Robert Bennett - The Company Man

She listened for some time. Maybe hours, maybe minutes. Then Henry coughed and she awoke from her trance. She walked away, head held high, and went and had a coffee before delivering her package to the Evesden Police Department and returning home. But for some reason she avoided sewer grates and street vents, and would not go near the trolley stations.

When she came home she found Garvey waiting in the mezzanine of her floor, seated in a chair and playing with his hat in his lap. He looked up and then stood when she came near, and ran a nervous hand through his hair. He looked pale and weary, as though he had been up for days.

“Oh,” he said. “I wondered when you’d come home.”

“How long have you been waiting here?” she asked. “I was just at the station to drop off what we had on Skiller.”

“I haven’t been here too long. Sorry to make you go all the way to the station when you could have just held on to it.” He paused, then said, “Are you all right? Are you hurt? I missed you at the Hamilton. I wanted to check in on you.”

“My ears keep ringing,” she said, and she began to walk toward her apartment door. “And I may have sprained my wrist. But otherwise I’m fine. Much better than Mr. Hayes.”

“That’s good to hear,” he said, following her.

“I’m sorry for delaying your case, which it seems is what I was doing. I should have made Mr. Hayes stop once we had Mr. Skiller’s address and then given it to you, shouldn’t I?”

“That’s not what I’m here about,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay.”

“Well, you can see that I’m fine,” she said, trying to believe it. She opened her apartment door slowly. The memories of the previous days bloomed in her head, the filthy, abandoned children and Hayes reading the goodbye letter as he sat upon the empty bed, and she badly wanted to think of something else, anything else. She looked at Garvey and saw he felt the same, perhaps. Blood was pounding in her ears, and she was reminded of the warehouse Evans had showed her, and the echoes in the deeps.

She entered and turned to him. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked. “You look like you’ve been awake for days.”

“That’s because I have,” he admitted. “I don’t even know what time it is.”

“Then why don’t you come in?”

Garvey hesitated. “I was just… seeing if you…”

He trailed off. She waited, but he did not say anything.

“Donald,” she said slowly and gently, “why don’t you come in?”

He looked at her, desperate and uncertain, and then nodded, still fumbling with his hat in his hands. He walked in and sat on her couch, and stared up at her earnestly. A cagey young thing, she thought, wearing years that lied about his true heart. Then, smiling slightly, she shut the door, and went to sit beside him.

Hayes lay in bed in the hospital, perfectly still. The nurses who looked in on him sometimes thought he was sleeping with his eyes open, but he was very much awake. He’d retreated deep inside himself and gone deaf to the outside world so that he could work in peace, slowly assembling his next move. He rifled his long and twisted memory for contacts and friends and reliable sources, for favors owed and debts unpaid and veins of information he could mine. Most of them were worthless, and these he laid aside. More troubling were the ones he started considering before remembering that they were not in Evesden at all, but belonged to some other city, to some sandy outpost or distant fringe country. He’d left them all behind long ago. And others that he’d summon up would turn out to be no longer in the world in any sense, having gone on dangerous voyages and never returned, or been laid low by a stray bullet, or met the noose and danced on the scaffold, or simply expired.

Most troubling of all were the people he remembered vividly, but could not recall meeting or having a conversation with. These, he figured, were not his memories at all, but were ones stolen over the years, mnemonic castoffs that’d somehow been caught within his mind. Sometimes he forgot he lived and worked mostly within a world of abstracts and dreams.

His work went slowly, and soon he realized he was distracted. What Garvey had said had nettled him, somehow. Garvey’s disappointment stung deeper for him than others’. As he’d come to know Garvey over the years of bleary cases and casual atrocities, Hayes had begun to feel the same admiration for him that a young boy does for his older sibling, even though Hayes was several years older than him. The way Garvey saw the world felt at once true and impossible, full of a sort of wisdom that had always been beyond Hayes. It was as if Garvey’s life was the way Hayes’s should have been, yet he had failed utterly at it, and now could only watch.

Most of it was that Garvey knew what Hayes could do, knew that Hayes listened to his thoughts, and simply did not care. The idea that someone could live so unashamedly and without self-disgust baffled Hayes.

Samantha cared, that was for sure. Ever since she’d learned of his abilities her nerves had sung like razor wire, every minute. But it was not the loathing and paranoia he’d expected. Instead Samantha almost welcomed his examination, and both perversely hoped for and dreaded his judgment. He had never met someone so desperate to prove themselves to someone, to anyone.

He’d forgotten how young she was, he realized, or perhaps what it was like to be young at all. It pained him a little, like the ghostly ache of a lost limb, but Hayes could not recall when he had lost that part of himself.

He shook his head, disgusted at his own self-pity. For the rest of his stay he continued to work, and did not spare a thought for either of them.

When he got out of the hospital the nurses gave him a list of medicines to purchase at the drugstore. He crumpled it up as soon as he was out the door and tossed it away. Then he went to work.

He guessed that Dockland would be the place to start so he took a trolley east to the Conver Bridge and then walked to Dover and 177th. He stood and looked at the buildings and tried to refresh his memory, then headed north along the Conver Canal and counted the sluice gates set into the side. When he got to the sixth he sat on the edge of the wall, waited until the street was clear, and lifted himself up and over.

He slid down the cement to the edge of the sluice gate, took out a pocket knife and undid the grate. Then he crawled into the small tunnel, cold water running over his shoes and his ankles, and stopped when he came to a drainage pipe leading up to the street. He reached up into the pipe and felt around until his hand found the little shelf inside and the wax paper bundle waiting on it. He tugged the package out and carefully opened it. Inside were four hundred dollars in cash, three birth certificates and identification cards for various purposes, a handful of light keys, mostly fitting locks throughout the Nail, and a. 22 pistol with twelve rounds, separately wrapped in more wax paper. He took the money out, counted off two hundred dollars, split the bills up into three parts, placed two of them in his pockets and the third in his sock, and put the rest of the money back in the pack. After that he picked up the pistol. He handled it, spinning the chamber and sighting it up along the drainage pipe, but shook his head and put it back. Then he rewrapped the bundle and replaced it in the drainage pipe.

He crawled out of the sluice gate, soaked up to mid-shin, and climbed back up the cement bank and crouched by the wall, waiting. When it was clear he vaulted back over and walked briskly into the heart of Dockland, shaking off the drops as he stepped.

He had seventeen such packages hidden throughout the city. Some were in hotel crawl spaces, others were in banks, others were under the floorboards of basements that were easily accessible from the street level. One was in the park, buried in the children’s playground and guarded by a tin dragon boys and girls could ride. Each package held the same things in the same amounts, though the IDs and keys varied depending on where the drop was. It had taken him about a year to place them all. Until now he had not breached one.