Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

She wads up the note and throws it to the floorboard of her car. Then she pulls out her cell phone and calls the front desk. The sergeant says he just checked on the Loon in Interview Two. "He's still at it."

"Thanks. I'll be back in a little while."

"So what's this about?" the sergeant asks. "What's he writing in there?"

"My resignation," Caroline says.

She hangs up the call and is about to drive back to the cop shop when she looks up and sees the sun at the horizon, maybe twenty minutes from setting. She's been at work now for twenty-eight straight hours. She looks down at the phone in her hand and taps out a number that she knows by heart but hasn't dialed in months.

"Hey," she says when a man answers. "Is this a bad time?"

When he says it isn't, she feels herself slump forward. "Look," she says, "I really need to talk. Is there any way you could meet me for coffee?"

Dupree is waiting at the coffee shop, the same place she visited this morning. It feels like a week since she's been here, since she came downtown to see if Pete Decker was dead. The pierced girl is bringing Dupree a cup of coffee. She smiles when she sees Caroline: "Another chai?"

Alan Dupree stands up. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt beneath a denim jacket. "Hey there." He's a little shorter than she is, and a lot balder. He has softened a bit around the middle since he took retirement from the police department six months ago. Even so, the blue eyes and the easy movement are the same as they've always been, the same as the day she met him thirteen years ago. And when he sits down she feels the old stuff, the sharp attraction in her throat, the desire to forget things she knows to be true.

She clears her throat. "Thanks for coming."

"My pleasure. You saved me from pinochle with the in-laws."

"How's Debbie?" Caroline asks. Dupree and his wife split up for a short time last year, just before Alan retired, and Caroline imagines their resuscitated marriage as tentative in some way, incomplete. Or maybe that's just what she likes to imagine.

"She's good. We're doing fine. She likes me better retired."

"And the kids?"

"They like me too. Staci asked me today what boys use their wieners for."

"Yeah, I've been wondering that myself."

"I told her nobody knows for sure."

"And how's the dark side?" Caroline asks. Since retiring, Dupree has worked as an investigator for a couple of defense lawyers, applying the same knowledge and energy to freeing bad guys that he once used to catch them.

"Great," he says. "The evil one gives great bennies."

Caroline has known other cops who retired and went to work immediately for defense lawyers, splitting from themselves, revolting against the framework that held them in place. She thinks about her own recent crisis and wonders if she could ever work for the other side like that. She doesn't think so.

"I don't think you called me down here to ask what boys do with their wieners."

"Actually…" Caroline tries to smile at his joke, but her eyes are drawn down to the table and her cup of tea.

Dupree reaches out and squeezes her hand. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," she says. "There's this…" And she starts to call it a case, but she catches herself and suddenly it's all so ridiculous, so unlikely, she has the urge to simply drop it, go home and forget the whole thing. Perhaps she's known all along she was being obsessive and irrational, but it seemed harmless until now, when she can imagine the look of concern on Dupree's face.

"Tell me," he says.

And though she doesn't want to, she's too tired to not talk. She starts slowly, Friday at nine, and she can hear herself pronouncing the right words – Davenport, eye patch, homicide, confession, legal pads, twenty-one hours – but she can tell by the look on Dupree's face that the story is not translating, that he's not getting it – why she'd spend the whole weekend running down the people this guy knows, making sure they're still alive (she thinks it must sound like a normal murder investigation in reverse, starting with the killer and looking for the body). "I know it sounds crazy, Alan, but you can see how I got caught up in this, right?"

He doesn't say anything.

"You think I'm losing it," she says.

"When was the last time you slept, Caroline?"

"I know what you're thinking-"

"When?"

"Night before last."

"Two days without sleep. Are you drinking? Taking something?"

"No." She laughs, or makes that sound anyway; it feels like a cramp in her chest.

"You call Spivey at some point during all of this?"

"Yes," she says. "He told me he wouldn't authorize overtime."

"So you're not even getting paid for your breakdown," Dupree says. "Nice."

She laughs in spite of herself. "Look, this guy did something, Alan. I can feel it."

He is a believer in intuition too, and for the first time, he seems to consider her seriously. Or maybe he's just being nice. "You check girlfriends? Wife?"

"Ex-wife," she says.

"She alive?"

"Oh yeah. In fact, when I saw her, she was full of spunk."

"Who's with the lunatic now?"

"Nobody."

"You left him down there?"

"I can't charge him with anything. But he isn't going anywhere. I took his shoes and his belt."

Dupree looks confused. "He a suicide?"

"Probably not. I just knew he wouldn't go anywhere without his shoes."

For the first time Dupree smiles, and gets that look of pride, the one that used to sustain her. "Look, just send the guy home, Caroline. Before it gets any weirder. Tell Spivey to pick him up Monday and they can start over."

"Okay," she says, to placate him, to drop the subject. "You're right."

He takes a drink of his coffee. "You knew I was going to say that. You brought me down here to ask me something you already knew the answer to?"

"No." The breath catches in her throat.

Dupree just watches her.

"Look," Caroline says. "How many confessions have you heard? A thousand? We arrest a guy inside a house and he confesses to breaking in. Or he confesses that he killed the girl whose blood he happens to be wearing. We can see that. We call it a confession when some asshole describes for us the world we can see with our own fuckin' eyes.

"But this guy today… I mean, did it ever occur to you that there is another kind of confession, maybe a more important kind?

"What I'm trying to say is-" She's frustrated by her inability to communicate to him. "Maybe there's a whole other world, Alan. And maybe it's made up of all the intentions and the things we don't do, the things we don't say. The things we want. Maybe there's a place where all of our ideas go, our desires, and it doesn't matter whether we acted on them or not, in this other world they still have… power."

And finally she looks up at him and she can see that he wants to know, but he can't possibly. How can he when she doesn't even know.

"God, you need to get some sleep," he says quietly.

"Maybe there aren't names for the crimes we commit."

"What the hell does that mean, Caroline?"

"I… I don't know." She closes her eyes and thinks about Clark Mason and the way he uses that word "confession," the purity and freedom of it, the way he seemed to just cut loose, to talk – or to write, actually. "I wanted you and Debbie to split up," she blurts. "I never told you that. I never acted on it. But it's what I wanted."

"Oh, come on, Caroline," Dupree says. "That had nothing to do with it. You can't take responsibility for what happens to other people."

"Did you think when you left Debbie that we would get together?"

His answer catches in his throat. "That wasn't why-"