Stephen Gallagher: Valley of lights

We'd covered maybe two hundred yards and I was doing better than I'd expected, holding the distance even if I wasn't gaining any. Mercado had looked back once, and it had cost him time. Now, as a wagon swung out ahead of him with a number of shapes huddled under the canvas in the load area behind, I saw him put on a spurt.

He was going to try to get aboard, before the wagon picked up speed and got out onto the main street. I was close to being finished, but he didn't know that. I saw him take three long steps, and then jump; he caught the edge of the tailboard and quickly brought his legs up, hanging on tight and kicking around for a foothold.

I couldn't swear to what happened next. The wagon was making the turn and I was slowing down, knowing that I had no chance of catching it and wondering if I'd even be able to get my car out of the market in time to follow. Mercado had got himself a foothold in what looked like the loop of chain from the tailboard pin, and he was struggling up and over when suddenly the tailboard slammed down and Mercado went with it.

My first fear was that he'd bounced on his head; on hard pavement, that's never a good sign. But almost immediately he was making weak moves to raise himself up, and my guess was that he was probably stunned or winded. The truck had stopped about fifty yards further on; someone in the back might have knocked on the cab, but it was more likely that the driver heard the tailgate fall. It was possible that Mercado, kicking around with his foothold on the chain, might have jerked out the pin. Then perhaps his weight had sheared the second pin, or maybe there hadn't even been a second pin. It was an old-looking vehicle, well-used.

There was another possibility, that of somebody already on board giving him a little help. I looked over toward the truck as I reached Mercado, and a dozen blank faces stared back. I knew the answer before I even had to ask the question. Nobody saw anything.

Mercado was still struggling to rise, and I crouched down beside him and helped him to sit about halfway up. That seemed to be all that he could manage for the moment in his winded state, which meant that I had to stay where I was and support him. As long as he didn't cry out or start spitting frothy blood from deep in his lungs I was hardly likely to be complicating any breakages. He seemed to have lost his sense of place for the moment, and needed to see where he was to get his bearings again.

Let me explain that I wasn't feeling too good about all of this. I said, 'You're not in any trouble. Why did you run?' And his eyes came around to my face and focussed on me hard, as if seeing me before had meant nothing but now he was looking with an intention to remember. He tried to speak normally, but there was so little breath in him yet that it came out no louder than a whisper.

He said, 'I don't like questions.'

'I only wanted to ask you what happened back there at the Paradise.'

'Well,' he said, 'now you'll never know.'

And then he did the weirdest damned thing I'd ever seen. He simply rolled up his eyes and died on me.

My arm was under his shoulders and I could almost swear that I could feel the life flood out of him all in a rush; but still it was several seconds before I fully understood what had happened, and it was with disbelief that I lowered his sagging weight and felt by his throat for a pulse. There was nothing.

I'd seen people die before. Not many, but in my line of work it's inevitable. I'd never seen anybody go like Mercado did; he was suddenly an empty glove, a discarded thing.

And this was the tough part to accept – he'd shown every sign of doing it deliberately.

I laid him flat and closed his eyes, and then I pulled somebody out of the crowd and told him to find a phone. A fatal accident with an off-duty officer in attendance, I told the man, and then I made him repeat it. By the time that I turned to look at Mercado again I think that I'd more or less rewritten the last few minutes in my own mind, giving myself a set of reactions that I could more easily live with.

The crowd didn't last as long as most; these people were here to catch a job, and watching was getting them nowhere. They'd mostly drifted away and I was into an argument with the truck driver as to why he couldn't do the same, since he was at the other end of the vehicle and facing the other way and hadn't actually seen anything, when no less than six night-shift PD cars with their howlers running appeared like banshees out of the dawn and converged nose-in on the scene. The driver clammed up fast and was suddenly the soul of co-operation; the reason for the heavy turnout, I found, was that the man I'd sent to the phone had misreported the whole thing as a fatality involving a cop. I decided to be charitable and assume that the expressions on the faces of the various patrols as they climbed back into their units were of relief that I'd been found walking and in one piece; but wasn't there also just a little bit of disappointment that their cavalry charge had led them to nowhere?

My opposite number on the night shift, Bernie Horowitz, radioed in for the ambulance call to be moved down a notch of priority. If it came down to a choice between someone in a serious accident and Mercado, Mercado was the one who'd complain least if he had to wait. Bernie was the same age as me, with a similar length of service; back in the early days he'd tried to persuade everyone to call him 'B.J.', which inevitably meant that he acquired the lifelong nickname of Blowjob Horowitz.

'You see any of this, Alex?' he asked me afterwards.

'I saw it all,' I said. 'I had the best view of anybody, if you don't include the victim.'

He shook his head at the marvel of it. 'A witness with a fixed address,' he said. 'That's a novelty, on this piece of turf.'

Bernie and I stood and chatted for a while as his patrolmen did all the marking and measuring and statement-taking that the book calls for. When the police photographer and the woman from the medical examiner's office had arrived and seen all they wanted, Bernie and I went over and I confirmed my identification. Everybody on the team had heard about the Paradise mystery by now, and they all came around to take a look at the face of the little guy who'd held the key to it.

Nobody was any the wiser for looking.

It was a full hour before the ambulance came to take him away, and we'd covered him with a blanket by then. When they'd reversed it in and the paramedic came around to open the doors, I said, 'Are you the only ambulance in this city, or what?'

'The only good one,' he said, and then he looked at me again. 'Didn't I see you in uniform yesterday?'

'My other life,' I said.

'Well, here's something you won't know. We just came over from County General and the place is like, unbelievable. They've got the big guys stalking through the corridors looking for little guys to nail to the wall, and out in the parking lot you've got to zigzag to avoid the malpractice lawyers scrambling out of cars in their pyjamas.'

'For what?'

'All because one of the zombies walked.'

'Say again?'

'It happened about an hour ago. One of them already died, right? Just quit breathing in the Emergency Room when a couple of nurses turned him over. Well, one of the others decided that he disagreed with the doctor's diagnosis. He got out of bed, helped himself to somebody's clothes, and then walked out.'

'Did anyone actually see him?'

'Two witnesses, one of them a Reverend in for minor surgery. Said it restored his faith in the resurrection.'

If there was a witness, then it could hardly have been body-snatching. I've heard of weirder things.

The paramedic added, as they brought out the folding stretcher for Mercado, 'I'd have liked to have seen it myself. Yesterday I'd have laid a bet with anyone. Between the ears, those guys were just dead meat.'