Chapter 8
What Mike Heard
Mike lived in a yellow house on Cooper Lane, at the end of a row of yellow houses, with a basketball hoop over the garage and a flag that had been up since the Fourth of July. Tom had been there a hundred times. He had been there for the christening of the girl who had since moved away to Phoenix with her mother. He had helped paint the porch. He had stood in the kitchen at two in the morning, the night the divorce papers came, and said all the wrong things, and Mike had said, it's all right, you're just here.
He parked at the curb and sat for a moment with the engine ticking.
The garage door was half open. A bar of yellow light lay across the drive. Inside, among shelves and boxes and a rack of fishing rods, a man in a gray T-shirt sat on an upturned bucket with his elbows on his knees and a bottle of rye between his boots.
He did not look up.
Tom came in under the door and stood there, with his hands in his coat. It was cold. The place smelled of motor oil and damp cardboard and the sour sweet breath of a man who has been drinking for hours. A radio on the workbench played very softly, a country song with a steel guitar. On the bench, beside the radio, was a framed photograph of a small girl on a pony.
"You came," said Mike.
"I said I would."
"You shouldn't have."
"Probably not."
Mike lifted his head. He had always been a handsome man in a heavy-lidded way, with a boxer's nose and a lazy half-smile, a man whom women told things on trains. He did not look that way now. His face was gray and swollen. There were deep pouches under his eyes, and his hair was standing up on one side, and his lower lip was cracked. He looked like a man who had been left out in the weather.
"Sit," he said. "Pull up a. Take a bucket."
"I'll stand."
"Suit yourself." Mike picked up the bottle, looked at it, and set it down again, hard. "How's Anna?"
"She's worried."
"Yeah. She would be."
"Mike."
"I know. I know." He held up a hand, palm out, like a man stopping a car. "Give me a minute. I'm going to say it. I've been practicing. I've been saying it to the wall for a month."
"Okay."
"Don't, don't look at me. Look at the fishing rods."
Tom looked at the fishing rods. There were nine of them in a rack, neat, with their lines tucked into the eyelets and their reels wiped clean. He and Mike had gone out on the lake together three summers ago, in a leaking boat, and had caught nothing, and had laughed so hard that Mike fell in.
"When we were running," said Mike, slowly, "I had my radio on my shoulder. You didn't. You'd lost your earpiece in the second alley, on the wet leaves. I saw it go. I thought, he'll pick it up on the way back."
"I didn't know that."
"I know you didn't. You'd have said."
"Go on."
"So I'm running behind you. And I'm looking at your back. And I'm, I'm thinking about nothing. About, my knee. It was bad that month. And the radio says something." He stopped, and swallowed. "It was Dispatch. It was Carol. It said, Units on Dock Street, update from the caller. That's what it said. And I thought, okay. And it said, Caller now states possibly a spray can. Repeat. Possibly a spray can, not a firearm."
Tom did not move.
He stood in the freezing garage with his hands in his coat and felt the words arrive, one at a time, like drops of cold water. He did not feel anything. Not yet. He only counted them. Update. Caller. Possibly a spray can. Not a firearm.
"What time?" he said.
"I don't know. I didn't look."
"Mike."
"Right before the fence. A minute. Thirty seconds. I was behind you, I was laboring. I heard it as we turned the corner. I thought, see? It's nothing. It's a kid with a can. I thought, thank God. I thought, I'll tell him in a second."
"You didn't tell me."
"I was fifteen feet back. I was breathing out my ears." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. "I was going to shout. I opened my mouth. And then you said, Show me your hands."
The song on the radio ended. A man began to talk, softly, about the weather.
"And then?" said Tom.
"And then you said, Drop it."
"And then."
"And then he said it."
The garage was perfectly silent.
Mike took the bottle by the neck. He did not drink. He turned it slowly between his fingers, and the amber light went up and down inside, and a drop ran down the side of the glass and fell into the dust.
"He said, It's paint."
For a time neither of them spoke.
It was strange. Tom had expected to be struck. He had expected the earth to open, or a great black wave to break over his head. He had spent a month bracing for it. And now it had come, and he stood in the cold garage in the thin yellow light, and noticed that his feet hurt. There was a nail in his shoe. A faint smell of gasoline. A moth was battering at the bulb.
"Say it again," he said.
"It's paint. Three words. Maybe, maybe four. I think it was, It's just paint." Mike's voice was dull and exhausted and quite steady. "He said it quick. He said it high, like, like it was cracking. He was looking at you. He had his hands up. I was behind you, to your left. I could see his face past your shoulder. And I could see the can. He held it out. Like this."
He lifted his right hand, and held it out, loosely, between finger and thumb, with the palm turned up.
Tom looked at the hand.
"I didn't understand it," said Mike. "It took me a second. I'm slow. You know I'm slow. I heard the words, and my head said, what? And I was still working it out, and then. And then you."
"Fired."
"Fired."
"Twice."
"Yes."
"I didn't hear him."
"I know."
"I didn't hear him, Mike. I swear to God. I didn't hear one word."
"I know you didn't." Mike put the bottle down. His hand was shaking so hard that it chattered against the floor. "That's what I keep telling myself. He didn't hear. He was ten feet closer, and he was yelling, and his earpiece was out, and he was scared out of his mind. He couldn't have heard."
"I didn't."
"I know."
"Then why."
"Why what?"
"Why didn't you say?" Tom's voice cracked, and he heard it, with a kind of distant surprise. "Why didn't you tell Bell? You were sitting right there. You were under oath. They asked you. They said, did you hear the subject say anything, and you said no."
"Yes."
"You said you couldn't make out words."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Mike looked up.
He did not say anything for a moment. His eyes were red and wet, with a rim of white all round. He had the face of a man who has been climbing a long hill and has just reached the top and found nothing there.
"Because of Ross," he said.
It had been the morning after.
He told it flatly, in order, as Tom had once told it to Bell. He had been called in at six. He had gone upstairs to the sergeant's office, with a coffee, in yesterday's shirt. Ross had been sitting at his desk with a single lamp on and the window blind drawn, and had risen and shaken his hand, and asked him how he was.
Fine, he had said.
You're not, said Ross. But you'll be.
He had put Mike in the chair. He had gone round the desk, and sat on the edge of it, with his large friendly face and his big gentle hands, and had said, in the voice of a father, that he wanted to talk about the statement.
"He said, I want you to think very carefully about what you actually heard." Mike's voice was thin and level. "He said, you were running. You were scared. You had adrenaline. People hear things in that state that aren't there. It's been studied. It's called auditory exclusion."
"He said that."
"He said that. He had a, there was a, a pamphlet. He had it on his desk." Mike laughed, a short ugly sound. "I said, Dave, I heard him say it's paint. And he said, Did you?"
"What did he mean?"
"He said, Did you? Or did you hear it afterwards, when you were standing over the body, and your brain went back and wrote it in?"
Tom said nothing.
"I told him I didn't know. That's what I said. I said, I think I heard it before. And he said, You think. And he said, Mike. If you tell Bell that you heard a word, a specific word, and the lab can't confirm it, you're going to look like a liar. And if you look like a liar, so does your partner. And Tom will lose his job. And his house. And probably go to jail."
"He said jail."
"He said it very kindly." Mike rubbed his face with both hands. "He said, This is the most important thing you'll ever do for him. He said, Be a friend."
"And the radio?"
"He knew about the radio. I told him that too. I said, Carol put out an update, she said it might be a spray can. He said, Did Tom hear it? I said no. He said, Then it doesn't matter. It's not relevant to what he knew. He said it was, he said it was a legal point. A reasonable officer standard. It's only about what the man in the room knew."
"That's true," said Tom, slowly.
"It's true."
"It's what the law says."
"It's what the law says." Mike's mouth twisted. "And I sat there, and I thought, that's right. That's exactly right. He didn't know. It doesn't change his state of mind. And Dave said, So leave it out. He said, It'll only give the lawyers something to play with. It'll confuse the Board. He said, If the family's attorney gets it, he'll turn it into a circus."
"And you left it out."
"I left it out." He nodded. He kept nodding, slowly, like a toy. "I left it out of the statement. And Dave left it out of the summary. It wasn't, it isn't in there. You can go and look. There's a line that says Dispatch broadcast an initial report. There's nothing about a second one."
"It's in the log."
"It's in the log. It's in the audio. It's in the dispatch system. Nobody looked." Mike lifted his eyes. "Nobody asked. Bell never asked. She had a thousand things to read, and a deadline, and the chief on the phone, and she looked at what was in front of her, and it was clean. And when she called me in on the ninth, she said, Officer Dunn, did you hear the subject say anything? And I looked at her. And I said, No ma'am. And she wrote it down."
Tom had stopped listening to the end of the sentence. He was looking at something on the wall: a calendar, from a feed store, with a picture of a red barn. October. Beside the fourteenth, in Mike's blocky hand, there was a small black cross.
"Why did you ask me?" he said.
"What?"
"After the interview. On the phone. You said, did you hear anything."
"Yes."
"Why did you ask me, if you'd already decided?"
"Because I wanted you to say yes."
Tom stared at him.
"I wanted you to say, Yeah, I heard it. I wanted you to say, I knew, and I did it anyway. Or I wanted you to say, No, I didn't hear a thing, but now that you mention it. I don't know. I wanted something. Anything but, but what you said." His face crumpled. "You said, I didn't hear anything. In your voice. Like it was nothing. And I knew then that I was the only one who ever would."
"Mike."
"I'm the only one who heard him."
"Mike."
"He's mine, Tom." The words came out in a howl. "I'm the only one in the whole world who heard what he said. He said it to you, and you didn't hear, and I did, and I've been carrying it round for a month like a, like a stone in my pocket. I can't tell anyone. I'm not allowed. If I say it now, I've committed perjury. And if I don't, he just. He just goes."
He bent forward, and put his forehead on his knees, and wept.
It was not a quiet sound. It filled the small garage, and echoed off the metal of the door. Tom stood there, in the cold, and watched his oldest friend sob like a boy. He saw the big shoulders heave. He saw the bald spot beginning at the crown of the head. He saw a wedding photograph on the shelf, face down.
He crossed the floor in three steps.
He did not know what he meant to do. His hand shot out. He had Mike by the collar of his gray T-shirt, and was hauling him upright, off the bucket, and the bottle went over with a clank and rolled across the floor and fetched up against a tire. Mike came up without a sound. He hung in Tom's fist with his eyes shut and his mouth open and his arms at his sides.
"You knew," Tom hissed.
"Yes."
"You sat there. For a month. You came to my party. You watched them clap. You let me."
"Yes."
"You let me sleep."
"Yes."
"You let me sleep, you son of a." He stopped. He was shaking so hard that Mike shook with him. "Why didn't you say?"
"Hit me."
"What?"
"Go on. Hit me." Mike opened his eyes. They were very close, blood-red and swimming. "I deserve it. I'd like you to."
Tom looked at the fist. It had come up all by itself. It hung in the air between them, white at the knuckles, a few inches from a big sagging pale face. He could feel the whole month in it. He could feel his own breath.
He opened his hand.
Mike dropped. He sat down on the bucket as if the strings had been cut. He sat there with his hands hanging between his knees, and his shirt collar torn, and looked up with a lost, gentle, puzzled expression.
"I'm not going to," said Tom.
"Why not?"
"Because I don't know who's guiltier."
They sat there for an hour.
It was past one in the morning. The radio had changed to a late call-in show, with a woman telling a story about her dog. Mike found two cups on the workbench and a thermos of cold coffee, and they drank it without a word. Tom sat on a crate. His coat was open. He found, to his surprise, that he was very hungry.
"It might not be what he said," said Mike.
"What?"
"The audio. It might not say it. I'm only one guy. I'd just come off a bad knee and a long shift and a, a pint of beer at lunch." He gave a wan little smile. "I might've imagined the whole thing. That's what Ross said."
"Do you believe that?"
"No."
"Then why say it?"
"Because it'd be easier."
They sat.
"Listen," said Mike. "I'm going to tell you something. And it's going to sound crazy."
"Try me."
"I keep smelling paint." He scratched the back of his head. "In the car. In the patrol car, I mean. It started about two weeks after. I'd get in, and it'd be there. Like someone had been spraying. I had the thing cleaned. I had it detailed. They said they didn't smell anything. And then, last Wednesday, I found a mark."
"A mark."
"On the steering wheel." Mike held out his hand, and made a small curve in the air with his finger. "A smear. Black. Like a thumbprint. Right where I put my hand. I wiped it. It came off on the rag. And I sat there for an hour, with the rag, thinking, where'd that come from?"
Tom did not say anything.
"And I hear it," said Mike. "I know how it sounds. I hear a, a tapping. In the glove box. Like a coin. Or a key. I thought it was the heater. But it doesn't stop when I switch it off."
The coffee in Tom's cup trembled.
"Have you," he said, and had to stop. He wet his lips. "Have you seen anyone?"
Mike looked at him.
"What do you mean, seen?"
"I mean. Anywhere. In the street. Out of the corner of your eye." He had begun, again, to rub his thumb across the ring on his left hand. "A boy."
For a moment neither of them moved. A car went by outside, on Cooper Lane, and its lights crawled across the wall of the garage and slid away. Mike's face, in the yellow bulb, was an odd, loose, hungry thing, caught halfway between horror and relief.
"No," he said, at last. "No. I haven't. But I think about him."
"All the time?"
"Every second I'm awake." Mike spread his hands. "Is that what it is, with you? Is that what's happening?"
"I don't know."
"Tom."
"I don't know. I don't know what it is." He put the cup down on the concrete, carefully, as if it were made of glass. "Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's what Evans says. Stress. Grief. I'm tired. I don't know."
"But you see him."
"Sometimes."
"What does he do?"
"Nothing." Tom let out a breath. "He doesn't do anything. He just looks."
Mike nodded slowly. He did not seem afraid. He seemed only to be taking it in, with the sad, tired attention of a man who has just heard that an old house is going to be pulled down.
"Then you're luckier than me," he said.
"How?"
"Because he's looking at you."
At two, Tom stood to go.
He stood in the open door of the garage with his hands in his coat pockets, looking down the dark yellow row of the lane, and felt the cold go in at his collar. He was very tired. He was a long way past it. He felt like a man who has swum out beyond the line of the buoys, and turned, and seen how far off the beach has gone.
"What are you going to do?" said Mike, behind him.
"I don't know."
"You can't tell anyone."
"I know."
"If you tell, they'll call it perjury. They'll go after me. Ross will say, Dunn's lying. He'll say I've been drinking. He'll show them the bottle." His voice was quite calm. "I'm not asking you to protect me. I just want you to know what it'll cost."
"I know."
"Then what?"
"I need to hear it," said Tom. "The call. The update. Carol's voice. If it's there. If it's on the log. I need to hear it with my own ears."
"Pam can pull it."
"Pam Hollis?"
"She works the dispatch archive. Third floor. You know her. She likes you."
"She'd be breaking the rules."
"Everyone's breaking the rules, Tom." Mike gave a crooked grin. "It's the only way anything gets done."
Tom nodded.
"Tell her," said Mike, "to look for the second call from the caller. Not the first. The first is on the report. Tell her to look for the one at ten-thirty-nine. Twelve minutes after. Linda something. A woman's voice. She sounds frightened."
"How do you know?"
"Because I looked," said Mike. "Last week. At four in the morning. I went in on my own pass, and I sat in the dark, and I listened to it twenty times. And then I put the headphones down, and I threw up in the wastebasket, and I went home."
He held out his hand.
Tom took it. It was damp and warm and rough. They stood in the doorway, shaking hands like men at a graveside, and neither could let go.
"Thanks," said Tom. "For telling me."
"Don't thank me."
"I'm not forgiving you."
"I know."
"I don't forgive me, either."
"I know," said Mike. "That's why you came."
Pam Hollis worked a corner of the third floor, behind a glass partition, in a room full of screens. She was fifty-five and soft-spoken, with a gray bob and wire glasses on a chain, and she called everyone sweetheart, including the chief. She had been a dispatcher for twenty-six years, and an archivist for the last six. She had once sat with Tom for an hour in the back of an ambulance, in the rain, while a woman died.
"Honey," she said, when he told her. She put down her sandwich. "You know what you're asking."
"Yes."
"It's an open file. It's evidence. I'd lose my job."
"I know."
"And you're an involved party. You shouldn't even be on this floor."
"I know, Pam."
She looked at him for a long time over the tops of her glasses. He stood in front of her desk, in his Records uniform, with his hands at his sides, and made no attempt to hide anything. He knew what he looked like. He had not slept for two nights. He had seen it in the bathroom mirror that morning, with a kind of detached interest: the gray skin, the red-rimmed eyes, the stubble. He looked, he thought, like a man in a photograph of a disaster.
"Sit," said Pam.
He sat.
She turned to the screen, and typed, and the sound of her nails on the keyboard was quick and light. She frowned. She scrolled. Her lips moved, a little, over the numbers. After a moment, she said, in a different voice, "Well. That's odd."
"What?"
"There's two. There's the first call, at ten-twenty-six. That's the one on the report. Possible armed subject. And there's a second." She tapped the screen. "Ten-thirty-nine and, oh, it's forty-four seconds past. Same caller. Same number. But it's, it's not flagged. It was never attached to the incident file. It's sitting by itself in the general log."
"Play it."
"Tom."
"Please."
"I could lose my."
"Pam."
She took off her glasses. She wiped them on the hem of her cardigan, slowly, one lens and then the other. When she put them back on, her hand was not quite steady.
"Headphones," she said, and passed them across the desk.
He put them on.
There was a click. A rushing sound, and then a crackle, like fat in a pan. A woman's voice, fast and breathless and high, speaking in the confused hurry of someone on a bad line.
Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?
It's me again. It's, I called before. About the boy.
Ma'am, can you give me your name?
Linda. Linda Hayes. I'm at the bus stop. I called about the boy near the tunnel, the one with the, with the thing in his hand.
I have that. Officers are responding.
Oh, thank God. Listen. Listen, I need to tell you. I think I got it wrong. A gasp. A sob of breath. I think I made a mistake. I went back, to look. I walked back down, and there's paint. There's paint all over the wall. Big letters. And there's a can, there's a can on the ground, and I think that's what he was holding. I think it was a spray can. I think he was just a kid.
Ma'am.
It wasn't a gun. I don't think it was a gun. Please. Please tell them. I don't want, I don't want anyone to get.
Ma'am, I'm putting that through now.
Please.
Stay on the line. I'm putting out an update.
A scrape. A tick. The faint, small, distant voice of another woman, calm and practiced, who said, Dock Street units, update on your call, and went on, and Tom took the headphones off and set them on the desk.
He sat quite still.
The time stamp, in small green numerals in the corner of Pam's screen, said 22:39:44.
The caller's name was Linda.
She walked back to look.
She went back, and saw the paint, and called, and said she was sorry.
He did not know why that was the part that undid him. A stranger. A woman at a bus stop. She had been frightened, and she had made a mistake, and then she had gone back, in the dark, to see if she was wrong. And when she had found out, she had called at once, in a panic, and said please, please, tell them.
Please tell them.
And forty seconds later, a man in an alley had shot a boy in the chest.
"Tom?" said Pam. She had come round the desk, and was bending over him with her hand on his shoulder. "Sweetheart? You've gone gray."
"I'm all right."
"You're not."
"I need a minute."
"Take it." She squeezed his shoulder, hard. Her voice dropped. "I'll tell you something, and then I'll tell you to forget I said it. I've been in this room twenty-six years. I've heard a lot of calls. And that one's been sitting in my head for a month."
He lifted his eyes.
"I listened to it the first night," said Pam. "On my own. After the news. I thought, somebody ought to. And I was going to say something. I swear to God I was. I went to Ross's office. I stood in the hall. And Ross came out, and said, Pam, honey, don't you worry about that, it's not relevant. And he was so kind." She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. "And I went back to my desk. And I've been sitting here ever since. Like a, like a coward. Waiting for somebody to ask."
Tom looked at her for a long moment.
Then he said, slowly, and without any heat at all, "Everyone's been waiting for somebody to ask."