Ben Winters - World of Trouble

“Okay,” I say again.

This is how he talks, Cortez the thief, my unlikely partner: like the world will go on forever, like he with his hobbies and habits will go on forever. He sighs and shakes his head sadly at my indifference, and slides past in the darkness like a phantom, away down the hallway in search of more loot. She’s not here , whispers Officer McConnell in my ear. Not judging, not angry. Just noting the obvious. You came all this way for nothing, Detective Palace. She’s not here .

The day is advancing. Dull gold sunlight inching closer to me down here at the far end of the dark hall. The dog, somewhere I can’t see him, but close enough that I hear him coughing. The planet wobbling beneath my feet.

Next to the detectives room is a door marked MUSTER, and this room too is full of familiar objects, coat hooks hung with windbreakers, a well-broken-in blue ball cap, a pair of sturdy Carhartt boots with stiffened laces. Policeman street clothes. In one corner there’s an American flag on a cheap plastic eagle-head stand. An OSHA workplace-safety information sheet is tacked to the lower corner of a billboard, the same sheet we had in Concord that Detective McGully liked to read aloud, dripping with disdain: “Oh, good, some tips on posture. We get frikkin’ shot at for a living!”

Along the back wall is a dry-erase board on wobbly wheels with an undated exhortation, all-caps and triple-underlined: “STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES.” I smile, half smile, imagining the weary young sergeant writing the message, hiding his own fear behind salty tough-cop cleverness. STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES. Keep a good eye on us, would ya? It hasn’t been an easy time for law enforcement, this last set of months, it really hasn’t.

I push through a door at the back of the muster room into an even smaller space, a kitchenette slash break room: sink, fridge, microwave, round table and black plastic chairs. I open the fridge and push it closed immediately against a wave of warmth and foul odor: soured food, spoiled food, rot.

I stand in front of the empty vending machine and peer for a moment at my funhouse reflection in the Plexiglass. There are no snacks in there, just the bare coils like empty winter branches. But the glass is not smashed, like all the world’s glass seems to be these days. No one assaulted this machine with a bat or a Carhartt boot to rob it of its treasures.

Presumably this machine was emptied out ages ago, maybe by Detective Russel or by her disappointing friend Jason on his way out—except, when I crouch down, take a knee and look closely, I find a plastic fork holding open the black horizontal door at the bottom where the food comes out. I shine my light on it, the fork dramatically bowed, the tensile strength of its hard plastic holding up precariously against the weight of the snack trap.

Holy moly, is what I’m thinking, because this could be exactly what I’m looking for, unless it isn’t.

Because theoretically, of course, a plastic fork could remain in that bowed position for a long time, for months even, but on the other hand, one of the many suspensions my sister earned during her rocky career at Concord High School was for performing the same trick: rigging open the vending machine in the teachers’ lounge and looting all the candy bars and potato chips, leaving behind just the low-fat yogurt bars and a note: You’re welcome, fatties!

When I catch my breath I gingerly remove the fork. I have a dozen sandwich bags in my pocket, and I slip the fork into one of the bags and the bag into my sport-coat pocket and move on.

The kitchenette’s two slim cupboards have been rummaged. Plates broken and disarrayed; bowls tossed onto the floor. Only two coffee mugs are still intact, one reading PROPERTY OF ROTARY POLICE DEPARTMENT, the other I’M THROUGH WITH LOVE; FORTUNATELY THERE’S STILL SEX. I smile and rub my bleary eyes. I miss cops, I really do.

Was she here? Did Nico take the candy?

The gooseneck spout of the sink is in the on position, angled up sharply to the left, as if someone came in for a glass of water, forgetting that the municipal supplies have stopped. Or perhaps the water went out right in the middle of someone using the sink. Some cop in the break room after a long and treacherous shift, filling up his cup or washing his face, her face, and suddenly, whoops, no more water for you.

The sink is full of blood. It’s a deep-walled sink with a basin made of stainless steel like the handle, and when I look down into it the sides and the bottom are covered with a rust-red explosion of blood. The drain is clotted and thick with it. I look again at the gooseneck spout, closer now, shining the light, and find the faint smudged patches: red, bloody palms clutching and jerking the handle.

STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES .

Above and behind the sink, bolted to the wall, is a horizontal rack hung with three knives. All of them are stained with blood, up and down, freckled from hilt and blade. A clot of dread and excitement forms in the base of my gut and floats like a bubble up into my throat. I swing around, moving quickly now, heartbeat thrumming, back through the muster room and out into the hallway, and now the sun is all the way up outside, casting a muted ochre glow through the glass door and I can see the floor clearly, see where the trail of blood runs down the hallway. Discrete spots, leading plain as bread crumbs from the kitchenette sink through the muster room, pass the dry-erase board and the flagpole, all the way down the hall to the front door of the station.

My mentor Detective Culverson, my mentor and my friend, he called it walking the blood . Walking the blood means walking with the escaping suspect or the fleeing victim, it means “you find the trail and see what songs it wants to sing you.” I shake my head, remembering him saying that, most of the way joking, purposefully hokey, but Detective Culverson could turn a phrase, he really could.

I walk the blood. I follow the steady line of drops, which appear on the tile at six- to eight-inch intervals all the way down the hallway and out the glass door, where the trail disappears in the thick mud just outside the building. I stand up in the gloomy daylight. It’s raining, a sputtering indecisive drizzle. It’s been raining for days. When Cortez and I got here late last night it was squalling hard enough that we were biking with our jackets tugged up over our necks and the backs of our heads, like snails, a blue tarp tied tautly over all our stuff in the Red Ryder wagon trailing behind. Wherever the bleeding person went from here, there is no trail left to sing about it.

Back at the bloody sink in the break room, I open my small blue notebook to one of its last fresh pages and draw a rough annotated illustration of the knives behind the sink. Butcher’s knife, twelve inches; cleaver, six inches with a tapered spine; paring knife, three and a half inches, with the brand initials W.G. inlaid on the handle, between the rivets. I sketch the blood pattern on the knives and in the basin of the sink. I get down on all fours and walk the blood again, and this time I note that each of these drops is oblong, less a perfect circle and more an oval with a pointy end. I go again, third time, nice and slow, running my big Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass along the trail and now I’m seeing that they alternate : an oblong droplet pointing this way, and then one pointing that way, one eastward droplet, one westward, all the way down the hall.

I was a detective for only three months, promoted out of nowhere and dismissed just as abruptly when the CPD was absorbed by the Department of Justice, and so I never received the higher-level training I would have in the normal run of a career. I am not as versed as I might wish in the finer points of crime-scene forensics, I cannot be as sure as I would like. Still, though. Nevertheless. What I’ve got here is actually not one trail but two; what the alternating droplets record are two separate instances that someone passed along this corridor either bleeding or carrying a blood-stained object. Two journeys in opposite directions.