Shuttered Sky

facts were in. Now, neither would speak of it, as if speaking it aloud would baptize their hunch into reality.

I’m wrong, Winston told himself as they approached the filing cab­ inets. I have to be wrong.

Winston found the drawer labeled “SA-SN” and tugged it open. The files smelled of age—apparently these folders went back for many years, and since the dead rarely returned to audit their own records, no one had bothered to input them into computers.

“There it is,” Drew said.

“I see it.”

Vicki Sanders’s file was a new manila folder, sandwiched between the aging ones. Winston pulled it out, but didn’t look at it just yet. He took a deep breath, and then another, feeling lightheaded from the stench of embalming fluid that had followed them in from the mor­tician’s station.

“You want me to read it?” Drew asked

“I’ll do it.” Winston clenched his jaw. There was some knowledge that came easily, and other knowledge that came with great pain. Ei­ther way, he couldn’t wait anymore. He flipped open the file, spread it across the open drawer, and shone his light at it. It was minimal—just a few pages. Information forms, medical examiner’s report, death certificate, liability releases, and finally a signed order to cremate.

“Tell me,” said Drew, who, despite the calm he had showed ear­lier, wouldn’t bring himself to look at the pages.

“Vicki Sanders,” began Winston. “Body found on the bank of the Colorado River, last October 21st. Cause of death: acute physical trauma consistent with fall. Sixteen years old.”

“Oh, Jesus . . .”

Winston blinked then blinked again, the information leaping off the page making his eyes sting. “Her mother came all the way from Florida to claim the body.” He took a deep breath before imparting the news. “Her mother’s name was Sharon Smythe.”

Drew pounded his fist on the filing cabinet, the sound tolling through the moribund silence of the funeral home.

“Vicki Sanders—Victoria Sanders—went by her mother’s last name,” said Winston. “It’s Tory.”

* * *

Martin Briscoe couldn’t be bothered with the taxi’s seatbelt. No matter how bad the Miami cabby drove, Martin knew there could be no accident. His mission put him above such things. He was protected against such inconsequential concerns.

“The law says I gotta take you where you want to go,” the cabby told Martin. “But that don’t mean I gotta like it.”

The cabby shrugged his shoulder uncomfortably, revealing the edge of a nicotine patch on his neck. It was obviously not doing the job, because the cab reeked of stale smoke, and the open mouth of the ashtray bulged with twisted Marlboro butts.

The cabbie glanced at Martin in the rearview mirror. “Detached retina?” he asked, taking notice of the bandage over his right eye. “My son had a detached retina—hit in the face with a goddamn hockey stick.”

Martin took a deep breath. A thousand cabbies in Miami, and he had to get the one who spoke English. He answered by not answering, hoping the cabby got the hint.

“Yeah, eye trouble is the worst,” blathered the cabby. “Can’t set it like a bone, can’t lance it like a boil.”

“How much further?”

“Almost there.”

Martin smoothed out a ruffle in his eye dressing. Although he had pared down the gauze and tape to a bare minimum, there was no way to hide the wound. The eye Drew Camden had blinded with a starter pistol still ached and oozed, having been untreated for more than a week, or at least untreated by anyone but him. Emergency rooms were out of the question—he was wanted in Eureka, and surely that damn kid had set the Newport Beach police on his tail as well. Self-treatment was the word of the day, but dentistry was a far cry from ocular triage. After six days, he suspected that his sight wasn’t coming back, and infection had taken hold.

Pain is good, he told himself. It reminded him of his failure in the graveyard—which made him determined not to fail again.

Martin unzipped the travel bag beside him to check that the lid hadn’t come off the urn he carried. Once he was satisfied it was secure, he glanced with his good eye at the address on a crumbled slip of paper and looked at the neighborhood around him. It was a neighborhood that decayed more with each block they drove, looking even worse painted in the half-tones and shadows of a failing twilight. “Exactly what part of Miami are we going to?” he asked.

The cabby spat out a rueful chuckle. “Haven’t been here before, have you?”

Martin shook his head.

“You’re going right to the middle of ‘The Miami Miasma.’ '

Martin sank back in the worn seat. “Sounds wonderful.”

“It got voted ‘Best place to drop the bomb,’ three times in a row.” The cabby told him, “Of course that was back during the cold war, when the bomb still meant something.”

They crossed an intersection, and the bottom seemed to drop out of whatever fabric held the neighborhood together. They had entered an overpopulated slum; a human sump that caught the dregs of every cultural group; the bitter bottom of the melting pot.

The cabby hit his lock button, even though all the locks were already down. “Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times,” he said. “The animals bite.”

The streets were infused with a sense of despair that permeated the souls around them: pushers and prostitutes competing for clients; angry youth with carnivorous glares. Bleak alley-shadows crouching in card­board dwellings. Even the decaying, graffiti-tagged walls seemed to breathe hopelessness in the oppressive Floridian humidity.

Martin had known his mission would take him to the edge of hell, but he had assumed it would only be figurative. “How much further?”

“Just a few more blocks.”

They turned a corner where children played in and around an abandoned rust-bucket Buick straddling the sidewalk. A brick frag­ment was lobbed like a grenade across the hood of the taxi.

“Son of a bitch,” grumbled the cabby, but just drove on.

Martin reached into his bag, nervously rubbing the side of the funeral urn he had brought as if it were a genie’s lamp. When he looked at its polished surface, he could see a faint reflection of his own face, oblate and distorted by the curvature of the brass. Were the angels watching him now, he wondered? The sense of intangible paranoia told him that they were still there. Observing. Judging. Perhaps the loss of his eye was a judgment as well. Perhaps bliss could only be achieved through pain. Or maybe they were just screwing with him.

“A loved one?” the cabby asked.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s an urn in your bag isn’t it?”

Martin toyed with the various indignant remarks he could respond with, and the various ways in which the cabby might be silenced both temporarily and permanently, but in the end decided none of it was worth the trouble. “I’m a funeral director,” he said, trying the lie on for size.

The cabby raised an eyebrow, “I didn’t know you guys made house calls.”

“Would you like my card?”

The cabby shrugged his neck uncomfortably again, glanced at the ashtray, and scratched his nicotine patch. “No. No, that’s okay.”

Martin grinned smugly. Yes, he was sufficiently funereal to pull off his current charade. He cleared a smudge from the urn, then glanced out of the window again.

To his surprise, the neighborhood had changed.

Gone were the graffiti-burdened walls and boarded windows. The gutters that had been filled with debris were clean, and the stench of misery was replaced by the smell of wet paint.

Just up ahead a barrier blocked the sidewalk, and narrowed the road to a single lane. It had the semblance