R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

“You know what I mean?” Nolen continued. “You have to crack heads in this line of work-there’s no way around it. So you… categorize… or so she says. Dehumanize… You know, to make it easier.”

Like most cynics, I have the bad, well-nigh-irresistible habit of thinking earnest people stupid. What I wanted to ask at this point was, Are you the mayor’s retarded nephew or something?

Instead I said, “Well… you know… my secretary, she called, said you wanted me to, ah, check in… ”

“Yeah. Yeah. So we could coordinate.” He leaned forward like an orphan angling for a bite of turkey dinner.

“Coordinate?”

I was afraid that the meeting would go sour. I tend to expect the worst when it comes to me and regular, decent folk, but I had no idea it would be this bad. There’s nothing quite so ripe-smelling as excessive eagerness in an adult.

“Coordinate,” he repeated. “Two heads are better than one, as they say. I just figured that a man with your expertise-”

“Expertise?”

“Expertise,” he repeated, like it was a boardroom buzzword. “I’ve only investigated four missing persons in my life. Four. You could say I’m in… well, way over my head. But I like to think I have other… you know, gifts, that compensate for my lack of experience. I’m a puzzle man. I’ve always been good with puzzles.”

Gifts? Puzzles? Was this guy for fucking real? One part of me wanted to tell him that the coach had lied, that it wasn’t cool to brandish a little dick in the change-room shower, but the other part was actually beginning to like this guy.

“This is great. Coordination. Expertise. All great. I’ll need a day or two to find my bearings on my own… you know. Then we can get down to business.”

“Sure. Sure.” He smiled with the daft credulity of a teenage Scout leader-or so it struck me. “Here,” he said, standing to hand me a small stack of folders. “I’ve gathered everything I could, you know, reports, statements-some photographs of the road she used to walk along-I’m not sure why they’re in there, but… “

I hefted the phone book-sized pile with a friendly scowl. Jennifer had been missing, what, three nights? If weight translated into thoroughness, this guy was nothing short of exhaustive. At the time I failed to realize the fear this amount of case-overkill implied.

“All great,” I said. “But would you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? I have this thing with… you know… talking stuff through.”

The Chief grinned, placed his hands on his knees in that elbows-out, getting-to-work way. “Awesome. Me too. Talking is so much better.”

Lonely, I realized. The guy was fucking lonely. He probably talked the coffee-shop regulars cross-eyed in his eagerness to brainstorm the case. Just like that I “got” Chief Caleb Nolen. He was one of those exuberant, earnest souls capable of feeling both horrified and celebratory at the same time. I had no doubt that Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance outraged him down to his deepest moral kernel. And at the same time, I knew this was the most exhilarating event in his bureaucratic life.

A real honest-to-God mystery… What would we do without dead hotties?

Never one to waste an opportunity, I began by reviewing the particulars of Jennifer’s disappearance, more to confirm the Bonjours’ version of events than anything else. Fact was, Jon and Mandy were too invested. Invested people tend to get all the details right in the wrong way, seeing ego-friendly things like hope and vindication where there is none. Caleb, I was beginning to realize, was also too invested, but in an entirely different way.

“I think about her, you know,” he said, waving his hands in a curiously frantic gesture. “Out there… somewhere… alone…” He swallowed against cracks opening in his voice. His eyes became frail in that men-don’t-cry way. “I’ve been doing this job for, well, about seven years now. I’ve even solved a murder or two-domestic stuff, though. But I’ve always felt more like a janitor, or custodian, I suppose. Cleaning up messes after they happen. But this… I mean, this girl, Jennifer… what’s happening to her is happening now. I feel guilty just taking time out with my daughter, or reading the paper. I feel guilty for being… well, you know, a small-fry cop in a small-fry town. I feel like she needs a comic book hero or something…”

I had this friend growing up, Joey Sobotka, who always told me that I had superpowers, that I would grow up to be someone important, envied and admired. A real-life superhero. He was killed in a train derailment somewhere out in Montana, of all places. Who dies in a train derailment?

And what kind of superhero lets his friends die?

“The world’s a toilet, Chief. Janitors are the only superheroes that matter.”

Apparently he didn’t know what to make of that. He just stared down at the fan of documents across his desk like a kid wondering how he was going to explain his latest D to his pop.

“Did you know her?” I asked on impulse. “Personally, that is…”

He blinked and frowned. “Yeah. She was the Framers’ representative at these community policing things we put together.”

“What was she like?”

“An angel,” he said. He laughed and scratched the back of his neck. “I would always get this… this… weird urge whenever I saw her…” He must have glimpsed what I was thinking on my face because he fairly tumbled over himself to explain. “No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her… well, a gas mask.”

“A gas mask, huh.”

“I know how it sounds. But you live here long enough and you begin to take a dim view of things, you know? There was just something about her that made you think she was, well, in danger. Like she was an endangered species or something.”

“She is, Chief. She is.”

I continued reviewing the details as the Bonjours had provided them. Not forgetting anything has made me quite the effective interrogator over the years. In a matter of several minutes I was satisfied that the Bonjour version was in fact the official version-though, given the peculiarities of Nolen’s character, it suddenly didn’t seem all that “official” at all. More like just one more dude’s take.

I then asked the standard questions, about known sex offenders, whether any recent events could possibly be related. No, not in Ruddick. None. Then I moved on to the question that had been burning a hole in my curiosity pocket.

“So I gotta ask: what do you make of the Framers?”

Nolen hesitated.

“Drive up to the Compound yourself,” he eventually said, chewing the inside of his bottom lip. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Framers are good people, you know, but they are, ah… co-operative.”

Part of me wanted to say, But do they have any expertise?

“What about the locals? What do they think of them?”

A lick-lipping pause.

“The thing you need to understand about Ruddick, Mr. Manning-”

“Disciple,” I interrupted. “Call me Disciple.”

“Sure… er, Disciple, then,” he replied with an embarrassed How- could-that-be-a-name look.

The urge to hit him passed quickly, and not simply because he was a cop. You know the saying: bloody a cop’s nose, break your future’s neck. He was too… well-meaning.

“Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean…”

Ruddick was open for business. I could almost see him sitting with a bunch of Chamber of Commerce fat-asses strategizing around a bucket of KFC. Hell, even cult members make the odd run to the Sam’s Club for toiletries and whatnot. The Enlightened wipe their asses at least as much as the Saved, probably more, given all that hummus.