Then in River Town, whatever lights were still burning went out and then Crandon followed suit. A thick, unbelievable blackness fell over them.
“Shit,” Chrissy heard herself say.
17
This is what happened at the Hope Street Cemetery:
When Officers Pat Marcus and Dave Rose did not turn up for a few hours after what seemed to be a pretty routine vandalism complaint, their empty squad car was discovered parked outside the caretaker’s shack. A brief search of the grounds turned up nothing. And it was this that got the wheels turning. For Marcus and Rose weren’t the first missing cops in Witcham; everyone in the department was still reeling from the loss of Officers Miggs and Heller from the River Town Precinct the night the Black River burst its banks and the disappearance of Eddie Stokely over in Guttertown that very afternoon. It was not good. And every cop in Witcham felt it right down to his or her roots. And as Captain Knoles said, “If we can’t even take care of ourselves…how in Christ are we supposed to take of this city?”
And this is what brought twenty cops out to the Hope Street Cemetery after dark that night. They came with guns and attitudes and a dog team borrowed from the State Police. Yes, the damn rain was still pissing down and there was every possibility that the dogs wouldn’t be able to scent their own balls, let alone track two missing cops. But Knoles didn’t care about that. The city fathers were shitting all over him and if he wanted to save his job, he had to at least make a good show of it. Because like the mayor herself had told him, “For the love of God, Captain, what kind of half-assed dog and pony show are you running over there?”
And Knoles honestly wasn’t sure himself.
So he siphoned off every extra available uniform he could get, even though there weren’t any extra available uniforms. His people were already pulling twelve and sometimes sixteen-hour shifts. The overtime alone was going to throw the city budget into an uproar. Let alone the bitching the cops themselves were doing.
Lieutenant Van Ibes was running the search and he broke his men into four five-man squads, each with a dog handler and each given a particular quadrant of the boneyard. And given that the cemetery was spread out over some two city blocks, that was plenty. Just a misty, rainy run of hedges and trees, hollows and low hills, stones and crypts thrust from the waterlogged ground like bad teeth from rotting gums.
Donny Soper pulled the duty and he was not happy about it. As they followed the dog-handler and his hound at the stone wall at the back of the grounds, he told Breeson and Kerr all about it. “I haven’t seen my wife or kids in three days,” he said, his black slicker shining with water. “You believe that shit? Three fucking days. I been pulling double-shifts courtesy of that prick Knoles. They got me sleeping in the barracks out back. You guys don’t have to do that. You got seniority. You got the years on me. You get to go home. But me? No, I get to bunk in that dirty, ratty old barracks. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, they haven’t even been used for nothing but storage since the fifties. Then Knoles gets this bright idea of clearing it out and setting up cots. And who gets to sleep there? Me and all the other idiots who don’t have the time in.”
Kerr just ignored him. Kerr was good at ignoring guys like Soper.
“You’re getting paid for it, aren’t you?” Breeson said, his flashlight beam glancing off the wet faces of monuments. “Christ, think of the check you’re gonna be pulling from this.”
“It’s not all about money,” Soper told him. “I need to see my family, too.”
Kerr grunted a little laugh at that.
Breeson had to hold back his laughter. Yeah, Soper was some kind of family guy, all right. When he wasn’t bitching about the job and how people like Knoles kept him down, he was bitching about his beloved family. His wife who was a shrew that nagged him twenty-four seven and his kids that were little demons straight out of hell sent to torment his every waking moment. Yeah, he missed them, all right. What he missed was his recliner and his TV and his refrigerator. His Wednesday night bowling and his dog and his girl-on-girl movies on the Playboy Channel. Maybe somewhere after those things he missed his family.
Up ahead, Sergeant Rhymes and Kleets, the dog-handler, paused while the hound sniffed around at the base of a stone urn.
“Must’ve picked up something,” Kerr said.
Soper laughed. “Yeah, probably got a good whiff of some bones.”
They stood there as the rain fell, not hard but more of a constant annoying drizzle that left a wet sheen on your face and made the trees drip and drip and drip. They panned their lights around, the beams looking like bright yellow pencils writing on the night. The tombstones rose around them, some new and shiny, others just worn and leaning and speckled with lichen. And all of them shadowy and crowded, like being in some surreal forest of marble trees.
The hound pissed against a stone and the men laughed.
Kleets led him away through a little family plot with stone urns and benches, lots of cylindrical markers that looked like pillars.
“You guys think all I care about is money?” Soper said, picking right up again.
“I’m thinking,” Kerr said.
Breeson just shrugged. “I thought you were big on money, Soaps. I mean, shit, I borrowed two-fifty from you for a burger and Coke that time and it was like pulling teeth getting you to open your wallet. Then day after day, you were after me to pay it back. You couldn’t even wait a week until payday. You remember that? When I paid you, I gave you two-fifty exactly and then you said the burger and Coke had come up to two-fifty-seven. You wanted those seven cents.”
“I got mouths to feed, don’t I?”
Kerr chuckled. “You are one cheap sonofabitch, Soaps. That’s why nobody wants to go drinking with you anymore. Rest of us are buying rounds and there you are, sitting on your fucking hands.”
“Like I said, I got mouths to feed.” He fell silent for a moment or two, brooding maybe.
Breeson wiped water from his face and thought about getting back to the station house and crawling into a hot cup of coffee. He and the others didn’t spend much time thinking about Dave Rose and Pat Marcus. They all knew those guys, but they didn’t like to be thinking about them or what might have happened to them. There was shit going on in this city that nobody liked to admit to. It was easier that way. So even though the lot of them knew they were coming out here to look for the missing men, they talked about anything but.
Soper said, “You guys think I’m a cheap bastard, fine. I don’t care. You think I’m a complainer, fine. Again, I don’t much care. You ought to try sleeping in those fucking barracks. I shit you not, it makes me miss the Army. Christ, those racks they got for us are like sleeping on beds of nails. Fucking Russian surplus or something. And that ain’t bad enough, I got to sleep next to Karpinski.”
Both men burst out laughing at that.
Up ahead, Ryhmes told them to pipe down, his black face just wet and shiny.
“Sure, you guys laugh. You have a good laugh,” Soper said. “You know what it’s like sleeping next to Karpinski? He snores all the goddamn time and when he’s not snoring, he’s farting. I mean constantly. Like a goddamn bugler. All night long he’s ripping one off after the other. Two hours into it, goddamn barracks smell like a burst gas main. Jesus. Something’s wrong with that guy. It’s not natural to have that much gas. Smells like he’s shitting his pants.”
Breeson laughed under his breath.
Now this was something he could sympathize with. There was something abnormal about Karpinski’s bowels. Breeson had partnered with him for a couple months once and the car would smell so bad you had to drive with the windows open in January. The whole time, Karpinski would be grinning like a little boy, lifting his leg and letting ‘em rip. “Hoo! There’s one for you!” or “Here’s a kiss for you, Breeson!” or “Christ, if that one would’ve had legs, it woulda walked right out of my asshole!” and “That one don’t smell like roses, now do it?” On and on and on. When Joey Hill had gotten killed over in Crandon in the line of duty, Breeson had been selected to be part of the honor guard at the graveside service. Karpinski had, too. There they stood with their dress uniforms on and white gloves, everyone crying and just losing it because they’d all loved old Joey. Whole time, Karpinski is cracking ‘em off. When the honor guard had raised their rifles to fire a three-shot salute, Karpinski had timed the rifle shots with the shots
