Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“So who’s watching Doyle right now?”

“I tipped one of the girls to pay special attention to him,” Lionel said, without taking his eyes off the street, “until I get back.”

It was only four blocks to Doyle’s, Lionel pulling into the alley that ran between Princeton Place and Quincy Street. The alley had a cut-through that went behind the houses on both streets-the backyards faced one another across the alley-and they were in the alley behind Doyle’s, the place where the pictures had been taken.

The side door slid open again and it dawned on Sully that it had all gotten out of hand, this story, his life, everything, since he’d come back from Bosnia, from Romania, from Afghanistan, from Gaza, from Nagorno-Karabakh. He had lost the ability to draw lines, to compartmentalize, to keep one part of his life separate from another. What was the morality in the war zone and what was the morality out of it? They were different, the rules were different, but what worked in war often worked on the streets if you just had the nerve. The blues were running into the greens, the yellows into the reds, the whole color wheel was just a blotch, and he did not think the colors would ever go back inside their lines again.

He shoved the thought aside, forcing himself to think of Lorena, of Noel, of Lana, of Michelle and her father. He was going to make this shit right and he was going to do it right now, before sunrise. In front of him, Sly slipped out of the car without a word, as quick and quiet as a leopard, vanishing into the shadows of the alley. Sully followed, a sense of freefall, as if he’d just parachuted out of an airplane, thousands of feet of dead air beneath him, and then suddenly he landed. He was shuffling forward over the rough concrete as fast as he could.

Behind him, Lionel pulled away, a thin plume of exhaust trailing. There was no sound now but that of his footsteps, his breathing. He and Sly were alone, and Sly had already cut the padlock on the wooden gate.

The gate swung open when he pushed it-there were no springs-and it slapped back against the wooden fence. Sly, already inside, turned and glared. Sully pulled the gate shut, making sure the clasp did not click, and then turned and leaned his back against it. There was only one streetlight working in the alley, but it still cast dim shadows. Everything was quiet again.

Sly, letting out a breath of exasperation, gestured toward the house with two fingers and then he was gone, hunched over, moving fast down the concrete slope, where a car would ordinarily be parked, to the peeling garage door, which looked as if it hadn’t rolled up since Nixon was in the White House. Sully could see, through a patch of streetlight, Sly move to his right, to the entry door. He was pulling open a pouch at his hip. Sully peered forward and saw Sly make a circle in the glass pane of the window on the door and tug. There was a faint tinkle of glass. A moment later, the door swung outward and open.

Sly was gone, pulling the door closed behind him.

Sully kept his eyes flicking from the windows of one house to the next door, expecting lights in adjacent windows to flick on, sashes to be thrown open, a belligerent voice to yell, “Hey! The fuck you doing?” But nothing stirred. He could not hear any cars passing, either on Princeton or on Park Place, the street running along the edge of the golf course behind them. After a few moments, he began to pick up the sounds of rain dripping from trees, from eaves, hitting the pavement below.

In front of him, in Doyle’s weed-choked backyard, were two metal chairs pushed up against the wooden railings of the fence, a pair of wet cushions on the ground beside them. The sloped drive in front of him had a thick oil stain. The streetlight shadows over the edge of the fence made it hard to see the interior borders of the property, and in this darkness he felt safe.

He counted to thirty, then forty-five, then eighty, and then the screen door opened on the tiny back porch. Sly came out into the half-light. He beckoned with a windmilling motion, and Sully kept to the shadows until he stepped onto the porch. From there he took hold of the open door and stepped inside, into the suffocating darkness.

Sly pulled the door shut behind him and turned the bolt. He took out a flashlight and turned it on, keeping the beam on the floor. When he did, Sully could make out the thin nose, the cheekbones, the angular cast to his head, and he could see the flicker in his eyes.

“What?” Sully said. “What?”

“You take the upstairs, I’ll do the basement,” Sly hissed. “Move.”

Sully advanced across the cheap linoleum of the kitchen, past the wooden shelves and pantry, all of it looking shipshape neat and well ordered. He kept to the right in the narrow hallway, then, when near the front door, made a U-turn to his left and was at the base of the stairs. He shone the light up the stairwell. He bit his lower lip and went quickly up the steps, keeping his feet to the outside edges to minimize the creaks.

When he reached the landing, one bedroom was in front of him, a bathroom to his immediate left. The hallway was just to his left, on the other side of the banister, running back toward the front of the house. He flicked the beam down the hallway, illuminating two doors opening off to the right. He knew, from the layout of his own house, there would be a small bedroom first and then the master bedroom, with the windows facing the street.

He walked down the hall and shone the light into the first room. There were three steel filing cabinets, each four drawers high and each looking as heavy as an engine block, set beside a heavy desk. It was designed to be a bedroom but Doyle had converted it into an office. Sully took three steps farther down the hall, pushed the door open with the flashlight, peeking into the man’s bedroom. It was neat, orderly, and almost completely bare. A bed: a mattress on the floor, no box spring. The sheets were pulled up and tucked in neatly. There were no pictures, no paintings, nothing on the peeling walls. An ancient telephone, its cord coiled and looped, sat by the pillows.

He went back into the converted office, the steel desk looking identical to the kind Doyle kept in his office at the store. The top of it was bare-free of paper, of files, of anything. The filing cabinets were not locked. The top two drawers were packed thick with manila folders, headings scrawled in bold black lettering on the raised tabs. Most seemed to apply to the store, others to cars he had owned, others labeled REFRIGERATOR and HAULING and BOAT, then folder after folder marked PAYROLL. There was tax information and three files on roofing problems. It smelled musty, old.

The bottom drawer was packed solid with pornography.

It was, Sully noticed as he bent down to lift a few magazines to peek at the titles farther down, all hard-core stuff, all black and Hispanic women, crude titles devoted to specific parts of the female anatomy.

“Hey.”

He jumped halfway to the ceiling. Sly materialized at the door, shining a flashlight in his face.

“Goddammit, would you give-”

“Come on. You got to see this.”

Sly led the way to the first floor, making the U-turn at the bottom of the steps turning to the back of the house. When he got to the door that led to the basement, he pulled it open and stepped down to the landing. Below them was a gulf of blackness, pierced only by the narrow beam of his flashlight. He looked at Sully and said, “We’re out of here in five minutes-I don’t care what you think. Pull the door behind you. And don’t fucking trip on anything.”

Sully nodded, closing the door, following Sly down the wooden steps, concentrating on the beams of the flashlights. When they both reached the bottom, Sly said, “There’s a laundry room at the back, and he blacked out the windows, so the lights don’t matter.”