Pearce Hansen - Stagger Bay

“How can you live with yourself?” I asked, not prodding for once but truly curious to understand the mechanics of whatever rationalization system he’d constructed for himself. “Why won’t you do your job, like Kendra did?”

“You won’t say her name again,” Reese said, his hands shaking as he racked a shell into his pump’s chamber.

Moe flinched, and I’ll admit to a startle reaction myself – only a madman or a kamikaze ignores a shotgun prepping for action. Reese closed his eyes and breathed in and out hard as I counted to ten internally.

When he looked at me again his voice was soft and calm and controlled. “You’re coming mighty close to disturbing the peace here, Markus. Maybe we should go for a ride, and you can resist arrest where there’s no one to video-tape your heroics this time.” His partner snickered again, like a halfwit with no larger repertoire.

“Besides,” Reese continued, “I’m the one who decides what my job is, not gutter trash from the Gardens.”

“How ‘bout you, Moe?” Reese asked. “You think I should do my job?”

Big Moe shook his head, looking at the ground. I was ashamed for him, and for the fear I saw in his eyes. We slunk back to the Gardens.

They found her body next morning. I heard a low murmuring outside, and roused from the couch to join a quiet throng streaming to where Reese and his brother officer had blockaded us the night before.

She lay in the middle of a subdivision lot across the street. The graded earth looked like it had been deliberately leveled to improve her display, naked as the day she’d been born. She was uncovered so God and everyone could see the things that had been done to her.

Weird signs and symbols were scalloped into her flesh – he’d taken his time to carve them just so. He hadn’t touched her face, probably on purpose. I judged from her frozen stare that she’d been alive through a goodly portion of it.

Her mother fainted, sagging into a boneless heap in the midst of her family. The big Indian kid Mackie took off his flannel and covered the little girl’s body with it. One tiny hand stuck out from under the shirt, palm up.

A caravan came our way: a squad car, followed by an ambulance and an Escort with a magnetized ‘Stagger Bay Coroner’ sign crookedly stuck on the driver side door.

They stopped and got out: Officer Rick Hoffman; two ambulance attendants serving meat-wagon duty; and the coroner, an older man with a doctor’s bag. They fidgeted on the far side of the flannel-covered little piece of evidence, avoiding our gazes as they looked down at the tiny body.

Hoffman and one of the meat-wagon boys started putting up yellow crime scene tape, using the surveyor’s stakes to string it on.

I approached him. “So, any theories, Officer Hoffman? Any hot leads?”

“Call me Rick. You know I don’t like having to do this. You know that,” he said, an expression of rage filling his face for a microsecond before subsiding. “You know I’m trapped, Markus. There’s more things I want to tell you, but there’s only one way out for me.”

I shook my head sternly, trying to recapture the control he’d handed me before. “There’s always choices. No one controls your life.”

“You’re the lucky one; you get to stand up. That’s why you think I can too. But you should know I only wait. That’s all I know how to do.”

“Look, you told me about Kendra so I know you’re sincere,” I said. “You can’t be the only one. You can keep making the man’s choice.”

“I could really be you? You’re sure?” he asked in a wistful voice. “I can do it, can’t I?”

I held my breath in surprised suspense, waiting to see if he was about to break open. But he sagged back into blankness and continued his work, concentrating on laying tape.

“No,” he said. “I still have to do what I’m told for now.”

The expression on his face told me I should feel sorry for him, and consider him the victim here. Poor pitiful Rick. I kind of wanted to rip his fat head off and defecate down the hole, that’s how much sympathy I wanted to feel for him.

But watching him squatting there all forlorn, I flashed back to prison and the nights I lay in my cell reading the Canon, listening to a punk’s sobs and the laughter of his playmates for the evening down the tier. Listening, but saying and doing nothing except turning the book’s pages.

Rick yanked on the last knot hard enough he snapped the anchoring surveyor’s stake in two. After studying the broken piece of wood for a few seconds, he went and got another stake.

I walked back to Big Moe but he put his hand up, so I was looking at his pale palm and spread fingers. “No disrespect, Markus, but I don’t much feel much like talking right now.”

We stood apart from each other, watching them slide the gurney into the ambulance. She’d been too small for the body bag and they had it folded in half beneath her – I could have carried it under one arm.

As the ambulance left Big Moe said, “They think they’re going to run us off, but they won’t. They’ll have to cart me away too. I won’t back down. I can’t.” Despite his sad-sack demeanor and the rap video clown suit he wore so awkwardly, I saw the steel in him.

Moe looked at me like I was an insect and said, “She’s dead because of you.”

My knees wobbled and I felt dizzy as Moe turned on his heel and headed into the Gardens, leaving me alone on that windswept development.

I walked back the way I’d originally come, the first night I’d stumbled into the Gardens. I walked up that broad new road, clean white sidewalks to each side with all the courts and lots laid out flat and perfect and sterile.

The new construction confronted the Gardens as if besieging them. The idle heavy equipment appeared ready to move in and do a Godzilla on those rows of bungalows the instant I wasn’t looking. Dirt fire-access roads led off into the surrounding old growth forests like radiating spokes.

I suspected any Pass I’d had in the Gardens was revoked now. I wouldn’t have even been surprised if a carload of Crips or Hmong cruised up and did a drive-by on me.

I found the trail to the marsh and worked my way through the blackberry thickets and tulie grass to the swamp proper. Carnivorous plants dotted the expanse of low mud hummocks spread in front of me.

The night I passed out here after escaping the hospital, I’d flashed back to the times I’d come to this spot with Sam when he was little. Now, in the light of day and doing everything possible not to think about that little girl, I again remembered catching spiders with Sam, and messing around with tadpoles. It had been fun seeing wild things for the first time myself, and sharing the experience with my boy.

One time we even found a raccoon skull. Sam was the one who spotted it by a bush in the middle of the marsh, and he’d just had to have it. So of course I wound up wading through knee-deep swamp bottom to reach that skull, and it turned out a yellow jacket nest was right next to it on a bush.

Apparently the yellow jackets didn’t approve of me being in their space. I danced around in the mud, yelling as they swarmed all over me stinging the shit out of me, and Sam laughed his ass off at the show I put on for his amusement. We went home, Sam with a cool raccoon skull, and me covered in stinking swamp muck and yellow jacket sting holes.

I chuckled at that bitter-sweet memory, but it wasn’t much comfort in the present. I'd been vain: I'd told myself I could do instantaneously what Karl hadn't been able to in seven years. I’d been proud: I'd told myself I was playing these kids, but my ego had been stroked to bloating by their hero worship; I’d bought into being the Crips’ token white boy OG.