Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

‘Tell me now, and I will forgive you.’

‘No. You won’t.’

‘Where I am now, there is nothing but forgiveness.’

‘No.’

Dory stood up, dripping water from her body into the tub like rain. She found the towel she’d draped over the sink and used it to dry herself. She stepped out onto the cold floor. Her face brushed the string hanging from the light fixture and she pulled it, squinting at the harshness of the bare bulb. She was alone. Michaela wasn’t there. When she looked down, she saw a millipede crawling near her toes. She kicked at it with her foot, and the bug slithered through the scummy grill of the floor drain.

She stepped into the same panties she’d removed before her bath. She pulled on her jeans and shrugged into a sweater that was scratchy on her bare skin. The leather of her boots was cold. Fully dressed, the fringes of her hair damp, she sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

She’d thought that telling Margot would ease her conscience. When they’d met for dinner at the Duluth Grill, she’d blurted out her secret. She’d told her everything. What she’d done. Why. Her shame, her guilt. Margot hadn’t been surprised at all, not one little bit. Like it made all the sense in the world. Like it was the key to a lock.

For Dory, her confession hadn’t changed anything. All she could think about were ways to wipe her mind clean.

She exited the bathroom into the hallway. It was empty, except for one old man, unconscious and smelly, sprawled in an open doorway. After a while, you didn’t even notice. You held your nose and stepped over them. There was no one else, just him and her. Mornings were quiet here, because everyone was sleeping off the nights.

Dory made her way down the hall. She had the last room, near the window, where gray light streamed from outside. All the doors around her were closed. She reached for the door handle to her apartment, but she stopped without touching it. She didn’t even know why she stopped.

She heard her sister whispering in her head, like a warning. ‘ Don’t go inside .’

Dory took a soft step backward and held her breath. Her room was as silent as a church. Beside her, through the hall window, she could see the alley below her. Papers whipped along the street, pushed by a lake wind. That was the problem. Silence. When she went to take her bath, she’d left her bedroom window open to clear out the smoke. She heard no breeze moving about the room now. The window was closed.

Someone was inside, waiting for her.

She backed up from her door. She avoided the drunk in the hall. She passed the bathroom again, moving through the warm steam. She kept going backwards, and when she reached the stairwell, she finally turned around and ran.

In the lobby, she hugged herself and hurried onto Superior Street. She didn’t wait to see if anyone came through the doors behind her. She ignored the greeting from the blind beggar in the lawn chair. She dodged traffic and ran toward the bank across the street and then sprinted when she was out of sight of the building behind her. Behind the bank, she cut into a pothole-filled parking lot and zigzagged through the cars. She crossed Michigan Street and found herself in the dead fields under the freeway. The car tires over her head sounded like stinging wasps.

She kept running. She didn’t look back until she was lost among the railroad tracks near the harbor and she was finally safe. She had no idea where to go, but she knew what she had to do.

She had to tell Cat the truth. And then she had to disappear for ever.

Leonard Keck swung his Nike VR Pro seven-iron with a fierce chop and shot an imaginary golf ball through the tricky crosswinds toward the seventeenth green at Pebble Beach. In high-definition clarity on the eighty-inch plasma television hung on his office wall, the orange ball shot crisply across a California blue sky, shanked left toward the end of its flight, and dropped with a tiny splash into the surf of the Pacific Ocean. A groan of disappointment from the computer-animated crowd burbled out of the Bose speakers built into the wall.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Lenny shouted. He waved at Serena and Stride in the office doorway. ‘Hey, come in, guys, don’t stand on ceremony with me. Jeez, Pebble is an evil course. Doesn’t matter what kind of day I’m having, I always go in the water at seventeen.’

Lenny swirled the melting chips of ice in his drink and swallowed it down. He wiped his lips with his hand. ‘I guess you guys are too young to remember the ’82 Open, huh? Watson chipping in from the rough to beat Nicklaus? Best shot ever.’

‘I remember,’ Stride said.

Serena smiled. ‘Golf’s not my game.’

‘Oh, golf’s not a game, sweetheart,’ Lenny told her. ‘Golf’s a twenty-two-year-old black widow with big tits. You know she’s going to eat you sooner or later, but you can’t stay away. Now come on, sit, sit.’

Serena and Stride sat in two plush armchairs in front of Lenny’s desk. Lenny took several more practice swings with his club and then paced around the office with the iron braced behind his neck. He seemed incapable of sitting still. He wore a chocolate brown tracksuit and golf shoes with cleats that left dotted impressions on the carpet. He peeled off a golf glove as he walked and stripped a tan visor from his head. He didn’t dress or act like a man with money, which told Serena that he had more than enough money not to care. The only luxury item she saw on his body was a gold diver’s watch.

Lenny was medium height, burly, with a modest paunch at his waist. Too many steaks and too much beer, she guessed. He had messy graying hair, a high forehead, and a tanned face freckled with age spots. His office at the back of his Miller Hill dealership showed off his influence and connections. He had framed photographs of himself with most of the state’s top politicians and one, in the middle, taken at the White House with President Bush. His credenza featured awards from the city and state chambers of commerce, sales trophies from Ford, and Lucite deal cubes celebrating the closing of multimillion-dollar real estate finance projects throughout the region. He had an oil portrait of his wife on one wall; she was a severe woman, small and thin, wearing a fulllength lavender ball gown, nose-bleed heels, a gaudy ring twisted with diamonds and emeralds, matching earrings, and blonde helmet hair that would have stood up to a Jared Allen tackle. Her pinched frown said: I’m a country club wife, and don’t you forget it.

Lenny finally sat down. He kicked off his golf shoes and propped his stockinged feet on the desk. When he pushed a button under the drawer, the thick curtains on the south wall parted, revealing a row of windows looking out on the auto showroom, where customers browsed among the trucks and hybrids. He studied the action on the floor.

‘One-way glass,’ Lenny said. ‘I like to watch my salespeople. They never know when I’m checking them out. Keeps them on their toes. Right now, I can tell you we’ve got two people ready to buy, that twenty-something young couple and the middle-aged black guy, and the rest are browsers. After a while, you know it as soon as they walk in the door.’

The auto dealer picked up a signed baseball from his desk and tossed it up and down like a juggling ball. ‘Herbie signed this for me after the ’91 Series. Had it on my desk ever since. I got a box at the new stadium, so anytime you want tickets, I can hook you up. Ms. Dial, I like that Mustang you drove in here. If you want a new one, I can give you a hell of a deal.’

‘I’m more interested in an Explorer,’ Serena said.

‘Yeah? Well, great, I’ll bring it home at cost.’