The Weight of Living Read online

  Dickinson took a smooth swing and the ball jumped out maybe a hundred and fifty yards, driven less by the power of the swing than the size of the metal clubface.

  Dickinson picked up the tee and walked on. “You play?”

  “No,” Nagler said, shaking his head. “Bad feet, no time.”

  Dickinson said, “That’s good, make ya crazy.”

  “So where’s the old Garrettson place from here?” Nagler asked as Dickinson lined up another shot: He topped it and the ball bounced out about thirty feet.

  “Maybe a mile south. The old mining camps, where the real money was, were about three, four miles southwest of here over the mountain. His place is at the edge of the fields. No one looking to make real money would have opened that vein.”

  “Anything left there?”

  “Yeah, heard hikers say there are some buildings, roofs caved in, windows shot out. There’s a hiking trail that heads up that way. It’s generally smooth since all the rocks have been picked out.”

  “I heard there was something called ‘Garrett’s Way?’”

  “It’s an old creek washout. He used it as a way to his place. Heard he blocked it off half way up with blowdowns.”

  Dickinson took another swing and with an iron drove the ball cleanly down the fairway.

  “All I heard about Garrettson was that he was crazy. People would see him on the valley road with a shotgun yelling at something, probably God. They had learned to stay away. I mean, Detective, they weren’t stupid. The wife dies when there were three kids. Then there’s ten kids and no new wife? Just wasn’t anybody’s business. I guess.”

  “Makes sense. Anyone been seen up there recently?” Nagler asked.

  “Don’t think so. Wait, heard at the gas pump the other day that some skinny red-haired woman was seen there, maybe a week ago.”

  Nagler turned away and stated into the green hills. Has to be Calista. What the hell?

  “Haven’t heard of anyone else, or heard that she was seen again. Might have been a hiker. Hey, watch this.”

  Dickinson set his ball on a tee and turned away from the center of the fairway. “I could do this as a kid. Let’s see.” He struck the ball hard and it sailed in an arc into the stone frame of the elephant sheds. “Ha!” he shouted.

  Nagler just laughed at the old man’s joy. He shook his hand and walked back to his car.

  “Any time you want to play, call me,” Dickinson yelled.

  ****

  Nagler found the cutout that acted as a parking lot for the trailhead about a mile from the golf course. A map mounted in a display case showed the path crossed the north-south valley road and headed east into a park reserve, and then west up the slope to a point where it made a semicircular turn before continuing southwest to connect with another trail. Maybe the turn circumnavigated the Garrettson property; Calista had said it was still in family hands.

  With the thought of his left foot screaming in pain in about a hundred yards, Nagler started up the trail.

  Not bad, he thought. Even the grade rose gradually. The path had clearly been beaten down by thousands of footsteps. Just don’t trip.

  To his right through breaks in the trees, Nagler could see a rock-strewn depression paralleling the trail: The dry creek.

  He tried to place a call to Ramirez, but there was no signal. Instead, he took a few photographs. Ahead the trail seemed to brighten as the canopy thinned. Just as the map showed, the trail began a wide turn.

  To his left the trees thinned, replaced by brush and tall grass. Then just grass — as he walked it became shorter, but still over his head, perhaps an old field gone wild, he thought.

  At a point where the grass had become shoulder high, Nagler spotted a path, a place at which someone had clearly left the trail and walked toward what he saw was a windowless yellow house with a caved-in roof a few hundred feet off the trail. Maybe it’s hikers, he thought. He took a few steps past the break to gain a better look at the house over even-shorter grass.

  The first shot sent Nagler sprawling as it broke branches about twenty feet over his head. A warning shot. The second shot came while he peered down the break in the tall grass. It clipped the beaded tops of the grass above his head.

  He scrambled on hands and knees toward the trees about twenty feet away, as a third and fourth shot pierced the shorter grass, shots with meaning.

  Nagler limped about twenty more feet down the trail deeper into the trees as a fifth shot clipped a tree ten feet behind him. Where were they shooting from? The house, upstairs?

  He spied a fallen maple tree, possibly more than a hundred feet tall that had ripped up a circle of roots and dirt about ten feet wide, and crawled into the cover it provided. He closed his eyes against the pain in his foot. If they don’t leave the house, they’ve lost their shooting angle, he thought. He shut his eyes briefly and filtered out the chips and drips of the forest, seeking human movement.

  He drew his weapon and crouched behind the roots trying not to move, knowing that the slightest crack of a stick or shift of a rock could draw a shot. His left foot... he squinted... his left foot; the pain drew sweat that rolled down his forehead.

  He heard nothing.

  He found two fist-sized rocks and tossed them one at a time across the trail into the trees to see if the sounds would draw more shots.

  Nothing.

  Then, coming from below him on the trail he heard at least three young voices. Hikers.

  He waited as they drew closer and then crawled from under the tree and stumbled back on the trail, pants torn and shirt and jacket muddied, to surprise two men and a woman geared up for a day’s hike.

  “What the fuck, mister?” one of them said.

  “Get away from me,” the woman screamed.

  “We need a cop,” the second man said.

  Nagler steadied himself and retrieved his badge from a pocket. “I am a cop. Don’t ask. Have a nice hike.” Should I tell them to beware? No, he thought. That wasn’t random; it was meant for me.

  Nagler limped sideways down the trail, sneaking looks back at the hikers to see if they drew gunfire.

  “Hey, look, an old house,” one of the men said. “Let’s check it out.” When Nagler heard that, he stopped and turned, ready to walk up the trail again, this time ready to return fire.

  “No, let’s not,” the woman said. “Not after seeing that creep. We should report him. I’ll bet he wasn’t a cop.”

  Nagler closed his eyes and leaned against a nearby tree. He dug out his handkerchief, wiped his brow and glanced down the trail. It was going to be a long, painful walk.

  How did they know I was coming?

  He watched as the three hikers disappeared behind the thickening forest on the other side of the overgrown field. Still watching? Your mistake is that you missed.

  ****

  “What I don’t understand,” Maria Ramirez said, “Is why they didn’t just kill you?”

  “I thought of that,” Nagler said, wiping the mud off his face and jacket. “They could have. Whoever it was fired because they saw it was me.”

  “How’d they see you? Somehow they knew you were coming.”

  “They have lookouts? What is it, a drug-gang compound?”

  “What was he shooting?” Ramirez asked.

  “Hunting rifle, single shot. Heavier than a twenty-two. If he had used a semi-automatic, he would have just mowed down the grass and I’d be in the morgue.”

  Ramirez handed him a couple painkillers and a glass of water. “You’ll need that.” She sat at a computer and pulled an earth-map view of the area around the compound.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know. Tank is ex-military and Garrett and McCann are cops. Could have been any of them.”

  “Why there?”

  “Calista said the Garrettson family still owned the property, as much a mess as it is. I didn’t get a good look at it, but maybe there is a cellar that’s covered, or they closed off some of the house enough to keep out t
he weather. The other thing? What are they driving, and where are they parking it? That trail lot has five spaces, and that road is two-lanes wide with a deep channel alongside for runoff and no space to park a car.”

  “Well, let’s look,” Ramirez said. “There it is.” She narrowed the picture on the screen to show just the compound and the field. “The closer you get with this, the worse the picture gets, but maybe. Looks like there are three buildings, Frank. The house, which I can see is a wreck, a shed of some sort and a barn, or half a barn.”

  Nagler didn’t want to put any weight on his left foot so he used a chair as a crutch.

  “Let’s see. There’s the trail, as it curves around the house. I was about there when the first shot came.” He used a pencil to indicate the spot. “The path to the house is about there, and I hid behind that tree about there.” He used the pencil as a compass and roughly figured shooting angles. “He had to be on the second floor.”

  “Damn, can’t see it clearly enough,” Ramirez said. She nodded at the screen. “What do you think that is, Frank?”

  “What?”

  “That.” And she took his pencil to point at an object on the screen. “Does that look like a motorcycle?”

  Nagler squinted, his eyesight affected by the pain in his foot.

  “Could be.” He smiled as he sat. “And I’ll bet that is a violation of trail use. The park police might be very interested. How do we make sure?”

  Ramirez glanced up, grinning. “Well, we could send you back up there to crawl through the grass, or I have a friend who works for the power company. They are doing aerial inspections of their power lines using, guess what,” she leaned over to Nagler, smiling. “Drones.”

  Nagler laughed. “You’re just brilliant, Maria. Just brilliant.”

  “Won’t hurt to ask, will it now?”

  Nagler winced.

  “Foot hurt?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the problem. The problem is George Dickinson told me a skinny red-haired woman has been seen in that area in the past week. Why is Calista Knox at the Garrettson compound?”

  ****

  “Okay, think for me,” Nagler said, as Lauren massaged his shoulders.

  “Well,” she said sharply, “I think that if I were you I wouldn’t crawl up to a strange building in the middle of nowhere without back-up. And if I was really thinking for you, I would have made a note of the location and would have gone back with the local cops. Jeez, Frank.” She stopped the massage, leaned back on her folded legs and held her head. “You know...”

  He reached over to touch her face. “I know, but I’m a cop, Lauren, not a dentist. Sometimes I just act.”

  She rotated his shoulder. “Yeah.” Softly, resigned; fearful.

  After he had returned home and sat in the kitchen with a beer, the tension that had cramped his back and neck was replaced by a squeezing pain that stiffened his upper body.

  “I must have jammed my shoulder when I dove under that tree,” he had told Lauren.

  She had led him to the bedroom where she stripped him down to his boxers, sat him on the edge of the bed and placed his left foot in a tall bucket of warm water. Then she kneeled behind him and applied hot compresses to his neck before replacing them with a balm that started cold and then turned hot as it was rubbed in.

  “So, think how, about what?” She asked.

  “Calista.”

  She peeled off her thin robe and kneeled behind him closer, naked, which was how she slept.

  “A woman with red hair? Not much to go on.”

  “Think about it. A woman with hair so red that a guy wearing a Day-Glo lime green shirt and red golf knickers would notice.”

  She laughed and was about to kiss his neck but then remembered the greasy balm.

  “Why would she be there?” she asked.

  “Leonard said she was on a rescue mission. But rescue what or whom? Alton Garrett? Sister Katherine said the little girl was safe. Who is she trying to save?”

  Lauren laid a towel on the bed and gently persuaded Nagler to lie back, and she cradled herself in tight to his side.

  “Herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That day she and I drove up there, she talked about confronting her greatest pain. She said that she wanted to make love to Leonard so deeply, but couldn’t. That her past had created a shell that she lived in. Touch was not touch, not a sensation but only an idea. And it made sense. The way she survived her life was to withdraw, to shrink into the smallest particle she could be so she could not feel the pain. I think of my Mom after the death of my father, how she had pulled back from the world, trying to find what it was they had, the thing that had given them a reason to live. That’s what that little girl you found is doing, Frank. Hiding, hoping someone finds her.”

  She pushed herself up on one elbow.

  “Then I thought of Leonard and how he and Calista are so much the same. I look at his eyes, even when things are going really well, and they are so sad and hollow, I wonder what is missing. I know that you have been his great friend, and the community has rallied around him, but he needs something else, and maybe only Calista can help him find it, just as only Leonard can help her shed that horrible skin she has been growing her whole life.”

  Nagler, wincing, rolled his shoulders and lifted an arm to pull Lauren closer, and they lay together silently.

  “That’s what Leonard said about the girl,” Frank said softly. “She didn’t talk to him during their captivity, but she let him hold her hand. He said he had felt at times that she wanted him to pull her out or open the path for her to escape, the way the pressure of her grip changed.”

  “It’s about love, Frank. Deep inside everyone remembers what it feels like, but not how to share it.”

  She reached to touch his face and then they kissed, softly at first, then wet and sloppy like teenagers.

  She reached into his boxers and stroked him.

  “Ah... I can barely move, Lauren.”

  She rolled away and then straddled his waist. “But I can,” she said smiling, as she adjusted her hips and let him enter her.

  ****

  Restless sleep.

  Each time Nagler relaxed enough to doze off, his back and neck would clench and he’d jerk awake. He wanted to get a muscle relaxant, but didn’t want to wake Lauren, asleep on his chest.

  He would jerk awake, seeing in his mind the busted yellow house and the field of tall grass; how the tree branch shattered and the fluffy tops of grass exploded and how pock marks popped from the hard trail; and the taste of moss and the smell of his perspiration mixed with the forest’s scent of rotted wood and wet dirt; of bark pulling off in his hands.

  Then fully awake: Why did Calista tell Lauren she was looking for the Garrettson compound when she already knew where it was?

  His shoulder grabbed at the thought: Calista was not there to find Alton Garrett. She was there to deliver Lauren to Tank. The most awful thought of all. Damn them. Damn them everyone.

  He shifted and gently laid Lauren’s head on a pillow. He pulled the sheet up to her shoulders and kissed her hair.

  He pulled on some pants, painfully slipped into a sweatshirt and kicked around on the floor for a pair of shoes.

  Outside, a steady rain washed away all other sounds; just the splash of water on asphalt and cement, tapping on roof tops and drumming metal car roofs; a perfect wall behind which to hide.

  We walk through this wreckage, seeking what does not exist: wholeness. This is the weight of what we are, he thought. The weight of living.

  A few cabs and delivery trucks splashed through the streets left damaged by winter’s wrath. Walking again. I wish I could walk this all away. What did Del say the other day: You see how deep the poison goes, how strong is the wrong in what they doin’.

  Tell it, brother.

  His phone rang and he answered it out of habit. “Yeah.”

  “Detective Nagler.”

  Nagler closed his eye
s and spit into the street. He glanced quickly around for a parked vehicle.

  “Fuck you, Tank.”

  “Oh, please. If it had been me shooting, you’d be dead. But Alton, well, he missed.”

  “It’s not me. She is off limits.”

  The receiver filled with a shallow breath.

  “Nothing is off limits.” Said slowly like a hiss. “I take what I want.”

  “You won’t take her.”

  “Then I’ll take something else.”

  “No ...”

  “It’s already in motion, Detective Nagler. Already in motion.”

  Don’t let him bait you, Frank.

  Nagler lightened his tone.

  “So why do you do this, Tank? That’s the perfect name for you. Something blunt and brutal, something destructively dumb. Tank.” He expelled the bitter name.

  “I take because I can, and I can because everyone wants something from me.” A deep laughed filled the phone.

  “What, money?”

  “Oh, please. Money is easy. Turn on late night TV or watch that Wall Street cable channel. You’ll see. Selling the American Dream. Give me a grand and I’ll give you back five. I have magic beans, the ear of God. I can conjure everything you want with a snap of my finger. I am the Wizard of Oz, but the heart I present to you is empty of feeling, the brain, devoid of thought. Money, I have more money than they will ever find, trinkets galore. I command a dark world.”

  “You’re just nuts,” Nagler said, chuckling. “Just fucking nuts.”

  “No, Detective Nagler. I’m in charge. Take Commissioner McCann. If I were Henny Youngman, I would add ‘please’ and get a big laugh. But, no. McCann wants power, so I give him the illusion that he has power. He makes what he thinks are command decisions, but fails to realize that they had been previously plotted. And he also fails to understand that if he does not carry out my plans, there is a certain matter of a bribe he took in his first year as a prosecutor. An act that allowed the scion of a wealthy family to walk away from a situation in which he had pumped his pregnant waitress girlfriend full of drugs and threw her off a highway overpass into the path of a truck. It was so well planned...” A smirking voice.