate was magic; a tiny phial of perfume; the lacy garter with the single stitched rose Keith had peeled from her thigh on their wedding night. Aunt Lee telling her to hold her mother inside now, laying her palm against Kate’s thin chest: “In here, sweetheart. Forever.” And for a long time, years, she’d managed to do that, hold her mother inside, conjuring her image easily, her memory. But in time this ability faded, until one morning in her early teens, after skinning her back on the door to the tree house that had once fit her so well, she found that when she closed her eyes she saw only darkness. And from that day on, despite a vivid imagination, to summon her mother’s image she had to look at a photograph.

Not now, though. Now, she could see everything so clearly…

Gord, the first boy she’d ever slept with, saying the words he’d spoken to her five years before with tears in his eyes, and as she heard them now she finally understood what had slammed shut inside her as she stood by her mother’s grave…

“You won’t let me in, Kate. You want to, I know you do, but then you run to your stories and I’m left out in the cold…”

Cold…so cold…

“Dad?” Kate murmured, her head drifting back again. “Dad…”

The reels for the movie
Aliens 3
arrived at the Grande Theater three days ahead of its release date and when her father mentioned it to her that night Kate begged him for a private screening. They’d done it before, just the two of them, munching leftover popcorn from the concession machines and sipping canned drinks, watching movies until sun up. It was her fourteenth birthday and she could think of no better gift. Without much coaxing Keith agreed, smuggling Kate and three of her friends in after hours. Kate screamed when the first alien appeared, and when they got home that night she began her first screenplay,
It Came From The Planet Zeluron
, a wild epic she finished a month later, a hundred pages of gore and cheesy dialogue. It was the proudest accomplishment of her young life.

She flashed again on Gord, her high school sweetheart, the reluctant tears in his eyes, then saw Jamie, the only other man she’d ever slept with, walking away from her for the last time two years ago, his disenchanted words ringing in her ears.
“You don’t love me, Kate. You don’t know how…”

Tears rolled down Kate’s cheeks as a strange, ululating cry intruded on the spell, dragging her back to the dark and the cold and the fear. She was going to die out here with her father and an awful wave of regret swept over her at the realization. She had squandered her passion on words, closed off her heart to everyone but her father, and now…

Kate’s ears sharpened.

That sound—

It was a siren.

* * *

Ten miles further south now, Marty Small pulled the van onto the shoulder and put it in PARK, his head starting to ache from squinting into the storm. He shrugged out of Keith’s overcoat, climbed into the back and started opening packages—carefully, peeling back the tape on the folded ends, trying to figure out what each one contained without messing up the flashy wrapping paper. If all went as planned, he wanted Earlene to have that pleasure.

He opened the biggest one first and found a shiny new espresso machine. In the dull glow of the ceiling light it looked like the real thing, one of those snappy restaurant models with the hood ornament on top. That was great. Earlene loved shit like that. The next one turned out to be a steam iron. Bummer. And there was blood on the wrapping paper. Marty tucked this one aside. He’d give it to his mother. The next five or six were toys. Maybe he’d drop them by his old church, get a novena or something. There was a bunch of stuff in clothing boxes with names like Satin ’n Lace, Sears and The Gap. With any luck some of it’d fit Earlene. Not that it mattered. There was a slew of other great merchandise—gold chains, watches, diamond earrings, perfumes, some nifty kitchen appliances, a stereo amplifier and a twenty-four-inch flat-screen TV. He found a CD Walkman with a bunch of fairly cool CDs—Eric Clapton, Smashing Pumpkins, Blues Travelers, a collection of Christmas Favorites—and decided to keep these for himself, struggling for a good five minutes to get the batteries in right. There were a dozen or so other things, but he didn’t have to open all of them to know he’d struck it rich. If this didn’t get Earlene on her back, nothing would.

Problem was, the girl could be a righteous bitch. Marty had bedded her only the once, three months ago—on the couch in her living room, against the fridge, in the shower, you name it—Earlene in complete control, finally making him come with his ass against the cold hardwood floor in the hallway. Man, he still couldn’t get that night out of his head. Earlene knew tricks Marty’d never even seen in the triple-X features he sometimes rented from the adult video outlet down the block from his Spadina Avenue apartment. He’d enticed her that night with a combination of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine he’d ripped off from a dental surgeon’s office and three bottles of vintage wine he’d lifted from some fat cat’s wine cellar. Earlene’d had a glow on already, and once Marty got a few lines of blow into her she’d softened right up. Jesus, what a night. What a
fucking
night. But when Marty turned up a few days later looking for more, Earlene had cut him off at the ankles. “Think of it as a charity fuck, Marty. I don’t think I could get that wasted again.”

That had stung, but after a while Marty believed he understood. It was just her way. Earlene was tough, hardcore, just trying to protect herself. The kind of work she did, it didn’t make sense to get close to anyone.

But Marty wanted her. He just needed to show her he could provide, and that what she did for a living, should she choose to continue, was entirely up to her. Cum washed off.

He climbed into the driver’s seat and got underway, his conscience nagging him now, spoiling his fantasies of Earlene. He couldn’t help wondering if the girl in the limo was still alive. Ripping them off was one thing—it was what he did—but walking away and letting one of them die? Well, he was a thief, not a killer. True, he’d looked for a phone, but not very hard. Must’ve been the adrenaline clouding his judgment. He’d always resented rich fucks like them, born with a silver spoon up their ass while his own life was a steady grind, worrying where his next score was coming from, whether or not he was going to get his balls shot off—like last night—trying to make it, and, on the few occasions he’d done time, sweating over how long it’d be before the yard ape he was celled with tried to cop his cherry. Robbing the rich had always made him feel like a kind of folk hero, a modern day Robin Hood hip enough to say, fuck the poor, man, I’m keepin’ this shit for myself.

But he was no killer.

Marty decided the next place he saw, he’d stop and call it in. Dial 911. He just wanted to put a little more distance between himself and the limo. That’s all.

The first place he saw—

A circus of flashing lights appeared in the distance now, bearing down on him fast in the oncoming lane.
Cops
, Marty thought
.
His first instinct was to flee, but he was locked in. Best to just play it cool.

He drove on, hunched low in his seat, the cruiser closing the distance then blowing by, trailing a parachute of snow. Marty tracked it in his sideview until it disappeared. Two minutes later another light show materialized into an ambulance.

So somebody’d called it in already. Good. One less thing to worry about.

At ease now, Marty strapped on the Walkman headphones, slipped in the Christmas Favorites and began to sing along with the first selection, his raspy smoker’s voice so far off key old Bing was probably rolling over in his grave.

“Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right up Earlene’s lane…”

* * *

They saw it as they rounded the curve where the rig lost control, the blaze reaching up from the ruptured tanker to the branches of the overarching trees, igniting them into torches of yellow flame.

“Jesus,” Mitch said, touching the brakes. The rear deck slewed on the black ice and Mitch corrected for the skid, slowing the cruiser to a crawl. He came abreast of the limo and stopped, leaving the cruiser in gear.

“Check the limo,” he said to Steve. “I’ll take the rig.”

Steve got out and strode to the trunk, determined to stay cool. At the last scene he’d gotten out of the cruiser after a while to lend a hand, cold and weak as a baby, but by then the important stuff had been done, nothing left but the clean up. No one said anything to him about it, but he felt their eyes on him, saw a few stifled smirks. He never wanted to feel that way again.

He dug out some foil shock blankets and flares and shut the trunk, watching as the cruiser took off toward the tanker, five hundred yards further on. He paused a moment, the stench of burning oil sharp in his nostrils, then triggered a flare and drove it into the snowdrift at the side of the road.

He approached the limo from its front end, following his flashbeam into the ditch. He checked the driver first, sprawled face-down on the hood, but the guy was obviously deceased; frost had begun to crystallize on the exposed contents of his skull. Steve looked away quickly, his stomach doing a threatening little flip-flop, but then he made himself look until the shock of it subsided. He noticed Marty’s footprints in the snow and assumed the silver-haired man lying coatless on the ground had wandered around stunned for a while before keeling over dead or unconscious. Steve bent over the body and checked for a pulse, surprised to find it palpable, faint and irregular. The man’s skin felt like refrigerated meat. Steve threw a couple of blankets over him then aimed his flashlight into the limo.

He saw a girl in there, pale and motionless in the flashbeam, and he leaned inside, knocking his cap off on the doorjamb. He pressed a finger to her neck and she opened her eyes. Startled, Steve shrank back from her, bumping his head on the plush ceiling. The girl blinked up at him, semi-conscious, her voice a dreamy whisper:

“Am I dead? Are you an angel?”

“You’re not dead,” Steve said with a nervous chuckle. He snugged the remaining blankets around her, glad to have something to do. “And I’m no angel. I’m a police officer.”

The girl managed a wan smile. In the same instant she reached up and touched Steve’s face, as if to verify his reality. Her touch sent a chill through him and Steve found himself absurdly embarrassed, unable to meet her gaze. She was beautiful.

Now she took her hand away and tried to look past him at the man in the snow, saying, “What about my dad?”

“He’s alive,” Steve said, “and there’s an ambulance on its way.”