Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

Right. Going to blow somebody up, thought I should tell you. Jesus.

Cat retrieved her report, notified Pete Ashberry. If this kid was the one, she had missed it.

She declined Pete’s offer to go home early. She sat out the remainder of the day, waiting to hear whether they’d picked up any more fragments from the site. She talked to a man who was going to fire-bomb a Starbucks (no specifics of location) because they insisted on hiring nigger whores. (She dutifully declined to mention the shade of her own skin but did put a hex on the fucker, telepathically.) She talked to another man, Slavic accent, who was going to kill the deputy mayor (why the deputy mayor?) because, as far as she could tell before he hung up, it just seemed like an interesting thing to do.

She kept all her pens in her drawer, off the desktop. It was a little like quitting smoking.

Pete came to her cubicle at five minutes to five. He was as big as a file cabinet and about that exciting. But he was a decent man; he wore his troubles bravely. His wife was going blind. His daughter had married some ecocultist who’d dragged her to Costa Rica to live in a tree.

“Now what?” Cat said. She was in no mood. She should sweeten up she had after all quite possibly missed it but if she went all nice and apologetic now, if she started acting like someone who needed forgiveness, she might never get back to herself. Screw them if they wanted her meek.

Pete stood in the opening (you couldn’t call it a doorway; it was just the point at which Cat’s four-feet-by-five-feet bled into the greater fluorescence) with his mouth settled. Pete was the only brother in deterrence. His skin was varnished mahogany, his hair an incongruously beautiful silver-gray. When he was stern and focused, you could put a can under his upper lip and push his nose to start the opener function.

“They got a left forearm,” he said. “They got half a sneaker, with half a foot inside. It’s a kid.”

“Jesus.”

“You ready for this? Kid walked up to this guy, hugged him, and self-detonated.”

“ Hugged him?”

“Witness says so. White kid, wearing a baseball jacket, very regular-looking. This is from both our reliables. It’s only the one who says he saw the clinch.”

“Fuck me.”

“Fuck everybody.”

“Who does Dick Harte turn out to be?” she asked.

“Speculator. Not Don Trump, but big. One of the people who make the high-rises rise.”

“Funny business?”

“Nothing yet. Lived in Great Neck with wife number two. Some kids, some pets. You know.”

“Think he knew the boy?”

“Hope so.”

Everyone would hope so. Everyone would be saying a silent prayer right now, to the effect that the kid had been Dick Harte’s illegitimate son, or that they’d been having sex in a park in Great Neck, or whatever. Just don’t let it be random.

“Shit.”

Pete said, “We don’t know it was your caller.”

“I have a feeling, though.”

“Yeah, well, I do, too. Want to hear the tape with me?”

“Nothing would please me more.”

She went with Pete down the corridor to the audio room. Pete stopped en route in the lunchroom for a cup of late-day, bottom-of-the-pot coffee sludge, with four Equals. Cat graciously declined. She and Pete went into the audio room, which was in her opinion the least unpleasant place on the premises. It was ten degrees cooler and not quite as relentlessly lit. They sat in the synthetic-plush gray chairs. Aaron had cued the tape for them. Pete punched the button.

Hello. This is Cat Martin. Like everybody, she hated hearing her own voice on tape. Inside her skull it didn’t sound so flat, so harsh. To herself she sounded muscular and musical, smoky, a little like a young Nina Simone.

Hello? There it was again, that throaty boy voice, utterly unexceptional. Nervous, a little squawky, probably thirteen. Are you a policewoman?

And your name is?

/ called the police, and they patched me over to you.

What can I do for you?

Nothing. You cant do anything for me.

His poor mother must have been hearing those words ever since puberty turned her sweet little boy sullen and strange and fetid. Had some mother out there started wondering yet?

Why are you calling, then? I want to tell you something. What do you want to tell me?

Silence. She could picture him all over again, desperate little wanker with a room full of slasher-movie posters, summoning his courage. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing at all.

Tm going to blow somebody up. Who?

I can’t tell you.

Why do you think you can’t tell me?

People have got to be stopped.

Why do you think that?

We’ve got to start over.

You’re thinking of stopping someone in particular?

It doesn’t matter who.

It does matter. Why do you think it doesn’t?

I mean, it doesn’t matter to the company.

What company?

The one we all work for.

Who do you work for?

You work for it, too.

Is the company telling you to hurt somebody? You think Pm crazy, don’t you? I think you’re angry.

Please don’t talk to me the way you talk to crazy people. I mean, one per son doesn’t matter. The numbers don’t crunch in single digits.

You want to hurt somebody who’s hurting you. Is that right?

I can’t talk to you.

Yes, you can. Tell me your name.

I’m in the family. We gave up our names.

Everybody has a name.

I just wanted someone to know. I thought it would be better.

Better for who?

/ wasn’t supposed to call. Shit. There it was.

You can work this out without hurting anybody. Tell me your name.

Tm nobody. Tm already dead. Click.

She had in fact messed up, then. The moment a caller referred to anyone else, it was an automatic red tag. Any caller who claimed to be receiving instructions from a friend, from Jesus, from the dog next door or the radio transmissions that came through the fillings in his teeth, got promoted to the next level of seriousness. This one had been vague enough he wasn’t supposed to call anyone but still. She should have kept him talking, shouldn’t have pressed quite so hard for his name.

Had she been making a list? Probably. Had she paid more attention to her list than she had to the caller? Hoped not.

“‘Tm in the family,’” she said. “‘We gave up our names.’ What’s that about?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Is there a rock band with lyrics like that?”

“We’re checking.”

“Good.”

“The family. What family?”

“The Brady Bunch. The Mafia. IBM. You know.”

Right. She’d had one just the other day. Mild-voiced citizen who’d said he was going to start driving around the country and running down illegal immigrants, under orders from Katie Couric. They tended to like the idea of working for celebrities or international corporations.

I do,” Cat said. “I do know.”

Pete said, “You shoulda red-tagged it.” He wasn’t nasty about it. Simple statement of fact. These things happened.

“You checked the trace?” she asked.

“Pay phone. Corner of Bowery and Second Street.”

“Ugh.”

“Bound to happen, sooner or later.” He slurped his coffee.

“I didn’t think it would happen to me.”

“Go home. Tell your boyfriend to make you a drink and take you someplace nice for dinner.”