Anarchy (12 page)

He had the basset-hound face of a career cop, a face that said it had seen it all and was now unmoved by everything. He stared at her for a good ten seconds, looking neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic.

“Well,” he said at last, “you better fix that.”

“I'll do my best.”

“I'm making some changes to the duty roster. There'll be longer shifts.”

“I'm fine with that.” She smoothed her hair. It still felt slightly crusty, the ocean salt clinging on. “It's not a big thing, sir. Just a couple of bad nights.”

Jonas arrived, straightening the cuffs of his shirt. “Whoa. Sarge.”

“You're late, Paul.”

“I'm always late. Hey, Goose. Man, you don't look too good. I'll get coffee. What's up, Sarge?”

“What do you think?”

“Don't pay me enough to think.”

“Have you two even been watching the news in your little holiday camp over here? Or do you just sit around making coffee all day?”

“Hey, I keep an eye out. But, you know. Alice never seems to make it onto the news.”

“Sit down for a minute, will you, Paul?”

Jonas gestured peaceably and eased himself behind the other desk.

“All right.” Now that he had their attention he'd turned self-conscious. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and sought gravitas. “Okay. So, we have a potential situation. I just got instructions last night. Whatever this problem is with the computers, they reckon it's sending a lot of stuff haywire. Infrastructure. We can expect some volatility. The whole force is canceling all leave. I've got the new roster here.” He waved a handwritten piece of paper. “Until they get it sorted out we're responsible for maintaining order. We have specific instructions to discourage hoarding and prevent looting.”

If Cope's delivery was supposed to impress his seriousness upon them, it didn't work on Jonas.

“In Alice?” he said. Goose had to bite back a giggle.

“This isn't a joke, Paul. The assistant commissioner's message suggests that we may be under attack.”

Jonas stood a tiny fraction straighter. “Okeydokey. We're vigilant.”

“Maculloch was asleep at her desk when I came in.”

“I'm vigilant,” Jonas corrected.

Cope sighed. “Look, I don't know what's going on either. Here's your rota. Keep an eye on the market. Nobody gets to clean out the shelves. Don't let anyone start freaking out.” He was about to hand the paper over to Jonas when he stopped and studied it, looking over his glasses, eyebrows rising. “Wait a sec . . . Yep, Webber's coming over here to cover you guys. Maculloch, I want you to take the day off. Got a pencil?”

“Sir, I'm entirely capable of performing my duties.”

“I'm sure you are.” He didn't even look at her. He leaned the sheet on the desk and made an alteration, finishing it off with an emphatic crossing-out. “You get the day off anyway. Go sleep. That's an order. Go get pills if you have to. Take them with two shots of bourbon, that's what I used to do.”

She hadn't felt so humiliated since she'd left home. “With respect, sir—”

“Just. Don't. Argue with me.” He straightened and adjusted his glasses. “I need all my officers at their best.”

“He's right, Goose. Ain't much we're gonna be doing anyway. The invisible enemy, you know?”

“Don't be so sure.” Cope never let himself get excited about anything, on principle, but there was a slight edge of relish in his voice. “Some people'll take any excuse to cause trouble. We're not going to let them. Understand?”

“Roger.”

“We keep things nice and quiet here while the geeks sort it out.”

“Hey,” Jonas drawled. “Might be nothing they can do either. The haunted Internet, you know? Ghosts in the machine.”

Goose looked at her feet and concentrated on wiggling them into her shoes, in small movements.

Cope pushed the handwritten roster in front of Jonas. “Just because we got the damn queen on our money doesn't make us crazy Brits. Here you go, Paul. This is work. Remember what that is? You signed up for it. Do it.”

Jonas picked it up. “You got it, Sarge.”

“Good boy. Oh, and one more thing. The commish says communications may be compromised. E-mail, messaging. Mobiles too. So nothing secure gets done that way for now, you get me? No police business on the computer. Best damn thing about the whole rigmarole, if you ask me.”

“Ahhey.” Jonas nodded to himself. “I was wondering why you drove all the way over here.”

“Well, you can be damn sure it wasn't for the pleasure of your company.” He wasn't good at the banter. He tried too hard to do the gruff old cop act and so never got it right. “Anything I need to know before I get back to work, of which, in case you were wondering, there's a damn shitload?”

Jonas pursed his lips and looked at Goose.

She felt rough-edged with tiredness, unpreparedness, and embarrassment. Her mouth seemed to open of its own accord and speak the sentence.

“There's a beached whale, sir.”

His whole face screwed up in disbelieving amazement. “A
what
?”

Why had she said it? It had been there in her unsleeping head all night.
Stinking up the place.
The smell of rotting fish. An offshore island, somewhere out in the fog.
Tlatch tlatch tlatch tlatch.
“A couple of guys in a boat reported it. I don't know if it's a police matter, sir. A stranded whale. I think they said an orca.”

“Yeah,” Jonas said, to her surprise. “I heard about that.”

Cope stared at her as if she'd confirmed all his suspicions about female officers in one convenient sentence. “As far as you know, Maculloch, has this whale committed a crime?”

“I haven't had a chance to interview it yet, sir.”

Mercifully, Jonas intervened. “I talked with those guys yesterday. They were asking who was gonna deal with it.”

“Oh,” Cope said. “Well. That's an easy one. Not me. Not me, and not you. Paul, you're responsible for this town till Webber gets over here. Maculloch, you're going to sleep until you look like a human being again. And try to pay attention, Paul. You get no backup this morning. We're not using the radio unless it's an emergency. Got that? And when I say ‘emergency,' I don't mean some dumbass whale that can't tell the difference between land and water.”

“The citizens of Alice are safe in my hands,” Jonas said, cradling his palms into a bowl.

“God help them.”

They waited for his car to disappear from earshot.

“Hey.” Jonas directed a sympathetic shrug at her. “Sorry, man. But seriously, you gotta take a break.”

She put her head in her hands. “I don't know what's wrong with me.”

“Just tired, man. It messes you up. The sarge is right, you should drop some pills if you need to. They got some behind the counter at the market, I can tell Linda to let you have some. She's good people.”

She looked up, studied his broad impassive face.

“None of this bothers you, does it,” she said. “Whatever's going on out there. It just rolls right off you.”

For a moment he was about to make a joke of it, but maybe he heard something in her voice, a fraction of desperation. He stood up and strolled over to the pane of glass in the door. He looked out thoughtfully. You could almost see him gathering words, getting them in order.

“You ever find it weird, Goose? Being . . . here. Instead of somewhere else. You ever think about that?”

“No,” she lied.

“I mean . . .” He crouched so he could peer up at the ocean-thickened sky. “You look out there every day and you'd think, okay, nothing's goin' on. Nothing much changes. But it's the same planet, you know? Same ball of rock. You keep going that way”—he nodded outward, in no particular direction—“you go on far enough, you get, I dunno. Africa or somewhere. Kids with AK-47s and no water. Or England. People sitting in circles and drumming, shouting and screaming this and that. It's connected, you know? Get on a plane and you can be there the same day. But from here . . . It doesn't feel real. Know what I'm saying?”

Vous êtes ici.
She suddenly thought that maybe sleeping pills weren't such a bad idea.

“I sort of think I do,” she said.

10

I
nstead, she went for a run.

She was too embarrassed to have Jonas escort her down to the pharmacy counter at the market. And, she told herself, she might have weakened enough to let herself be forced into buying pills, but she'd never have taken them. She'd never touched a cigarette or a joint. She'd never had a glass of wine. She wasn't putting anything in herself that had even the slightest hint of the glamour of addiction. It was all part of her project to make herself as unlike her mother as possible. She knew only one way to blot out the passage of empty time, to haul up a barrier between herself and the lurking ennui of existence: violent exercise.

She promised Jonas she'd go back to the apartment and go to bed. She did, at least, go back to the apartment. But she changed, avoiding the mirror, and left again as fast as she could. She kept thinking. She thought: I should call Annie to make sure she's okay. I should call Dad to make sure he's okay. I should call Tess too. I should this, I should that. I shouldn't have let Jennifer go. I didn't let Jennifer go. She's gone, she isn't gone. It's a bug, it's a virus. It's a plague. It's a curse. What will happen now, what will happen, what what what. The only way to stop thinking was to run.

There was one road long enough to run on, Route 30. It followed the inlet out of town and then turned steep, heading up toward the pass. She went steeply up with it. Her legs found themselves in a fight and fought. There were trees on all sides and no sound but the choreography of that battle, the steady thrum. She didn't worry about when to turn around. She'd recognize the moment when it arrived: when she'd gone far enough that she couldn't think at all for the pain.

Cars occasionally passed. Trucks. One, oncoming, was a patrol car. She glanced up for half a second, saw Webber, glanced down. He might have recognized her, or not, it didn't matter; she'd been going steeply up for almost an hour, maybe, long enough anyway that nothing mattered but keeping her legs turning and her elbows swinging. A while later and she topped the ridge, the road dipping into a long shallow descent. At that moment she felt a clean burst of elation, pure and weightless. Running downhill was so easy she felt she could be flying, loosed from the weight of existence altogether.

Many curves of the road later a car slowed as it passed her from behind. Another patrol car. It pulled up. The door swung open and out stepped Jonas.

Crap, she thought. It was the first thought she'd been conscious of for some time.

He waited for her to jog up, hands on his hips. She let herself slow, carefully. Bewildered at the change in their rhythm, her legs wobbled and threatened to drop her.

“Okay,” he said. “You're in big trouble.”

She stood, gulping air. He pulled open the back door.

“In you get,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Way.”

“Can't make you go to bed if you don't want to. We're just gonna talk. In you get.”

She put her hands on her knees. They were trembling. “'Kay,” she said, and crawled into the back.

He started driving: not, as she'd assumed, back the way he'd come, back to Alice, bringing her in like a fugitive, but on east, toward the other side of the island and Hardy.

“Where we going?” she croaked.

“Webber brought a message over from Cope. There's been a boom break. Sarge wants me out in my boat to check it out.”

“Boom break?”

“You know the log booms?”

“Oh. Huh.”

“Big break. Whole boom got loose, apparently. That could be like three or four thousand deadheads. Good as a floating minefield.”

“Huh.”

“What am I gonna do with you, Goose?”

“Come too.”

He twisted around.

“Please,” she said. Her lungs were calming.

His unflappable look settled back on the road. “Sea air ought to make you sleepy, I guess,” he said. “Anyway. Okay. You can't be trusted on your own.”

• • •

She'd have died of exposure if she'd gone out on the water in nothing but her sweaty vest and shorts, but Jonas had outdoor clothes and waterproofs in his trunk. They sagged around her like a spacesuit. She didn't mind. She was on the edge of something; she didn't know what, but it felt perilous, and Jonas's company was keeping her from tipping over.

Besides, she had an idea. It felt like it might help.

“Jonas?”

He sized her up as she zipped the waterproofs closed, chuckling. “I gotta hand it to you, Goose. Not a lot of chicks I know have the guts to go outside wearing that.”

“Don't call me a chick.”

“Wouldn't dream of it.”

“So you already know about that whale?”

“The one that stranded?”

“Yeah.” He walked, she shuffled along the gravel of the wharf toward the dock. There were a couple of kids pushing strollers. Both of them looked far too young to have kids of their own. “You ran into those guys who told me about it?”

“Uh-huh. Fishing buddies.” She waited for his
They're good people
,
but it didn't come; something must have given him pause.

“You think they were having me on? I kind of had the feeling they were messing with me.”

“The thing is,” he said, as if he'd been mulling it over for hours, “they wouldn't feed me the same story. If it was just you, yeah, I'd say maybe. Don's good people” (
aha!
) “but he gets a kick out of stuff like that.”

“But they told you the same thing? A killer whale stranded on, what was it? Something island?”

“Masterman. Yep. Weird place for it. And wrong time of year. Even the transients are usually still down south now. Plus I only ever heard of them stranding in bunches.”

She descended carefully onto the floating pontoon. They were the only people on the dock. “Can we go check?”

“Huh?”

“That island group's just out of the bay, right?” She'd looked them up in her atlas. That was at around three in the morning. Three in the morning, the apartment smelling of packing tape and unwashed wetsuit (she'd left it in a heap in the bathtub), and poor sleepless Séverine awake still, wondering what was happening, where the silent girl had been going, still in the grip of the nighttime delusion that she could work it all out.

“Oh. You mean take a little detour? I guess.”

“You're supposed to report strandings, aren't you?”

He knelt and began untying his boat. “Right now,” he said, “I think people got other things to worry about.”

“It can't be that much of a detour. Humor me.”

“You know there's nothing we're gonna be able to do? Those things weigh twice as much as a car.”

“Yeah, I know.”

He climbed aboard, lifted up a plastic tub, and took a bunch of keys out from underneath it. “Gonna look pretty miserable up on the beach. If it's there at all. Just a big hunk of dead fish.”

“That's where you keep the keys? Seriously? Not even in a locker?”

“Hey.” He clicked the bilge pump on and started the motor. The few kids pushing strollers through the park below the town all turned to see what the noise was:
something happening!
There were people in Hardy who walked down from their houses a couple of afternoons a week just to watch the ferry arrive. “We do things different up here.”

She climbed in after him, huddling in the limited shelter of the cockpit. “So can we check? I'd like to see.”

Jonas gave her a long look as he steered out. It almost qualified as curious.

“What's up with you, Goose?”

“I wish I knew.”

• • •

North of the island's tip, the ocean air banked thick and damp against the ramparts of the coastal range, tripling the late winter mist into a fog. The continent's edge was outlined in soft white, a hazy barrier, like an atmosphere. A white boat drifted there, invisible. It made no sound. There was nothing to propel it: no sail, no engine. Its single passenger sat in it, sightless head bowed, unmoving. The head was black as well as white, and there were black characters on the bow, as useless in that solitude as patterns made by a tangle of weed: LV6 IRKUTSK STAR. The open boat, no more than twice as long as Marie-Archange Séverine Gaucelin-Maculloch's kayak, rocked and swiveled, rudderless in the long swell. Birds avoided it.

• • •

The shore was a series of protrusions and indentations, a wavering negotiation between rock and water. Tree roots fingered into every crevice above the line of high tide. The forest pressed as close to the ocean as it could, the two vast uniformities almost touching, the dull dark evergreens and the dull grey water. Goose couldn't find anything to look at.

“You doze off if you want,” Jonas said, over the motor's whine. “Looking kinda dopey.”

“I'd love to.” The sea was calm, barely more ruffled than bedsheets. They skimmed along without jolting.

“Logs'll just ride up and down on the tide until the wind gets up. I don't think there's gonna be a problem with them getting into the bay.”

“Did Cope say why the boom broke?”

“Dunno. No, he didn't say. They lost contact with the tug. This problem with the satellites, I guess.”

“Those booms can break up in bad weather, eh? But it's flat as a pancake out here.”

“Yup. Looks like there's a fog up the Passage.” He shaded his eyes to look north and west as they powered out of the bay. Though there was no glare, the sheer expanse of grey had a kind of glistering weight that hurt the eye.

“Oh, great.”

“Nah. Not gonna bother us today. Way off. See over there? Those are the Mastermans.” Jonas indicated a snaggle of forested rock chipped off from the main body of the island, debris fallen a few hundred meters offshore. “How about we swing by now? I'm not seeing deadheads anywhere.”

There were a couple of outlying lozenges of rock. An eagle stood near the top of a bare tree and watched them as they slowed to pass between.

“That's the big island on the left there. Don said it's right up on the beach.” He pulled the throttle back and curved their course away, to get a better view. “Right over there.”

Goose stood up. She could see the break in the trees, a pebbly notch scalloped out of the island. “There?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I guess your buddy likes winding you up too.”

Jonas looked slightly pained. “I guess. Never thought he could keep his face that straight.”

“Unless it unstranded itself.”

“Could be.” His normal lack of curiosity was reasserting itself quickly. He leaned on the wheel, turning them about. “Okay. Nothing to see here.”

“Wait.” Now Goose shaded her eyes, squinting. Jonas followed her look back toward the tiny beach.

“Hey,” he said.

Looking for a four-ton orca, neither of them had at first seen the smaller shape slumped on the pebbles, too big for a bird, too small for a twisted fragment of felled tree.

“Looks like a body,” Jonas said. He let the boat complete its curve until it was facing the island again.

Goose was feeling something she recognized from the middle of the night: a strange and bleary quickening, like the first glimpse of a prospect equally hoped for and dreaded.

Jennifer,
she thought.
Jennifer.

There was definitely someone lying half curled up on the pebbles, partially draped by some dark covering.

“That's a kid,” Jonas said beside her. “Oh, m—”

The depth beneath them was reducing rapidly. He slowed to a crawl and steered around a treeless reef. The scattered land pushed closer around them, the water now shallow and perfectly calm. Dead ahead, a dark-haired child sprawled unmoving as beached driftwood. She lay in the center of a strangely smooth depression printed in the speckled sand and stones, as if, Goose thought,
as if, as if something really really heavy and kind of rounded had been lying right there making that shape.

“Hey!” Jonas shouted. The wall of straight-trunked evergreens swallowed his voice. Another eagle flapped silently away, disturbed. “Hey!” The child lay unresponsive, the back of her head to them. Something about her didn't look like Jennifer. “Take the wheel,” Jonas said, “I'm gonna jump.” But Goose, ignoring him, had already scrambled to the bow and over the forward railing. Too small, she thought. Short hair. Just before the bow scraped, she sprang onto the pebbles. The kid was lying with a dark puffy coat draped over her, head sticking out one end, feet out the other. Goose slowed as she came close, crouched down, put her hand out to the neck.

“Dead?” Jonas called from the boat.

It wasn't Jennifer. It wasn't a girl. It was a boy, a small boy, not much older than Cody, a native kid, pale as death. His mouth was open.

His eyes were open too. They twitched toward her.

“
Mon dieu.
Okay. Oh my God. Okay.” She bent over him and touched his cheek. He was as cold as the sea. “Okay, you're going to be okay. Can you hear me? Hello?”

The boy's feet scraped against the pebbles. She heard Jonas swear.

“Get on the radio!” she shouted over her shoulder. The boy quivered at the sudden noise. His head lifted a little. One hand came up from beneath the coat and clutched at his chest, a feeble and clumsy infant gesture. “We're going to need an ambulance at the dock!”

“Is he hurt?”

“I can't tell!” She tried to catch the boy's wandering eyes. “Hey. Can you hear me? Are you okay? Can you get up?” She squatted on her heels and lifted the coat away.

She fell back on her heels, heart juddering, swearing without thinking.
“Tabarnac.”

A brutal gaze fixed on her, its eye a single huge dark lozenge.

The boy had curled himself around a native mask. It stared at her like the head of a beast buried in the shingle. “
Tabarnac
. What the hell.” It dared her to touch it. It was all flowing lines and carved protrusions, as fierce and solid and substantial as the boy was frail and limp.