The Bright Spot Read online

  “He told me to watch myself.” Murphy pondered the irony of the moment. Any cop who starts pondering irony should consider a career change. Maybe they all should. He sat up, fixed me with his deep brown eyes. “Here’s their story: The three pool guys confessed. They said they never loaded their ’ware up Sunday morning when they got the call, that they used their jobs as cover to attack Kennemeyer to steal from him, and because they have a deep-seated hatred of homosexuals.”

  “Deep-seated.”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Three guys who only got up one morning and went to work just had the rest of their lives stolen from them. All they were good for now was suffering. That was five lives and counting. “You don’t believe any of that shit, do you?”

  “Course not. I saw the damn visuals from those three. They were running ’ware or there wouldn’t be any visuals. But it doesn’t matter. It’s over for me. Nobody can even tell me who they did all this confessing to. They’ve been transferred to an undisclosed location for their own safety, standard procedure in hate-crime cases.”

  We reached our destination, and the cruiser bleeped softly in case we hadn’t noticed.

  “What about Salvador?” I asked.

  “Who? The Maryland officer I talked to about that case is now on unspecified leave. Hell, maybe he’s in Sri Lanka. They never heard of a Jesse Salvador murder case or a James Dumfries disappearance, and if I have the intelligence God gave a flea, I never have either.”

  “Is that why we went out and talked to the old lady?”

  “No. We did that because I’m a stubborn son of a bitch who doesn’t like being told what to do, and I thought we might get lucky, get some answers.”

  “We didn’t do so badly.”

  “We got confirmation that Galatea Ritsa was real, an associate of Kennemeyer and Dumfries, who, as it so happens, liked to fuck each other. That might be good material for you, but it doesn’t exactly solve any crimes in the here and now. This is as far as I go unless I got something real to go on. You’re in this, Nick, you and Lu both, someway, somehow. Cover your ass, fine. But don’t ask me to come clean it up for you. If in your research for this bullshit role you’re playing, you find something I can use, you let me know. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “And people think the government’s inefficient.”

  “Listen here. I’m good at what I do. But I can’t make bullshit smell like anything else. Those names you gave me, the ones you were supposedly having the little meetings with? Seems they conspired to launder the wrong money, the kind that rats you out when it gets caught. They’ve been living in a minimum security prison in Arizona for the past two years. It’s a much nicer place than they’re going to put you before this thing is over, if you don’t fade away while you still can. Let me connect the dots for you—if the pool guys didn’t do it, you’re next in line.”

  I didn’t see any reason to hang around after a line like that. I got out of the cruiser. He hadn’t come to the logical place next to Murphy’s this time, but at the other end of the street where the bus stops. The cruiser sat like a big shiny boulder in a rushing torrent of high-speed traffic. Murphy’s window slid down.

  “I couldn’t help noticing you didn’t drop in on your folks,” I said, pointing my thumb down the street.

  “Is it somebody’s birthday? Somebody file a complaint? Nobody wants me around there. I was doing you a favor. If you want to be seen with a cop, that’s your business, but it won’t exactly help your standing in the community. Leave this whole thing alone, Nick. It’s a dead end. Folks want it that way. Understand?”

  “It must be hard, doing your job.”

  “Only when you try. Save your empathy for your characters.” His window started up.

  “Wait.” The window stopped where it was. I stepped up, leaned on the roof of the cruiser. “Lu and I were doing a job with Salvador, scamming Dumfries out of his fortune, at least that’s what we thought we were doing. It was a phony time-travel number with me as the young Dumfries and Lu as Galatea. Salvador had recordings—a Dear John scene in a diner—though I’m thinking there was more going on there. The old guy flipped out and came up to me while Lu’s in the john. He tells me about Galatea getting killed the next day, says I’ve got to stop it. Tells me to find Kennemeyer. After Salvador stiffed us, I finally did. That’s how the whole thing got rolling. Salvador took him to an old diner in DC, probably by limo. I can send you some photos. I don’t know where we played our scene—a set in a warehouse somewhere. A limo ride. I can give you a description of the driver and the vehicle.”

  The window went up, the door opened, and Murphy emerged. “Why in the fuck did you have to tell me all that?”

  “I didn’t have to. I could’ve just let it alone, kept it under my hat, wherever I’m supposed to put it. You just said you’re good at what you do. Well, do it. But don’t give me this it’s-what-folks-want routine when you fade. What folks want is for you to be good at what you do, to do the right thing instead of what you’re told to do. Then they might get an even break for a change. If you don’t like me telling you the truth, you can ignore it, like cops usually do. Let the pool guys do some hard time. After all, it’s what folks want—the good folks at the top who decide which laws you’re enforcing this week and which lives matter.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. He might slug me, haul me in—I had no idea. But I didn’t care. He’d pushed a button, I guess. Don’t give me the will of the people when the fix is in. I took my chances.

  “Lu ever say you remind her of her mother?” he asked.

  “Never.”

  “Ask her sometime. One tough lady. When I was ten years old and giving my mother some grief, Bea says to me, since I was so righteous maybe I should become a cop. She meant it as a putdown. I showed her.” He laughed, shaking his head, pondering irony again. “All right. We’ll play it your way. I’ll see what I can do with this better-late-than-never information without getting us both busted or killed. In the meantime, don’t share it with anybody else.”

  “Even Jackson?”

  “Especially Jackson. He doesn’t like you one little bit.”

  “I’m hurt.” I gave him a description of the driver and the limo, and he wrote all that down.

  “You got a script for the diner scene?”

  I tapped my head. “It’s all up here. I’m a pro. I never forget a line.”

  “Write it up and send it to me. Maybe it means something.”

  “Lu and I will record you a command performance. Is it safe to be sending you something like that?”

  “Anything incriminating in it?”

  “Not that I can tell. It’s all ‘Please give me one more chance’ and lines like that. It sure sounds like the guy was in love with her, no matter what the former Mrs. Dumfries thought.”

  “Maybe they were acting. The woman said he had a passion for the theater. Besides, everyone can act a little.” He wrote down an address and phone number, tore it out, and gave it to me. “Send everything here—that address is only remotely connected to me, so it should be okay. Use this number to call me if you need to, but don’t call just to chat. I’ll contact you when I know something. If you haven’t heard from me in a couple of days, or anybody else starts sniffing around, I’d suggest you and Lu leave town.”

  He got back in the cruiser and the window zipped open. “I’d shake your hand but you’d have to move to another neighborhood. Second thought, maybe I should do just that.” He smiled and gave me a little wave. “Be careful,” he added as the window zipped up, and he was gone. I’d finally graduated from “Watch yourself.”

  I looked around my neighborhood and felt good, lighter for my confession. I knew I’d probably just let Lu and me in for a world of trouble, but I felt the same giddiness I felt coming here with her the first time. This being Nicholas Bainbridge was all righ
t. He had good instincts, did Nick, and he’d had one helluva Monday— rubbing elbows with the rich and lustful—engaged to be married—so upstanding, policemen wanted to shake his hand—and not just to plant evidence.

  I imagined our house down at the end of the street, all lit up, waiting for the bridegroom’s return. That’s a scene I could definitely play. The night was young, and so was I—a lot younger than when I decided to become Nicholas Bainbridge. A dry west wind blew talk and laughter up the street from Murphy’s three blocks away. It sounded like so much mush up here—warm, pleasant mush. I started home.

  There was also a faint, persistent buzz off to my left, and I looked that way. The road crew was at work on the next street parallel to ours, where the latest well-dressed dogs had started moving in. The sound came from the big lights. The workers were strictly mime.

  I looked between the narrow houses as I passed. Each gap offered a brightly lit scene of the ’ware workers’ wild, inhuman dance. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, like watching cannibals dancing around a cauldron of flesh. Only these people weren’t dancing around it. They were in it. The lives devoured here filled overfed guts who didn’t live around here, people like Trey Kennemeyer, wherever he was. Guys who never had—and never would—given the ’ware a try, would never make something of themselves.

  The closer I got to home, the more the vague Murphy’s noise on the wind resolved into Dell’s lamentations, Sylvia’s laugh, Clinton and Lyndon arguing and speechifying, Vincente screeching a falsetto punch line. Behind all that, Big played for the umpteenth time. They all became soundtrack for the workers dancing in the lights, saying nothing, understanding nothing, remembering nothing, making something of themselves. The system worked, the politicians were always saying. Worked like a fucking charm.

  Maybe I’d listened to too many of Kennemeyer’s speeches, the poor old bastard, but I couldn’t look at the workers anymore without a slow rage rising up inside me. How did things get to be like this? How were we ever going to find our way back?

  Laughter erupted from another Vincente punch line, and I tore my eyes away from the workers and looked toward home.

  I stopped.

  There, under the streetlight halfway down my block, four members of the road crew stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the street, facing me. Their dead eyes, all eight of them, were trained on me.

  I took a step back, and they started walking briskly and purposefully up the middle of the street toward me.

  I looked left at the work site, where all the workers were rising from putting down their hoses, their picks, their lasers, to face me, like a cast rising from their final bow. Then they started walking, climbing over fences, knocking obstacles out of their way with an indifferent sweep of their hands, all headed my way.

  I turned on my heel and ran back the way I came, hollering my head off. It took them a couple of beats to react, then they all started jogging at once, at the most efficient pace for moving the human resource from one site to another quickly without undue wear and with maximum endurance. They could keep it up for miles, hours. Me, I was doing the hundred-yard dash. There wouldn’t be much left after that. I was an adrenaline rocket. No one seemed to hear my hollering but the dogs, who quickly drowned me out. I saved my breath. When that gave out, I was done for.

  The first workers I’d passed now emerged from between the houses ahead of me, and I veered left. I scooped up an abandoned baby doll from the front yard and heaved it in a high arc, stripped off my jacket, and ran between two strategically chosen houses. Wrapping the jacket around my fist, I vaulted the fence just as baby doll bought the farm on the other side of the yard, and—relying on sheer surprise, sheer audacity that anyone would be suicidal enough to cut through this yard, of all yards—made it to the back fence before the resident dogs got it together and managed to kill me. I gave up the jacket to a pair of flying jaws and vaulted into the alley on a dead run, as the pack slammed into the chain link with furiously gnashing teeth, and the whole fence swayed. I fell, rolled, and kept on running. There were five of them—a pit bull bitch and her three sons, plus a rottweiler male as big as a pony. Buck, whose faith in fences was unshakeable, liked to linger behind their yard to work them into a killing frenzy, but that was nothing compared to the fury I heard behind me as they lit into the waves of workers trespassing through their territory.

  None of the workers appeared in the alley in front of me to cut me off. I’d funneled them all into a game of follow the leader. Their tactical skills were clearly limited. They had no strategy but relentless pursuit of the victim. Maybe, I thought, I can get out of this alive.

  I looked over my shoulder, and there were about a dozen of them back there, all jogging steadily. One of the guys out front had a pit bull hanging off his right arm. He didn’t let it bother him any. Who needed a strategy? The boom of shotgun fire filled the night, as Mr. Lester, the owner of the dogs, opened fire on the stragglers. A dark shape fell from the fence into the alley.

  A dozen pairs of eyes were still trained on me. No one had looked back but me. I tried, someway, somehow, to find more speed in my limbs.

  I was almost to the road. Cars shot by in either direction. Somebody would see this bizarre scene, I was hoping, call the police, call the news, call on somebody besides God. My own prayers had Him covered for half an eternity already, and I wasn’t even a believer.

  By the time I stood tottering on the curb, my lead was less than twenty yards. Cars swept by in an instant. I did a wild, gyrating, arm-waving dance of my own. Before anyone saw me—if anyone was even looking out at the blur—they were gone. I could hear the workers behind me as steady as a marching band.

  Down the road, lumbering northbound, the driverless bus approached, all lit up and nearly empty and across eight lanes of high-speed traffic. It was a chance. I focused on the first lane and waited for as close to a break as I was going to get.

  I plunged into the road, dashing for the first lane markers, remembering the drill—keep your eyes on that fucking mark, land on it, become the thinnest, straightest, most vertical person imaginable, ready to face down the next lane of lethal machines, like charging bulls with jet packs. They sucked the air out of my lungs and tried to tear the clothes from my body, but each miss was a victory deeply cherished. The Bright Spot had done this before, in his misspent youth.

  I made two lanes and was waiting for a break across the third, gathering my strength and nerve—I only had to do the impossible six more times—when the workers followed me into the traffic. Their skills didn’t cover jaywalking on high-speed roads. They had no strategy, no luck, no moves. I looked back in time to see a heavyset man hit head-on. His upper torso soared into the air, bounced off the roof of another vehicle, and slid to the road in a heap. At least a couple of other workers were down, but I hadn’t seen how. One was crawling toward me on his elbows. The others jogged around the fallen.

  With the first impact, a siren began to wail, and the southbound lanes came to a complete stop. I’d lost my strategic advantage. I kept running between the cars, against the stopped traffic, staying low. The surviving workers kept coming, eight or nine of them. They were gaining on me, with the same steady, upright jog-along. Their skill set likely didn’t include cops either, and neglected to instruct them to scuttle low, like a rat.

  “Remain in your vehicles,” a voice from above instructed. “Remain in your vehicles.”

  The workers were right on top of me. I watched for a break and plunged into the still-moving northbound lanes. One of the workers, an unnaturally tall, bald woman, obviously an altered veteran, stepped into the traffic after me and was torn apart, shattered. The northbound traffic stopped before the last of her hit the ground. I crouched down and slunk between the cars. I didn’t even think about asking one of these nice machine-encased people to open up and help a fellow out. They didn’t know me from Adam, never had, never would. How do you do? Glad to meet you. I’m the Bright Spot, don’t mind me, just slinkin
g through.

  Riot cops started dropping out of the sky and shot the remaining workers dead in a matter of seconds. I crawled into the bus and huddled between the seats. A woman across the aisle slipped off her coat and threw it at me. “Here they come,” she said.

  I covered myself and went limp, just as the cops did their dash through. They expected anyone they were looking for to be running like hell or squealing like a cornered rat. Cops are looking to sniff out your guilt and your fear—any guilt and fear will do. It doesn’t even have to have anything to do with them or the law. The only way to escape is not to have either one—or at least to act like you don’t. They let my shameless, senseless, drooling wino under the coat sleep, and the bus started moving in no time. My rescuer snatched back her coat and got off at the next stop. I rode out the route. It was about an hour by the time I made it back around to my stop, where not a trace of what had happened remained, and traffic flowed as usual.

  THE BRIDEGROOM’S RETURN

  13

  “We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”

  —MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein

  I CREPT IN THROUGH THE BACK DOOR IN CASE ANYONE was watching the house, careful not to rouse Buck, easing the door silently closed behind me. I was hoping Lu would be asleep, hoping to clean up before she had a look at me, but every light in the house was on.