The Speed of Dark (27 page)

I call his office.

“The police are coming to talk to me,” I say. “I will make up the time.”

“Lou! What’s wrong? What have you done?”

“It is my car,” I say.

Before I can say more, he is talking fast. “Lou, don’t say anything to them. We’ll get you a lawyer. Was anyone hurt?”

“Nobody was hurt,” I say. I hear his breath gush out.

“Well, that’s a mercy,” he says.

“When I opened the hood, I did not touch the device.”

“Device?What are you talking about?”

“The… the thing that someone put in my car.It looked like a toy, a jack-in-the-box.”

“Wait—wait. Are you telling me that the police are coming because of something that happened to you,
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that someone else did? Not something you did?”

“I did not touch it,” I say. The words he has just said filter through slowly, one by one; the excitement in his voice made it hard to hear them clearly. He thought at first that I had done something wrong, something to bring the police here. This man I have known since I started working here—he thinks I could do something so bad. I feel heavier.

“I’m sorry,” he says before I can say anything. “It sounds like—it must sound like—I jumped to the conclusion that you had done something wrong. I’m sorry. I know you would not. But I still think you need one of the company’s lawyers with you when you talk to the police.”

“No,” I say. I feel chilly and bitter; I do not want to be treated like a child. I thought Mr. Aldrin liked me. If he does not like me, then Mr. Crenshaw, who is so much worse, must really hate me. “I do not want a lawyer. I do not need a lawyer. I have not done anything wrong. Someone has been vandalizing my car.”

“More than once?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.“Two weeks ago, when all my tires were flat. Someone had slashed them. That is the time I was late. Then, the following Wednesday, while I was at a friend’s house, someone smashed my windshield. I called the police then, too.”

“But you didn’t tell me, Lou,” Mr. Aldrin says.

“No… I thought Mr. Crenshaw would be angry. And this morning, my car wouldn’t start. The battery was gone, and a toy was there instead. I came to work and called the police. When they went to look, the toy had an explosive under it.”

“My God, Lou—that’s… you could have been hurt. That’s horrible. Do you have any idea—no, of course you don’t. Listen, I’m coming right over.”

He has hung up before I can ask him not to come right over. I am too excited to work now. I do not care what Mr. Crenshaw thinks. I need my time in the gym. No one else is there. I put on bouncing music and begin bouncing on the trampoline, big, swooping bounces. At first I am out of rhythm with the music, but then I stabilize my movement. The music lifts me, swings me down; I can feel the beat in the compression of my joints as I meet the stretchy fabric and spring upward again.

By the time Mr. Aldrin arrives, I am feeling better. I am sweaty and I can smell myself, but the music is moving strongly inside me. I am not shaky or scared. It is a good feeling.

Mr. Aldrin looks worried, and he wants to come closer than I want him to come. I do not want him to smell me and be offended. I do not want him to touch me, either. “Are you all right, Lou?” he asks. His hand keeps reaching out, as if to pat me.

“I am doing okay,” I say.

“Are you sure? I really think we should have a lawyer here, and maybe you should go by the clinic—”

“I was not hurt,” I say. “I am all right. I do not need to see a doctor, and I do not want the lawyer.”

“I left word at the gate for the police,” Mr. Aldrin says. “I had to tell Mr. Crenshaw.” His brow lowers.

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“He was in a meeting. He will get the message when he gets out.”

The door buzzer sounds. Employees authorized to be in this building have their own key cards. Only visitors have to ring the buzzer. “I’ll go,” Mr. Aldrin says. I do not know whether to go in my office or stand in the hall. I stand in the hall and watch Mr. Aldrin go to the door. He opens it and says something to the man who is standing there. I cannot see if it is the same man I talked to before until he is much closer, and then I can tell that it is.

HI, MR. ARRENDALE,” HE SAYS, AND PUTS OUT HIS HAND. I put out mine, though I do not like to shake hands. I know it is appropriate. “Is there somewhere we could talk?” he asks.

“My office,” I say. I lead the way in. I do not have visitors, so there is no extra chair. I see Mr. Stacy looking at all the twinklies , the spin spirals and pinwheels and other decorations. I do not know what he thinks about it. Mr. Aldrin speaks softly to Mr. Stacy and leaves. I do not sit down because it is not polite to sit when other people have to stand, unless you are their boss. Mr. Aldrin comes in with a chair that I recognize from the kitchenette. He puts it down in the space between my desk and the files. Then he stands by the door.

“And you are?” Mr. Stacy asks, turning to him.

“Pete Aldrin ; I’m Lou’s immediate supervisor. I don’t know if you understand—” Mr. Aldrin gives me a look that I am not sure of, and Mr. Stacy nods.

“I’ve interviewed Mr. Arrendale before,” he says. Once more I am astonished at how they do it, the way they pass information from one to another without words. “Don’t let me keep you.”

“But… but I think he needs—”

“Mr. Aldrin , Mr. Arrendale here isn’t in trouble. We’re trying to help him, keep this nutcase from hurting him. Now if you’ve got a safe place for him to stay for a few days, while we try to track this person down, that would be a help, but otherwise—I don’t think he needs baby-sitting while I chat with him. Though it’s up to him…” The policeman looks at me. I see something in his face that I think may be laughter, but I am not sure. It is very subtle.

“Lou is very capable,” Mr. Aldrin says. “We value him highly. I just wanted—”

“To be sure he would get fair treatment. I understand. But it’s up to him.”

They are both looking at me; I feel impaled on their gaze like one of those exhibits at the museums. I know Mr. Aldrin wants me to say he should stay, but he wants it for the wrong reason and I do not want him to stay. “I will be all right,” I say. “I will call you if anything happens.”

“Be sure you do,” he says. He gives Mr. Stacy a long look and then leaves. I can hear his footsteps going down the hall and then the scrape of the other chair in the kitchenette andthe
plink
and
clunk
of money going into the drink machine and a can of something landing down below. I wonder what he chose. I wonder if he will stay there in case I want him.

The policeman closes the door to my office,then sits in the chair Mr. Aldrin placed for him. I sit down behind my desk. He is looking around the room.

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“You like things that turn around, don’t you?” he says.

“Yes,” I say. I wonder how long he will stay. I will have to make up the time.

“Let me explain about vandals,” he says. “There’sseveral kinds.The person—usually a kid—who just likes to make a little trouble. They may spike a tire or break a windshield or steal a stop sign—they do it for the excitement, as much as anything, and they don’t know, or care, who they’re doing it to. Then there’s what we call spillover. There’s a fight in a bar, and it continues outside, and there’s breaking windshields in the parking lot. There’s a crowd in the street, someone gets rowdy, and the next thing you know they’re breaking windows and stealing stuff. Now some of these people are thekind that aren’t usually violent—they shock themselves with how they act in a crowd.” He pauses, looking at me, and I nod. I know he wants some response.

“You’re saying that some vandals aren’t doing it to hurt particular people.”

“Exactly.There’s the individual who likes making messes but doesn’t know the victim. There’s the individual who doesn’t usually make messes but is involved in something else where the violence spills over. Now when we first get an example of vandalism—as with your tires—that clearly isn’t spillover, we first think of the random individual. That’s the commonest form. If another couple cars got their tires slashed in the same neighborhood—or on the same transit route—in the next few weeks, we’d just assume we had a bad boy thumbing his nose at the cops.Annoying, but not dangerous.”

“Expensive,” I say.“To the people with the cars, anyway.”

“True,which is why it’s a crime. But there’s a third kind of vandal, and that’s the dangerous kind.The one who is targeting a particular person. Typically, this person starts off with something annoying but not dangerous—like slashing tires. Some of these people are satisfied with one act of revenge for whatever it was. If they are, they’re not that dangerous. But some aren’t, and these are the ones we worry about.

What we see in your case is the relatively nonviolent tire slashing, followed by the more violent windshield smashing and the still more violent placement of a small explosive device where it could do you harm.

Every incident has escalated. That’s why we’re concerned for your safety.”

I feel as if I am floating in a crystal sphere, unconnected to anything outside. I do not feel endangered.

“You may feel safe,” Mr. Stacy says, reading my mind again. “But that doesn’t mean you
are
safe. The only way for you to be safe is for that nutcase who’s stalking you to be behind bars.”

He says “nutcase” so easily; I wonder if that is what he thinks of me as well.

Again, he reads my thoughts. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have said ‘nutcase.’… You probably hear enough of that sort of thing. It just makes me mad: here you are, hardworking and decent, and this—this
person
is after you. What’s his problem?”

“Not autism,” I want to say, but I do not. I do not think any autistic would be a stalker, but I do not know all of them and I could be wrong.

“I just want you to know that we take this threat seriously,” he says.“Even if we didn’t move fast at first.

So, let’s get serious. It has to be aimed at you—you know the phrase about threetimes enemy action?”

“No,” I say.

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“Once is accident, twice is coincidence, and third time is enemy action. So if something that only might be aimed at you happens three times, then it’s time to consider someone’s after you.”

I puzzle over this a moment.“But… if it is enemy action, then it was enemy action the first time, too, wasn’t it? Not an accident at all?”

He looks surprised, eyebrows up and mouth rounded. “Actually— yeah—you’re right, but the thing is you don’t know about that first one until the others happen and then you can put it in the same category.”

“If three real accidents happen, you could think they were enemy action and still be wrong,” I say.

He stares at me, shakes his head, and says, “How many ways are there to be wrong and how few to be right?”

The calculations run through my head in an instant, patterning the decision carpet with the colors of accident (orange), coincidence (green), and enemy action (red). Three incidents, each of which can have one of three values, three theories of truth, each of which is either true or false by the values assigned each action. And there must be some filter on the choice of incidents, rejecting for inclusion those that cannot be manipulated by the person who may be the enemy of the one whose incidents are used as a test.

It is just such problems I deal with daily, only in far greater complexity.

“There are twenty-seven possibilities,” I say. “Only one is correct if you define correctness by all parts of the statement being true—that the first incident is in fact accident, the second is in fact coincidence, and the third is in fact enemy action. Only one—but a different one—is true if you define correctness as all three incidents being in fact enemy action. If you define correctness as the third incident being enemy action in all cases, regardless of the reality of the first two cases, then the statement will correctly alert you to enemy action in nine cases. If, however, the first two cases are not enemy action, but the third is, then the choice of related incidents becomes even more critical.”

He is staring at me now with his mouth a little open. “You… calculated that?In your head?”

“It is not hard,” I say. “It is simply a permutation problem, and the formula for permutations is taught in high school.”

“So there’s only one chance in twenty-seven that it is actually true?” he asks. “That’s nuts. It wouldn’t be an old saw if it wasn’t truer than that… that’s what?About four percent? Something’s wrong.”

The flaw in his mathematical knowledge and his logic is painfully clear. “Actually true depends on what your underlying purpose is,” I say. “There is only one chance in twenty-seven that all parts of the statement are true: that the first incident is an accident, the second incident is a coincidence, and the third incident is enemy action. That is three-point-seven percent, giving an error rate of ninety-six-point-three for the truth value of the entire statement. But there are nine cases—one-third of the total—in which the
last
case is enemy action, which drops the error rate with respect to the final incident to sixty-seven percent. And there are nineteen cases in which enemy action can occur—as first,second, or last incident or a combination of them. Nineteen out of twenty-seven is seventy-point-thirty-seven percent: that is the probability that enemy action occurred in at least one of the three incidents. Your presumption of enemy action will still be wrong twenty-nine-point-sixty-three percent of the time, but that’s less than a third of the time. Thus if it is important to be alert to enemy action—if it is worth more to you to detect enemy
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action than to avoid suspecting it when it does not exist—it will be profitable to guess that enemy action has occurred when you observe three reasonably related incidents.”

“Good God,” he says. “You’re serious.” He shakes his head abruptly. “Sorry. I hadn’t—I didn’t know you were a math genius.”

“I am not a math genius,” I say. I start to say again that these calculations are simple, within the ability of schoolchildren, but that might be inappropriate. If he cannot do them, it could make him feel bad.