Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

"Did you think we would get together?"

He looks down at his coffee.

"Then don't tell me it didn't have anything to do with it." She feels herself getting wound up. "Up here, in the world, we collect fingerprints and we make eye contact and we measure blood spatters and interview people who lie to us and we pretend like we don't want each other and that what we're doing has meaning. But what the fuck are we doing? You're with your wife. I'm alone. The dead stay dead. We bag 'em and take 'em away and clean up their blood and so what? We save some girl's life, and we're so busy patting ourselves on the back, we don't even notice that she's been dying since she was twelve. We just move the shit around up here, Alan. We don't change anything. We don't save anyone."

"Who told you we're supposed to save people?"

"Then what?" She cranes her neck.

"We make sure the other guys don't get away with it."

Caroline wants to sleep or to cry, she can't tell which. She looks past Dupree, out the front window of the coffee shop.

"You're tired, Caroline. That's all. You're a little burned out, and you're letting some nutcase get inside your head."

She's ignoring him now, staring out the window and across the street.

"You need to send this guy home. You need to get some sleep. You need-"

Caroline stands and begins walking slowly across the coffee shop.

"Where are you going?" Dupree asks.

She walks to the window and looks out. Across the street, behind the row of parked cars, she can see Pete Decker, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He is yanking on something – the hair of the young girl who answered the door to Pete's apartment. Pete is dragging her by the hair across the sidewalk, toward the door of the apartment building. Two of the boys who were up in Pete's apartment earlier stand patiently on the sidewalk holding big stereo speakers and watching Pete pull the girl.

Caroline walks out the coffee shop door and begins to cross the street.

The girl says nothing as Pete drags her by the hair. Her face has the placid surface of the recently and frequently stoned. In fact, she doesn't resist at all until they reach the doorway, at which point she spreads her arms and calmly gets hold of the door frame. For a moment, Pete can't get her inside. He flicks at her face with the back of his hand and the girl crumples, and Pete gathers himself to finish dragging her inside when he looks up and sees Caroline striding across the street.

"Oh, hey," he says, and lets go of the girl. She slumps in the doorway.

Caroline reaches the curb without slowing. Pete steps out of the doorway and begins to sprint down the sidewalk, but she has the angle. She gets her arms around his waist and is dragged a few steps as Pete tries to run. He smells like cat piss and onions. He twists and punches at her the way he punched the girl; Caroline feels a weak blow glance off her head, and she slides off his waist and down his legs. He tries to run again, but she's got his ankles and Pete Decker crashes down on the sidewalk. He scurries a few feet with her holding his ankles before she can pull herself up and jump onto his back and crawl up, driving the ball of her kneecap between his shoulder blades. The air goes out of him, but he keeps trying to crawl forward. She grabs the scruff of his hair and pushes his face into the sidewalk. Pete continues to struggle, flailing with his arms and legs. Caroline wonders what the hell is taking Dupree so long.

And it's not until she gets one of his wrists and cranks it, and Pete finally gives up and slumps down on the sidewalk, that she looks up and sees Dupree standing there like a civilian, like a fucking tourist next to the gawkers and the kids with the stolen stereo. They're all staring down at Pete Decker, whose face is jammed into the sidewalk and whose nose and lips are bleeding. And they all have the same look on their faces.

"Jesus, Caroline," Dupree says. "You need to get some sleep."

The cold returns at night in Spokane, on just about every night in the winter, even nights like this, when the sun has lied about early spring. At dusk the air loosens, the pooled snow begins to freeze, and the grass shines like it's been sheeted with glass.

Across the street from the coffee shop the patrol officers have arrived. They carry the stolen TV from Pete Decker's apartment, along with plastic baggies filled with pipes and baking soda and allergy medicine and batteries and enough cooked methamphetamine to keep Pete and his young friends stoned until the real spring comes. A handful of people watch from the street. Dupree stands among them self-consciously.

Pete sits quietly on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind his back, trying to reach the dried blood on his nose with his shoulder. When he sees two cops carrying the stolen TV through the front door, Pete tries to get Caroline's attention. "I was gonna give that back just like you said. You didn't give me much time to finish your list."

The father of the girl has arrived – a big man in work boots – and Caroline sees the girl cower in the lobby of the apartment building. Caroline pulls the father aside and points at Pete. "He's facing assault charges for hitting your daughter," she says, and then shakes her head. "Make sure you keep her safe so she can testify. Okay?"

The father nods.

Caroline shakes her head. "What kind of asshole would hit a girl?"

The father looks down. "I don't know."

"Yeah," Caroline says. "Me neither."

The girl emerges from the building with a patrol cop, and the father opens his passenger door.

From the sidewalk, Pete cranes his neck and tries to laugh. "We was just screwin' around, huh, Amber? Tell the cops we was just screwin' around. Amber?"

Caroline walks over and crouches next to Pete so that her body is between him and the girl. Pete pulls back a bit, but when he realizes she's not going to hit him, he smiles. "You didn't give me very much time."

"No," Caroline says. She continues to fill out her report for the patrol cops.

"I could've used a little more time," Pete says.

"Sorry," she says, without looking up from her report.

Amber leaves with her father. Pete watches their car pull away.

The patrol cops come and stand Pete up. He rises easily; he's comfortable in custody, and the cuffs hang naturally on his wrists.

"Hey, I thought of something," Pete says.

"Yeah?" On the report, Caroline checks boxes for assault, possession of drugs, possession with intent to deliver, possession of stolen goods, and resisting arrest.

"Yeah," Pete says. "You asked if Clark ever had a beef with anyone. There was this one guy when we were kids."

"Tommy Kane?" Caroline asks without looking up.

"I don't know that guy. No, this guy was some kind of queer or something. He and Clark used to get into it at the bus stop. This kid named Eli Boyle."

Caroline ignores him.

"I used to have to break up their fights."

Two patrol cops grab Pete by his arms. "Yeah, I hope that helps you," he says. The patrol cops lead Pete away to the car. "Maybe helps me out too?" They push his head down, but he's done this often enough himself, and he slides easily into the backseat. "Maybe you tell my PO how I'm cooperating, okay? Okay?" The back passenger door closes and Caroline looks up to see Pete Decker settle back comfortably and nod to the cop in the front seat, as if he were Pete's driver. The car pulls away.

Dupree joins her on the sidewalk. "You goin' home now?"

"Yeah," she says. "I'll go down and get what the guy's written so far and tell him we'll pick it up on Monday."

"Good," Dupree says, and he looks down at his shoes. A decade ago, when she first started dreaming the old stuff – running away with him, a small town by a lake, kids – Alan's bald spot was the size of a nickel. Now it is a cantaloupe. She wonders if she has aged as obviously, or with her, if it's mostly inside, if there's a hollow spot, an emptiness that was a nickel and then a cantaloupe, and now is a beach ball.