Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

David’s enormous shoulders heaved with every breath. I could see vapor trails rising like steam from each nostril like a bull. He spat on me, turned, and sauntered away.

I listened to his heavy boots crunch through the snow. With my head still spinning, I sat up and watched him leave. Once he passed through the trees and into the darkness, disappearing from sight, I nearly forgot what he looked like.

I think I’m going to pass out, I thought. I think I’m going to pass out. I think I’m going to—

Darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A slight and indistinct form crept beside me without making a sound. Weightless, it climbed onto my chest. Hot breath fell across my forehead. I felt its tongue lap up the tears that were searing hot ruts down the sides of my face.

—Kyle, I said.

No answer.

When I finally came to, the sun was just beginning to crest through the cemetery trees. It hit my eyes in that perfect way only the sun knows how to do, and I winced and turned my head, suddenly unsure of my surroundings. Sunlight caused the trees to bleed and the snow-covered hills to radiate like a thousand Octobers. I could make out a distant church, its spire like the twist of a conch shell against the pale sky.

Struggling to sit up, a nauseating wave of dizziness filtered into my brain. I tried to bring my right arm up but couldn’t—I was still handcuffed to the fence. Tenderly, I touched the side of my head with my free hand. Winced again. The bump there felt like a softball pushing its way through the side of my skull.

The events of last night rushed back to me in a suffocating whirlwind. I glanced at my left hand and found it was sticky with blood. A sizeable gash bisected my palm. Somehow, in the jumble of events, I’d sliced it open pretty nicely. The fingertips were blue.

Then I realized how badly I was shaking. I couldn’t calm myself, couldn’t get warm, and figured I must have been out here lying in the snow for at least five or six hours.

My head was woozy, and I probably had a slight concussion. The blood from my injured hand had dried in the night, running in bright red parade streamers from my wrist down the length of my arm to the crease of my elbow and into the snow. I looked like I’d just gutted a pig.

“Fuck . . .”

The sound of my own voice sent shards of broken glass into the soft gray matter of my brain.

Voices: I heard voices then, coming from afar. I caught movement through the trees and watched three people advancing toward me. As they drew nearer, I realized two of them were police officers in uniform. The third person I assumed to be the cemetery groundskeeper.

The three men paused a few feet in front of me. I spied my notebook in the snow next to one of their shiny black shoes.

“Hey,” said the taller officer. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m fucking freezing,” I chattered.

The groundskeeper pointed in my direction. He was a fat little shrew with atrocious teeth, a character in a Dickens novel. “See that? See his hand? I said he was chained up, didn’t I?”

“My n-n-name’s T-T-Trav—”

“I know who you are.” The taller cop, it turned out, was Douglas Cordova, my brother’s partner whom I’d met at the Christmas party. In his unblemished uniform and with his square jaw and jade-green eyes, he could have marched straight out of a recruiting poster. To the other officer, Cordova said, “Unhook him.”

The second officer dropped to one knee in the snow while fumbling around on his belt for his handcuff key. Less intimidating than Cordova, this guy had a slack, sleepy-dog face, and his chin was minimal and abbreviated, giving his profile an overall unfinished look. His nameplate said Freers.

“You need an ambulance or anything?” Freers said too close to my face. His breath smelled of onions.

“No.”

“You’re bleeding, you know.”

I glanced at my lacerated palm.

“I meant your face,” said Freers, standing.

On shaky knees, I climbed to my feet and steadied myself against the large oak tree. My jeans cracked audibly, frozen stiff to my legs. Had I not been wearing my coat, I surely wouldn’t have made it through the night.

“Who did this to you?” Cordova said. He had one hand on the groundskeeper’s shoulder, and they looked like mismatched football players about to form a huddle to discuss the next play.

“David D-D-Dentman,” I said.

Cordova did not alter his expression. “Okay,” he said, turning to his partner, “let’s get him in the car before he turns into a Popsicle.”

Freers took me by the forearm and led me around the tombstones.

“Wait.” I paused to pick up my notebook from the ground. Glancing around, I tried to see if I could spot any of Earl’s crime scene photos, but they were gone.

“That there’s littering,” barked the groundskeeper. Pointing at the notebook in my hand, he said, “There’s a fine to pay for littering.”

“No one’s littering,” Cordova assured him, his hand still on the smaller man’s shoulder.

“There’s a fine,” he repeated, though his tone was much less stern.

“Come on,” Cordova said, saddling up beside me and placing a couple of fingers at the base of my spine.

“I think I can manage, thanks,” I said.

“This is trespassing, too,” said the groundskeeper as we trailed out of the cemetery and down the gravel drive toward the road. The police car sat there waiting. “Trespassing!”

“Don’t mind him,” Cordova said close to my ear.

“Watch the skull bone,” murmured Freers as he unlocked the back door of the cruiser and helped me inside. Across the roof of the car he called out to Cordova, “Pump the heat up for this guy, will ya?”

Doors slammed. Cordova negotiated his big bulk behind the steering wheel while Freers reclined in the passenger seat. Cordova cranked the heat, and despite my frozen state, I began to sweat into my shoes.

“You okay back there, Travis?” Cordova asked.

“Feel the heat?”

Not trusting my lips to form words, I simply nodded repeatedly at his reflection in the rearview mirror.

My head pounding like a calypso drum, I watched the landscape of Westlake shuttle by the windows. The string of shops, the collection of little whitewashed two-story homes, the parade of vehicles filing through the streets. We went by Waterview Court.

“You missed my street,” I said through the holes in the Plexiglas partition.

“We’re not taking you home,” said Cordova.

“Where are we going?”

Freers leaned over to Cordova, peering at me from the corner of one eye. “Maybe we should take him to the hospital first. He’s shaking like a tambourine.”

“We can take him after,” Cordova said.

“I asked where you were taking me.”

Cordova’s eyes blazed in the rearview mirror. “Down to the station. Strohman wants to talk to you.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Should you be?” said Freers, turning around and grinning at me like an imbecile.

Decidedly, I did not like Officer Freers.

Paul Strohman’s office was a square cell of cinder blocks painted the color of bad beer. There were no photographs or awards on the walls, and aside from an oversized coffee mug and a telephone, the top of Strohman’s slouching wooden desk was bare as well. A single inlaid window, roughly the dimensions of a collegiate dictionary, was seated in the wall above the desk, the pane reinforced with wire. Had it not been for the stenciling on the pebbled glass of the office door—Paul J. Strohman, Chief—I would have thought this was one of the interrogation rooms.

Strohman was handsomer in person. Tall and solid, with good hair and well-defined features, the chief of police exuded an indistinct celebrity quality. He wore a white dress shirt with no tie, the sleeves cuffed nearly to his elbows, and charcoal slacks with pleats. He was leaning back in a rickety wooden chair, the telephone to one ear, when Cordova nudged me through the door.