Edward Lee - Creekers

“Hi,” Phil said.

The station door slammed. Susan trudged in, a knapsack full of her school books tugging at her arm.

“Need some help with those books?”

“No.” She dropped the sack at the foot of her desk, then sat down at her commo console and prepared for work.

“How was school tonight?”

Susan frowned at him. She wasn’t biting on the cursory small talk, but then Phil never really guessed that she would.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Talking to the chief.” He shuffled his feet, looking down. He felt like a little kid sent to the principal’s office. “Then I thought I’d hang around awhile, wait till you got in.”

“Why?” Susan sniped, checking the hot sheet and county blotter.

“Well, I think we should talk.”

“About what?”

Phil looked down at the floor. This was a lost cause before it started. Christ—women are so unforgiving. He didn’t know what to say then. But at the same moment a notion struck him very keenly. Forgiven? Wait a minute, Phil—don’t be a schmuck. What do you have to be forgiven for here? You didn’t do anything WRONG!

So against his better judgment, he mustered an unfounded gall:

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” he yelled.

Her expression seemed to recoil.

“Go ahead, make a face!” he yelled again. “Give me the cold shoulder! Treat me like dogshit! Do whatever you want, honey, but tell me this. What did I do wrong?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Susan calmly replied, paging through her code book. “It’s a free country. You can do anything you want. You don’t have any obligations to me just because we went to bed. That certainly doesn’t mean we’re involved.”

“Well, pardon me if I’m just stupid, but I kind of thought that we were involved.”

“You thought we were involved?” She gaped at him. “Well, then I guess we both have drastically different definitions of the word.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She gaped at him again. Phil didn’t like it when she gaped.

“Doesn’t involvement imply some kind of monogamy?” she asked.

“I didn’t cheat on you!”

“Oh, I see. I hear a scream coming from your room,” she went on, “so I come down to see if you’re all right, and what do I find? I find monogamous Phil, with a bath towel around his waist, leaning over a prostitute.”

“I didn’t sleep with her!” Phil yelled.

“Oh, then what did you do? Tell me, Phil. What do guys with towels around their waists do with prostitutes? Play chess? Read the Sunday Post? Discuss the vagaries of quasi-existential dynamics?”

“I didn’t have sex with her,” Phil nearly growled.

“Oh, okay. You didn’t have sex with her. But you can have sex with whoever you want, Phil. That’s not my point.”

Phil felt like a pressure cooker about to blow its seam. “What is your point?” he asked as calmly as he could.

“My point is you lied to me.”

Silence.

“How did I lie to you?”

If looks could kill, Phil would be dead now, a dozen times over. Her eyes leveled on him. “Before you and I did anything, I asked you, didn’t I? I asked you if you were still involved with Vicki. And you said no.”

“And that was the truth!” he yelled.

“So what was she doing in your room with you standing there with a towel wrapped around your waist.”

“She had a problem,” he said. “She got beat up, and she needed a place to sleep.”

“So you thought your bed would suffice?”

“She slept on my couch! I didn’t touch her! And I just got done telling you—I didn’t have sex with her!”

More silence, but it was not a contemplative kind of silence; it was a mocking one. “So you’re telling me,” Susan asked, “that, since you’ve been back to town, you haven’t slept with her?”

“I—” Phil began. If there was one thing he could never do, it was lie to her. If he lied, he was as phony as the phoniest guy on earth.

“Well,” he admitted, “I did once. But not today. It was last week—before you and I even went out.”

She seemed to sit in a dull shadow generated by her own anger and disappointment. It made her bright-blond hair less bright, her blue eyes like ruddy stones. Her voice sounded just as ruddy when she said, “I’d have to be out of my mind to believe a load of crap like that.”

“Susan, you’ve got this all wrong—”

She mockingly glanced at her watch, then looked up at him again. “Oh, you’re still here?”

Phil turned and went out the back through Mullins’ office. Why flog a dead horse? She’ll never trust me in a million years, he realized. I fucked it all up—good job, Phil. I wonder what else you can fuck up today. He could scorn himself forever, but that would not change the fact that there was nothing else he could do.

clank!

Out by the back driveway, Phil looked to his left. The door stood open to the old lockup, which Mullins had converted to a supply room. He must be in there now, Phil deduced, noticing both the patrol cruiser and Mullins’ own sedan still in the lot. Probably getting more coffee and Red Man. Phil strode on toward his car. It was back to Sallee’s, to start all over again now. The low moon shone pasty yellow, just rising over the top of the station. Cricket sounds throbbed steadily.

Phil turned again, much more abruptly this time, at yet another sound coming from the old lockup.

The sound of breaking glass.

It was probably nothing—The chief probably dropped a coffee pot—but Phil thought it best to investigate anyway. What if it wasn’t Mullins? What if someone was actually breaking in? Yeah, the rednecks around here are even stupid enough to bust into a police supply room, Phil considered.

The building stood merely as a drab cinder block edifice about the size of a typical trailer. Phil entered cautiously. A single low-watt bulb lit the dusty hallway. Another door stood open at the end. Phil decided not to call out; in the event that someone was burgling the place, the element of surprise would work greatly to his favor.

He walked very quietly to the next door, peeked in, and—

What the hell is this?

—noticed at once that this was no supply room. It was what it always had been. A jail.

Three barred cells lined the wall. The first two were empty. Mullins bent over before the third, picking pieces of glass off the floor.

“Ya fuckin’A-hole dimwit. Ya busted a perfectly good glass,” Mullins griped.

But who was he griping to?

“Hey, Chief?” Phil spoke up. “What gives?”

Mullins glared up, his fat, round face inflamed. “What the hell are you doing here!” he shouted.

Then Phil saw why his chief was acting so guilty. In the third cell, which Mullins claimed had been empty for years, sat an unshaven, overweight young man.

A prisoner, Phil realized. Mullins had a prisoner in here all this time and never told me…

««—»»

“For shit sake! I was gonna tell ya!” Mullins insisted.

“Yeah, right, just like you were gonna tell me about how for the last six months you’ve been finding mutilated bodies all over goddamn town!” Phil was so mad he was shaking. “Yeah, you were gonna tell me, Chief, only you didn’t! Christ, you never would’ve told me if I hadn’t found out on my own!”

“Phil, you’re jumpin’ the gun here. Let me ex—”

“Goddamn, Chief! Everything you tell me is a crock of shit! And now this—” Phil extended a hand to the third jail cell. “You tell me you haven’t used the lockup for anything but a supply room, and now I walk in and see you’ve had a prisoner in here all along! What the hell’s going on?”

“Well, if you’d shut up and quit yelling a minute and let me fuckin’ talk—”