P. Parrish - Dead of Winter

Back at the station, Louis watched while Dale scavenged a thermometer from the first-aid kit and Jesse filled the Pyrex coffeepot with ice cubes from the refrigerator. In minutes, the two had their experiment set up on Louis’s desk.

“Check the temperature,” Dale said, caught up in Jesse’s experiment.

“Louis, get the watch,” Jesse called out.

Louis unwrapped the new gold-plated Timex and handed it to Jesse. They waited until the water in the pot had dropped below freezing. Louis stepped back, shaking his head.

He watched as Jesse dropped the watch in the water.

“What time you got, Louis?” Jesse asked.

“Five straight up.”

The seconds ticked off as Jesse and Dale peered at the watch in the water.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Louis looked to the door. Gibralter was standing there, staring at Jesse and Dale huddled over the coffeepot.

Jesse jumped to his feet. “A test.”

Gibralter came over to the desk and looked down at the glass bowl. “What kind of test?”

“We’re trying to find out how long this watch will run in ice water.”

“Why?” Gibralter demanded.

“Louis thinks Fred — ”

Gibralter’s eye flicked to Louis and then back to Jesse. He reached in the coffeepot, pulled out the watch and tossed it on the desk.

“Every minute you waste could cost another officer his life,” Gibralter said, leveling his gaze at Jesse. “I told you to go through the case files. Now go do your damn job.”

Jesse wet his lips. “But — ”

“Do your job, Harrison,” Gibralter repeated, enunciating each word, as if to a child. Without looking at Louis, he went into his office, slamming the door.

Louis looked at Jesse. He was just standing there, his face red with embarrassment. Dale and Florence were watching, their eyes wide in sympathy.

“Fuck,” Jesse muttered, wandering off.

Louis looked down at the watch. The face was clouded with condensation. He picked it up.

It had stopped at 5:04.

The sound of bells tolling. A white meadow, snow, and a stand of pines in the distance. A white church, with a steeple piercing a cobalt blue sky. And a line of blue moving slowly, swaying, emerging from the church. A coffin…they were carrying a coffin out into the snowy meadow as the bells tolled.

Louis woke with a start. Bells…the phone.

Wiping a hand over his eyes, he turned over and grabbed the receiver. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely.

“Louis?”

“Yeah.” He reached for his watch and squinted at the dial. It was after ten. He had slept through the morning.

“Louis, this is Phillip.”

“Phillip?” He blinked at the sound of his foster father’s voice and pulled himself up on one elbow. “Phillip! Jeez, it’s good to hear from you.” He reached down to pull the covers over his bare chest. The room was freezing cold.

“You sound strange. Don’t tell me I woke you up.” The voice on the other end of the line chuckled.

“No, no. Well, yeah, you did. But that’s okay. I’m off today.” Louis’s eyes swept over the crumpled bed. He spotted his chambray shirt crumpled in the blanket at the end. He squinted and saw two glasses on the bureau, half-filled with tawny liquid.

“I know. I called the station. They gave me your number.”

Louis suppressed a sigh. He had forgotten to call his foster parents and tell them he had finally gotten a phone.

“Look, Louis,” Phillip went on, “I won’t waste time busting your chops about why we haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

“Thanks,” Louis said softly. Leave it to Phillip Lawrence to cut through the bullshit. He hated talking on the phone more than Louis did.

“But it does make it easier to guilt you into coming down to dinner,” Phillip added.

“Dinner?” Louis said, surprised. “Where are you?”

“We’re at Higgins Lake. We brought the motor home up for the week.”

Louis laughed. “That old piece of shit? I’m surprised it made it this far.”

“Oh, I got rid of the Winnebago. Got a brand-new Gulf Stream Super Coach. The galley’s bigger than our kitchen. Frances is happier than a clam.”

Louis smiled, remembering a trip they had taken to Saugatuck in the Winnebago the summer of his thirteenth year. Frances tried to cook a chicken on the tiny stove.

“So, when can you come?”

Louis rubbed a hand over his face, trying to clear his head. What day was it? He had spent yesterday with Jesse in the station, going through case files. It has been Jesse’s day off, but he had come in anyway, desperate to find something after the watch scene with Gibralter. But after hours of going through the files they had found no one who could be considered a threat.

“Louis? You there?”

“Yeah, Phil.”

“How about tonight? Fran’s making a Christmas ham.”

Christmas…it was two days away. He had forgotten that, too. “Sure, I’m off today, I’ll be there,” he said.

He grabbed a pen off the nightstand and wrote directions to the campsite on his palm. He said good-bye and hung up, rolling onto his back and pulling the blanket up over his naked body.

He shivered, giving in to his mild feeling of guilt. He hadn’t called the Lawrences since he left Detroit and he had seen them only three times since his return from Mississippi last February. They hadn’t pressed and he was grateful. He knew that they loved him. They had been his parents, without being his mother and father. They had always instinctively honored the emotional buffer he had installed around himself. And he had loved them all the more for that. But right now, he was feeling more than a little guilty. They deserved better.

A snow blower started up somewhere off in the distance. He didn’t want to get up. He felt lazy, satiated with the languid energy of a good night’s sleep. He pulled the sheet over his cold nose. A smell drifted up to him, the sweet-musky smell of sex.

Zoe…

He closed his eyes. Zoe…snow…glow. He smiled.

Glow…go…slow.

Slow…don’t…go…Zoe.

He flipped over on his stomach, burying his face in the pillow, inhaling her smell, reliving in his head the chaotic choreography of their lovemaking.

Finally, with a sigh, he heaved himself out of the warm bed. He shivered and started to the bathroom. It was an hour’s drive down to Higgins Lake and he had to stop in town and find something that would pass as Christmas presents.

“So, how’s the job going?”

Louis poured himself another glass of brandy and sat back in the kitchen booth. “Good. Not what I expected exactly, but it’s a good, honest department.”

Phillip smiled. “I guess so. When I called, somebody named Dale McGuire answered. When I told him who I was he acted like I was his long-lost cousin or something.”

Louis laughed. “Dale’s very…social.”

“So they’re treating you good there?”

Louis considered the question for a moment. Phillip was asking, without asking, if things were different than they had been in Mississippi. It had always been that like between them, this odd dance they did about race. They were white; he was half white, half black. They had always dealt with it obliquely, a thing seen always from the corner of the eye, never straight on. Sometimes it bothered Louis. Sometimes he was grateful for it.

Like now. He hadn’t told Phillip everything that had happened to him down in Mississippi, just that his color had been “a problem.” He hadn’t told him that for the first time in his life, his color had nearly cost him his life.

Phillip Lawrence, he knew, would not ask either. It was part of the emotional buffer. It was part of their dance.

“It’s different here,” Louis said finally.