“Hey, Behr,” Aybar said. He looked like he’d grown four inches in the past month, but his weight hadn’t kept pace.
“Hey,” Behr said, “wanted to know if you guys had seen or heard anything that might have a connection with what happened.” Both kids shrugged and shook their heads.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Besides class and cleaning up?” Max asked. Behr nodded.
“Nothing really. Picked up a bunch of cases of water with him at Wal-Mart,” Aybar said. “Oh, and the NAGA tournament.”
“In Chicago. We rode up there with him, a few weeks back,” Max added.
“How’d you do?” Behr wondered.
“Submitted my first guy, then got triangled,” Sanchez said, and Behr looked to Aybar.
“I submitted my first guy, then lost on points,” he said. “But that judge was totally tripping. He missed, like, two of my takedowns and a reversal. I totally had that shit.”
“Was anyone there from Francovic’s school?” Behr asked, though he felt it was pointless.
“Nah, don’t think so,” Sanchez said, “not in the under eighteens. Maybe some adults were there, I didn’t see ’em.”
“Was Francovic there? Did Aurelio talk to him?” Behr asked. Both kids shook their heads.
“Other than that, just the usual picking up boxes, moving around furniture, and shit,” Sanchez shrugged.
“The whole thing really sucks,” Aybar said. Behr nodded his agreement. Then Aybar continued, “We got nowhere to roll now.”
“We can do it in the wrestling room here, but we got to find another teacher,” Sanchez added. Behr looked at them, young and strong, so full of life and maybe because of that so unattached to it. Any sadness they might have felt competed with the inconvenience of not having an instructor in a way that was so completely genuine and without malice he almost laughed.
“Yeah,” Behr said. “Maybe the academy will open back up.”
So four days had passed, and while he searched for an angle to pursue, Behr went to the tire. It was a training technique he used from time to time. He had a large tractor tire stashed down at the track of the nearby middle school that was closed for the summer. He’d go down there and rope it to an old weight belt he strapped around his waist. Then he’d run, the heavy black rubber circle bouncing and dragging behind him, as he went around the track and up and down the hill next to it. When his lungs and legs gave out, he’d unbuckle the belt and go after the tire with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. He’d slam the thing, controlling the rebound of the heavy hammer, until his core and his extremities were quaking and his mind was blank, even mercifully so of Susan. The idea was to continue on, session after session, until the tire had worn away to nothing, then get a new tire and do it all again. Then Behr would drag his hammer home, enveloped in a sense of hollowness. He was hitting it hard, literally and figuratively, but there was no longer a sense of purpose to it for him. While he had previously trained to support his efforts in jiu-jitsu, so that the physical fitness component wouldn’t hinder his progress, that was gone. His motivation had been replaced by a grim but increasingly vague sense of payback.
Then there was the Caro list. Behr ground it out nightly, driving by every last damn one of those miserable properties in his rapidly-becoming-a-piece-of-shit car. He glanced at the passenger seat, which while it wasn’t new, was still in pristine condition. Testament to how few people rode in it, and for how little time, compared to the leatherette under his ass and behind his head, which was cracking and peeling-disintegrating really-under his weight and sweat and the fact that he practically lived in the car at times. But the answers were out there, somewhere, in a morass of meaningless information and blank faces and seemingly disconnected facts. It was just a question of him finding them, so he went.
And as for the properties themselves, paint was nearly nonexistent on the houses, as were intact windows. Rotten siding was the rule. Foundations and eaves sagged. His expeditions stretched into the nights, when he would cross paths with the SLED team- the Street Level Enforcement Detail-an aggressive roving tactical unit that was supposed to turn the tide, or at least survive, the high crime areas-and they would eyeball him, silently urging him to get on his way.
As he visited the addresses on the list, he was able to enter them all. The abandoned houses were easy targets, with broken windows and rotted jambs and sashes and weak locks-when the locks and knobs and even doors weren’t missing altogether. None of it was going to keep him out. But once he was inside, there was very little to inform him. Save for feral cats, used crack vials, spent malt liquor cans, and even human feces, the dwellings were all empty in a way that seemed a reflection of his own being at the moment. The gleaming commercial and municipal structures of downtown, like the one that housed Caro, and the immaculate parks and public spaces that surrounded them, filled with lunchers, strollers, and joggers, were a world away and seemed built to mock him and the neighborhoods he was exploring.
Among the worst of them was the house from Ratay’s latest story. Behr made his way past some fallen crime scene tape and through a loose piece of plywood into the darkened cavern of the busted-out dwelling. As he made his way through a living room he shined his Mini Maglite and stepped around empty bottles of Alize and Martel in his path. He was headed toward the bedrooms when he froze and killed the light. He heard noises, a voice, and recognized that he wasn’t alone in the house. He moved silently in the direction of the sound. Stepping into the doorway, Behr raised his light with his left hand and pressed his right against his gun’s handle, ready to draw it if necessary. Jacked-up eyes, glowing red in the flashlight beam, peered back at him. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all African American. They looked old and weathered at first glance, but upon closer inspection Behr saw none of them was close to thirty yet.
“Oh shit, you police?” one of the men said. “We won’t run.”
“I’m not,” Behr said. “Don’t run anyway.”
One of the men nodded and finished what he was doing, which was handing a glass pipe to the woman.
“Were any of you here the other night when that thing went down?” Behr asked.
They all shook their heads no. “We come after the police are done, nobody’s around for a few days,” the woman said, “and we have us a place.”
“I get it. Was this a pea-shake house? You know anything about it?”
“Nope,” the woman said. They all shrugged and shook their heads again, and then just sat there looking as fearful as newborn rodents. Behr stared at them for a moment. Then he clicked off his light and left the way he’d come.
Upon his return home he ran property searches on the addresses that told a story of foreclosures, city seizures, building department condemnations, and cases of flat-out abandonment. A few of the houses changed hands via sale, but the owners’ names meant nothing to him and didn’t form any discernible pattern that he could see. Pilgren, Craig, to Stavros, Mr. A. Had it been a dream home purchase? In that neighborhood it seemed unlikely. Or was it a bad play before the real estate bubble burst. Rodriguez, Raul, to Bustamante, Victoria. It could have been a Latin-to-Latin transfer, or Latin to Italian. Her name was on a few transactions. She must have been a low- level speculator. Same with Snopes, C, to Kale, Maurice. Mr. Kale owned five properties but had lost three to foreclosure within the past eighteen months. He made a note to run a p-check on those names.
And then, finally, there was nothing else to do. Originally Behr had gone into police work and then investigation in order to wrestle with the not knowing. He had imagined himself uniquely built to explore the dank, murky corners of crime, where lacking the coordinates of hard information, the ordinary person might become lost and panic. But that had been near twenty years ago, and lately the state of things had gone beyond the intriguing, past the irritating, and was approaching the maddening. The thought of another twenty years of it stretching out ahead of him was daunting. Especially when he considered he might be at the height of his powers, or worse, that the high water mark was already behind him. He had the sensation he was up to his shoulders in cold, wet mud, and he was sinking. What good was what he was doing anyway? Regardless of what he found out, Aurelio was going to stay dead, and this crew wasn’t his problem in the first place. Was he going to feel satisfied if he found something out? What did that mean anyway?
It made him want to give it up, and not just these matters, but maybe the profession as a whole. He didn’t know how to do anything else though, and shining his flashlight on the doors of a Costco in a night watchman’s uniform didn’t seem like much of an alternative.
His mind was chewing itself into a pulp, and perhaps that was why he found himself, in the fading light, driving through the gates of South County Municipal Landfill. He was desperate, and this latest hit on a house was in
