Ben Winters - World of Trouble

It’s foolish to keep listening to strangers. I should preserve the battery; I should preserve my time. I press the SCAN button just one more time, the last time, and find a quiet and urgent voice, and I have to move right up close to the speaker to hear it.

“I repeat, I am in my car and I am driving south on Highway 40, if you get this and you still love me, I will be in Norman by five tomorrow, that’s tomorrow… I repeat, I’m in the car, I’m on the highway, and I love you. I, uh…”

The voice trails off into silence, the rush of highway wind. I wait a moment holding my breath and then I turn it off, just as the jackhammer starts up again at last, steady and sure from Cortez’s end of the hall. He fixed it. He’s got it.

It remains hard to fathom, hard to believe, that this is what the world has become. That this, of all possible worlds and times in which I could have been born, could have been a policeman, that this is the world and time that I got.

“We got ripped off, Nic,” I walk back over to my sister, look again at her face, the savaged flesh of her neck. “We got ripped off.”

I start to pull the tarp up over her head but then I stop, I just hold it there like a blanket.

It’s the wound. It’s her throat.

Maybe I didn’t look hard enough out in the woods, maybe I was distracted or maybe it’s that just now I’ve had the experience of sitting and staring at Jean for half an hour, watching her talk, looking at her throat. Out there in the woods, at first glance, it was clear to me that these two wounds were the same: two girls, throats slashed, victim one and victim two, wound one and wound two.

But it’s not so. Nico’s injury is worse—much worse. Which makes sense, of course, because she’s dead and Jean isn’t. I lean in close, trace the line of the assault with the tip of a finger. Looking closely I see it’s not a cut but a mass of cuts, a cluster of overlapping lacerations, forming a rough V below the victim’s chin, pointing down. With the other wound there was blood, there was the raw pinkness of the exposed muscle, but now here with this second victim it goes deeper than that—below all the blood of the jugular and the shredded layers of throat there is the shell color of bone, the off-white piping of the trachea. The depth of the wound and its messiness suggest that she was struggling, moving the whole time, trying to defend herself, get free from what was happening.

I blink back to Jean’s wound, the one I was just staring at while she stumbled through her story, a less messy wound—a single slash, suggesting little struggle or no struggle, contrary to the bruising and lacerations on her face.

So—then—so—I stand up, pace in a tight circle—so she fought back, Jean fights back but is captured and subdued. Let’s say a pill or pills, let’s say the assailant pushes something into her mouth, covers her nose with his hands and forces her to swallow.

No—stop—I stop, smack the wall with my hand, think faster, Palace, think better. We’re in a fast-moving scenario here, victim two—Nico—is already sprinting off into the woods, I’m the killer and I’ve got to catch her, can’t let her go. I hit her with something. Knock her down. Jean’s in the dirt—unconscious?—gets her with one quick smooth slice to the throat and then I’m off and running after victim two, after Nico Palace tearing breathlessly in her sandals through the woods.

But I checked Jean’s body, while she was asleep, when she was still Lily, I checked her scalp for blunt force trauma, surely I did.

She was, though, she was still . Pills or an injection or the blow of a hammer to the side of the head, she wasn’t moving when she was cut and Nico was.

I find that I’m panting, pacing, horrified. It’s out there, it’s up there, the dark heart of the sky, coming in fast.

Focus Palace but I can’t but I have to. Keep going.

Killer catches up to poor Nico in that second clearing, gets on top of her and pins her down, and she’s terrified, she’s awake, she’s writhing, and he grabs her from behind and slashes her throat until it’s open.

I am trembling, like I’m there, like I’m in the scene, like I’m cutting or being cut.

There’s something else, too. I turn around, away from the window, look at her one more time, wiping tears out of my eyes, feeling my knife hand clenching and unclenching. There’s something else.

Among the messiness and the gore of the wound there is something—I crouch—lean forward, take out my measuring tape, and murmuring apologies to Nico, after all that she has suffered, murmuring “holy moly” and then “holy shit,” I peel back small portions of her lacerated skin, one-tenth of a centimeter at a time, and I keep discovering them—smaller cuts within the larger, lines as small as insect legs. I move my magnifying glass across the neck and confirm that these smaller cuts are regularly spaced at quarter-inch increments along the whole line of the wound.

Parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound. Dr. Fenton would say that nothing is certain, that certainty is for schoolchildren and magicians, but that parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound strongly indicate that the weapon used was a serrated blade.

I burst out of the dispatch room and run down the hallway, hands spread out to either side like an animal wingspan, fly down the corridor to the kitchen to confirm my snapshot memory of the knives on the rack behind the kitchen. Butcher’s blade; paring knife; cleaver. Nonserrated.

Back in Dispatch I run it down for Nico, explain to her about her wound, the parallel superficial incisions and what they mean. I remind her, furthermore, that the only serrated blade I am aware of, in the context of this investigation, is the sawtooth buck knife noticed by Atlee Miller, hanging from Astronaut’s belt.

“Policeman.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

Cortez. Tentative expression, narrowed eyes. Looking at me like I’m not actually okay.

I clear my throat. “I’m fine. Did you crack it?”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I am. Did you get us down?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the tarp.

“Palace,” he says. “Is that her?”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s her.”

I give it to him fast, the thumbnail sketch only. “The sleeping girl, whose name is Jean Wong, originally of Lansing, Michigan—her memory of the incident in question is very uneven, essentially empty, but she was able to lead me directly to a field in the woods where I located the body. Cause of death is a deep wound to the throat with a serrated blade. That’s about—that’s about what we’ve got. So.”

I stop abruptly. I know exactly what I’m doing by talking this way, very rapidly in crisp and distinct policeman diction, I’m stringing words out around my grief like a perimeter, like caution tape.

Cortez nods, solemn, adjusts his ponytail. I wait for him to ask again if I’m okay, so I can tell him I am and we can move on.

“Death,” he says instead. “It’s the fucking worst.”

“Did you get us down there?”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Okay. Okay, great.”

He backs out of the room rather than turning, and as I stand up I see that for some reason I took one of the knives with me, the blood-stained butcher’s knife from the kitchenette. I’m holding the handle tight in my fist. I look at it for a second and then I slide it into my belt, on the inside, close to my thigh, like a huntsman.

So the group goes underground but then Nico pulls a runner and Jean runs after her and Astronaut chases them both, catches them, kills them one by one.