Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

He used to consider the age of the deceased and compare it with his own. He'd think two more years and he's dead, three years left, eleven to go. This boy in the grass is no more than twenty, maybe twenty-five. Santos reads the obituaries of his cases. He still makes bargains about natural causes. Heart disease.

MS. Something exotic and cruel. Would he be happy enough to die at fifty, at fifty-three?

He says, "They hide in the landing gear and hang on for the ride. Every now and then they fall asleep, or they're not ready. And then the doors open."

The neophyte looks up, then down at the body, the surprise on his face telling a story of human flight, of falling like a stone through long seconds to the promised land.

Barbados sniffs. "Third bird this week."

The neophyte's partner is swinging his head, looking over both shoulders. "I don't know, this just feels like Brooklyn."

Barbados toes at the corpse's arm and lifts it off the ground and delicately places it over the head. Backstroking swimmer. "Now it's Queens."

In the car, Barbados takes them between empty lots and rollercoaster ruins. They pass a patchwork of trailers and tin sheds, plots of weedy flourishes clicking with ice, dead space compressed by the shapes of more dead space around. They pass a dark street of eyeless brick, a receding forest of I-beams bearing the elevated F train above, high square vaultings where the hollow snapping of pigeons' wings echo like gunfire. Shafts of murky half-light hang from the tracks in an infinity of gauzy curtains. The few cars and pedestrians pass through and pass through, vanishing and reemerging closer as through the slowmotion camera wink of old memory.

They drift to the curb. This street where no one lives crawls with life. In the alleys, a maze of coops, constructions of plastic sheeting and boxes slumped with snow. Tracks in the snow-dust begin nowhere, wander like goat paths and converge at a phone booth down the block where a man in thin leather jacket and baseball cap stamps his feet and leans out of the booth into a shaft of light. A small boy appears in a doorway and heaves a plastic bag of garbage out into the street and goes in again. Barbados falls asleep.

His jaw cradled in the crook of his arm, Santos eyes the fallen eaves across the street, the buckled doorways, thinking law school then the academy, then five years on the street, then five out of uniform, coming up on six now, and still he wanders like an alien through streets on which he was a child. He passes his hand over his face, closing his eyes, as though to erase what he has seen, his legs twitching, his lips moving against the tacky cold of the car seat, in his feet somewhere far below he can feel the subway, distant like surf, breaking upon him, and Santos wakes-has he fallen asleep?-his eyes searching the ceiling of the car. Following the train's guts sweep'ng by overhead. The shower of sparks like birthday flares burn piss-holes in the snow. Barbados, awake now, brings the lighter to his face. Up the street a man has stopped at the phone booth as before a confessional. Pusher and his buy shuffle hands in a kind of two-fisted shake. Santos watches Barbados watch the business, his deep black, even innocent, eyes like the eyes of a young girl; like himself, once a child of promise.

The radio under the dashboard emits a fart of murmured static. The buy at the booth straightens and cocks his head, as an animal will at a sign of danger. From above, a whistle, as for a dog. The silence around them all, suddenly, sinister. Dark faces fill the doorways. The buy skids away, running the way he came. A bottle whistles overhead and powders against a wall to the car's left. A child's shriek fills the canyon. "Fuck," Barbados mutters, and takes them quickly around a corner and down a street ending at the boardwalk and sky. Santos reaches for his inhaler.

The thousand marquee bulbs above Famous's blink off, on.

"Look," Santos says, rubbing a porthole in the glass.

Barbados leans over. Inside Famous's, at the window bar, stands a man, short, pear-shaped, his breaths hanging before him in yarnlike balls of vapor, pushed rapidly forward like a smoker's trick by the next, and the next. He dabs his glistening forehead and neck with a handkerchief. Looking down at his watch, his chins multiply. Krivit.

"You call him?" Barbados asks.

Santos shakes his head. "Wait here a minute."

Outside on his feet he inhales the briny cold, drops his cigarette in the snow, and walks a long diagonal to the door. The plexiglass flaps behind him. A family stands at the counter, joylessly chewing. In the rear a black man labors over a clatter of steaming fry-o-matics while a well-groomed Pakistan' gazes at a mute TV. An out-of-town game, 49ers and Seahawks, Santos thinks, the away team in their white uniforms veiled as ghosts, the home jerseys tackling bodiless helmets and a floating leather oval.

"My guess, you weren't expecting me today.”

Krivit sets down his cup of coffee with a click. "Am I expecting anyone?"

"You come all this way for the hot dogs."

"Everybody does." Smiling a gummy smile, Krivit dabs at his forehead with the back of his hand.

Outside, in the street, Barbados has pulled the car alongside a baby blue police cruiser.

"A little early for you, isn't it?" Santos says. "You're making office hours in the daylight now?"

"I like to keep my nights free for other business."

"I remember."

Barbados is leaning on the horn. The cruiser's passenger window drops. Bleary-eyed, a teenage cop pats his cheeks while his partner sleeps openmouthed behind the wheel. Barbados makes a gun with his hand, fires.

So, Santos says, "what do you have?"

"Nothing for you."

"Something for someone."

Krivit shifts his coffee cup forward then back. "Having a slow day, Detective?"

"Slow, fast, it's a day. You've never been at a loss."

"I'm generous. There's plenty to go around without repeating myself. Doubling back is bad for business. But maybe later. Yes, later, probably." Krivit lifts his hand, limp-wristed, and wriggles his fingers. "For now, hasta la vista, Tino." Santos blinks at this bottom-feeder, swallowing the metallic taste of contempt. Though who it's for he can't say. Fat rat, yes- but who's asking what from whom?

He shoves at the door with his shoulder, hands in his pockets.

A stop sign shivers in the wind. A ship brays offshore, a foghorn if there were fog, calling to-what?

He starts for the car but a figure, his chin in the collar of his cashmere coat, brushes past him toward the door. The face is instantly known to him.

"Cold enough for you?" Santos says.

"What-? No, not interested."

"Nathan, it's Errol. Errol Santos."

Nathan Stein looks back at him, his eyes blinking, focusing with recognition. "You haven't changed."

Stein looks to Santos made up for an older part, a better one, hair thinner and streaked with chalk, but his face taut and his body slim. "We've both changed. But you look good, Nathan. Isabel told me you looked good."

"She's your sister. She has to tell you that."

"Well, terrific for you anyway."

Nathan lifts a hand. "Not really." He points vaguely to his watch.

"Look, I don't want to keep you."

"Maybe a beer sometime," Nathan says, taking a step away.

"We'll catch some tunes downtown."

"Maybe Bradley's. Like the old days."

Nathan cocks his head. "Bradley's is gone, Errol."

"Since when?"

"They sold the piano. Since? It doesn't matter. Years- Well,Errol." Nathan looks about him, as though for a trap door in the air. "So how are you?"

"Like you see. How are you?"

"Fine. Real good. So-" Nathan is grinning. "So how is Claire? "

"Fine, Nathan. She's fine."

"Good. Good."

"I'm sure she'd send her regards. If she knew."