Vortex

Chapter Twenty-five Sandra and Bose

Before Bose could say anything else—before Sandra could even begin to consider what he had told her—another bus pulled up at the stop across the street. She turned her head to watch.

Under the orange glare of a streetlight, the shiny-wet bus looked like a floating hallucination. Nobody got on. Two men got off. Just a couple of shift workers carrying dinner pails. The bus pulled away, and the men hurried off wherever they were going—not in the direction of the Findley warehouse.

“It’s getting late,” Sandra said. She wasn’t ready to think about what Bose had admitted about himself, and Bose seemed willing to back away from the subject. “What if he doesn’t show up?”

“I think he will,” Bose said.

“Because of what he wrote?”

“Whatever else they might be, I think Orrin believes his notebooks are prophetic. The passage about Turk Findley setting fire to the warehouse—in Orrin’s mind that’s not something that did happen, it’s something that might happen. He wants to change the outcome.”

“Obviously he knows a few things about the Findley family—if any of it’s true.”

“The basics weren’t hard to confirm. Findley spent a few years in Istanbul. He has an eighteen-year-old son. The high school his son graduated from also has a Latisha Philips registered the same year.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“No. What would I say? She’s not implicated in any of this.”

“Or the son?” Whose nickname, Sandra presumed, was Turk.

“Hard to do that without tipping off Findley.”

“So maybe we can assume Orrin talked to the boy, or overheard something and drew his own conclusions, and he incorporated that into his story.”

“Logically, yeah. He’s not psychic.”

“Well, he predicted the storm,” Sandra said. The rain eased off every once in a while but it always came roaring back, as if half the Gulf of Mexico had levitated over the city and yielded to gravity.

“But he was wrong about other details. Orrin’s document says the warehouse was empty except for the night watchman. It’s not, not tonight. Also, one of the reasons Orrin was so upset when he was fired is that he thought he was supposed to be the watchman on duty when Turk set fire to the place.”

“He was predicting his own death?”

“In a sense. But not because he wants to die. Orrin doesn’t strike me as remotely suicidal. I think he came here to prevent the thing he was predicting, whether he’s the victim of it or not.”

Bose sketched out the scenario for her. Orrin, working at the Findley warehouse, somehow uncovers a plan on the part of the boss’s son to commit an act of arson, and he incorporates that knowledge into his ongoing notebook fantasies. The notebooks are the work of a troubled young man who happens to be smarter than anyone including his sister imagines he is, but whose grip on reality is tentative at best. Unexpectedly fired from his job, and then locked up at State, Orrin panics: he believes the time of the planned arson is close and he thinks he can stop it if he can get free. (Which was why he bit Jack Geddes during his clumsy attempt to break out, Sandra thought.) Once Bose and Sandra cut him loose, he borrows car fare from Ariel and sets out to prevent Turk Findley from committing an unforgiveable act.

Sandra thought about it. “Seems like your timeline is a little off. Orrin was fired before he could have known anything about Turk’s romantic problems.”

“We don’t know who his source is. Maybe it was secondhand. Maybe he stayed in touch with someone at the warehouse. The pertinent passages in the document are the most recent ones, and we don’t know for sure when they were written.”

“Why would he even care whether Turk Findley sets fire to his father’s business? Orrin already lost his job there—work that paid less than minimum wage and barely covered the rent on a flophouse room.”

“I don’t know,” Bose admitted. “A few days ago I was hoping you could tell me.”

She didn’t have an answer for him, then or now. “What if the explanation is even stranger than that? I don’t know. Something just… weird.”

“Then we’re still sitting here,” Bose said. “Doing what we’re doing.”

The woman behind the restaurant counter, the one who had invited Bose to make himself comfortable, left for the day. Sandra caught a glimpse of her as she drove off in a ten-year-old blue Honda. She was replaced by a teenage boy with facial eczema and a nervous tic. The night manager poked his head out of his office a couple of times, eyeing them, until Bose got up and said something reassuring. He bought a couple of doughnuts, which neither of them touched.

The next bus arrived on schedule. The rain was still gushing down, overflowing the gutters and rinsing the street of its sheen of oil. Four people got off this time. They all looked like shift workers to Sandra. None of them was Orrin Mather. Three of them ran to the left, hurrying toward shelter. One turned right and began walking at a casual pace, as if the rain didn’t concern him.

She turned away from the window but found Bose still staring intently through the glass. “What is it?”

“The young guy. The one by himself.”

Young, yes. A skinny young guy wearing a black poncho and carrying something bulky in a plastic bag.

“Shit,” Bose said.

She leapt to the same absurd but unavoidable conclusion: “You think it’s Findley’s son? You think that’s Turk Findley?” The boy reached the corner and then turned south, toward the warehouse. “What do we do?”

Bose stood up abruptly. “Stay here. Keep your phone handy. Call me if you see Orrin. Or anything else I need to know about. Otherwise sit tight until you hear from me.”

“Bose!” she said.

“Love you,” he said, maddeningly and for the first time.

He was out the door before she could close her mouth. She watched through the window as he cut through the restaurant parking lot, keeping to a fence line parallel to the street and ignoring the rain that instantly soaked him.

The counter clerk must have noticed her startled expression. “Ma’am?” he asked helpfully. “You want a coffee or something?”

“Crazy,” she said aloud.

“Ma’am?”

“Not you.”