The plane dropped the distance that made me an active voyeur in people’s lives, instead of a distant watcher. I could see individuals under the streetlights. Trees became sets of branches instead of blurry masses of brown.
A school went by below us, swingsets empty. The neighbor-hood was full of tidy, ordered streets. Carefully tended trees, bereft of leaves, lined uniformly trimmed lawns. Well-washed cars reflected the streetlights. Even from the air well before sun-rise, it screamed out, This Is A Good Place To Live.
The next neighborhood over didn’t look as posh. Wrong side of the metaphysical tracks. Cars were older, had duller paint and no wax jobs to make them gleam in the streetlights. Mismatched shingles on patched roofs stood out; lawns were overgrown. It wasn’t that the owners didn’t care. It was that the price of a lawn-mower or a matched roof patch could be the difference between Christmas or no Christmas that year.
Not that I knew anything about it.
A whole street went by, lightless except for one amber-colored lamp, the kind that’s supposed to cut through fog. It made the street seem unnaturally vivid, details coming into sharp-edged focus below me.
A modern church, an A-frame with a sharp, nasty spire, was lit by the edges of the lone amber light. Its parking lot was abandoned except for one car, parked at an angle across two spaces, one of its doors hanging open. I wondered if it closed at all. Probably: it was a behemoth from the seventies, the kind of car that will last forever. I grew up with that kind of car. Air bags or no, the little crumply things they make today don’t seem as safe.
Someone tall and lean got out of the car, draping himself over the door as he looked down the street toward the functional light. Even from above I could see the glitter of light on the butterfly knife he played with, comfortable and familiar. Watching, I knew that he could play knife games in the dark and blindfolded, and he’d never stab a finger.
A woman broke into the amber light, running down the center of the street. She took incredibly long strides, eating a huge amount of distance with each step, but her head was down and her steps swerved, like she wasn’t used to running. Her hair was very long, and swung loose, flaring out as she whipped her head back to look behind her.
I twisted in my seat as the plane left the subdivision behind, trying to see.
A pack of dogs leaked out of the darkness. Their coats were pale gold under the amber light, and they loped with the casual confidence of a hunting pack following easy prey.
The woman stumbled, the pack gained and the plane took me away from them.
“You don’t understand. There is a woman in trouble out there.” It was the fourth time I’d said it, and the pilot kept looking at me like I was on drugs. Well, maybe I was. Lack of sleep has the same effect as certain narcotics. I was lodged in the door of the cockpit, other passengers pushing out behind me. Fourteen minutes had passed since I saw the woman. There was a knot of discomfort in my stomach, like I’d throw up if I didn’t find a way to help her. I kept hoping I’d burp and it would go away, but I didn’t, and the pilot was still eyeing me.
“And you saw this from the plane,” he said, also for the fourth time. He had that bright lilting sound to his voice that first grade teachers use to mask irritation. “There are lots of people in trouble, ma’am.”
I closed my eyes. They screamed with pain, tears flooding as I opened them again. Through the up well, I saw an expression of dismayed horror cross the pilot’s face.
Well, if he was going to fall for it, I might as well milk it. “It was five minutes before we landed,” I quavered. “We circled around and came in from the northwest.” I lifted my wrist to show him the compass on my watch band, although I hoped that, being the pilot, he knew we’d approached from the northwest.
“I was looking out the window. I saw a woman running down the street. There was a pack of dogs after her and a guy with a switchblade down the street in the direction she was running.”
“Ma’am,” he said, still very patiently. I reached out and took a fistful of his shirt. Actually, at the last moment, I grabbed the air in front of his shirt. I didn’t think security could throw me out of the airport for grabbing air in a threatening fashion, not even in this post-9/11 age.
“Don’t ma’am me…” I stared at his chest until my eyes focused enough to read his name badge. “Steve. Is that your name? Steve. Don’t ma’am me, Captain Steve. I just need to know our rate of descent. Humor me, Captain Steve. I work for the police department. You don’t want me to go to the six o’clock news after a murder’s been discovered and tell them all about how the airline wouldn’t lift a finger to help the woman who died.”
I didn’t know why I bothered. The woman was probably dead by now. Still, Captain Steve blanched and looked back over his shoulder at his instruments. I retrieved my hand and smiled at him. He blanched again. I guess my smile wasn’t any better than my hair or eyes just now.
“Hurry,” I said. “Once the sun comes up the streetlights will go off and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find her then.”
I left my luggage in the airport and climbed into a cab, trying to work out the triangulation of height, speed and distance. “Drive,” I said, without looking up.
“Where to, lady?”
“I don’t know. Northwest.”
“The airline? It’s just a couple feet down the term—”
“
“What for?”
“So I can figure out where we’re going.”
He turned around and stared at me.
“Watch the
“Yeah, here.” He threw a city guide into my lap. I thumbed it open to find the airport.
Airplanes go fast. I realize this isn’t a revelation to stun the world, but it was a little distressing to realize how far we’d flown in five minutes, and how long it would take to drive that. “All right, we’re going northwest of the lake.” I remembered seeing its off-colored shadow making a black mark below the plane as we’d left the subdivision behind. “Somewhere in Aurora.”
“Think? That ain’t such a good neighborhood, lady. You sure you wanna go there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m trying to find somebody who’s in trouble.”
The cabby eyed me in the rearview. “That’s the right place to look.”
I glared at him through my eyebrows. He smiled, a thin I’ve-seen-it-all grin that didn’t really have any humor in it. He had gray eyes under equally gray, bushy eyebrows. He had a thick neck and looked like he’d be at home chewing on a stogie. I asked if he had a cigarette. He turned around and looked at me again.
“Those things’ll kill you, lady.”
His voice was rough and deep like a lifetime smoker’s. Surprise showed on my face and he gave me another soulless smile, reflected in the mirror. “My wife died of emphysema three years ago on our forty-eighth wedding anniversary. You want a smoke, kid, find it somewhere else.”
Sometimes I wonder if I have a big old neon sign stamped on my forehead, flashing Asshole. I retaliated with stunning wit: “I’m not a kid.”
Gray eyes darted to the mirror again, and back to the road. “You’re what, twenty-six?”
Nobody ever guessed my age right. Since I was eleven, people have misguessed my age anywhere from three to seven years in one direction or the other. I felt my jaw drop.
“It’s a gift,” the cabby said. “A totally useless gift. I can tell how old people are.”
I blinked at him.
“Great way to get good tips,” he went on. “I go into this long explanation of how I always get ages right, and then I lie. Works like a charm.”
“So why’d you guess my age right?” The question came out of my mouth without consulting my brain first. I didn’t want to have a conversation with the cabby.
“Never met anybody who didn’t want to be in their twenties, so what’s the point? Why you going out there, lady? Lotta trouble out that way, and you don’t look like the type.”
I glanced sideways at the window. A faint reflection looked back at me. He was right. I looked tired, hopeless and worn-out, but not like trouble. “Looks can be deceiving.” His eyes slid off the rearview mirror like he
