The Weight of Living Read online

  He pushed open the car door, paused, and prepared to duck. Before he stood up, he peeked out of the corner of his eye toward the black vehicle, then he rose and turned.

  Nothing moved.

  He gripped his service weapon, the rough handle familiar. Show it?

  No. Then yes. He pushed his jacket aside.

  He took three strides forward.

  When he reached for his phone to call for back-up, the vehicle spit the rain puddle from the road, performed a little shimmy and sped off. Nagler ran to the curb, but it had already taken a turn and vanished.

  Who the hell are you?

  ****

  “Here it is, Frank,” Lt. Maria Ramirez said, pointing at the monitor. “Arrived at seventeen-twenty.”

  Nagler leaned over her shoulder and studied the video. The black vehicle had pulled to the curb and sat there. No one got out. Then, thirty minutes later, Nagler walked into view and the vehicle drove off.

  Ramirez leaned back in the chair and laced her fingers behind her head.

  “You’re sure that was for you?”

  Nagler leaned against the wall and exhaled. “Seems so. No one else was there. But how did they know I was there? My car looks just like ten other Ironton police cars, and you can see that no one from the SUV got out to survey the parking lot.”

  “So someone is following you. And Dawson, and dropped a child off in the middle of the night, all driving a black SUV.” Ramirez punched the tape back to life and just stared at it. “Want me to put out an alert?”

  Nagler shook his head. “No. There must be a couple hundred black SUVs in Ironton. We have no markings, no license, not even a dealer nameplate, just a black vehicle.” He paused and stared at the moving video. “Know what? You got a couple guys you really trust?”

  Ramirez shrugged. “Good, tell them quietly. They only report what they find to you.” He reached over and stopped the video. The vehicle shimmered slightly in the center of the screen. “We’re gonna hunt this SOB down.”

  “Something else,” Nagler said. “A phone call the other night. Said, in essence, ‘You have her. I want her.’”

  “Hear the voice before?”

  “No, it wasn’t the voice that called to say, ‘She’s six,’ This was deeper, older, more guttural. Time to get the word to everyone, watch your six.”

  ****

  The place smelled like a sewer more than ever.

  The homeless had been moved out and housed in a new shelter carved out of a vacant textile mill on the west side, but the stalled work to clean up the old stoveworks left the property wet, muddy and seeping gray water that settled into deep, sludgy pools that emitted a slight sticky aroma of waste.

  Frank Nagler peeled back one of the jagged holes that had been snipped into the ten-foot industrial fence and stepped into the semi-dark shell of the factory.

  The company that owned it for decades had surfaced and started redevelopment after Nagler’s old police partner Chris Foley tried to burn it down five years ago in the scheme that sent him to jail and then led to the murderous spree by Foley’s nephew Tom Miller.

  There were meetings, and plans, and more meetings, and tours with officials smiling and nodding, and signs with gaudy drawings of an invisible future, and then all the work ended. The company vanished again into its vaporous past, the lovely signs were removed, and the place was left to rot.

  “How Ironton is this,” Nagler muttered. “Classic.”

  His shoes splashed through small puddles and his steps echoed wetly against the bare brick walls.

  The faint scent of a wood fire grabbed his attention and he followed it to a back room, finding Delvin Williams.

  “What are you doing here, Del?” Nagler asked, both relieved that he had found his old friend and annoyed that he had to search for him. “You should have come to me.”

  Williams tossed the broken arm of a chair on the fire and stared into the rising sparks.

  “Was embarrassed, Frank. Ashamed.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Felt like I let everyone down.”

  Nagler shook his head, no, “Should have come to me. We’ve been friends through a lot worse.” Del stared at the floor and kicked the chair’s arm deeper into the blaze.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Del looked up at Nagler, his face hard and eyes dark. “Ain’t my drugs, Frank. Ain’t my coat.” Bitterness like frost filled his voice.

  “What then?” Nagler asked.

  Del sighed heavily and rubbed his face.

  “I was at Belmont trying to get a kid out. This kid Donny from the community center got himself on the wrong side of a drug gang. Dated the wrong girl, I guess. He told me they were gonna cut him and rape his little sister unless he helped them, so he took on a few bags. But he never sold ’em. Just used money from his part-time job to pay for the drugs, but it never evened out. They wanted more. We talked. And I couldn’t stop him. He told me he was goin’ all-in, just to protect his sister. I went there to get him out and the cops showed up. Couple of them I knew and I started to tell them what’s happening and this guy I didn’t know, a young cop, hands me a coat and says I was goin’ with him. Next thing I know, I’m goin’ with him. At the station, they patted me down and all, and found them folds in an inside pocket. I said they ain’t mine. Told that cop, you handed me this coat. It ain’t mine. And he just smiled all nasty and superior and all, and told me that anything I said could be held against me.”

  “Damn it,” Nagler yelled. “Who was this guy?”

  “Never saw him before. Alt...Alton...something...”

  “Yeah. Garrett Alton. Over-eager and hard-nosed. A pleasant combination.”

  Del turned away from Nagler and walked to a wall. He at first leaned with both hands planted against the concrete block, then he folded into his arms against the wall and sobbed loudly.

  “Whose coat?” Nagler asked.

  “Don’t know, some junkie’s I guess, unless they planted it,” Del Williams said, shaking his head. “Why he do that?” Del pleaded. “Don’t he know? Man, I’ve been in that junkie hole before and I ain’t going back. But a thing like this shakes a man’s confidence. It’s how they trap you, find you a place away from the noise and the want in that silent, hazy hole and you just want to stay there. I didn’t do nothing, Frank. I’m clean.” His voice regained fullness. “I’ll piss in a cup right now,” and he scanned the floor for a jar or bottle and found none.

  They stared at one another for a long silent moment.

  “Well, you’re not peeing into my hands,” Nagler said, laughing.

  Del smiled and then chuckled. “Guess not.”

  In the car heading back downtown, Nagler asked Del if he needed a place to stay.

  “Naw. I’m good. Got me that room above Leonard’s store. Drop me there.” At the curb outside the book store, Del leaned into the open window. “We all like family, ain’t we? You and me, Lauren the Fox, Leonard, Bobby, Calista and the center kids, all like family. Even Jimmy Dawson in some way. How about that.”

  “Yeah, all family,” Nagler smiled. “And the next time you get into something, remember that. Come to the family so we can help.”

  ****

  In the dark office, he pulled up the computer file of Garrett Alton’s records.

  Nothing unusual. Average high school student. Two years at the county college in criminal justice; fairly common.

  But then, this. He didn’t attend high school, but was home schooled.

  Lotta kids are home schooled, he thought. Come through it okay. Garrett Alton played football, ran track... Nagler flipped through a few more pages... wrote a senior paper on child sexual abuse and the criminal justice system ... wow, mature, for sure, but really unusual for a high school kid... big family.... No bells went off... Whatever.

  He rocked forward, grabbed the phone and called Hanrahan on the night desk.

  “Alton’s not here, Frank,” Hanrahan said.

  “When’s he on again?

&nbs
p; “I mean he’s not here, Frank. Missed his last two shifts. Not sick that we know of, no family emergency, just didn’t show up. We checked his apartment, nothing. I had patrols roll by every hour, just in case. His cell phone is apparently busted or something, don’t even get a voice message. One more day and I assign a special patrol to check empty buildings, vacant lots and abandoned cars and we send out an alert.”

  “The kid been under any stress lately?” Nagler asked. “Any chance he called the help-line?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Frank, but no, we checked.” Hanrahan’s breathing filled the phone. “He was wound a little tight, but didn’t seem troubled, no way near suicidal. This about the other night with Del Williams?”

  Nagler exhaled loudly into the phone.

  “Maybe. Something was wrong with that incident. Del said the drugs were planted on him or that Alton just picked up a random coat and handed it to him, you know, a coat that just happened to have twenty folds of heroin in the lining.”

  “Whoa,” Hanrahan said, “That’s serious shit.”

  “And that ain’t all. I know he recognized our lost kid. That first night, he stared at her for several more seconds than the other officers. When I asked him about it the other day, he denied it, and then got a call to move prisoners to the county.”

  “Oh, crap... I...” Hanrahan’s breath filled the phone. “Know what? I remember that, thought it was odd.”

  “Yeah,” Nagler said. “Call me when you find him.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Where did all that pain go?

  The silence of the office gave him a headache. He shut off the desk lamp and his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness lit only by the computer screen. The air was sticky and moist, a film of office odors hanging like the still, empty tides of the Saragossa Sea.

  Scrawled across a lined note pad were the uneven letters that said “FAMily CouRT.” Nagler had circled the words a dozen times.

  It was not that message that concerned him, but the tone in the voice of a former school principal from Jefferson who had finally returned Nagler’s call; a tone between anger, fear and disbelief.

  “Garrett Alton was somewhat of a misfit,” said school official Dennis Wilson. “Not many friends. He had been home schooled, but off and on. The district had a problem getting his guardians to commit to a study program, so he’d fall behind, and we’d pull him back to daily school attendance. We’d encourage him to get involved with extracurricular activities to give his time a school more purpose, but that was only partly successful.”

  “Guardians, you said. Not parents?” Nagler asked.

  “He was accompanied by an uncle sometimes, a woman who had said she was his mother, but honestly seemed too young, an aunt. I know... we should have checked further, but we are not a prison, Mr. Nagler, just a school. We check identification and if it’s proper, we accept it. Our truant officer reported he saw the same people at the home as came to the school.”

  “How many people were in that house? Sounds like an unusual situation,” Nagler said. “Where’d they live, anyway?”

  “The house was on the valley road. No one there now; been empty for a while. Not unusual these days with extended families under one roof and all. We are in a way returning to a housing pattern very familiar to our grandparents.”

  Dennis Wilson could not see Nagler shaking his head. “Yeah, okay. Anything else?”

  A long soft breath came though the phone. Sorry I’m bothering you.

  “People were always getting his name wrong, backwards.”

  “Meaning? Like what?”

  “I was particularly guilty. Called him Alton Garrett, and then would correct it to Garrett Alton. One teacher, in fact, had asked on the first day of class who was the student who wrote down two last names.”

  “I’ll bet that made him feel a little less than welcome, huh? Why was that so hard?”

  “I’m a local historian,” Wilson said. The Garrettsons, or variations thereof, are an old Jefferson family with a colorful history. At the time I had been reading some local diaries about them and the Garrett or Garrettson name was in my mind.”

  “How colorful?”

  “Well, do you have a minute?”

  Nagler chuckled. “I have several, in fact.”

  “The Garrettsons are an old Jefferson family, as I said. Settled here after the Revolution. Up in the northern part of the township. There’s a broken-down road into the woods, called Garrett’s Run. Some maps show it runs down from a hill in the Berkshire Valley to the river. Back in the day it was said to be the road to the Garretson’s compound. They were called Garrett or Garrettson interchangeably. The record keeping of the era was not precise.”

  “Compound? That sounds ominous,” Nagler said. “Anyone live there now?”

  “It was the home base of their businesses,” Wilson said. “They had a farm, an orchard, and around 1870, they found a vein of iron ore. They worked that mine successfully for about ten years, and then off and on for a few more years, until the ore petered out. That’s what the records say. The industry was dying. Far as the records show, the compound was abandoned, but the maps of the time were not necessarily accurate.”

  Nagler listened; Wilson’s voice said something else.

  “Sounds like you didn’t fully believe the records, Mr. Wilson.”

  Nagler’s ear filed with the sound of a long, slow breath.

  “Something happened up there,” Wilson said softly, distracted. “No one was really sure what, but records show Garrettson children had stopped attending school. In the nineteenth century, that wasn’t a big concern since there were no roads, just mine trails and railroads. Finally, the railroad company began a daily dependable service from the mine field settlements into Wharton and Ironton and school attendance improved. But in the Garrettsons’ case, the children had stopped attending school after the transportation improvements were made.” Wilson sighed. “But the information you need, Detective Nagler, is in the records of the county family court division.” Silence, then a hard breath. “I have not read it, just am aware it exists.”

  And you’re lying to me, Nagler thought. Why? But he let it drop and thanked Dennis Wilson for the call.

  ****

  Outside, the city hall parking lot was dark except for the sporadic light coming from the single street lamp still in operation. The light flickered to life, blinked three times and then went dark, only to repeat the sequence; the view of the parking lot as seen with a strobe light. The other six lights had been taken out of service to be rewired five years after the flood had turned the downtown into a temporary lake. The lot was a mess of rocks, poles, wire spools, and equipment.

  He wasn’t supposed to be walking through the construction site, but it was the shortcut to his car parked off Bassett Highway in the dirty, cluttered parking lot that Lauren was hoping to transform into a riverside park.

  Nagler walked cautiously to his car, head swiveling, scanning whatever he could see in the temporary light. He illuminated each tire with a flashlight, then the trunk and the hood and peered into the vehicle. It was awareness not just bred by the black SUV that was recently waiting for him, but a lesson learned after Tom Miller a couple years back had tried to kill him by blowing up his patrol car.

  That event had changed him, Nagler realized later, not so much because of the attempt on his life, but the understanding how vulnerable his job made all those in his circle. Besides, the sneakiness of it had just pissed him off.

  Later, Nagler realized that he held onto the angry edge to fend off the fear that lurked just under the surface at that memory: That the next time he might not be quick enough to get out of the way.

  The shudder of that memory had grabbed his spine about a year ago, when he was investigating the murder of a wife by her husband. The man had plundered their meager savings and pledged their mortgage to bookies to settle gambling debts, but when the vig became greater than his ability to pay, he blew her up in her car for
the life insurance.

  Standing in that front yard with the charred frame of the car still smoking in the street Nagler summoned the memory of the concussive blast caused by Miller’s bomb, felt again the smoke fill his lungs as he rolled on the asphalt of the city hall parking lot to escape the next shock; recalled it all, even as at the new scene he sucked in the dirty taste of burning rubber and plastic, felt the adhesive smell cling to his nostrils and throat, the acid smoke stick to his skin like grease and watched as the cooling metal of the car’s roof had transformed to a muddy rainbow. Nagler remembered how he had felt himself withdraw, as if he was watching the whole scene on film. The weeping husband had already confessed, sitting in the back of a patrol car banging his head against the driver’s headrest. He had told Nagler how he watched from the front steps as his wife entered the car, adjusted her seat belt, blew him a kiss and started the engine, and as the car exploded, stared in her last seconds of life at her husband with tear-filled horror just before she was engulfed screaming in flames. This the husband had related to Nagler in a twisted-face, hair-pulling drama, the plea I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wish I hadn’t done it delivered with cold, hard eyes; elaborate fakery. And Nagler coldly thinking, what an asshole.

  And then later, at Barry’s while starting at a coagulating cheeseburger, asking Dawson, “When do you reach the limit, Jimmy? Haven’t you ever asked yourself that question? Maybe sitting in one more courtroom watching a sad sack confess to a crime he can’t recall committing because he was so high he thought he was flying; standing there, shrugging in agreement with his public defender, and then with a yeah, okay accepting the judge’s word that two years at the county lockup was about right for stealing that forty of pig-swill beer and a pack of smokes from the liquor store. Or that last time you sat in a city council meeting watching them pass some rule that you knew was so wrong you could feel the damage to the city happening while they were voting on it? Haven’t you ever just said, ‘Fuck it, I’m done.’?”