Hoffman and one of the meat-wagon boys started putting up yellow crime scene tape, using the surveyor’s stakes to string it on.
I approached him. “So, any theories, Officer Hoffman? Any hot leads?”
“Call me Rick. You know I don’t like having to do this. You know that,” he said, an expression of rage filling his face for a microsecond before subsiding. “You know I’m trapped, Markus. There’s more things I want to tell you, but there’s only one way out for me.”
I shook my head sternly, trying to recapture the control he’d handed me before. “There’s always choices. No one controls your life.”
“You’re the lucky one; you get to stand up. That’s why you think I can too. But you should know I only wait. That’s all I know how to do.”
“Look, you told me about Kendra so I know you’re sincere,” I said. “You can’t be the only one. You can keep making the man’s choice.”
“I could really be you? You’re sure?” he asked in a wistful voice. “I can do it, can’t I?”
I held my breath in surprised suspense, waiting to see if he was about to break open. But he sagged back into blankness and continued his work, concentrating on laying tape.
“No,” he said. “I still have to do what I’m told for now.”
The expression on his face told me I should feel sorry for him, and consider him the victim here. Poor pitiful Rick. I kind of wanted to rip his fat head off and defecate down the hole, that’s how much sympathy I wanted to feel for him.
But watching him squatting there all forlorn, I flashed back to prison and the nights I lay in my cell reading the Canon, listening to a punk’s sobs and the laughter of his playmates for the evening down the tier. Listening, but saying and doing nothing except turning the book’s pages.
Rick yanked on the last knot hard enough he snapped the anchoring surveyor’s stake in two. After studying the broken piece of wood for a few seconds, he went and got another stake.
I walked back to Big Moe but he put his hand up, so I was looking at his pale palm and spread fingers. “No disrespect, Markus, but I don’t much feel much like talking right now.”
We stood apart from each other, watching them slide the gurney into the ambulance. She’d been too small for the body bag and they had it folded in half beneath her – I could have carried it under one arm.
As the ambulance left Big Moe said, “They think they’re going to run us off, but they won’t. They’ll have to cart me away too. I won’t back down. I can’t.” Despite his sad-sack demeanor and the rap video clown suit he wore so awkwardly, I saw the steel in him.
Moe looked at me like I was an insect and said, “She’s dead because of you.”
My knees wobbled and I felt dizzy as Moe turned on his heel and headed into the Gardens, leaving me alone on that windswept development.
Chapter 36
I walked back the way I’d originally come, the first night I’d stumbled into the Gardens. I walked up that broad new road, clean white sidewalks to each side with all the courts and lots laid out flat and perfect and sterile.
The new construction confronted the Gardens as if besieging them. The idle heavy equipment appeared ready to move in and do a Godzilla on those rows of bungalows the instant I wasn’t looking. Dirt fire-access roads led off into the surrounding old growth forests like radiating spokes.
I suspected any Pass I’d had in the Gardens was revoked now. I wouldn’t have even been surprised if a carload of Crips or Hmong cruised up and did a drive-by on me.
I found the trail to the marsh and worked my way through the blackberry thickets and tulie grass to the swamp proper. Carnivorous plants dotted the expanse of low mud hummocks spread in front of me.
The night I passed out here after escaping the hospital, I’d flashed back to the times I’d come to this spot with Sam when he was little. Now, in the light of day and doing everything possible not to think about that little girl, I again remembered catching spiders with Sam, and messing around with tadpoles. It had been fun seeing wild things for the first time myself, and sharing the experience with my boy.
One time we even found a raccoon skull. Sam was the one who spotted it by a bush in the middle of the marsh, and he’d just had to have it. So of course I wound up wading through knee-deep swamp bottom to reach that skull, and it turned out a yellow jacket nest was right next to it on a bush.
Apparently the yellow jackets didn’t approve of me being in their space. I danced around in the mud, yelling as they swarmed all over me stinging the shit out of me, and Sam laughed his ass off at the show I put on for his amusement. We went home, Sam with a cool raccoon skull, and me covered in stinking swamp muck and yellow jacket sting holes.
I chuckled at that bitter-sweet memory, but it wasn’t much comfort in the present. I'd been vain: I'd told myself I could do instantaneously what Karl hadn't been able to in seven years. I’d been proud: I'd told myself I was playing these kids, but my ego had been stroked to bloating by their hero worship; I’d bought into being the Crips’ token white boy OG.
Moe was right: My rage had killed that little girl as surely as if I’d wielded the knife myself. I’d poked the tiger in the sphincter with a sharp stick, thinking to bully the Driver – but he’d mirrored my anger, blazed up just as hot and nasty. It was supposed to have been me he came after to chop – instead, that little girl died screaming for my mistake.
I deserved to have the Gardens turn on me.
Chapter 37
I walked toward downtown Stagger Bay. My mind was so involved in my self pity fest that Reese or the Driver could have rolled up and had a free crack at me.
In the past I’d learned to put the darkness and self loathing where it belonged: in a box in my heart where I never had to examine it other than in dreams. But this time the box had overflowed all the way.
I was trapped by the memory of the little girl. I felt small again, just as small as when I awaiting trial for the Beardsleys. Any strength I ever might have had meant nothing.
The classics I’d read in prison were no guidance at all. The Masters were pompous hypocrites. A man couldn’t be expected to fight the impossible; it was pointless for me to even have stood up here.
I reached my destination: the same bus terminal I’d arrived at when I raised a seeming eternity ago. The same bus terminal I’d been heading toward the day it all went down at the school.
I could catch a Greyhound bus to Oakland here at the terminal if I wanted. And why wouldn’t I? If I could sink into the earth I’d do it to get away from this place.
Chapter 38
There were no buses in sight and no hangers on waiting as I neared the tiny terminal’s entrance. The sign on the door said ‘Closed for Lunch.’
I wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to ride the magic bus to East Bay freedom for another little while. In the meantime, I wasn’t about to squat in front of the terminal like a homeless mope, letting traffic goggle at me as they drove past.
The next block over toward the waterfront, the bulk of the Andersen Club towered over Old Town’s shorter interposing commercial structures. The Club, originally a mansion built by one of Stagger Bay’s nouveau riche founding robber barons to show off his wealth, had transformed long ago into a men’s club for the local wheels.
