Periphery, page 3
“Look,” Hamilton settled his hands palm down on the blotter, “we both know you don’t have a lot of friends left in the department after what happened with your previous partner. There are some who think you got off easy with a suspension and transfer. Slap on the wrist. Those people would like nothing better than to see you screw up enough to finally get the boot. But I’m not one of them.
"Whatever happened at your old station, that’s ancient history. I only care about what happens at this one, and so far, you’ve given me no reason to think you’re anything but a competent, professional fire medic. That’s still my opinion.”
Andrew nodded. “ ’Preciate that, Captain.”
“Now get the hell out of my office and go relax until the next bell. The way this summer has been going, that shouldn’t be long.” Hamilton centered the laptop before him once more and gave the mouse a shake. “I’m beginning to think this drought is affecting people’s minds. The crazies are coming out of the woodwork.”
Andrew’s hand was on the doorknob when he paused and turned back.
“Captain, what did you mean before when you said ‘from what I saw’? From what you saw, I kept my head. Someone take a cell phone video?”
Hamilton looked up from the computer screen with a lopsided smirk. “That’s right; you’ve been on runs all day. Guess you haven’t had a chance to turn on the news.” The station captain pulled a remote from the top drawer of his desk and turned on the wall-mounted television. The image that sprang into focus was a stil frame of Andrew taken from behind. His arms were raised, a water bottle in each hand. From the angle and poor resolution, it was obviously a zoomed shot from a distant camera. In the bottom left corner, a local news channel’s logo was bisected by a frozen burst of static.
“I recorded your segment. They’ve been running it all afternoon.” Andrew blinked up at the screen, his lips slightly parted. “You’re in the middle of your fifteen minutes of fame, my friend. Enjoy it.”
Andrew found Gary in the locker room with a suds-covered sponge in one hand and a bucket of soapy water on the bench behind him.
“Damn. Another thirty seconds and this shit would have been gone. Sorry, man.”
Andrew approached, his elbow cupped in one palm, his chin in the other, the thoughtful posture of a museumgoer assessing a painting’s artistic merit. Scrawled in red lipstick up the side of his locker door were the words: HOW ABOUT A GAME OF CRAZY TATES?
“It’s mildly clever. I’ll give them that.”
“Don’t let the lipstick fool you.” Gary slapped the sponge against the metal hard enough to send a spray of suds across the adjoining lockers. “This is Sid’s work. Clare has too much class to stoop to this.” He began scrubbing, but the letters were thick and the first few swipes did little to erase the message.
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll clean it later.”
“Jackson or Tracy must have started talking once they got back to their station,” Gary said, ignoring the request. “The story’s been making the rounds ever since. I swear to god this department is worse than a fucking sewing circle when it comes to gossip. Sid’s a prick. I don’t care how many citations he’s earned or how long he’s been here. He can’t bully coworkers. You’re going to the captain about this, right?”
“I’m not running to Hamilton every time someone tries to rattle me.” The letters were disappearing in pieces, flecks of red suspended in the runoff pooling on the floor, a puddle of tiny hemorrhages. “This is nothing.”
Gary shook his head. “It’s not nothing. If he gets away with it once, he’ll do it again.”
“We don’t know he did anything.” Andrew understood he should be grateful for this display of support, but all he felt was a growing impatience with Gary to be finished and gone. He wanted in his locker. His cell phone was there. Maybe Grace had seen the news and left a message, a few words acknowledging his role in ending the standoff. “You did okay out there.” That would be enough. And of course, there was something else in there as well, something secreted behind the back panel.
“The hell we don’t.” Gary wrung the sponge out over the bucket. “At the very least, we confront him, tell him we’re not going to tolerate his bullshit. I’m not suggesting a physical confrontation.” Color bloomed in Gary’s cheeks and he turned quickly back to the locker. “Nothing like that. Just a quiet little chat out in the bay.”
The letters were gone, only a few spots of red remained. Andrew pulled a handful of paper towels from the roll mounted next to the sink and began drying the door, forcing Gary to step back. “I appreciate the sentiment. Seriously. But I’m not in a position to make accusations. Long as nothing was damaged, I’m going to pretend you finished your cleanup before I got here.”
“This isn’t going to be the end, you know.”
“It is for now. I’m letting it go. I’d like you to do the same. Can you do that for me?”
“If that’s what you want, man.”
“That’s what I want.”
Gary moved past him toward the exit, the soapy water sloshing heavily in the bucket at his side.
“Hey,” Andrew called when he reached the door. “We cool here?”
Gary turned, his eyes focused not on Andrew but on the wall behind him. After a moment that stretched within a few heartbeats of becoming uncomfortable, his face relaxed. “Yeah, we’re cool.” He opened the door, took a step, turned back. “I have to know. Did you really see something out there?”
“You heard that part?”
“We all heard it. We all heard everything.”
“No,” Andrew said. “I didn’t see a goddamn thing.”
Andrew stood for a long time with his thumb poised over the phone, the light from the screen’s display filling the inside of his locker with its blue glow.
His wife had left him no messages. He was neither disappointed nor relieved. His gaze alternated between the two photographs taped to the loose back panel. The smaller showed him and Grace at a department Christmas party. When? Two, three years ago? They both looked happy. His hand clutched her knee; her arm draped his shoulder. It wasn’t a good photo, slightly out of focus and both sets of eyes red as stop lights, but the casual intimacy in their nearly identical smiles and the way they leaned toward one another suggested a quiet confidence in their happiness, an awareness that their love, like gravity, was something so constant and predictable as to be entirely unremarkable.
The second, larger picture showed Anna standing on the front porch steps in full cowgirl regalia: pink boots, brown vest, string tie, a miniature ten-gallon hat with a star centered above its wide brim. It was Halloween and soon she’d be off with a group of friends and parents, knocking on doors in the slanting evening light.
Andrew smiled despite the pang he always felt looking at his daughter this way, still perfect, without the skin grafts marring her right arm and hand. As he continued to examine the photograph, his grin faded. The bottom right of the image showed a portion of the azalea hedge fronting the porch, a dusty green wall that burst into fuchsia blooms every February.
But this photo had been taken in October. There shouldn’t be any blooms. Not even the buds he now noticed for the first time, spots of color nearly concealed behind a profusion of leaves, six perfect spheres arranged in pairs up the length of a branch. He noticed an unusual luster in those buds, a wet gleam that gave them a decidedly un-plantlike appearance.
Andrew brought the phone’s glow closer. The shadows around the buds appeared denser than anywhere else, so dense they formed a corridor of blackness. He removed the picture and in the flat, harsh light of the overhead fluorescents, the difference between the foliage around the buds and the rest of the azalea was far more striking, the dark swatch becoming not simply negative space but an object in and of itself, a black, compact body a foot thick and three times as long, split at one end like a forked tongue and covered with quill-like projections and red boils.
Or were those eyes?
Andrew traced the revealed shape with a forefinger as it swept from the edge of the photograph toward his daughter, a little girl in a Halloween costume who, if she had stretched out her left arm, would have touched something like a monstrous forked tongue covered with spikes.
“Fuck this.”
Andrew shoved the photo beneath a Tampa Fire Rescue sweatshirt and, after a glance over his shoulder, pulled the barely-threaded top right screw from the back panel of the locker. He slid aside the metal plate to reveal a shallow recess created by the cinderblock wall notching around water pipes. The flask rested on the lip of a pipe fitting, wedged between the PVC and wall.
In the eight weeks since he had been transferred to Station Three, Andrew had taken three hits of Royal Crown. Once when Grace had canceled a planned outing because both she and Anna had come down with the flu. Or so she claimed. Once after he and Gary had responded to a hit-and-run involving a girl so like Anna in age and appearance his breath had caught as he removed her shattered bicycle helmet. And once after reading Max’s letter, that fumbling, handwritten attempt to explain himself, to frame their current situation as a series of bad choices made by everyone involved.
Andrew pulled the flask out, relishing, as he always did, the way it fit his palm, the way his fingers molded around the stainless steel. Three hits. That was all he had taken, and yet the container was nearly half-empty. Three large hits, then, a few swallows each, just enough to settle his nerves without impairing judgment. Nothing like before. But after this afternoon, who wouldn’t want a drink? It was entirely understandable.
Andrew ran a fingertip around the rim of the lid. “Who wouldn’t want a drink?” he asked again, this time aloud. Just one swallow, a single mouthful to coat his tongue. Barely a taste. Hadn’t he earned it?
“Hell yes.”
The cell phone’s shrill ring made him jerk back with a strangled gasp.
“Jesus Christ.”
It trilled three more times as he fumbled the flask back into its hiding place. One more ring and his voicemail would pick up. Andrew had just enough time to scoop up the phone, see the incoming call was from Grace and hit the “talk” button.
“You sound out of breath,” she said.
“I heard it ringing inside my locker as I came in.”
“Ah.” Grace fell silent. Andrew shifted the cell to his other ear and pressed his back and head against the lockers, his face tilted to the ceiling.
“So, what’s up?” he said with all the contrived cheer he could muster.
“I wanted to talk about tomorrow.”
Andrew raised his head off the locker. He was planning to take Anna to Clearwater Beach the following day, an outing that had required a month of cajoling and three weeks of outright pleading before Grace finally agreed. It would be the first time since the accident he’d be supervising his daughter on his own, the initial step in a long path toward eventual redemption. Or so he hoped.
“We’re still on, right?”
From the other end, silence.
“Grace?” He heard the desperation in his voice and closed his eyes, trying to will himself to remain calm. If he got into an argument with his wife now, all hope of spending the day with Anna would be lost. “Talk to me, honey.” When was the last time he had used such an endearment? The word sounded foreign in his mouth, calculated, but he pressed on. “What’s up?”
Grace sighed. “It’s just I’m not entirely comfortable with you driving all the way over to the Gulf. The sun is so strong out there and you know how sensitive her skin still is. There’s no shade at all.”
“But she loves the beach.” This wasn’t about the sun. The dermatologist had assured them the graphs had healed enough to tolerate a few hours of exposure, so long as they used a strong, moisturizing sunscreen. The real issue was the forty-minute drive across the Bay, the bridge traffic, the level of responsibly required to transport a child safely from point A to point B. The sobriety it demanded.
“I just think it would be better if you stayed closer to home. Why don’t you take her to the playground in Hyde Park? There’s lots of shade there and she can play in the fountains.”
“Absolutely,” Andrew said, surprising himself with his quick acceptance. What difference did it make where he spent the day with Anna? So long as they were together.
“Okay, then.” Gracie sounded more off-put that relieved. Had she been expecting him to protest, hurl accusations, fly into a rage? Had she been expecting him to react in a way that would give her an excuse to cancel the outing entirely? There was a time, not long ago, when he could read his wife’s intentions as easily as Anna’s. Not anymore.
“Great.” The alarm sounded and Andrew sagged in relief. “Duty calls. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He ended the call before she could reply, tossed the phone back into the locker, slammed and locked the door and exhaled into his cupped hands before hurrying to the door.
It wasn’t until they were pulling out from the bay that Andrew realized his breath check had been unnecessary. He’d never taken the hit of Royal Crown.
The next two bells were routine: a standard nursing home grab-and-go for a broken hip and a junkie trying to score a morphine fix by faking a kidney stone, a run Max would have called a “TDB”: terminal display of bullshit. During these hours, Andrew threw himself into his work, and by early evening the day’s events had scabbed over with a thin crust of perspective. Maybe the thing by the dumpster was just a product of heat and stress and his father’s stories. Maybe he, Katie and Comanche had experienced some sort of shared hallucination. It wasn’t unheard of. The mind was unreliable, easily fooled, vulnerable to suggestion.
Malleable.
Given enough time, people could convince themselves of all sorts of crazy notions, including living in a world where unnoticed monsters lurked in plain view.
By the third bell, Andrew had nearly persuaded himself what had happened during the hostage standoff was a sort of waking dream. And then the domestic disturbance call came in.
“Ah,” Gary sighed as he pulled in front of the address dispatch had given them. “This looks like it’s going to be fun.”
A handful of neighbors were mulling along the street in front of a modest, cinderblock tract house. Two patrol cars were parked crookedly on the brown lawn, lights flashing, doors ajar. Even before exiting the cab Andrew could hear the thump-thump-thump of base notes buzzingly transmitted through the cab’s metal and glass.
Outside, the din was thunderous, hip-hop music booming out the house’s open door at chest-thumping decibels. Langston parked engine eleven behind them, the normal squeal of its airbrakes a thin whine under the percussive assault.
“Jesus Christ,” he said to no one in particular. “Why don’t they turn it off?”
A moment later the music did stop, prompting a smattering of applause from the crowd. “About damn time,” someone said, but the relief was short-lived. The silence was almost instantly broken by a wail of protest.
“Turn it back on! TURN IT BACK ON! It was blocking 'em out. Oh god, they’re still in my head! Turn the damn music back on!”
As Gary and Andrew pulled the stretcher from the back of the ambulance, his partner rolled his eyes in tired resignation. “Going to need the restraints on this one, I guarantee.”
“Tweeker?” For once, Andrew was grateful of Langston’s presence, his linebacker build and unflappable demeanor. If they were going to have to deal with a combative transport, he could think of no one else he’d rather have at his side.
“Huffer, tweeker, bath salt snorter. Who the hell knows?”
They pushed through the crowd, rattled up the flagstone path leading to the door and paused before the lanai. Langston and his partner Clare Humbert went in first, Andrew and Gary close behind. The screaming continued, now little more than a series of “na”s interspersed with guttural snarls that sounded like someone trying to cough up an enormous wad of phlegm.
May have to intubate, Andrew thought. This guy’s on the far side of the moon.
They turned left down a hallway, following the noise to a doorway near the end. Although he had only been subjected to the blaring music for a few seconds, Andrew could still hear an echo of it at the edge of his perception, a lingering murmur deep in his ear that seemed to mimic song lyrics stripped of rhythm and harmony.
A red-faced and perspiring officer stepped into the hallway to meet them. “So, what’s the story here?” Langston asked, pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
“Male, mid-forties, highly agitated. Been acting erratically for about sixty minutes now. Wife called nine-one-one after he started banging his head against the wall, ranting about voices in his head.”
“History of drug use or mental illness?” Andrew asked, pulling on his own pair of gloves.
“Wife claims no.” The officer was clearly unconvinced of this, but before Andrew could pose a follow-up question something large crashed to the floor inside the room.
“Could use some help in here,” called a second officer. The first cop disappeared across the threshold, followed by Langston and Humbert.
“Here we go,” Gary said.
Andrew stepped into the room last, leaving the stretcher in the hall. What he saw over the shoulders of the others was a bedroom in ruin. The mattress had been pulled off its frame and propped up against the far wall. Along another wall, a bookcase, chair, and numerous dresser drawers were piled in a heap rising nearly to the ceiling. The floor was scattered with the remains of a large, cathode-ray television—most likely the source of the recent crash—along with clothing items and bed sheets.
Thrashing on the floor amid the litter was a man in shorts and a torn tee-shirt. Andrew was mildly surprised by how slight the screamer was compared to the officers who were now on either side of him, each pinning an arm to the floor. Not that size was a reliable indicator of potential danger in a situation like this. He had seen octogenarians in the throes of dementia lash out savagely enough to break noses and jaws.
