The Missing Person (22 page)

I was holding the gun out in front of me with my arms locked like they do in movies. My finger on the trigger was shaking. I thought this should feel like a dream, but it didn't; it all felt gloriously real, each second defined, as it passed, in miniature splendor. “Pull the keys out of your pocket,” I said, “and hand them to Wylie.”

Gerald dropped his fists and looked at me with what I had to admit was considerable dignity for a man faced with a gun he didn't know was loaded with BBs. “Don't be stupid,” he said to me.

“Show me the keys,” I said.

He shrugged, and did.

Wylie stepped forward and grabbed them. “Let's go,” he said.

Wylie drove. Psyche was quiet, a silence that now seemed ominous. Irina was quiet too, and when I asked how she was doing—she was sitting in the back—she didn't answer. I asked her again.

“I am worrying,” she said tightly. Her shadowed face had an ugly red sheen; her breath was labored and her voice hoarse. She was sick, too.

“Wylie,” I said.

“I know,” he said. The car bounced and jostled on the dirt road, then turned velvet-smooth—it was an expensive sedan— as we sped onto the highway. After several minutes I could see the city's loose beginnings ahead, farms and spread-out houses and the flow of gas stations. Beside the road the land sloped away to sheer nothing. Somewhere in that nothing, I knew, fire was catching in the desert grasses, a flower of spark blossoming into the air, the smoking particles fizzing and popping like a lightning storm. Ahead of the car the lights of the city stitched an uneven seam against the hem of the night sky. The world took on a funhouse cast, dense with terrible possibilities. We raced past a gas station, and inside the brilliantly lit interior of the Quick Mart a man stood behind the counter smoking and gazing out at the night.

Then, in front of us, the cluster of electricity and faint halo of neon around Albuquerque went dark, like a candle blown out in a single breath. The city vanished.

“Yes,” Irina said.

Never in my life had I seen so many stars.

Twenty-One

Irina was chattering behind me in some kind of dizzy, sick euphoria, and I snapped at her to shut up and Wylie told me to shut up and then we all did for a while. Darkness settled over everything, and the car's headlights seemed barely able to penetrate it. It was like black fog, and Wylie kept braking suddenly at the shocking discovery of a stop sign, a cat prowling, another car. He kept off the main streets, wisely, steering us through neighborhoods where people stood in front of their dark houses talking to their neighbors or on their cell phones, whose tiny screens flared like lit matches as we passed.

On Indian School Road, I saw a man standing in front of a tall building, shaking his fist at it in reproach. Outside a night-club, people had circled their cars in the parking lot and were dancing in the ring of headlights, their radios turned to the same booming station.

In another parking lot, a crowd had gathered round a bonfire in a garbage can, warming their hands over it as if the night were cold, which it was not.

“We're almost there,” Wylie said.

I saw a few flashlights and candles, and with my window rolled down I could hear distant yelling and what sounded like breaking glass; if looting had broken out, it wouldn't have surprised me. I realized that Irina had been quiet for a long time, and when I looked back her head was laying against the seat at an awkward angle and I couldn't tell if she was asleep or unconscious. The baby, too, was silent in her sling.

“Wylie,” I whispered. “We've got to hurry.”

“I know,” he said.

But around the next corner we came upon a scene of malevolent chaos. In front of a gas station several cars were parked in the middle of the street, doors open and lights on. One had a dent in the passenger side and steam issuing from its hood. Along the curb other cars had stopped, some drivers honking their horns, and a crowd had gathered, though for what purpose, exactly, was unclear. Some people were banging on the dark windows of the gas station, others were yelling, and there were several fistfights. The road was completely blocked, and Wylie slowed down, trying to decide what to do. I heard a window shatter, and Irina leaned into the front seat.

“What is happening? Are we at the hospital?”

“Almost,” Wylie said. “Everything's going to be fine.”

“Who are all these people?” Irina said wonderingly. I was asking myself the same question. They looked monstrous and intent, their faces contorted with anger, but I couldn't figure out what they wanted or where they'd all come from.

Wylie pulled into the gas station and drove around the back of the building, but then a police car pulled in on the far side, cutting us off, and a voice on a megaphone told us to turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Wylie said.

“What is this?” Irina said. “Wylie, we can't stop. We have to go to the hospital.”

“Hold on,” Wylie said. “We have to deal with this first.”

We stepped out of the car and faced two blue-uniformed officers, who in the red swirl of the cruiser's light seemed just as monstrous as the rioters out front. I saw two other patrol cars pull into the lot, the cops looking anxious as they commanded the crowd to disperse.

“We need to get to the hospital,” Wylie was explaining. “We have a sick baby over here.”

One of the officers glanced at Irina and Psyche and nodded. The other, though, came around to my side of the car and played his flashlight over the interior.

“Please, there is no time for this!” Irina shouted, her voice breaking with panic. “We have to go now!” She was bouncing in place and sobbing, clutching Psyche to her chest.

“What are you people doing back here? And what is
that
?” the officer said.

His beam, I saw, was fixed on the pistol on the front seat.

“What are you doing with that weapon?”

“It's a BB gun,” I said.

The cop looked at me as if this was everybody's excuse. “That doesn't answer my question,” he said.

“What are you waiting for?” Irina yelled, and people all around us stopped whatever they were doing to stare. It was possibly the loudest shout I'd ever heard. “My baby needs a doctor!”

“Planning on doing a little shopping tonight while the lights are out?” the cop said.

“With a BB gun?”

“You want to scare people, all you need is the appearance of a weapon,” he said. A universal wisdom, apparently, since Angus had said the same thing. I just shrugged. He went around to the back of the sedan and told me to open the trunk, which I did.

“What's all this?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's not my car,” I said.

“Where'd you get it from, then?”

“A friend of ours.”

By this time Irina was completely hysterical, and Wylie wasn't in much better shape. I had a dreary, dazed feeling that things were going from bad to worse, which was confirmed by the officer's reaction when he looked in the trunk.

“Jesus,” he said. “We'll take that baby to a doctor, and then you people are going to answer some questions.”

We wound up with a police escort to the hospital. The building had power, and coming into its stark fluorescence made us all blink like moles. An orderly or a nurse—someone wearing pink scrubs and carrying a chart—took one look at Irina and Psyche and said, “Come with me.” Wylie and I filled out the paperwork, and he kept trying to persuade the desk clerk that he should be allowed to go back and check on his friend and her baby.

The cops wanted to question us but were constantly interrupted by urgent calls on their radios. From the unending crackle of the dispatcher and the frantic repetition of police codes, I could tell that the city was verging on chaos.

“We're not going anywhere,” I told the nicer officer. “We'll be here for a while if you want to come back.” His partner shot me a dirty look. “We haven't
done
anything,” I said, but he looked completely unconvinced.

The officers argued briefly, over the radio and with each other, then wrote Wylie a ticket for reckless driving. He started to protest, but then thought better of it, and the police left, promising they'd be back.

Outside the electric doors of the hospital the city stayed dark. A man came in leaning on another man's shoulder, moaning that his leg was broken. In the waiting area a woman in a flowered dress held her son's head in her lap and her daughter sat next to them, squinting intently at a hand-held video game that beeped and sang as she played it. A short man in his forties, who I guessed was her husband, stood at the counter explaining their situation to a young receptionist.

“We can't afford to buy my mom's insulin from the pharmacy,” he was saying, his hands palms-up on the counter. “We got no health insurance and the guy in the South Valley only charges five dollars.”

“You buy illegal medication, you take your life in your hands,” the receptionist said. She didn't look much older than seventeen, and on her bare shoulder was a small, elegant tattoo of a woman's face.

“Five dollars,” the man said. “Instead of like fifty.”

“Some guy tells you it's insulin, and you believe him?” she said. “You can't trust these people.” She shook her long, shiny hair, dismissing him, and picked up the phone. The man watched her for a moment, then walked slowly back to his family.

In the corner a man in a red suit was shaking, as if being constantly electrocuted; his suit buttons rattled against the plastic chair, and every once in a while he shouted out random obscenities. A couple of homeless people sat wrapped in layers of clothes and blankets, and there were several families with young children and a man with a cut on his forehead who apparently spoke neither English nor Spanish and couldn't understand the receptionist. It was the county hospital, and everyone in the room seemed used to waiting a long time for any kind of service at all.

Wylie came back shaking his head. “They wouldn't let me in,” he said. He looked like hell. Dust ringed his eyes and striped his cheeks; his face was all dark circles and hollows, his nose and cheekbones jutting out.

“We'll just have to wait,” I said, and tried to smile.

“I didn't know you could shoot a gun.”

“I'm glad I didn't have to.”

“What was it, a BB gun?”

“Yeah.”

“How'd you know it was there?”

“I know a few things.”

He nodded. “I guess so,” he said.

Time passed and passed, and then it was two in the morning. I drank three Cokes and felt brittle and jittery and wide awake. The man in the red suit let loose an elaborate string of swear words, beaded with shrieks and gasps, and the mother covered the ears of her sleeping son with the palms of her hands. Two young white junkies walked in—a boy and girl, impossibly skinny, wrapped in blankets, the visible swatches of their pale skin festooned with sores and scabs—and asked the receptionist about a friend of theirs named Buster. A doctor came out and informed the man whose mother had taken illegal insulin that she'd be all right. After the doctor left, he sat down, put his head in his hands, and was wracked by three or four dry, heaving sobs. Then he looked up at his wife and children, and his face was perfectly calm.

The doors to the ER hissed open, and the same cops walked up to us. “Did you think we'd forgotten about you?” the mean one said. He was gray-faced and smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. He held out his hand, and I thought the gesture was curiously graceful, almost chivalrous, until he gripped my wrist, hard.

“You're coming with us,” he said, jerking me to my feet.

“What?” I said. The other cop was talking to Wylie, who was telling him that we hadn't heard about Irina and the baby yet and had to stay at the hospital.

“Hey, lady, focus on me,” my cop said. “You and I are talking here.”

“What's going on?” I said.

“We need to ask you a few questions about that car of yours.”

“Gerald's car?” I said. “Is this about taking Gerald's car?”

“Are you telling me the car's stolen?”

“Well, he can have it back
now,
” I said.

The man in the red suit yelled, “That's right, motherfucker!” and I glanced at him, grateful for his support. Everybody was watching. Wylie and his cop were undergoing the same talk and the same dance, face to face. The next thing I knew, we were being marched outside to the patrol car, my cop gripping my elbow and reciting my rights, his posture again almost chivalrous. The night air blew a current of exhaust from somewhere in the invisible city. In the intersection below us a cop had set up a spotlight and was directing traffic, his white gloves lit eerily in its glow. Without electricity the darkness took on new gradations of gray, navy, and mauve.

At the police station they led us into different rooms for questioning. My cop kept talking about “materials” in the trunk, which I didn't know anything about and couldn't get them to explain. He wanted to know what we'd been doing all night, and I didn't want to say. Keeping my mouth shut was remarkably easy, and the cop became incensed, yelling at me and pounding his fist on the table. I didn't think that anyone who smoked as much as he evidently did could stand to be that angry without risking a heart attack. I looked down at the ground, feeling like a kid in high-school detention.

“All right,” he finally said. “I'll let you stew in a cell for a while. That should change your mind.”

The cell was jam-packed, with hardly enough room for me to squeeze in, but everyone ignored me except a prostitute with long red nails and a purple leather miniskirt. She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted, and told me that her friend had OD'd in a motel room on Central but was going to pull through, maybe.

“Tonight's gone all crazy,” she said. In her high-heeled boots and teased-up hair she towered over me. “The whole city got no lights, and I'm like, what the fuck is this?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“I mean, what the fuck
is
this?”

A woman in the cell gave a high-pitched moan, and Psyche's face flashed in front of me then, red and twisted. I hoped desperately that she was all right.

Still muttering, the hooker flicked her cigarette across the floor, where it skipped over the concrete like a stone on a lake. Then she stamped her high-heeled foot in a fit of petulance and said, “Fucking Albuquerque. City can't do anything right.”

The cell stank of urine and body odor and smoke. As the sugar high from my Cokes wore off, crashing me into exhaustion, I started to reconsider my high-minded position. So what if the police found out where Wylie and Irina and I had been? We'd left before the main event anyway. But saying anything about this would amount to turning in Stan and Berto— and Angus. I couldn't do it. Gerald, maybe, but not the others.

Another cop came into the holding area and called my name. Tall and thin, he had a neatly trimmed mustache and carried himself with an air of gravitas.

“I'm Lieutenant Duran,” he said.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“You're in a lot of trouble, missy.”

I looked at him, not believing that anybody still used the word “missy.” It was one more element of the evening that I couldn't believe. It was three in the morning, and my patience for everything was wearing thin.

He guided me by the elbow and led me upstairs to a plain, windowless room. On the table were clear plastic Ziploc bags filled with wrenches, cutters, and handsaws, all the usual apparatus of vandalism. The whole world was swimming into the surreal. I wondered where Wylie was, how they were treating him and what he was saying, when we could leave.

“Explain,” the lieutenant said.

“Explain what?”

“What you were planning on doing with all these items.”