Nerve Damage (12 page)

“Think, Jerry.”

“I'm trying,” Jerry said. He scrunched up his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “It's no use. You had them. That's all I remember.”

Roy bent down, peered under the desk.

“Search the whole house if you want,” Jerry said. “I don't care.”

Sergeant Bettis turned toward the door. “Call me if you happen to find anything.”

“Wait,” Roy said.

Sergeant Bettis paused in the doorway.

“One other thing,” Roy said. “When Tom Parish left—ran away from me, really—he vanished into this strange room behind the wineshop.”

“What kind of strange room?” said Sergeant Bettis.

Roy described it: cubicles, workers in headsets, monitors everywhere, big maps on the walls.

“Yeah?” said Sergeant Bettis.

 

Roy rode
to Wine, Inc. in Sergeant Bettis's unmarked car. They went inside. No one was there except Westie, coming toward the door. “I was just closing up,” he said. He noticed Roy. “Oh, hi—did you want one of those Priorats after all?”

Sergeant Bettis showed his badge. “This won't take a minute.”

Westie's eyes widened. “What won't? Is there some problem?”

“Not involving you,” said Sergeant Bettis. “I'd just like a peek at your storage room.”

Westie glanced at Roy. “But why?”

“Part of an ongoing investigation,” Sergeant Bettis said.

“Gee,” said Westie, “I don't know. Maybe I should call the owner?”

“Is that Lenore?” said Roy.

“I told you, sir,” said Westie, sounding a little aggrieved. “There's no one here by that name.”

Sergeant Bettis gave Roy a quick glance, then turned to Westie. “No need to go to any trouble,” he said, now moving toward the rear of the store. Westie trailed after him, biting his lip; Roy followed.

Sergeant Bettis put his hand on the employees-only door and gave a slight push. Now it swung smoothly open. They went into the storage room.

The storage room: floor-to-ceiling coolers, cases of wine, display trellis with plastic grapes, unmarked door in the unfinished wooden wall—

But no. There was no unfinished wall at the rear of the storage room. A solid brick wall stood there instead, no door in it. Brick wall? No door? Roy approached slowly, ran his hand over the bricks. They felt like bricks. He tapped at them. The gazes of Sergeant Bettis and Westie pressed on his back, physical pressure he could feel. Roy struck the wall with the side of his fist, as though it might come tumbling down. But it did not.

He rounded on Westie. “When did this happen?” he said.

“When did what happen, sir?”

“This brick wall. There was an unfinished wall here just yester—” For a moment, he couldn't remember how much time he'd lost in the hospital. “There was an unfinished wall. I saw it with my own eyes. When did these bricks get laid?”

Westie looked astonished. “But it's been like this as long as I've been here, sir, almost two years.”

“That's a lie,” Roy said. He pounded on the wall with the flat of his hand, then shouted, “Tom! I know you're over there.”

Westie stepped back, palms up. “What's going on?” he said, confused, even frightened.

“Nothing,” said Sergeant Bettis. He put a hand on Roy's arm. “We're done here. Sorry to trouble you.”

Roy shook free. “We're not done.”

Sergeant Bettis took hold of him again, much harder this time. “We are,” he said, drawing Roy back toward the employees-only door. Roy gazed at the brick wall. It seemed so real.

“What happened to your arm?” said Sergeant
Bettis.

They stood on the street, outside Wine, Inc. The display window went dark.

“Hockey,” Roy said.

“Still playing?”

Roy nodded.

“You like the fighting?”

“What fighting?”

“Thought there was lots of dukin' it out in hockey.” Sergeant Bettis threw a quick combination in the air. That crazy notion of taking Sergeant Bettis in a fight, at any time in their respective lives? It vanished from Roy's mind at once.

“On TV, maybe,” he said. “We don't even bodycheck in our league.”

“What about off the ice?” said Sergeant Bettis. “Get into fist fights from time to time, a little brawling?”

“What kind of question is that?” Roy said.

“Just trying to paint a picture,” Sergeant Bettis said. Westie came out of Wine, Inc., buttoning his coat. He took one glance at them, then hurried away in the direction of Washington Circle. “The boyfriend—Jerry?—says you're a famous sculptor.”

Down the block, brake lights reddened on a car. It pulled to the side, stopped under a streetlight: a silver sports car, maybe a Porsche. Westie got in. The car drove off.

“I said,” said Sergeant Bettis, “that Jerry makes you out to be a famous sculptor.”

Roy turned to him. “Not that famous,” he said. “But so what?”

“Famous people tend to be concerned about their reputations,” Sergeant Bettis said. “Stands to reason.”

“Does it?” Roy said. “What are you driving at?”

“An obituary is all about reputation, right?” said Sergeant Bettis. “No surprise that you'd want a little look-see.”

“I told you,” Roy said. “It was all about that stupid goal.”

“I know what you told me,” said Sergeant Bettis. “But suppose a famous person, for whatever reason, sneaks that look-see and doesn't like it, maybe even feels a bit insulted, like how his reputation adds up. Maybe he gets pissed off at the guy who wrote it.”

Silence. Sergeant Bettis's eyes—dark, intelligent, impartial—met Roy's. Roy laughed. “You're saying I killed Richard Gold?”

Sergeant Bettis didn't see the joke. “Anything you want to tell me?”

“Sure,” said Roy. “For starters, I'll remind you that I was at home in Vermont when he was attacked, quite possibly, as I mentioned, on the phone with him.”

Sergeant Bettis nodded. “I had one like that,” he said. “A guy of means, not from art sales, something else. But my point—he made sure to give this enemy of his a call just before the car bomb went off. Rubbing it in and establishing an alibi at the same time, if you follow.”

Roy took a deep breath; tried to—but again found the bottoms of his lungs tied off, unavailable. “So I paid someone else to do it?” Roy said. Breathless, almost panting, like a guilty man.

Sergeant Bettis's voice softened, came close to striking a gentle note. “If you did, we can probably work something out. But it would have to start now, like right here.”

“You're wasting your time,” Roy said. He paused to catch his breath, got only some of it. “And mine.”

Sergeant Bettis's eyes lost their impartiality. “Maybe,” he said. “I've been wrong before.” He opened the door of his unmarked car. “Who wouldn't be, twenty-two years on the job?” He stepped into the car, looked at Roy over the roof. “One thing that's changed in those twenty-two years—there's nowhere to hide in this country, not anymore.” He got in the car, drove slowly away.

Roy took a few steps along the sidewalk, toward the Starbucks. A narrow alley separated it from Wine, Inc. Roy followed the alley, past some trash cans and a wheelless bicycle frame chained to a pipe, around to the back of Wine, Inc.

Another alley, this one wider, ran behind the buildings. Nighttime, but Roy could see pretty well by the city's luminance. There were two reserved parking spaces behind Wine, Inc. A sign on the wall—a wall of solid brick—read:
RESERVED FOR EMPLOYEES OF WINE, INC. ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED
. Solid brick. He tried to resist the urge to run his hand over it and didn't succeed.

Roy moved back to the narrow side alley. The side wall? Also brick. But up high, near the corner where the two walls met, he saw a small slatted square, the kind that indicated the presence of a ventilation fan.

One of the trash cans was empty except for an inch or two of water sloshing around at the bottom. Roy dumped the trash can out—stinking water, as though fish had gone bad in there—and stood it upside down under the ventilation fan. He'd never actually climbed onto a trash can before, but how could that possibly be a problem given his sense of balance, his strength, his agility? Shouldn't have been, but it took three tries, and on the last the trash can wobbled and almost toppled him over.

Roy stood on the trash can, just breathing for a minute or two.
Come on, boy.
He rose up on his toes and peered through the slats of the ventilation fan. A dark space on the other side, but not completely dark: a glow spread from…from what? Wine coolers—those floor-to-ceiling wine coolers. Roy could make out cases of wine, the trellis with the plastic grapes, dusty bottles on a table, the glint of a corkscrew beside them. This was the storage room behind the employees-only door; no other
room—with cubicle workers, monitors, wall maps—existed behind it, no other room where Tom Parish had disappeared from sight. And nothing beyond the storage room except the alley, with its two parking spaces. Roy closed his eyes tight, opened them, and saw again what he'd just seen. This was no hallucination. So, by logical necessity, was that office or call center or map room or whatever the hell it was in fact the hallucination? Roy couldn't make himself believe it. He thought of a line Delia had quoted once when he'd asked how her work was going: something about holding two contradictory thoughts in your mind at once. The exact words? The source? He couldn't remember, but he had the obscure sensation that Delia had been this way already, was farther up the trail. Kind of crazy—Delia hadn't been a great one for trails and hiking, and two or three runs on the mountain was usually enough skiing—but it calmed him a little. What she liked about winter was sitting by the fire in the barn and watching the snow fall;
the reflected flames flickering in her eyes, lighting up those golden flecks.
That memory calmed him more. He climbed off the trash can.

Roy caught a cab to Jerry's. One light shone in an upstairs window. He got into his truck and started on the long drive home, the pieces of the broken chair beside him. As the miles went by, those pieces began pulling at him, demanding his attention, rebuilding themselves in his mind. Roy found a Home Depot off the Garden State Parkway, bought a sixteen-ounce bottle of Elmer's Super Wood Glue, and in the parking lot, put the chair back together, carefully making every joint wrong. A series of wrongs, all slightly different, that added up to…what? He didn't know.

A man passing by with a brand-new plunger in his hand took a long look and said, “Buddy? They got ones just like that inside. Thirty-five ninety-nine.”

 

Rain in Hartford,
sleet at the Massachusetts line, snow in Vermont, first heavy wet flakes, then small and hard, flying through the yellow cone of the headlights: Roy passed a wreck, then a second, and a third,
all of them bad. People died on the highway every day, passing from normal life, through terror, to nothing.
Slow-motion crack-up:
Krishna's driver's take on
Delia.
But real crack-ups on the road happened fast, the terror part, act two, probably lasting no more than a few seconds; in contrast to the long second acts people dying from some other causes went through. Those people, the ones who got sick, who really did die in slow motion, had too much goddamn time to think. Not nearly enough time to live, way too much to think: Therefore? Roy blew by a snowplow, glanced down at the speedometer: eighty-five.
The question is
—
can he do it?
He eased off the pedal.

Roy drove up to the barn. The wind rose, hitting high notes in the trees. The driveway was unshoveled, Skippy's old sedan not there. Roy got stuck halfway up and waded on foot through the snow to the front door. Lights shone, but only in the big room. He could see
Delia
in the tall windows.

Roy unlocked the door, went in. He heard music, the thumping, repetitive bass that rappers liked.

“Skippy?”

No answer.

He put down his bag. Everything looked fine.

“Skippy?”

Roy walked through the house, checked the spare bedroom upstairs. No sheets on the mattress, but there was a blanket, clothes were scattered here and there and the bedside radio played. No sneakers, though. Roy shut off the radio. He left the porch lights on and went to bed.

In his own bed. Ah. He took a deep breath, almost a real one. His eyelids—so heavy, as though they'd gained weight, gained with no effort while he had to struggle to hold on to every ounce of the rest of his body—fell shut. Roy hadn't eaten in hours, knew he should go down to the kitchen, fix himself a meal. But he wasn't hungry, and in any case couldn't force his eyelids back up. Outside those notes the wind made rose higher and higher. Snowflakes thumped on the windows, soft and fast, like drumming fingers.

 

“This,”
said Delia, “will be the bedroom.”

“Isn't it a bit small?”

“We'll just have to take that wall down.”

“We?”

“And the window needs to be bigger. That's east, isn't it, Roy?”

“Yes.”

“We'll have sun in the morning. And the bed goes right there.”

“Maybe we should have one in every room,” Roy said.

Delia tried everywhere for the right bed. She hit antiques stores from the Eastern Townships to the Berkshires, but nothing was quite right. They were still sleeping on a mattress on the floor when Delia left for Venezuela. And Roy still slept on it now.

 

Sun in the morning.
Roy opened his eyes. He felt pretty good. He rose, went to the window. Snow covered the valley, pure white everywhere. It was like seeing the clouds from above. He thought of all those cartoons that take place in heaven; one of his favorite cartoon subgroups.

The phone rang. “Roy? Freddy Boudreau. Saw your truck in the driveway on my way in. How was the trip?”

“Good.”

“How's the arm?”

“Healing fine.”

“Good news—gettin' torched without you on the blue line, need you back soon,” Freddy said. “Reason I'm calling, that kid you had taking care of the place—”

“Skippy?”

“Locked him up yesterday, in case you been wondering where he was.”

“Not another DUI?”

“Nope,” said Freddy. “But that would be preferable, all around.”

“What do you mean?”

“Illegal gun possession,” Freddy said.

“I don't believe it.”

“Smith & Wesson thirty-eight,” Freddy said. “One of those sneaky little models with the real short barrel. Serial number filed off, by the way—that's a separate crime, tacked on. Bail's set at ten grand.”

“Oh, God,” Roy said. “Is his mom—”

“Uh-unh.”

“Murph?”

“Murph at the salvage?”

“That's his uncle.”

“Haven't heard from him.”

Roy got dressed, went outside: everything soft, round, white, including his truck. Roy took the shovel off the peg by the door. He'd always liked shoveling snow—the full-body rhythm, the squeak the blade sometimes made digging in, the shovel loads holding their shapes for brief moments in the air. Some guys did a sloppy job of it, moving just enough snow to free their cars, but not Roy—he always made sure there was no loose snow, left the ground hardpacked, the banks squared at their bases, all angles right angles. Just not today: today he was sloppier than the sloppiest, and even that pitiful effort wiped him out. He leaned on the truck, sweating a cold sweat, breathing fast shallow breaths. Long trip, aftereffects of Dr. Chu's cocktail, maybe just an off day—weren't there lots of possible reasons? A passing car tooted at him. Roy made himself straighten up and smile and wave at whoever it was.

 

“Hey, Roy,”
said Freddy, behind the desk at the station, “good to see you.” He took a second look. “You okay?”

“Fine. Is a check okay?”

“From you, yeah,” Freddy said. “We don't cash it or nothin'. And if you sign this surety here, you only need to put up ten percent.”

Roy signed a piece of paper, wrote a check for one thousand dollars. Freddy locked them in a drawer and handed him a receipt.

“Another traffic stop?” Roy said.

“Mine, this time,” Freddy said. “The kid had it in the glove box, right on top. He gave permission for the search, no fuss, no muss.” Freddy opened another drawer, took out a handgun. “Exhibit A,” he said, “ideal for concealed carrying.” He held it out, a snub-nosed black revolver with a polished wood grip. “A real lady's gun, if you ask me—feel how light.”

Roy had never actually held a handgun. “No, thanks,” he said.

“See where the numbers got ground off?” Freddy said. “They don't use a file—too much work.” He put the gun away, rose, opened a low swinging door and led Roy around the desk, down a hall to the cells. All empty except the last one: Skippy lay on a bunk, face to the wall.

“Wakie wakie,” Freddy said. Skippy groaned. “Mr. Valois here bailed you out. Again.”

Skippy rolled over, sat up, rubbed his face. He shot a quick glance at Roy from between his fingers, looked away.

“Hopin' for an Oscar?” said Freddy. “On your feet.”

Skippy rose. New pimple eruptions on both cheeks, forehead oily, eyes gummy. Freddy unlocked the cell door, swung it open with exaggerated courtesy. Hands in his pockets, head down, Skippy shuffled out.