David Jackson - Marked

‘Cal!’ LeBlanc squawks. ‘Cal! Look at yourself. Look at what you’re doing.’

Doyle freezes. He is glad there are no mirrors in here. He can imagine what he must look like. He can picture the crazed fury written on his face and in his eyes. He can feel the tautness in the muscles and tendons of the arm that is about to pulverize his own partner’s features.

Christ, he thinks. He’s right. What am I doing? Can this really be me?

He relaxes the fingers wrapped around LeBlanc’s throat. Starts to lower his clenched fist. LeBlanc slaps Doyle’s arm aside and pushes himself away from the shelving. He moves toward Proust, still lying on the floor, groaning.

‘He jumped,’ Doyle says.

LeBlanc whirls on him.

‘What? What did you say?’

‘He jumped through the door.’

LeBlanc’s laugh is without humor. ‘What, not even a trip? A stumble? A fainting spell? Come on, Cal. Even you can do better than that.’

Doyle feels his anger building again, and he has to fight to push it back inside. ‘He jumped, Tommy. It’s a set-up. He’s trying to put me in a jam to save his own ass.’

LeBlanc just shakes his head and kneels down to examine Proust.

‘What,’ says Doyle, ‘you don’t believe me? You think I’d make up something as ridiculous as that?’

LeBlanc glares at him. ‘I don’t know what to believe. All I know is what I heard and what I saw. What do you think a jury would make of that, Cal? Especially given your history with this guy?’

LeBlanc stands again. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cellphone.

‘You giving me up, Tommy?’

‘You must know, I’m calling in EMS.’

‘He doesn’t need an ambulance.’

‘Oh, so you’re now a medical expert too, Cal? The man has just gone through a sheet of glass. Maybe there’s a piece of glass in an artery and he’s bleeding to death here. Maybe he’s fractured his skull. Maybe he’s broken his freaking neck.’

‘He doesn’t need an ambulance,’ Doyle repeats. Then, to Proust, he says, ‘Get the fuck up, Stan. Cut the act.’

LeBlanc suddenly forgets about his phone call. He steps toward Doyle. Reaches under his jacket. Whips out his Glock.

Doyle’s pulse races. What the hell has gotten into LeBlanc?

‘Here,’ says LeBlanc. He offers his gun to Doyle. ‘Go ahead, take it. You wanna finish this, go ahead. Put a bullet in his brain. You really hate this guy so much, then take him out.’

Doyle stares at the younger man. He wonders how things got to be so twisted around. How it is that he, Doyle, is acting like a rookie who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, while LeBlanc is being the true professional. How did that happen? When did the world get turned upside down?

He has no answers. And he has no words for LeBlanc. Instead, he starts walking away. He’s done here. He doesn’t care anymore, and maybe that’s because he cared too much. Let LeBlanc make his call. Let him report Doyle to the bosses. Let them take him off the case, off the squad, off the job.

Who gives a fuck?

The noise is driving her crazy.

The hammering, the drilling, the sawing — she can’t hear herself think. It was going on most of yesterday, and it was going on when she had breakfast this morning, and now it’s lunchtime and it’s still going on. What the hell is he doing in there?

Nicole pours the remainder of her still-steaming coffee down the drain and places her cup in the sink. She walks across to the door leading into the garage, then pauses.

It’s gone quiet. Eerily so. She puts her ear to the door. Nothing. Not even the shuffling of Steve’s feet. She presses her head harder against the wood. Holds her breath. .

Whirrrrr.

She leaps back, afraid that a drill bit is about to come straight through the door and into her skull. Angrily, she flings the door open and steps inside. Ready to confront him.

Only she can’t speak.

She can’t talk because of what she sees here. This is not the garage she was expecting. All of its contents have been pushed to one end. In the center of the space, Steve has set up his workbench. A length of wood lies across it, and on top of that is a saw and a retractable tape measure.

But what really grabs Nicole’s attention here is the shelving. Miles of it. Or at least there will be when Steve has finished. Almost every square inch of wall space now has brackets running up it, and some are already supporting wooden shelves.

Steve is standing at the wall separating the garage from the kitchen. He is holding a cordless drill. There is masonry dust and wood shavings all down the front of his coverall and on his face. He looks blankly at his wife as if to say, What’s the problem?

‘Steve,’ she says. ‘What are you doing?’

‘The place is a mess. It needs organizing. I want it neat and tidy.’

She stares at him, incredulous. ‘You want. . What about what I want? Were you planning to consult me on this major change to our property?’

‘Nicole, don’t wig out over a few shelves. You never come in here anyway. Anytime you want something you send me in here to find it. Takes me hours sometimes, going through all that stuff.’ He gestures behind him at the boxes and crates and bicycles and gardening equipment. ‘This way we’ll be able to find things instantly.’

Nicole moves into the center of the garage and looks again at Steve’s handiwork. She’s not convinced that all these shelves are necessary. Not at all sure that they have enough items in here to fill them.

She turns to look at the possessions they keep in the garage, and notices that Steve seems to have divided them into two piles, one larger than the other. She steps closer to the smaller pile. Opens up one of the boxes. It’s full of old auto magazines.

‘Steve, what are the boxes on this side of the garage?’

He turns to face her, the drill still in his hand. ‘Things we can throw out. We don’t need them anymore.’

She nods, but something tugs at her. Whispering to her that something isn’t right here. It’s in Steve’s body language. It’s in his voice. Awkwardness. Anxiety.

She opens another box. Peers inside. Her heart stops. She faces Steve again, sees the guilt on his face.

‘Steve. Please tell me you’ve made a mistake.’

‘What?’ he says, but she can tell that he understands her exactly.

‘Some of Megan’s things are in this box. In this pile that you say is garbage.’

‘I didn’t say they were garbage. That’s not the word I used.’

‘You want to throw them out. What the hell else do you call stuff you’re throwing out?’

‘I. . It’s all really old stuff, Nicole. Stuff we never look at anymore. Stuff you probably don’t even remember keeping. When’s the last time you asked me to dig out any of those things, huh?’

She glares at him. Her eyes blur. She wipes away the tears.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she says. ‘Megan has been dead for what seems like five minutes, and already you’re throwing away her stuff. How could you do that? How could that idea even occur to you?’

He shifts his gaze away from her then, and she can tell that he’s lost the argument. He knows that what he did is wrong. Probably knew it when he set up the two piles. But he did it anyway. What she can’t comprehend is why.

She hopes he will explain. She hopes he will apologize and say that he didn’t know what he was thinking, and then he will cry and they will talk and they will start to come to terms with their grief.

But instead, when he looks back at her there is anger in his eyes. ‘Nicole, we have to move on. The only way we’re going to survive this is if we move on. Megan is dead, and we have to accept that.’