Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

His pointless action with the photo told me differently, and I waited for the rest.

“Ulises moved here with a girlfriend,” Cicero went on. “She quit him eventually, but he liked it here, so he stayed. They sent me up here to live with him about four years ago, after rehab, and he died a year after that.”

It wasn’t the end; in fact, it was a prologue.

“Ulises was a baker,” Cicero said. “He had screwy hours, starting work at two in the morning, at a little bakery in St. Paul.”

Immediately I knew the story Cicero was going to tell.

“The neighborhood wasn’t the best. There was some drug activity there,” Cicero said. “One night, as Ulises was going to work, there was an APB in Ramsey County for a drug suspect who’d taken a shot at some cops. Ulises drove a car similar to the one they were looking for. A couple of plainclothes Narcotics officers saw him parking behind the bakery and they braced him as he got out of the car.”

“And they shot him,” I said. You didn’t have to be a cop to have heard about it.

Cicero nodded. “They said afterward that he ignored commands to raise his hands and reached for a weapon instead. Both of them opened fire. They hit him seven times and killed him.”

“I remember,” I said. “It was awful.”

“I believe them when they say he was reaching into his jacket. Ulises was probably reaching for his wallet. They were in street clothes, in a bad neighborhood, at two in the morning, pointing guns at him. Ulises probably thought he was being robbed. There was even a newspaper columnist who floated that theory, but the police never lent it any credence at all.”

Oh, yes they did, I thought, just never in public forums. I remembered the days of heated debate that had gone on in locker rooms and shooting ranges, anywhere cops talked among themselves.

“They also suggested, early on, that Ulises had ignored their commands because his English wasn’t good enough. They had to back down from that idea. English was his first language, just like it was mine, and everyone who knew him knew that.” He paused. “Naturally, the review board found no fault with the officers. They went back to work, and a week or so later, I had to move up here.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” Cicero said. “It’s not your fault.”

“ Cicero,” I said, “I probably should tell you something.”

My lie of omission- about being a cop- no longer rested lightly on my shoulders. I looked over at the photos, found the one of a younger Cicero and his brother. There was something lighter in Ulises’s expression. A physician’s seriousness informed Cicero ’s face, even at rest; Ulises looked more easygoing.

“I’m right here,” Cicero said patiently.

Come on, Sarah, it’s not that hard. Three little words: I’m a cop.

Then we both heard it, the muffled shrill sound that was my cell phone ringing in the depths of my shoulder bag. I turned from the photos on the table, shot Cicero an apologetic look, and dug the phone from the bag.

“Sarah?” It was Marlinchen. “I’m sorry to bother you, but-”

“What is it?” I asked, antenna up.

“I think someone’s outside the house. Liam heard noises earlier, when he went out to take a break from studying, and I just heard something outside the bathroom window while I was brushing my teeth. They don’t sound like animal noises to me.”

I could easily have told her to call the police in her area, but noises outside a house weren’t likely to be a top priority, and ten at night wasn’t a peak time for staffing at most smaller departments. The Hennessys would likely get a ten-minute visit, sometime in the next two hours. I couldn’t leave it at that. The Hennessy kids were my responsibility.

“I’ll come over,” I said.

Despiteher disclaimer- They don’t sound like animal noises to me - I thought that Marlinchen had probably heard whatever had killed Snowball. If it had hunted on their grounds before, there was no reason it wouldn’t come back. But it was quite dark as I got close to the Hennessy home, and I didn’t blame Marlinchen for being afraid.

She met me at the door, Colm and Liam not far behind her. “Thank you for coming out,” she said quickly.

“You’re welcome. I’m going to make a quick check of the house, then the grounds,” I told her.

“The house?” Marlinchen said, startled. “The noises were outside.”

“Are you sure all the doors have been locked all night long?”

“I think… I guess…,” Marlinchen tried to answer, but she wasn’t quite sure, and her two brothers remained silent.

“Better to check,” I said. “Where’s Donal, by the way?”

“Sleeping,” Marlinchen said. “I sent him to bed a half hour ago.”

I checked on him first, and his chest rose and fell evenly in the light that spilled across his bed when I opened the door. Moving inside, I checked the closets as quietly as possible, and under both the beds. Nothing.

I went through the darkened upstairs rooms, then the downstairs. A door in the kitchen led down to a basement, and I shone my flashlight into its shadowy corners. There was some old furniture stored down there, and two mattresses. A smell of dust and concrete hung in the air. It wasn’t orderly, but I found nothing that suggested a recent intruder.

When I’d finished with the house, I went out into the garage, where Hugh’s Suburban stood. There was no one hiding under it, and the closets held only canned food and camping equipment, and a few dusty old bottles of wine.

Outside, I went to the broad back porch and dropped to my hands and knees, looking between a wide gap in the boards through which a human might easily have squeezed. Underneath was nothing but an expanse of dust and small nondescript rocks. I walked out to the fence line on either side of the house, poked around the bushes at the property’s edge, looked under the small wooden dock at the lake’s edge. No broken branches, no footprints to be seen. The only thing that was out of place was the little rise of overturned-and-smoothed soil near the willow tree, the resting place of the late Snowball.

Last, I went to the detached garage. The door was unlocked. Stepping inside, I pointed the flashlight beam into the darkness, and jumped.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. At first glance, it had looked like a body hanging from the rafters: a heavy bag. To the right of it was a weight bench. Colm’s gym, as the other kids called it.

The rest of the building was taken up by a car, an early-eighties BMW. Underneath a layer of dust, the paint seemed to be a deep bottle green. Its windows were likewise filmed with dust, like a corpse’s eyes, and all four tires were flat. It wasn’t damaged in any other way, but it had clearly been years since it was driven. I pointed the flashlight at a window, and the beam pierced the light layer of dust to show nothing out of the ordinary: pale-brown leather seats, all empty. Spiders had gotten inside, their webs threaded across the bars of the headrests and dangled loosely from the ceiling handgrips.

“Everything looks fine,” I told Marlinchen when she answered my knock at the door. “I think you probably heard an animal of some kind.”

Marlinchen looked sheepish. “Maybe what happened to Snowball has me on edge,” she said.

“That’s understandable,” I told her. “In fact, I was thinking I might as well just stay out here with you guys tonight.”

“Really?” she said. “That’s not necessary, honest.”

I’d expected that this would startle her, and said, “Well, it is late, and it’s a long drive back…”

“Oh,” Marlinchen said, falling back immediately into her good manners. “I understand. I didn’t mean-”