The Blue Religion, Page 2

  “Can your dad protect you from your brother?” Jim asked out of nowhere.

  “Dale’s stronger now. But mostly, yeah.”

  Jim didn’t say anything to that. After nearly forty years of being married to him, I can tell you his silences mean he doesn’t believe you. And of course there were the broken lips and black eye making his case.

  “If you need a place, you come stay here a night or two,” he said. “Anytime.”

  “You’d be welcome,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, looking down at his sandwich.

  I wanted to ask him what he wrote in the notebook, but I didn’t. I have a place where I put things for safekeeping too, though it’s not a physical place.

  Later that night, we went to a party at Ed and Ann Logan’s house on the other side of Spirit Lake. It was mostly retired SoCal cops, the old faces from Orange County and some Long Beach people Jim fell in with whom I never really got to know. I’ve come to like cops in general. I guess that would figure. And their wives too — we pretty much get along. There’s a closedness about most cops that used to put me off until JJ died and I realized that you can’t explain everything to everybody. You have to have that place inside where something can be safe. Even if it’s only a thought or a memory. It’s the opposite of the real world, where people die as easily as leaves fall off a tree. And the old cliché about cops believing it’s them and us, well, it’s absolutely true that that’s what they think. Most people think that way — it’s just the “thems” and the “usses” are different.

  A man was stacking firewood on the Logans’ deck when we got there. He was short and thick, gave us a level-eyed nod, and that was all. Later Jim and I went outside for some fresh air. The breeze was strong and cool. The guy was just finishing up the wood. He walked toward us, slapping his leather work gloves together.

  “I apologize for Dale,” he said. “I’m his dad. He ain’t the trustworthiest kid around.”

  “No apology needed,” said Jim. “But he’s no kid.”

  “He swore there was nothin’ missing from that bag.”

  “It was all there,” I said.

  Badger jammed the gloves down into a pocket. “Jason says you’re good people. But I would appreciate it if you didn’t offer him no more work. And if he comes by, if you would just send him back home.”

  “To get beat up?” said Jim.

  “That’s not an everyday occurrence,” said Badger. “We keep the family business in the family.”

  “There’s the law.”

  “You aren’t it.”

  Badger had the same old-ice eyes as Dale. There was sawdust on his shirt and bits of wood stuck to his bootlaces, and he smelled like a cord of fresh-cut pine. “Stay away from my sons. Maybe you should move back to California. I’m sure they got plenty a’need for bleedin’ heart know-it-alls like you.”

  WE LEFT THE party early. When we were almost home, Jim saw a truck parked off in the trees just before our driveway. He caught the shine of the grill in his headlights when we made the turn. I don’t know how he saw that thing, but he still has twenty-fifteen vision for distance, so he’s always seeing things that I miss. A wind had come up, so maybe it parted the trees at just the right second.

  He cut the lights and stopped well away from our house. The outdoor security lights were on, and I could see the glimmer of the pond and the branches swaying. Jim reached across and drew his .380 automatic from its holster under the seat.

  “We can go down the road and call the sheriff,” I said.

  “This is our home, Sally. I’m leaving the keys in.”

  “Be careful, Jim. We didn’t retire up here for this.”

  I didn’t know a person could get in and out of a truck so quietly. He walked down the driveway with the gun in his right hand and a flashlight in the other. He had that balanced walk, the one that meant he was ready for things. Jim’s not a big guy, six feet, though, and still pretty solid.

  Then I saw Dale backing around from the direction of the front porch, hunched over with a green gas can in one hand. Jim yelled, and Dale turned and saw him, then he dropped the can and got something out of his pocket, and a wall of flames huffed up along the house. Dale lit out around the house and disappeared.

  I climbed over the console and drove the truck fast down the driveway and almost skidded on the gravel into the fire. Had to back it up, rocks flying everywhere. I got the extinguisher off its clip behind the seat and walked along the base of the house, blasting the white powder down where the gas was. A bird’s nest up under an eave had caught fire, so I gave that a shot too. Could hear the chicks cheeping. I couldn’t tell the sound of the extinguisher from the roaring in my ears.

  After that I walked around, stamping out little hot spots on the ground and on the wall of the house. The wind was cold and damp, and it helped. My heart was pounding and my breath was caught up high in my throat and I’m not sure I could have said one word to anyone, not even Jim.

  An hour later Jim came back, alone and panting. He signaled me back into our truck without a word. He put the flashlight and automatic in the console, then backed out of the driveway fast, his breath making fog on the rear window. There was sweat running down his face, and he smelled like trees and exertion.

  “He’ll come for his truck,” Jim said.

  Then he straightened onto the road and made his way to the turnoff where Dale’s truck waited in the trees. We parked away from the Ram Charger, in a place where we wouldn’t be too obvious.

  WE SAT THERE until sunrise, then until seven. There were a couple of blankets and some water back in the king cab, and I’m glad we had all that. A little after seven, Dale came into view through the windshield, slogging through the forest with his arms around himself, shivering.

  Jim waited until Dale saw us, then he flung himself from the truck, drawing down with his .380 and hollering, “Police officer,” and for Dale to stop. Dale did stop, then he turned and disappeared back into a thick stand of cottonwoods. Jim crashed in after him.

  It took half an hour for him to come back. He had Dale out in front of him with his hands on his head, marching him like a POW. Their clothes were dirty and torn up. But Jim’s gun was in his belt, so he must not have thought Dale was going to run for it again.

  “You drive,” Jim said to me. “Dale, you get in the backseat.”

  I looked at Jim with a question, but all he said was “Coeur d’Alene.”

  Nobody said a word to Coeur d’Alene. It wasn’t far. Jim got on his cell when we reached the city and got the address for army recruitment.

  We parked outside.

  “Tell Sally what you decided to do about all this,” said Jim.

  “I can join the army or get arrested by your husband,” said Dale. “I’m joining up.”

  “That’s a good thing, Dale,” I said.

  “Name me one good thing about it.”

  “It’ll get you out of trouble for a few years, for starters,” I said.

  We walked him into the recruitment office. There were flags and posters and a sergeant with a tight shirt and the best creased pants I’ve ever seen in my life. He was baffled by us at first, then Jim explained that we were friends of the family, and Dale had decided to join up but his mom and dad weren’t able to be here for it. Which didn’t explain why Dale’s and Jim’s clothes were dirty and more than a little torn up. The sergeant nodded. He’d seen this scene before.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Then we’ve got no problems. Notta one.”

  There were lots of forms and questions. Dale made it clear that he was ready right then, he was ready to be signed up and go over to Iraq, try his luck on some ragheads. He tried a joke about not having to cut his hair off, and the sergeant laughed falsely.

  Then the sergeant said they’d have to do a routine background check before the physical, would take about half an hour, we could come back if we wanted or sit right where we were. r />
  So we went outside. The wind was back down and the day was warming up. Across the street was a breakfast place. The sun reflected off the window in a big orange rectangle, and you could smell the bacon and toast.

  “I’m starved,” said Dale.

  “Me too,” said Jim. “Sal? Breakfast?”

  We ate. Nothing about Dale reminded me of JJ, but everything did. I hoped he’d find something over in that blood-soaked desert that he hadn’t found here.

  And I hoped that he’d be back to tell us what it was.

  Sack o’ Woe

  By John Harvey

  The street was dark and narrow, a smear of frost along the roof of the occasional parked car. Two of a possible six overhead lights had been smashed several weeks before. Recycling bins — blue, green, and gray — shared the pavement with abandoned supermarket trolleys and the detritus from a score of fast-food takeaways. Number thirty-four was toward the terrace end, the short street emptying onto a scrub of wasteland ridged with stiffened mud, puddles of brackish water covered by a thin film of ice.

  January.

  Tom Whitemore knocked with his gloved fist on the door of thirty-four. Paint that was flaking away, a bell that had long since ceased to work.

  He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt and sweater, a scuffed leather jacket — the first clothes he had grabbed when the call had come through less than half an hour before.

  January 27, 3:17 a.m.

  Taking one step back, he raised his right leg and kicked against the door close by the lock; a second kick, wood splintered and the door sprang back.

  Inside was your basic two-up, two-down house, a kitchen extension leading into the small yard at the back, bathroom above that. A strip of worn carpet in the narrow hallway, bare boards on the stairs. Bare wires that hung down, no bulb attached, from the ceiling overhead. He had been here before.

  “Darren? Darren, you here?”

  No answer when he called the name.

  A smell that could be from a backed-up foul-water pipe or a blocked drain.

  The front room was empty, odd curtains at the window, a TV set in one corner, two chairs and a sagging two-seater settee. Dust. A bundle of clothes. In the back room there were a small table and two more chairs, one with a broken back; a pile of old newspapers; the remnants of an unfinished oven-ready meal; a child’s shoe.

  “Darren?”

  The first stair creaked a little beneath his weight.

  In the front bedroom, a double mattress rested directly on the floor; several blankets, a quilt without a cover, no sheets. Half the drawers in the corner chest had been pulled open and left that way, miscellaneous items of clothing hanging down.

  Before opening the door to the rear bedroom, Whitemore held his breath.

  A pair of bunk beds leaned against one wall, a pumped-up Lilo mattress close by. Two tea chests, one spilling over with children’s clothes, the other with toys. A plastic bowl in which cereal had hardened and congealed. A baby’s bottle, rancid with yellowing milk. A used nappy, half in, half out of a pink plastic sack. A tube of sweets. A paper hat. Red and yellow building bricks. Soft toys. A plastic car. A teddy bear with a waistcoat and a bright bow tie, still new enough to have been a recent Christmas gift.

  And blood.

  Blood in fine tapering lines across the floor, faint splashes on the wall. Tom Whitemore pressed one hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

  HE HAD BEEN a member of the Public Protection Team for nearly four years: responsible, together with other police officers, probation officers, and representatives of other agencies — social services, community psychiatric care — for the supervision of violent and high-risk-of-harm sex offenders who had been released back into the community. Their task — through maintaining a close watch; pooling information; getting offenders, where applicable, into accredited programs; and assisting them in finding jobs — was to do anything and everything possible to prevent reoffending. It was often thankless and frequently frustrating — What was that Springsteen song? Two steps up and three steps back? — but unlike a lot of police work, it had focus, clear aims, methods, ambitions. It was possible — sometimes — to see positive results. Potentially dangerous men — they were mostly men — were neutralized, kept in check. If nothing else, there was that.

  And yet his wife hated it. Hated it for the people it brought him into contact with, day after day — rapists, child abusers — the scum of the earth in her eyes, the lowest of the low. She hated it for the way it forced him to confront over and over what these people had done, what people were capable of, as if the enormities of their crimes were somehow contaminating him. Creeping into his dreams. Coming back with him into their home, like smoke caught in his hair or clinging to the fibers of his clothes. Contaminating them all.

  “How much longer, Tom?” she would ask. “How much longer are you going to do this hateful bloody job?”

  “Not long,” he would say. “Not so much longer now.”

  Get out before you burn out, that was the word on the Force. Transfer to general duties, Traffic, Fraud. Yet he could never bring himself to leave, to make the move, and each morning he would set off back into that world, and each evening when he returned, no matter how late, he would go and stand in the twins’ bedroom and watch them sleeping, his and Marianne’s twin boys, five years old, safe and sound.

  That summer they had gone to Filey as usual, two weeks of holiday, the same dubious weather, the same small hotel, the perfect curve of beach. The twins had run and splashed and fooled around on half-size body boards on the edges of the waves; they had eaten chips and ice cream, and when they were tired of playing with the big colored ball that bounced forever down toward the sea, Tom had helped them build sandcastles with an elaborate array of turrets and tunnels, while Marianne alternately read her book or dozed.

  It was perfect: even the weather was forgiving, no more than a scattering of showers, a few darkening clouds, the wind from the south.

  On the last evening, the twins upstairs asleep, they had sat on the small terrace overlooking the promenade and the black strip of sea. “When we get back, Tom,” Marianne had said, “you’ve got to ask for a transfer. They’ll understand. No one can do a job like that forever, not even you.”

  She reached for his hand, and as he turned toward her, she brought her face to his. “Tom?” Her breath on his face was warm and slightly sweet, and he felt a lurch of love run through him like a wave.

  “All right,” he said.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  But by the end of that summer, things had changed. There had been the bombings in London for one thing, suicide bombers on the tube; an innocent young Brazilian shot and killed after a bungled surveillance operation; suspected terrorists arrested in suburbs of Birmingham and Leeds. It was everywhere. All around. Security alerts at the local airport; rumors that spread from voice to voice, from mobile phone to mobile phone. Don’t go into the city center this Saturday. Keep well away. Stay clear. Now it was commonplace to see: fully armed in the middle of the day, a pair of uniformed police officers strolling down past Pizza Hut and the Debenhams department store, Heckler & Koch submachine guns held low across their chests, Walther P990 pistols holstered at their hips, shoppers no longer bothering to stop and stare.

  As the Home Office and Security Services continued to warn of the possibility of a new terrorist attack, the pressures on police time increased. A report from the chief inspector of constabulary noted that, in some police areas, surveillance packages intended to supervise high-risk offenders were now rarely implemented due to a lack of resources. “Whether it is counterterrorism or a sex offender,” explained his deputy, “there are only a certain number of specialist officers to go round.”

  “You remember what you promised,” Marianne said. By now it was late September, the nights drawing in.

  “I can’t,” Tom said, slowly shaking his head. “I can’t leave now.”

  She
looked at him, her face like flint. “I can, Tom. We can. Remember that.”

  It hung over them after that, the threat, fracturing what had held them together for so long.

  Out of necessity, Tom worked longer hours; when he did get home, tired, head buzzing, it was to find her turned away from him in the bed and flinching at his touch. At breakfast, when he put his arms around her at the sink, she shrugged him angrily away.

  “Marianne, for God’s sake . . .”

  “What?”

  “We can’t go on like this.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then do something about it.”

  “Jesus!”

  “What?”

  “I’ve already told you. A hundred times. Not now.”

  She pushed past him and out into the hall, slamming the door at her back. “Fuck!” Tom shouted and slammed his fist against the wall. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” One of the twins screamed as if he’d been struck; the other knocked his plastic bowl of cereal to the floor and started to cry.

  THE TEAM MEETING was almost over when Christine Finch — one of the probation officers, midfifties, experienced—raised her hand. “Darren Pitcher. I think we might have a problem.”

  Tom Whitemore sighed. “What now?”

  “One of my clients, Emma Laurie, suspended sentence for dealing crack cocaine, lives up in Forest Fields. Not the brightest cherry in the bunch. She’s taken up with Pitcher. Seems he’s thinking of moving in.”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “She’s got three kids, all under six. Two of them boys.”

  Whitemore shook his head. He knew Darren Pitcher’s history well enough. An only child, brought up by a mother who had given birth to him when she was just sixteen, Pitcher had met his father only twice: on the first occasion, magnanimous from drink, the older man had squeezed his buttocks and slipped two five-pound notes into his trouser pocket; on the second, sober, he had blacked the boy’s eye and told him to fuck off out of his sight.