J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

It’s the car making that sound, a gleaming green Ford circling the block. I follow the flash of sunlight on the glass, the heads silhouetted inside, three or four of them. Only the driver’s window is down, a brown and thin-wristed forearm jutting out with a hand-rolled cigarette clutched in the fingers. The sidewalk moves under my feet, but I get no farther. It’s like a swaying, fragmented treadmill keeping pace with my every move.

— You can go here and you can go there, but you can’t go away.

There’s another sound, a metallic pop, and slowly the fact dawns on me that it’s the thumb break on my old duty rig. My old pistol slides up into my hand, the one I carried as a rookie and only fired once in anger. I look at my arm and it’s blue. All of me is. My old uniform fits again, like a suit of polyester-blend armor.

The ground settles and up through my legs a sense of calm takes hold, the rootedness of an ancient tree. More heads appear in the car, too many to count, all pressing against the glass as the Ford bears down. Chrome glistens and blinds me, then my pistol answers it-one, two, three. Four, five, six. The air moves, and my rounds carve tracer arcs around the fast-approaching green car. The misses baffle me.

— Come to me, kid. Don’t be scared.

Brass tumbles at my feet while the Aranda dog silently wails. One, two, three. A cigarette bursts on the curb. Four, five, six. The brown hand tapping on the Ford’s green door. The car sails past me, gliding over air, the driver’s eyes behind gold-rimmed sunglasses. Under the long trunk, a thumping sound. And the metal quivers in circuits like rippling water.

“Roland, stop.”

A cold touch sinks through my forehead.

“You’re burning up.”

I find her wrist in the dark and pull the hand away. “It’s nothing.”

“You were kicking me.”

“Sorry.” I throw the covers back, swing my legs onto the hardwood floor. “Just another bad dream.”

Her laughter is soft and kind. “You and your dreams. You should see somebody.”

“Go back to sleep.”

A minute or two under the shower and I can’t remember the details anymore. Just a handful of surreal and disconnected puzzle pieces from a moviemaker’s idea of an acid trip. I run my uncle’s old double-edged safety razor under the tap, shaving in the usual sleepy, imprecise way, then go to the closet. From bed, Charlotte’s voice echoes.

“Wear one of your new outfits.”

They’re not new and I hate that word outfits . But I pick through the zippered bags anyway, still reluctant to admit that my father-in-law of all people had more style in his little finger than I’ll ever possess. Or care to. I don’t come from a world where clothes are chosen for how they look. Though we have a few peacocks in Homicide, a jacket’s main function is to keep your side arm from showing.

My old partner Stephen Wilcox saw it differently, always dressing like a cut-rate English gentleman to the extent the weather allowed. If he knew, he’d burn with envy over this hand-tailored wardrobe and have no qualms about wearing a dead man’s clothes. He doesn’t know, however, because despite our recent truce we are not really on speaking terms.

“I like the brown checks,” Charlotte calls.

The most old-geezer-looking option of the bunch, a tweedy sort of jacket with brown horn buttons. I put it on over a blue shirt and a pair of khakis, checking in the mirror to make sure the grip of my SIG Sauer doesn’t poke out through the side vent.

It’s just past six when I head down the stairs, leaving Charlotte to sleep awhile longer. The stairs out back leading up to the apartment over the garage are wet with dew, and the window next to the door glows gold, meaning our tenants are already up. Unlike Dr. Hill, we don’t rent the apartment out from necessity. The original idea was that we’d live there while having the house updated, only that project never quite came to fruition. Once the apartment existed, Charlotte wouldn’t let it go to waste.

As I gaze toward the door, Gina Robb comes out. She teaches at a private school out in Spring, commuting back and forth every day against the flow of traffic, while her husband, Carter, works at something called an outreach center in the Montrose area, where people hang out over coffee to talk about books and watch movies and have old-time religion subtly forced on them. Carter was a youth pastor at a suburban megachurch last year, a standard-bearer for the fanatics Sheila Green mentioned yesterday. Now he’s in a kind of free fall, a feeling I can easily relate to.

“Good morning, Mr. March.”

Gina’s always so formal with me, despite the closeness that’s grown between us all since the Robbs moved in. She dresses formal, too, in a high-necked, round-collared overcoat that looks too warm even for our cold snap, and a velvet thrift-store beret, just in case the French Resistance needs some backup. When she comes down the stairs, her eyes light up in a way that makes me cringe with anticipation.

“I like your blazer,” she says. She would like it. “Is that what you call it, a blazer?”

“You got me,” I say. “It’s one of the ones Charlotte brought back from her father’s. She’s trying to make me look more distinguished.”

“She’s doing a good job.”

“Thanks.”

When I first met her, I didn’t see the appeal of this rather plain and eccentric girl, and certainly couldn’t understand what it was Carter, with his more athletic, unreflective cast of mind, would find appealing. Now I do. She’s constant and bright, an optimist grounded in reality, an eccentric with breathtaking disregard for how other people perceive her.

“Your husband’s a lucky man, you know that?”

She bunches her lips the way she always does when I say something silly. “I’m sorry we missed you yesterday, but I know they work you so hard.”

“I guess we’re both the early risers in our families.”

“Carter’s up,” she says quickly, almost defensively. “I can get him if you want to-”

“No, no. I’m just on my way out, like you.”

“He does want to talk to you about something, Mr. March. It wouldn’t take long.”

“Right now, you mean?”

“We just weren’t sure when we’d see you, and here you are.” She pleads with her whole body hunched forward, hands together in a prayerful gesture. “Let me go get him real fast, okay? It’ll take, like, two minutes.”

Set loose by my nod, she bounds halfway up the stairs before stopping herself, ascending the rest of the way at a calmer pace. When she returns, Carter is with her, his hair still matted from sleep, looking ridiculous in shorts and an unzipped hoodie.

“I do have to go,” Gina says, getting on tiptoes to kiss his stubbly cheek.

Once she’s reversing down the driveway, leaving us alone together, Carter wipes the traces of a sheepish grin from his lips, signaling that whatever he wants to tell me must be important. In his mid-twenties and no stranger to tragedy, he still has a boyish way of steeling himself for serious talk, like he’s afraid of not being taken as an adult.

“Roland,” he says. “There was something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“So I gathered.”

“It’s. . really, I don’t know if it’s awkward or not. But we thought we should say something to you first-in case it might be, you know?”

The hoodie falls open. I scan the words on his wrinkled T-shirt. MY SAVIOR CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT.

Nice.

“Gina,” he says. “We just found out that she’s pregnant.”

My chest tightens, like somebody just inflated a balloon under the ribs.

“You’re having a kid?” The words sound hollow in my ears. “That’s great, Carter. Congratulations. That’s. . wonderful news.”