Thomas Cook - Sacrificial Ground

“Hey, Frank, you okay?” Caleb said after a moment.

“Yeah, fine.”

“You look like you ate something that didn’t agree with you.”

“I’m okay.”

Caleb stared at him closely. “No, you’re not,” he said. “Do you need a drink?” He smiled softly. “All you got to do is tell me you can handle it.”

“I can,” Frank said firmly.

“Good enough,” Caleb said. He pulled into the next bar he came to, a little plaster imitation of a Mexican tavern.

There was an empty booth in the back, and they walked directly to it.

“Give me one of them Tequila Sunrises,” Caleb said when the waitress arrived. “What about you, Frank?”

“Scotch.”

They drank silently when the drinks finally came, and Frank allowed his eyes to drift idly over the grain of the wood of his table, then up along the rough, exposed beams toward the plaster ceiling, and beyond that to where the sky could be seen, blue and vacant, through a small skylight at the very crest of the ceiling.

After about a half-hour, Caleb glanced at his watch. “Want another round?”

“No.”

“You look like you’re coming down with something, Frank.”

“I got tired all of a sudden,” Frank said. “Got very tired. That ever happen to you?”

“Yeah. It’s the sign of a bad ticker, the doctor told me.”

Frank nodded slowly. “Could be.”

“That’s what the doctor told me, anyway,” Caleb added. “So I said to the doctor, ‘If you got a bad ticker, what can you do about it?’ He said you couldn’t do very much. So I said, ‘Well, there must be something I can do, for Christsake.’ And that bastard just smiles at me and says, ‘Just one thing, Caleb. Live like hell.’” He gulped down the last of his drink with a laugh and grabbed his wallet. “This one’s on me, Frank,” he said. “With a bad heart, you don’t ever know, it might be your last one.”

It took almost another half-hour to make it back to headquarters. Alvin was standing beside Frank’s desk as the two of them entered the bullpen. His face looked as stricken as Frank had ever seen it. He looked as if everything he’d ever cared about had been tossed over a cliff.

“What is it, Alvin?” Frank asked immediately. He thought of Alvin’s wife, of Sheila, even, illogically, of Karen, but he could not guess what dreadful thing had happened.

“What is it?” he repeated.

Alvin shook his head slowly. “Daddy died about an hour ago,” he said quietly, as he drew his only brother gently into his arms.

17

It was almost midnight two days later before Alvin pulled over to the curb at Waldo Street to let Frank out.

“Well, I thought the funeral went about as well as could be expected,” Alvin said.

Frank glanced toward the backseat. Alvin’s wife and Sheila were both dead asleep. “Give them my best when they wake up,” he said.

“I will,” Alvin said. “Hey, listen. Maybe I could drop them off and come on back over here.”

Frank shook his head. “I don’t think so, Alvin.”

Alvin leaned toward him. “Don’t go on a drunk over this, Frank,” he said.

“I won’t,” Frank assured him.

“You got a good case. Don’t mess it up.”

“Good night, Alvin,” Frank said. He closed the door and headed up the stairs to his apartment.

The single lamp he’d left burning days before was still on in the living room, and the light, as it passed through the red shade, colored the air like a spray of blood. He wanted to turn it off, but he didn’t have enough energy to do it. It was as if he had returned to a different planet, one whose greater density and more rapid spin held things down with an enormous, insurmountable force.

He lit a cigarette, and watched helplessly as his mind went back over the last few days. He saw his father in the coffin, his face rouged and powdered, in his makeup for God. He could hear the preacher at the funeral, his voice flowing over the congregation: His life was goodness. His reward is glory . There was no doubt that his father had believed all that, and for a moment Frank felt himself all but captured in the mystery of such belief. And yet he knew such faith was lost to him, lost entirely.

He took a long drag on the cigarette and tried to think of something he believed in. Only the most negative ideas emerged. He believed that if you hit a man very hard in the face, he would pay attention to you after that. Everything else seemed soft and inconsequential when compared to the finality of sudden violence. “If I was God,” Caleb had said, “I’d keep one hand on everybody’s balls.” Caleb had said it more or less as a joke, but to Frank it was the one true reality of life, the hard bedrock of everything else. But it was without comfort. It had no place for love or hope or mercy, but only raw and dreadful force, and the aching need for vengeance which it left behind.

He glanced about the apartment, taking in its usual disarray. He thought of Karen’s house, then of Angelica’s room, its immaculate walls, perfectly made bed, polished mirror. It seemed as little a part of the real world as his own, and he wondered if a balanced life did not have to be lived somewhere in between order and disarray, in a borderland of neither too many rules nor too few.

The smoke from the cigarette gathered in the far corner of the room. The light from the lamp gave it a distant, lavender hue. It was graceful in the way it moved, and for a time he watched as it coiled and spun in the reddish light. Slowly, his mind drifted to Karen, and he saw her as she had appeared to him on the day they met, a woman in an artist’s smock. He wanted to see her, more powerfully than anything else he could think of.

Within a few minutes he was in his car, heading toward West Paces Ferry Road. It was past midnight and the city seemed to sleep peacefully in a dark cocoon. The air was still warm with the day’s heat, but he could feel a coolness in it now, a comforting relief, and he hung his arm out the window, as if dipping it into a mountain stream.

For a time, he hesitated at her door. The house was dark, but he felt certain she was not asleep. Finally, he knocked gently, and when she opened the door, she did not seem surprised to see him.

“I heard about your father,” she said. “Mr. Stone at the police station told me. I’m sorry.”

“I wanted you to know that it won’t have any effect on how I handle your case.”

“You could have told me that in the morning.”

“I know,” Frank said weakly. “But I didn’t want to wait until then.”

She stepped back from the door. “Come in.”

Frank followed her into a small study toward the back of the house. It was not like the rest of the house. It was more cluttered. A few paintings lay scattered about, and there was a battered wooden desk and a few metal filing cabinets. A single bookshelf rose almost to the ceiling and, beside it, an ancient manual typewriter rested on a paint-spattered metal stand.

“This is my room,” Karen said. “This is where I work.” She smiled slightly. “I even sleep here sometimes. There’s an old mattress in that closet.”

“Are you going to stay in this house now?” Frank asked.

“No,” Karen told him, “I’m not even going to stay in Atlanta.”

Frank felt something very small break inside him. “You’re not?”

“No.”

“Where are you going?”

“New York.”

“Why?”

“I just can’t stand Atlanta anymore.”

“I see,” Frank said quietly. “Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go.” Because there seemed nothing else to do, he took out his notebook. “I wanted to let you know that we found out a few things about Angelica.”

Karen pointed to a small wooden rocking chair. “Sit down.”