Lisa Unger - Black Out

I come to a halt at a distance from his vehicle. I’m not going to pull up to him. I’m not going to approach his car. I’m going to stay inside with the doors locked. If he wants to talk, he’ll have to come to me. I sit and wait, expecting him to call me on my cell phone. A minute passes, then five. Finally I find his number on my phone and call him. His voice mail picks up.

“Hi, you’ve reached Ray.” His voice is bright and chipper, like a high-school cheerleader’s. “Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you.”

I have a low opinion of Detective Harrison, and it’s getting lower. He’s taunting me, waiting to see what I’ll do. Eventually, I can’t take it anymore. I pull up alongside his vehicle. He’s sitting there, smoking a cigarette. He turns as I come to a stop. He rolls down his window.

“I wasn’t sure how desperate you were,” he says. “Now I am.”

“Spare me the foreplay,” I say. “Just get to the point.” The smell of his cigarette makes me want to smoke, even though I haven’t in years.

He gives me that neighborly, “I’m nobody” smile he seems to have perfected. I see that his whole nice-guy aura is a persona he cultivates to put people at ease, to relax them. Like his voice-mail message, for example-friendly, disarming, not stern and professional, not likely to scare away the skittish.

“I read that you watched while Marlowe Geary killed those girls. That witnesses saw you watching, doing nothing. What does that feel like?”

I don’t answer him, just take the blow. I did ask him to get to the point. I guess the point is that he knows everything.

“How do you live with yourself?” he wants to know. Now I hate him. I find myself wishing that it was him and not Simon Briggs under that bridge. Or maybe both of them. I hate the way anger causes a mutiny of the body, the dry mouth, the trembling hands.

“You’re awfully self-righteous for a dirty cop,” I say.

He pulls his face into a mock grimace. “Ouch.”

I rub my eyes hard, but it’s no use, the pain in my head is ratcheting up.

“So you go from Marlowe Geary to Gray Powers. From killer to cop, or whatever he is. Actually, they’re not so different, are they? They just kill for different reasons, kill different kinds of people. I wonder what this says about you.”

But I’m not listening to him. I’m watching a young girl approach us. She is emaciated and pale as death today. Her hair is dirty and hanging limply. Her arms are covered with bruises. She walks slowly, almost dazed, but she’s looking right at me. Detective Harrison turns to follow my gaze, puts his hand inside his jacket.

“What are you looking at?” he asks.

I know he can’t see her. She is shaking her head at me in disapproval. She thinks I’m weak, foolish. If it were up to her, Detective Harrison would already be dead.

“I’m starting to wonder about you, Ophelia. I’m concerned about your stability.”

There’s a ringing in my ears now. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, she’s gone.

“I have money,” I say. “A lot of it. Just tell me what you want.”

“It’s not about money anymore,” he says with a dramatic sigh. “At least it’s not about your money anymore. Let’s just say this: Ophelia March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten. And do you know how many enemies your husband has? How many people would like to see him suffer? Do you have any idea about Powers and Powers, the things they’ve done?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, and more than that, my head is going to implode. I feel his eyes on me, and when I meet them, I’m surprised to see the man I saw that first night, the one I liked.

“You know what?” he says, incredulous. “I don’t think you do know what I’m talking about. I really don’t. Because when I look at your face, I don’t see the person I read about. What’s wrong with you? How did you let your life wind up like this?”

I close my eyes again and rest my head back. The pressure of the seat against the base of my skull feels good. I have a millisecond of relief.

We’re both still sitting in our cars, speaking through the open windows. The streak of white hair over his ear looks silver in the moonlight. “You’re one to talk,” I say. “Look at you. Blackmail? You don’t seem like the type.”

He shrugs. “Like you, I’ve made some bad calls.”

“So why don’t we just help each other out? I give you what you need to make a clean start; you leave me and my family alone.”

I sound cool and practical, just as Gray would sound in this situation, I imagine. And I do feel calmer than I have in hours. I watch Ophelia. She’s standing right beside Harrison now on the other side of his window. I can see her breath fogging the glass. He’s staring straight ahead, oblivious to her.

“Let me think about it,” he says. Suddenly he seems tired and sad, as if he’s taken on an enterprise he no longer has the will or the strength to finish. He puts his hand to his eyes and rubs hard. He’s conflicted, I think. Part of him wants to be the good cop, the hero. He hasn’t lost that part of himself. It hurts him to be so corrupt, to do such an obviously wrong thing. That’s why he delivered his self-righteous speech at the mall, to make it all okay for himself.

Ophelia turns and walks away, slowly fading like a fog that’s passing. I can hear her laughing. The headache and the ringing in my ears start to fade.

“I was seeing a doctor,” I tell him.

“Yeah?” he says, glancing over at me. “Good. You need one.”

“He disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“His office, everything in it, was just gone the last time I went there.” I leave out the part about his horrifically bloody murder. I don’t feel like getting into all that.

He cocks his head to the side, gives me a quizzical look. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I was just wondering. Would you have a way of finding out if he was ever actually there? Or if he is who he told me he was?”

He looks at me with something like concern on his face. He’s trying to decide how crazy I really am.

“What was his name?” he asks, his tone surprisingly gentle. Detective Harrison is a complicated man.

“Dr. Paul Brown.”

He writes it down in a little book he takes from his dash. He asks for the address, and I give it to him.

“I’ll look into it,” he tells me. “In the meantime, are you sure you’re safe at home?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I remember the question he asked on my voice mail: How much do you really know about your husband?

That wolfish smile again. “Sometimes the people we know least of all are sleeping in our beds.”

“You must be thinking about your wife,” I snap. “What does she know about you? Not much, I bet.”

He doesn’t like that-too close to center. His face takes on that dark expression, the one that frightens me. He starts the engine of his car. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait,” I say, sorry for my smart mouth. “Who else is looking for me?”

He rolls up his window and pulls away, leaving me alone to watch his car merge onto the highway and disappear. I wonder if he’s trying to unnerve me, make me think there are other people after me, that my husband is not who I believe him to be so that I’m more vulnerable to his blackmail. Or maybe he’s just a sadist. Or maybe he’s telling me the truth. I look for Ophelia in the darkness, but she’s gone.

I return to the house. It’s dark, quiet. Esperanza has gone to bed. I peek in on Victory, and she’s sound asleep with Claude under one arm. The colored fish from her night-light dance around the room. Gray is not back from his deadly errand. And I wonder where he is, what he’ll tell me about his night when he gets home. I consider calling my father but decide it would be reckless and pointless. I go to the bedroom, close the door, and wait-for Gray, for Marlowe, for Ophelia, whoever comes first.