Blind Spots, page 18
“If you want, I could look like … her.”
It takes him a moment to understand what she’s saying.
“Jesus Christ,” he’s barely able to say. He slides her off his lap and he stands up, takes a few steps away from her. Feels like he’s been punched in the stomach. Turns to face her again. “Why would you think that?”
She shakes her head as if realizing what a mistake she’s made.
“And a few days ago … That was you, walking around downtown. Looking like her. Why?”
He’s been wanting to ask her this for days but has been afraid of the answer. Afraid she’d take it the wrong way if he was mistaken. You looked at me and thought I was her? But now, after what she’s said, he has no choice.
“I don’t know,” and she looks away. “I think I just … wanted to see what it was like. To look like someone else.”
“But her?”
“I know it was stupid. Maybe I was … wondering how you’d react.”
“… What?”
“You’ve been acting differently, Mark. For a while. I was wondering if it was … the anniversary of her death. You giving away her art. You—”
“You wanted me to do that.”
“Don’t put that on me. I never told you to give it away.”
He waits for a moment, and nods. “I wanted to do it, yes. It’s time. And if I’ve been acting weird, it’s because some weird goddamn shit has been happening to me. Seeing you look like Jeanie sure didn’t help.”
She opens her mouth but nothing comes out. Like there’s something else she wants to say but is afraid to. He can’t imagine this can get any worse.
“What?” he asks.
“Some IA guy came up to me a little while ago and started asking questions about you. Huntington. He said—”
“Jesus. Don’t talk to him.”
“I didn’t.” They look at each other for a moment and he fears that she’s lying to him. Or that there’s still more she isn’t telling him. He shouldn’t have cut her off.
“I just…” he tries to explain. “I hate how they’re trying to dredge up all this old shit. Nobody’s proud of what happened those days, but, my God … I was doing the best I could.”
He realizes as he says this that he spoke while pacing away from her again, breaking eye contact. Wonders if that’s his tell, if it looks to her like he’s lying or withholding.
Which he is.
“You know,” she says after a pause, “you guys get awful touchy whenever that time comes up.”
“You don’t … you don’t know what it was like then.”
“Oh, life was so easy for me? I was blind too, Mark. You aren’t the only one who lost people then.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He knows about her brother, the impact it had on her sister. There’s barely a soul who wasn’t affected by some tragedy. “I meant, what it was like to … to have people expecting you to help them, when you could barely do a thing for yourself.”
“You’re right, I don’t know.” She leans back against the wall. “So why don’t you tell me about it?”
He laughs, sort of. Looks away again and realizes how that appears. So he faces her again, forcing himself to, as if challenging her now. She meets his gaze. Amira has never been one to avoid a challenge.
“So, what, just…” He’s not sure what to say next. “Just tell you all about it? Now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He nods. Stalling to prep himself. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever it is that makes you freeze up now and then. Whatever it is that Huntington’s hounding you about.”
He’s never told her about what happened at Western Market. She’s never asked, yet surely she’s heard rumors.
Those rumors, he realizes, are precisely why she hasn’t asked.
He’s going to be late for work if they really get into this now. He could use that as an excuse. Say he’s in a rush, no time. It would be such an obvious cop-out.
“Huntington wanted to talk to me about what happened at what used to be the Western Market. By the 12th Street canal.”
“My family used to shop there.”
“Yeah.” He sits on the bed. He wonders how long she’s wanted to ask him about this. How much she’d put together from workplace gossip, archival records. “It had been empty two weeks when finally a shipment from some distributor was coming in. Food, water, the works. The store had kept it quiet because they were afraid of a riot, but somehow word got out. They wanted ten cops there, a show of force. This was early June, when some people could still see. The rest of us just were in denial, you know, hazy smudges and all, trying to stumble along, praying it’d get better.”
That sensation so strange and awful, like driving drunk, convinced you’re strong enough to master your failing senses but knowing deep down you’re wrong, that you’re putting yourself and others at risk. “Half the cops had quit or run off or Christ only knows, but I was trying…”
Thickness in his throat, stopping him.
“I know.” Her voice both gentle and tough.
“There was a huge crowd before we even got there. Couldn’t really see ’em, but you can hear that many people. You can feel them. And we’d heard rumors a couple street crews were going to be there, try to steal the food so they could resell it. They’d done that before and we were told to be ready for them, but … Our sergeant, Ross, I’m pretty sure she had the best vision at that point, and … Remember how strong our sense of touch was? You could just brush up against something and know exactly what it was?”
She takes his hand.
“Yes.”
He shakes his head and issues a laugh that sounds strange even to himself. Demonic. Laughing to keep from crying. It doesn’t work.
“I felt hands on me,” and he takes his hand back from hers, runs his right fingers along his left forearm to demonstrate, “and my partner yelled Gun, and someone else, too, and then I heard shots.”
He avoids her eyes by staring out in front of him, at a wall that’s been blank since he donated all the artwork.
“I couldn’t … I couldn’t even see where they were coming from. They sounded like they were coming from my right, and close. And then … people just surged into us. Then another shot and I … I fired back.”
“I probably would have done the same.”
“Twenty people died.”
“I know.”
She can’t know it all.
“The shooting came from all over. But right after I pulled the trigger, that one second when I could feel so many hands on me, right before they backed off—these fingers brushed up against my wrist.” He caresses his forearm again. Crying. “They were so small. Like, a kid’s. Jesus, who’d bring a kid to something like that?”
He shakes his head and he’s crying harder now and she leans forward to wrap her arms around his shoulders.
“I shouldn’t have even been there. Shouldn’t have pulled my gun … on people I couldn’t even see.”
He wonders again if she’d already known about the kids. They’re in the record. Had she always known but been afraid to discuss it, or had she never looked it up and this is new information for her? If this is new, he wonders if is he forever different to her, if he’s the one who’s morphed before her eyes.
CHAPTER 24
Been a bad week for Jonathan Naylor, aka Nayles. First the bust where his boss gets shot and killed by a cop, then the charges going from gunrunning to fucking treason. His attorney’s been telling him the treason will be dropped, it’s a ploy, an attempt to goad them into a plea deal, but still. He’s always believed the maxim that you make your own luck, that you’re your own man, but suddenly all his life is shit and he’s become a mere pawn in a game he doesn’t understand.
And now an even worse morning, or at least an unexpected one. He’s summoned from his cell, told his presence is requested by city police. The same son of a bitch detective who put him away, Owens, wants to talk to him again.
The prison screws take him down a long hallway. Add handcuffs and ankle shackles to his prison wardrobe.
Then marshals appear, escort him onto a bus with the other convicts who have important appointments with judges or cops or executioners.
The long ride downtown, staring through windows so covered with bars that he gets a headache trying to discern what he’s seeing.
In prison, he heard the amateur, weight-room attorneys telling him how, back in the early days of vidders, every prisoner had his vidder taken away. The idea being it made prisoners more compliant. Easier for the screws to fuck with. Took a couple years before some criminal justice attorneys took it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that sight was a right that couldn’t be forfeited even if you had committed murder or rape. Nayles wonders why he’d never heard this. But he’s not the type to follow the news, or to care about those more fucked than he is. He’s just glad he got to keep his vidder. Prison is hell but adding blindness to it would be too much to bear.
Bus ride ends, he’s escorted through the bowels of the downtown police headquarters. Marshals hand him like a baton to two uniformed cops. His shackles and chains jingling like a satanic Santa Claus. Everything your parents warned you about. Naughty, not nice. They make you look and sound criminal so they can then point at you and tell people, See? A criminal.
“Why am I here?” he asks the cops as they lead him down another hallway.
“How the hell would we know? Someone wants to question you, I guess.”
“Why now?”
What new topic could they possibly want to grill him about? He’s been interrogated already, told them to fuck themselves in as many ways as the English language permits plus some new ones he coined. Clever retorts being pretty much the only thing they can’t take away from him.
Unless he really does get the chair.
The cops stop at the door to an interrogation room, unlock it, push him in. Small table, a chair on one side, two chairs on the other. Two-way mirror.
“I want my lawyer here.”
“I’m sure one of our finest public defenders is on his way.”
“Fuck that, I have an actual attorney, and—”
They close the heavy door behind him, leaving him alone and annoyed.
* * *
Down in the basement-level garage, three uniforms finish loading dozens of crates into a white tractor trailer marked “POLICE.”
“They found all of this at Slade’s club?” one of them asks. “Guy must have been trying to take over the world.”
Another cop reads the manifest from a tablet. “Why are we moving this from the station, anyway?”
“Beats me. We’re just the muscle, right?”
Footsteps and they turn. Approaching is a short white man with a dark buzz cut. The blue suit screams Lawyer, but the badge dangling from his pocket clarifies, Fed.
“The FBI will take it from here, gentlemen.” He pats the side of the truck. “Thanks for the muscle.”
* * *
Nayles imagines the interrogation room never even had a clock in it back in the sighted days, all the better to make people stew. He knows the time thanks to the clock at the bottom bar in his vidder’s display, and he can’t help noticing he’s been sitting here a goddamn hour already.
“This is bullshit,” he announces as loudly as he can without actually screaming. The walls are probably soundproof, all the better to hide the beatings. “I gotta use the can, all right? Somebody take me back to my nice warm cell.”
Finally the door opens.
His first thought is that his vidder’s on the blink. Or some unfunny cop prank, an attempt at intimidation.
Because the person who enters is concealed from his vision, as if wrapped in midnight. Darkness moving. Closing the door behind it.
“Who the hell are you?” Nayles asks.
Nayles can discern the rough shape of two legs, two arms, a head. That’s it. The black blur stands there another few seconds.
Then the figure raises one of its arms, pointing it at Nayles.
“What in the—”
And he’s just starting to think that the finger the blur is pointing is awfully fat and long when he hears the beginning of a sound, a sound that no doubt became louder as all the sonic waves blitzed through his auditory canal and struck his eardrum, but his brain is unable to receive those messages from his vestibular nerves and auditory nerves, unable to process what the sounds mean, because half of his brain is no longer in his skull.
CHAPTER 25
Captain Carlyle has a very large family, and it seems to Khouri that every member is represented on his office walls. She sees shots of family reunions—several skin tones and many generations of Carlyles wearing matching T-shirts while standing around a few grills—photos of graduations, weddings, police academy inductions, amateur baseball teams. As a woman, she’s afraid to put up a single picture of a family member lest she be labeled soft and sentimental, yet here the captain has visually documented the hundred or so people most closely related to him. She resents the double standard, but at the same time she mentally tips her cap to a man who cares about his people that much.
“What did you find?” he asks her.
“Nothing. All the cameras Ballantine drove past that night were malfunctioning.”
He leans back in his seat, not liking the news. “Come on. All of them?”
“Every single one, Captain.”
Downed or broken cameras are not uncommon, but they aren’t usually all in the same area like that.
He seems to ponder this a moment, then asks, “You get reports from any other witnesses? Anyone on the road that night say they saw something funny, a black blur instead of a car?”
“No one.”
She lets him work through the ramifications. It’s not hard.
Owens made it all up. There was no black blur in the shape of a car. Unless you were so paranoid that you believed someone hacked all those cameras, made them all go blank at the right time. And unless you thought everyone else on the road that day somehow just didn’t notice, like Owens did, that a car was blacked out.
Maybe it really happened like Owens said and maybe the person found a way to black himself out only to Owens or only to the people he wanted to deceive, but Khouri by nature distrusts any sentence with one maybe in it, let alone two.
“You work with him more closely than I do,” he says. “How’s he seemed to you lately?”
He’s inviting her to toe the thin blue line.
“He’s seemed like Owens.” Thinking, I too can equivocate with the best of them, sir.
“Meaning?”
“What, other than this? And other than him nearly killing Peterson because he thought it was a good idea to shoot a man even though his vidder was busted?”
In other words, Ask yourself that goddamn question and don’t you dare put me on the spot.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll talk to him.”
Someone pounds on the door. Khouri turns and sees a young male officer, out of breath, opening the door without having been invited to.
“What?” Carlyle asks.
“We got a 1–7.” Code for homicide. “Inside the station.”
* * *
Owens notices the commotion later than most. Earbuds in to block out the noise, he’s been absorbed in online searches for Obscura, the company Ballantine told him about in the last moment of his life. A company that may or may not have actually existed.
Once again, he can’t believe he’s doing this, chasing the kinds of ghost stories he’s long ridiculed as paranoid delusions. Most of the sites he finds are clearly the product of diseased minds. Every time he thinks he’s found something interesting—a website with a leaked transcript from a congressional hearing into government surveillance programs, biographical information on past Obscura researchers who eventually met suspicious ends in car crashes, fires, hunting accidents—that same site includes a link to some fire-breathing rant about New World Orders, Zionist conspirators running the banks, sects of sovereign citizens uniting to fight our oppressors, future followers of Reverend Miriam spreading their madness online as they prepare to renounce all technology, et cetera.
He’s heard all this before, usually from people in the back seat of a squad car. Roughly half the people he arrests subscribe to some skewed belief system or another, desperately using those narratives to arrange the chaos of life into a tidy story that explains their predicaments.
Sure, it’s not that you chose to commit a crime, it’s that you were manipulated by forces larger than yourself. Your thoughts are not your own, they were implanted by powers against your will. Schizophrenia writ large, spread online, disseminated to the bored and similarly afflicted. A nation of the delusional, and No, we can’t help it, Your Honor.
Eventually he hears “1–7” penetrate the music in his earbuds. He pulls them out and looks up, asks what’s happening.
“Somebody got shot in one of the interrogation rooms,” a uniform tells him, hurrying past.
Jesus. “One of us?”
“No, a perp. Goes by Nayles.”
His legs propel him out of his chair. How did Nayles get shot in an interrogation room? What cop would do that? And why was a man Owens locked up brought back to the station without Owens being notified?
He’s pondering all these questions and more when Peterson walks up to him.
“Jimmy, what happened?”
“One shot to the head, I’m hearing. Less than half an hour ago.”
“Why was he even here? You call him in?”
“No. Figured you did.”
“I didn’t. I haven’t worked that case in days. The prosecutors have it.”
They stare at each other for a moment, half expecting the other to explain. But there is no explanation, at least not yet.
They head to the interrogation room, but halfway down the hall their path is blocked by Khouri.
“Sorry, guys. That’s enough.”
“We’re the ones who arrested him,” Owens says. “I need to see the room.”
