Land Of The Blind

time to go through normal channels.

Her cell phone vibrates. She looks down. Spivey. He must've finally been called out to Eli Boyle's house. It won't be long now. Caroline reaches down and turns off her phone.

'I just need to ask you a couple of questions,' she tells Pete.

He crosses his arms. 'I don't like when you ask me questions.'

'You mentioned someone, a guy that Clark used to fight at the bus stop when you were kids.'

'Yeah.' Pete finally sits down.

'Eli Boyle.'

'Yeah, that's him. Weird fuckin' kid.'

'When did you see him last?'

Pete shrugs. 'I don't know. Twenty years? About the same time I saw Clark the last time.' He gestures toward the jail guard standing at the door behind him. 'I don't bump into too many people from the old neighborhood.'

'Uh-huh.' She looks down at her notes from the interview with Louis Carver. 'Do you remember anything about your arrest in '98?'

'Did three and some at Walla Walla for that shit. 'Course I remember.'

'In the arrest report, you said that you found five hundred grams of cocaine outside your apartment.'

He shrugs and tries to smile. 'Yeah. That's a good one to try in court, huh? Fuck I was thinking? I found it! Stupid-ass motherfucker.'

'So did you?'

'Did I what?'

'Find a half-kilo of cocaine outside your apartment?'

He stares at her and his eyes narrow, as if he's trying to figure her angle. 'What the fuck is this-'

'Look, I'm just asking a question.'

'Bullshit.'

'You don't want to tell me what happened in '98?'

'You're fuckin' with me.'

'I'm not.'

'You won't believe me.'

'I might.'

'Okay. You want to know?' He chews his bottom lip. 'I'd been out two months, but I was straight. The one good thing about state time is you can get off the shit, you know? You probably don't believe me, but I was pissin' clean those two months.'

He looks down at a crudely drawn tattoo on his arm, as if it would finish the story for him. 'Had a car, a little apartment downtown, a job washing dishes. Most times that shit don't work for me – goin' straight. It's boring. But Walla Walla changed everything. I hated that place so much, I'd have washed every fuckin' dish in the world to stay out.

'Then one afternoon, I come out of my apartment to go to work, and there's a car parked next to mine. Brand-new fuckin' Mercedes-Benz. Beautiful car. Charcoal-colored ragtop. I mean… we didn't get us a lot of Benzes parked outside my building. Nobody's around and the top and windows are down. No other cars in the alley. So I looked in. I mean, how could I not? Be like some chick sitting topless on your sidewalk, you know? You gotta look. Don't mean nothing. Just means you looked.'

He wipes his brow at the memory.

'It was sitting right there in the driver's seat. Half a brick. I never had that much weight myself – not in coke – but I seen guys cut from packages like that. Shit. I don't know if the guy was coming back for it, if it just fell out, if it was a drop. I don't know shit except it's sitting there on the driver's seat, like everything I ever wanted in my life, like someone left it just for me. Like God or something just woke up that day said, 'You know what, Pete, ol' buddy, even assholes deserve a break sometimes.'

'I don't even remember grabbing it. Next thing I know, I'm driving away, checking my rearview mirror, that thing in my lap.' He cradles his hands as if holding a baby. He smiles. 'I made sure no one was behind me and then I cut a seam and did a line while I was waiting for a red light. Oh! Pure as a hug from your mama. Shit was amazing.' He laughs and his eyes roll back. 'Best four minutes of my life.'

'Four minutes?'

'That's about how long I drove before the cops swarmed me. Uniforms. Four rollers. I figured they was watchin' the Benz, but when I told 'em I found it in that car, they just laughed at me.' He shakes his head. 'They got a big kick out of that. 'He found it! Motherfucker found it!'

'I said, 'You mean you guys wasn't watchin' that Benz back there?' They just laughed at me. 'What Benz?' they said. I swore so much that's what happened, they drove me back down the alley to check it out. But the car was gone.

'In court, the cops said that some dude had called in, said he saw a guy in a gold Nova driving north on Division with a big bag of coke in his lap. Bang, strike three, judge gives me a fuckin' nickel. You know, I've had bad luck, but to have some fucker call in when I'm doing a line in my own car? That shit's unfair.'

Pete shrugs, as if he's bored with his own story. 'Yeah, yeah, so poor me, huh? What's this got to do with Eli Boyle?'

Caroline looks down at the Department of Motor Vehicles report for Eli Boyle that she just printed out. She slides it across the table.

Pete picks it up and reads it, his lips moving as he does.

She watches Pete's face as he reads that Eli Boyle has registered only one car in the last four years, a gunmetal gray 1998 Mercedes-Benz SL500 convertible. Pete looks up from the paper, his face blank, as if he can't comprehend this, as if he's never imagined that such patterns could be at play in his life, that he could be subject to such elaborate forces, the shadows, the world beneath this one.

Maybe that's what's going through his head, Caroline thinks, or maybe that's just me. Because all Pete says is, 'Motherfucker.'

'He hired an investigator to find you,' Caroline says. 'I guess he knew what time you went to work and he parked there, figuring you wouldn't be able to resist.'

Pete shakes his head and reads the DMV report again. 'Why?'

'I don't know. I was hoping you could tell me.'

'I don't… I don't know,' he says quietly. She watches the disbelief on his face become something else, sadness over those lost three years, maybe, or the wonder over whether he could've stayed clean. Then his face changes again, and this new emotion is unmistakable – cheeks reddening, eyes narrowing, lips closing in.

Caroline stands and motions to the guard. She takes the report from Pete. 'Listen, I'll put in a word with the prosecutor,' she says. 'Tell him you helped me. Maybe they'll give you a break.'

The guard comes in, but Pete is staring off, miles away.

'Oh, and if you're thinking about paying Eli a visit when you get out,' Caroline says, 'you're about three days too late.'

4

SHE'S LOST CLARK

She's lost Clark. Of all the terrible things that could happen now – and there are others – this is the most terrible; Caroline has no idea what to do next. She stands in the doorway of Interview Two and stares, unbelieving, at the empty chair. No legal pads. No pen. No coffee cup. It's as if he were never here. Now that she could finally sit across from Clark and say, Look, I know what happened, there is no Clark to sit across from.

She'd come back to drop the whole thing in his lap that way – Eli Boyle and Pete Decker and Louis Carver, all of