Possession (9 page)

"Don't pity me," she said quietly. "If you ever pity me, I'll be gone so fast your head will spin."

"Is that why you drink?"

She looked at him with no expression in her dark eyes, and shook her head.

"No. I drank before. I always drank. I have a talent for it. You'd think it would kill me, wouldn't you?"

"Do you wish it would?"

She picked up the fat gray cat and held it against her, burying her face in its fur. Then she met his eyes again. "Of course not. Don't be ridiculous."

"We could have a baby. Would you try again with me?"

"Thank you. It's a most gracious offer. But I'm too old, and you're too old, and I don't believe in babies anymore." God, how he'd wanted to save her. He'd been so convinced that he could rescue her and he'd never wanted anything so much in his life. His track record at making women happy was somewhat muddied, but he had never loved a woman the way he loved Nina. He felt sure that if he could only love her enough, she would have to love him back and be happy. He began to drink with her. It brought them along

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together through the long nights on the houseboat. Her mind—the mind that had snared him—continued to amaze him and let him think there was hope. He detested what liquor did to that intelligence and dreaded the inevitable progression to slurred words, the repetitions of half-ideas, and long silences. When he drank too, when she no longer made sense, it no longer mattered to him. They were together.

But he could not save her because she did not love him.

"Is it me?" he asked her once. "Are you ashamed of me? Downtown, you act as if I'm just another cop, someone you barely know. We could have lunch together. We could see other people together."

"No," she said. "It's me. Everything I touch turns to shit, Sammy." She cradled his head in her lap. "You'll see. You hang around here much longer and you'll see."

"You want me to go away?" He kept his eyes closed and tried to stop his ears against her answer.

"No—I don't know. But you will."

"I won't leave."

She sighed. "Yes you will."

And of course he had. Nina could handle the drinking. She could separate days and nights. She could put on day clothes and go to court clear-eyed and clear-headed and cogent. He couldn't. The change in his abilities was so subtle at first that he was the only one who perceived that he was missing details in a profession that demanded absolute attention to details.

And then one afternoon when they were working the fairly obvious suicide death of a downtown lawyer in the deceased's waterfront office, he caught Jake staring at him with a look of puzzlement.

"Why the hell did you put your cigarette out in his ashtray, Sam?"

"I didn't."

"Yes you did. You just fucked up the scene."

"Sorry." He scraped out the offending butt and slipped it in his pocket.

"Is it that woman?"

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"What woman?"

"Her. Armitage."

"What do you know about that?"

"I know. I'm an old detective, but I'm a detective. You've been leaving the same number for on-call too many times. I checked the reverse directory."

"It's no secret."

"It seems to be. You seem to think it should be."

"It's private."

"Your women were never private before. How come? She too good to share with Jake? She don't sit down to pee like any other broad?"

"She sits."

"Then for God's sake, enjoy her, but don't let it mess you up. Don't let it mess me up. I know you carry me. Everybody knows you carry me. I can't carry you; you're my last partner. You fuck up and we both go down."

He hadn't wanted to let Jake go down. He'd tried to cut back on the booze, but he couldn't be with Nina and do that. For the first time in his life, the job was less important than the woman, and they were both sliding away from him. He showed up drunk at a homicide scene at four one morning and it was all Jake could do to push him off into the darkness and pretend Sam was gathering soil samples. Sam was so damned shit-faced that he could only rock back and forth on his hands and knees. Sam begged Nina to marry him and she laughed and turned away. He wondered if he hated her more than he loved her, but her hold on him was just as tenacious—more so—than it had ever been. She was killing him. But it was Jake who died.

They were called out at six on a bitterly cold January dawning to work a scene that could have waited; the victim had been dead for a week and a few more hours wouldn't have made a hell of a lot of difference. The temperature cleared Sam's head for the first time in weeks, and that night-morning it had felt almost like the old days with Jake. He'd been anxious to enter a scene for the first time in a long time and call upon his instincts and skill to winnow out

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what had happened. Jake had sensed it, and they'd bullshitted with each other as if nothing had happened. As if Nina hadn't happened.

The patrol officer who'd responded to the first radio call was puking in the snow when they drove up, and Jake had silently handed Sam a cigar. It was going to be a smeller, reeking of putrescence that only a body left to decay in a winter-heated apartment could cause. They'd have to burn the clothes they wore when they finished, but the strong cheap cigars would let them work without gagging.

Up three flights of stairs, past the green-tinged officer who grinned at them with embarrassment as he leaned against the stained wallpaper of the upper landing, past the manager of the old hotel who seemed more annoyed than distressed. He'd heard Jake puffing behind him, but Jake always puffed and snorted if he had to walk up more than one flight of stairs.

The room was a morass of stacked newspapers, cardboard boxes, dirty clothes, garbage, and, for some reason, a dozen blank-eyed television sets. They had had to stand for a long time before they could even see the body that lay there in the flotsam of the last few years of the victim's life. And then they saw her, a great blackened, bloated balloon of what had been a human being, her skin stretched so tautly by decomposition gases that it had cracked in places. The stab wounds in her shriveled breasts gaped apart obscenely. An old hooker, who had probably lain down for a six-pack of beer, clad in torn lace panties and high-heeled, patent leather boots that still bore a Goodwill sticker on the bottom of one sole. As they puffed determinedly on their cigars, a rat jumped from the top of a pile of boxes and ran past them.

"Oh shit," Jake said. "Why do we get all the losers?"

But they had worked together that morning, attuned to each other, measuring, recording, snapping pictures that were going to make some jury blanch (// it ever got to a jury), bagging evidence from a seemingly unending pile of possibles.

They hadn't talked. Talking meant breathing without a

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cigar to mask the miasma. Later, all the years later, Sam had wished that they had talked. He had felt good. Good for the first time in a long time, and never mind that a sane man should not feel good working around a body dead so long, amid trash that stank of that forlorn body. He'd been working and working well, and thinking only of the solution to the problem presented to them.

Jake had let out such a soft little sigh that Sam barely heard him, scarcely looked up. And then he'd felt the tape measure lead in his hand go slack and he'd turned to ask Jake to hold his end tighter. Jake was still hunkering down against the filthy sink, still clenching the cigar in his teeth, and his eyes were still open.

But he was dead—as dead as the prostitute who sprawled between them. Sam dragged him out into the hallway, screaming at the young cop who stood over them, transfixed by shock, to get the aid car. Sam pressed his mouth to Jakes's, willing the older man to take his breath and use it. He'd crashed his fist down over Jake's stilled heart, crushing the two cigars left in his shirt pocket; nothing changed what had happened. The Medic One paramedics with all their paraphernalia and radio-telemetry direct to the county hospital couldn't change it either.

Young men. Young men in dark blue uniforms with neat dark hair, mustaches, and flat stomachs. They worked over Jake for an hour and a half, piercing his chest with the long needle that made Sam wince, forcing air into his lungs and making him appear to breathe, letting Sam think that maybe it would be all right, that the new start they'd shared really had been another beginning after all.

They sat back on their heels finally and shook their heads, leaving Jake to lie on the frayed carpeting that jumped with fleas, his chest dotted with the white circles that held the useless defibrillator leads.

"Get him out of here," Sam said softly.

"I'm sorry," the tall young man said. "I'm really sorry."

"Get him the fuck out of here!" Sam yelled. "I don't want him here. This is no place for him to die."

They'd glanced at each other, confused by the vehemence 63

in his voice, at the lack of professionalism. They hesitated, reaching for their gear and slowly stowing it into their Life-Paks.

"I said get him out of here! Now!" Sam bent over Jake and tried to pick him up himself.

"Hey, man . . . sir." The young men stood up and reached for Jake. "We'll take him."

"Then do it."

Sam stayed at the scene until noon, doing it all himself. When he finally walked down the stairway, the snow was melting, sending eddies of water down First Hill toward the Sound.

He had lost his partner. He had never lost a partner before, and he vowed it would be the last time.

He didn't go to the houseboat. Instead, he drove to the apartment he still rented, the rooms unfamiliar now, filled with dust and stale air. He shucked off his suit and coat and left them on the bathroom floor while he showered for fifteen minutes, scrubbing long after the odor should have been gone. He dressed in old jeans and a T-shirt and he carried the reeking clothes to the dumpster behind the building, throwing them in along with his shoes. When he returned to his apartment, his phone was ringing, a nagging ring that went on for fifteen shrill alarms. He looked at it without interest. It stopped, then began again. He pulled the jack from the wall and the rings ceased, leaving only the sound of dripping water from the eaves outside the windows.

All Jake had ever wanted to do was to hang in as long as he could, and then retire to his cabin on the Skykomish River with his nice, fat, dumb, and faithful wife. Sam, who had no hobbies, no avocation, had never comprehended Jake's fascination with fishing, hunting, and endless Masonic meetings. Now Jake had no time for any of it, and Sam had more time ahead than he could ever hope to fill.

He shut his eyes, and the picture of Jake—dead—came back with such force that he choked, feeling bile rise in his throat. He made it to the stool in the bathroom and vomited until his eyes hurt and the veins stood out on his neck. He

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pressed his face against the coolness of the toilet lid and sobbed for the man he was supposed to take care of, the man whose inadequacies had been his responsibility to cover. Then he drank himself into unconsciousness.

When he went back to Nina three days later, he knew that it was almost finished. She didn't question him about where he'd been, and she didn't try to comfort him about Jake; she waited, knowing that her presentiments of disaster had come to pass. She was calmer than he'd ever known her to be and drank less. He drank constantly from the moment he arrived at the floating home until he fell asleep. He woke sometimes to find that she was holding him so tightly that he could not tell whose breathing he felt, but he had no stirring of passion for her any longer. She had never talked to him about anything that happened in the deepest part of her mind, and he could not talk to her now.

They gave him another partner, one of the new guys, not yet thirty, who was a stickler for procedure and who had no wish to cover Sam's lapses or absences. Sam lasted two weeks before the lieutenant called him in. After ten minutes of embarrassed platitudes from the lieutenant and stony silence from Sam, he was offered a choice: sign into the alcoholic treatment program voluntarily or transfer back to patrol. Sam stood up and began to empty his pockets.

"Badge. I.D. Call-box key. Oh, yeah—my free bus pass. I'll keep my weapon. It belongs to me."

The lieutenant had to push it. "Clinton, don't be an asshole. Six weeks and you'll be back here and nobody will remember it. That woman is behind it, isn't she? No woman is worth it. You're going to lose it all, and you'll be lucky if you get a security job at Pay-N-Save." Sam stared at him with eyes as dull as smoke. "You keep your college-educated baby dicks and your admirable closure rate and stuff them all. I choose to keep my woman and my bottle and fuck you." He didn't keep his woman.

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Nina watched him go as placidly as she'd allowed him into her life. She sipped scotch from a smudged coffee cup and watched him pack up. She didn't ask where he was going, or if he was ever coming back. She knew. She held up dry lips for him to kiss and lifted her cup in a last salute.

"You be O.K.?" he asked, and she looked back at him with the closed, blank look he'd seen so often. Then she set down the cup and picked up the gray tomcat.

"Take him. You'll need somebody to talk to. He always liked you better anyway."

He stood for a final look at the lake, the struggling cat under one arm, and a brown paper sack under the other. The geraniums were dead, blackened in their planter boxes. If she had said one word, if she had asked him to stay, he would have. But the only sound inside the tilted floating house was her stereo, tuned to high volume. He could see the back of her head through the door's window. She stared out at the water and let him go.

His old pickup was pointed east in the parking lot. As good a direction as any. Pistol sniffed the seat covers, and then curled up next to his knee as he headed across the Floating Bridge, through the eastside bedroom communities, and up toward the pass. It began to snow beyond Issaquah, white streaks darting straight at the windshield, road ice making the truck skid on the turns.