Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

"Nice to meet you, Clark."

"I wish it were under different circumstances," he says.

She thinks, not half as much as I do.

Pete Decker's apartment is on the fourth floor of a seedy building that Caroline knows only because it's across the street from the coffee shop where she and some of the other detectives used to go in the mornings for tea. It is a squat, squalid building at the end of downtown, an old railroad hotel remodeled into flop apartments that house more than their share of criminals and addicts, people in the throes of recovery and teen pregnancy and AIDS, the chronically troubled and luckless. She parks in front of the building and opens the door, climbs the stairs three levels and finds herself in a dark, dank hallway, lit by a single bulb. There are six doors on the fourth floor, profanities scratched into the wood. She reads the graffiti and finds that Tina gives good head, that Joe B. is a motherfucker. None of the doors has a number or a letter. Caroline looks down at her notebook. Pete Decker lives in 4B. It could be any of the six. She checks her watch. Not quite 7:00 A.M. She doesn't have to worry about Pete – if he's even here – skipping out in the morning. As a group, criminals are not early risers.

She leaves the building, happy for the fresh air, crosses three lanes of theoretical traffic, and opens a door into the warm smell of her old coffee shop. She stopped coming in after the barrista – a young bundle of stomach muscles and dreadlocks everyone calls Goose – asked her out one morning.

She walks across the dark floor and smiles at two of the coffee shop regulars, a youngish father and his round, blond, agreeable son, who is torturing a cinnamon roll for information.

"Hey," says the father, who hasn't bothered to learn her name, as she hasn't bothered to learn his; the beauty of coffee shop culture is its sustained surface cordiality, like an office without that irritating work.

"Hey," she says back.

"Haven't seen you here in a while."

"No," she says, and continues to the counter. Luckily, Goose isn't working; the pierced girl behind the counter gives her a warm smile.

"Can I get a twenty-ounce chai tea?" Caroline asks.

"Certainly," the pierced girl says, and the snappiness of this exchange, this entire morning, makes her feel as if something has changed. This is what her life felt like before – normal exchanges with people one step removed from strangers: driving, walking, talking, sitting in a dark coffee shop and indulging in a cup of tea.

She picks out a day-old pastry, pays, and sits at the window, watching Pete Decker's apartment building. No one comes or goes, and she thinks maybe she's missed something – misread his record and the down-and-out address. Ah, but it's early for heavy drug traffic anyway. She's a little groggy, having stayed up all night while Clark the Loon worked on his opus. The tea warms her throat.

She watches the fourth-floor windows, but no lights come on. Just then a car, an old beat-up Honda Civic, pulls up to the curb in front of the building. Caroline grabs her tea and stands.

"See you," says the father as he wipes frosting from his boy's mouth.

"Okay," says Caroline, and she pulls on her gloves and leaves the coffee shop. She jogs across the street just as a young woman steps out of the car. From first glance Caroline sees that the woman is a meth addict, one of those forty-year-old twenty-year-olds that the drug produces, eyes red and deep-socketed, skin sallow and puckered.

The girl sees her coming and her fried nerves go off scattershot; her arm cocks and her lip twitches. "What? What?"

"You live here?" Caroline is friendly, firm, and holds out her badge. "In this building?"

"I didn't do nothing."

"I'm sure you didn't. It's okay. I need to talk to your neighbor."

"Who?"

"Pete."

The girl answers reflexively. "Don't know him."

"Sure you do," Caroline says. "Look, I just need to see if he's okay. Have you seen him in the last few days?"

"No," she says. "Something happen to Pete?"

"I don't know yet."

The girl thinks about it for a moment and relaxes. "I wouldn't mind if somebody finally killed that fucker. He steals everything."

"Will you show me his door? I won't tell him that you did."

The girl shrugs again. "If he ain't dead, I wouldn't want to be the one to wake him up. He got a fuckin' temper, him."

"Oh, I'll be gentle," Caroline says. She follows the girl back up the stairs, into the fourth-floor landing. The girl points at a door and nods solemnly. Caroline nods back and hands the girl her tea, then waits for her to make her way quietly down the stairs.

When she hears the girl's door ease closed two floors below, Caroline smells around the door. It stinks, but she isn't sure if it's that stink. Caroline puts her ear to the door. Nothing. She knocks on the door to Pete Decker's apartment. She rests one hand on the nine-millimeter in her shoulder harness, and with the other reaches for the doorknob. She is surprised when the knob turns and the door opens, and she finds herself staring at an even younger girl, about sixteen, wearing nothing but a flannel shirt.

"Hi," the girl says cheerily.

"Don't answer the fuckin' door," says someone, presumably Pete, who is also presumably alive, in a tangle of blankets on a mattress on the floor. Caroline steps in, past the girl. The apartment consists of this one room, about twelve feet by twelve feet, nothing inside but the mattress and a new thirty-two-inch color television across from it. The walls are chipped and covered with shit and there are bags of chips and cookies all over. There are six people along the walls of the room, boys and girls, teenagers, and they all have the blank eyes and cat-box smell of heavy meth users.

She recognizes Pete from his mug shot. Alone on the mattress, he sits up, pissed off and bare chested. "What the fuck time is it?" Pete stands and he is naked, as skinny as the teenagers in the room – a bantam rooster, hard and small. Quarter-size bruises cover his body. "Don't answer the fuckin' door unless I tell you to!" Pete yells again, and he shoves the sixteen-year-old girl, who looks like an empty flannel shirt as she flies across the room.

Caroline steps toward him, inside the range of his fists. She grabs him by the throat just as he swings at her. She deflects most of the punch, and catches the rest in the neck; she is taller than he expected, and not as easy to move. This is a guy used to hitting down at his women. Caroline gathers herself, tightens her grip on his neck and swings her knee up into his balls. He grunts and slumps, and she pushes him back down on the mattress. He rolls over onto his side, moaning.

"You must be Pete," Caroline says, and shows her badge. She picks up Pete's jeans, feels in them for a weapon, and comes away with a long pocket-knife that she slides into her own pocket.

"Anybody in here eighteen?" she asks the owl-eyed teenagers. "Yeah, I didn't think so. You've all got twenty seconds to get your clothes and get out of here. And if I ever see any of you in here again, you're going to jail."

As Caroline continues to look for weapons, the teenagers scramble into their shirts and shoes, grab their bags of Doritos, and hurry out the door. Only the flannel girl is left. She pulls on a pair of pants and wipes her bloody lip with a white T-shirt. "Where do I go?"

"You his girlfriend?"

"Yeah."

"How old?"

The girl considers lying. "I'm sixteen," she says finally.

Caroline gives her two dollars. "Go to the coffee shop across the street and get yourself a cup of hot chocolate. I'll be over in a minute." The girl leaves and Caroline turns back to Pete, who makes no move to cover himself or his sore testicles.