me.
“Been meaning to ask you something,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
I leaned on my shovel. Rodriguez gave me a look as he pulled out the other spade.
“Think you would have done it?” I said.
“Done what?”
“Pollard.”
“Taken him out?”
“That’s it.”
The detective slammed the trunk shut and put his foot up on a fender.
“Don’t know, Kelly. I mean, I would have liked to, but things never really got that far.”
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bullshit. The night in the industrial park. You could have done it. You thought about it. Thought about it hard.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, but I knew you wouldn’t pull the plug. Not in your nature.”
I moved off the car, stepped over a chain strung across the road, and started to walk across the rail yards. Rodriguez was a beat behind.
“Nicole told me a little bit about this,” he said. “How you’re always talking about people’s nature, their way of being. She said you got it from Cicero or something.”
“Changing the subject, Detective.”
“Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. You’re right. I thought about it. Came close.”
I looked over.
“But you stopped,” I said.
“There’s a line there, you know. Once you step across…”
“You live with it.”
“Guess I couldn’t do that. Still, there’s a part of me that wanted it, still wants it. Still thinks about it.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“My nature?”
“Yeah.”
The detective shrugged and took a look around.
“You know where we are here?”
I thought back to that day twenty-one years ago. Fourteen years old, standing in the swamp. Seeing Nicole. Watching her rape. My first look at a live sexual act. Feeling the first hint of darkness. Surrendering to it.
“Some things have changed,” I said. “But I got an idea.”
I headed out across some old tracks and through the back of the yards, to an alley I had cruised three times in the past week. Best I could figure, this was the front end of the old swamp. Twenty yards behind it was the south end of the tracks. I remembered those. In between sat a depressed bit of ground, littered with beer bottles, condoms, and a couple of bums sleeping it off. The back end of the swamp. The end where Nicole was assaulted, where I might very well have killed a man.
“You realize we aren’t too likely to find anything,” Rodriguez said.
I hefted my shovel, picked out a spot, and started to dig.
“I know,” I said.
“But you have to try.”
“I guess so.”
“Let me ask you something,” Rodriguez said. “What if we do find something?”
I stopped. There wasn’t much of a hole yet, but I could feel the pulse in my temple, the first flush of blood through my arms and shoulders. It was work. It made me feel better.
“We call Homicide,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Rodriguez put a foot to his shovel and turned over a layer of dirt that was more like dust. A fragment of ancient text ran through my head:
It was Aristotle’s take on friendship:
“One soul living in two bodies.”
I dug into the hard ground again and waited for the sweat. Either way, my friend Nicole and I would get our answers. Either way, it was going to be okay.
