Vortex

Chapter Twenty-nine Sandra and Bose

The minutes tracked past like boxcars in an endless train as Sandra sat at the restaurant window, waiting for Bose. Fifteen minutes. Then thirty. Then forty. We’re doing this insane thing, she thought, and now it’s going wrong. Outside, the storm eased and then gathered strength again. It was the price paid for all those weeks of remorseless dry heat, a terrible karmic balance being struck.

Across the street, a bus pulled up. It idled briefly, then cleared its throat and ambled off into the sheeting dark. At first Sandra thought no one had gotten off. Then she saw the figure standing outside the halo of the streetlight, dressed stupidly for the weather: a yellow short-sleeved shirt that stuck to his skin like a coat of paint. A skinny kid, all ribs. It was Orrin, of course.

She stood up without thinking and ran from the restaurant, the counter clerk calling after her in alarm: Ma’am? Ma’am?

“Dr. Cole,” Orrin said when she reached him. He didn’t seem surprised to see her. His expression was mournful. “I got lost,” he confessed. “I should have been here before now. I guess you know I mean to stop Turk Findley from doing what he means to do.” His lip trembled. “But I think I’m too late.”

“No, Orrin, listen, it’s all right.” The rain had gone through her clothes as if they didn’t exist, and she hugged herself to keep from shivering. “I understand. Turk got here a little while ago, but Officer Bose went after him.”

Orrin blinked. “Officer Bose is with him?”

“Officer Bose won’t let him set that fire.”

“You mean that?”

“It’s the absolute truth. He ought to be back any minute.”

Orrin’s shoulders slumped with relief. “I thank you for coming here,” he said, his voice barely audible over the hammering of the rain. “I really do. I suppose you read what I wrote in my notebooks?”

Sandra nodded.

“It’s not happening the way it did. But I guess that’s to be expected.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s not just one thing,” he said solemnly. “It’s the sum of all paths.”

Sandra wanted to ask what he was talking about, but not while they were standing exposed at the bus stop. “Come across the street with me, Orrin. We’ll wait for Bose over there. He won’t be long.”

“I would like a cup of coffee,” Orrin said.

Sandra turned, but drew back before she could step off the curb. A car pulled up, blocking her path. The passenger-side window rolled down and Sandra could see two men inside. The passenger was a middle-aged man, smiling tightly. The driver had a gun held loosely across his thigh.

“Hello, Dr. Cole,” the passenger said. “Hello, Orrin.”

Sandra recognized the voice. She felt numb. She wanted to run but she couldn’t take her eyes from the car. She felt rooted in place.

“Hello, Mr. Findley,” Orrin said sadly.

“I’m sorry to see you here, Orrin. That’s not good news for either of us. Why don’t you and Dr. Cole get in back, so we can talk.”

The driver kept his engine idling but didn’t drive away. Sandra prayed he wouldn’t. As long as she was within sight of this ugly road, the bus stop, the coffee shop across the street with its yellow lighted windows, it was possible to believe she might still get away unhurt. But if the car began to move it would carry her out of the familiar world, into that unlit land where unspeakable things happen.

She knew about the unlit land. Often enough, at State, she had interviewed candidates who had been routinely beaten, abused, abandoned, or degraded. They were refugees from the land of unspeakable things, and through their eyes she had begun to sense the vastness and emptiness of its geography.

Findley looked at her from the front seat, his face lined and pockmarked, his eyes deceptively mild. “First things first,” he said. “One of you is missing. What happened to Officer Bose, Dr. Cole?”

She doubted she could have answered even had she wanted to. All the moisture in her mouth had dried up. The world was drenched in rain, and she couldn’t even spit.

“Come on,” Findley said impatiently.

She managed, “I don’t know.”

“Please.”

“He’s not with me. I don’t know where he is.”

Findley sighed. “You should have accepted the offer I made you, Dr. Cole. It was perfectly authentic. A second life for your brother, in exchange for nothing important. There was no downside to it. It was generous. You were stupid.” He paused. “Over there across the street, parked in back, that’s Bose’s car. So where is he, Dr. Cole?”

She closed her mouth firmly and shook her head.

The driver—the gunman—turned in his seat to look at her. He didn’t look like a criminal, Sandra thought. His face wasn’t unpleasant. He looked like a high school English teacher, tired after a long day.

He showed her the gun. She didn’t know anything about guns and she couldn’t say what kind it was. It was as if he was saying, “Here is the source of my power over you.” As if he wanted her to acknowledge and understand it. Then he struck her in the face with the grip clenched in his fist.

The blow glanced off her cheekbone and loosened a tooth. The pain was literally sickening. She wanted to vomit. Her eyes clenched shut and she felt tears leaking out of them.

“Don’t do that,” Orrin said.

Findley turned to face him. “Look at all this trouble you caused, Orrin. And why? What did I ever do to you but take you off the street and give you respectable work?”

“None of this is my fault, Mr. Findley.”

“Whose fault is it, then? Tell me.”

“Your own, I guess,” Orrin said.

The gunman jacked his seat back so he could reach Orrin, but Findley raised a hand to stop him. Sandra watched through slit eyes, one hand clamped over her bleeding mouth. Everything looked watery, as if the rain had come inside the car.

“How do you figure that?” Findley asked.

“Your own son hates you,” Orrin said calmly.

Findley reddened. “My son? What do you know about my family?”

“You shouldn’t have done what you did about his friend Latisha. I don’t believe he’ll ever forgive you for that.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

Orrin closed his mouth and looked away. Sandra cringed, waiting for the inevitable blow.

But the gunman was looking past her, down the street. He said, “Here it comes now, Mr. Findley.”

Sandra risked a look. What was coming was a plain white van. Sandra couldn’t begin to guess at its significance, but Findley was pleased to see it. He waved at the driver of the van as it passed. “All right then,” he said. “We might as well get moving.” Into the land of unspeakable things.

“One more chance to tell me about Bose,” Findley said. Sandra glanced at the gunman, who smiled horribly.

Orrin watched the van pull ahead. “Mr. Findley?”

“What do you imagine you have to say, Orrin?”

“Mr. Findley, I believe that truck’s on fire.”

Yellow flame guttered out of the van’s loosely chained rear doors. Smoke, too, though rain and mist concealed it. The driver of the van apparently hadn’t yet noticed.

Then something inside ignited with a visceral thump. The rear doors flew open, feeding air to a sudden inferno. The van swerved and came up hard against the curb. Two men tumbled out of the cab, looked back in horror, then ran into the darkness.

Findley and the gunman were still staring when Bose’s car barrelled out of the coffee shop parking lot. Findley saw it first: “Go! Drive for fuck’s sake!” he shouted; but Bose braked directly in front of the car, blocking it. The gunman put the car into reverse but succeeded only in ramming his rear bumper into the concrete bus bench. His last recourse was the weapon in his hand. He raised the pistol, looking for a target. Findley was still shouting, pointlessly.

Sandra saw Orrin lunge forward and grab the gunman’s right arm. Orrin who wouldn’t so much as step on a bug, Sandra thought. Unless he was provoked. He had wrenched the gun to a vertical angle when it went off. The bullet cut a flanged hole in the roof of the car, allowing in a fine spray of rain. Findley jerked open the passenger-side door and threw himself out, landing and rolling on the wet street. Sandra realized she should do the same. But she couldn’t bring herself to move. She had become a still point around which the universe was revolving. Her body was leaden and her ears were ringing.

She wanted to help Orrin, who had one knee braced against the back of the driver’s seat and was struggling to leverage the gunman’s arm backward. The pistol looped around like a rattlesnake looking for something to bite. Orrin grunted and redoubled his effort, clutching the gunman’s arm and pumping with both feet. The pistol went off again.

Then Bose pulled open the driver’s-side door. He moved with a speed that took Sandra by surprise. His Fourth reflexes, maybe. He reached in and gripped the gunman’s arm just as Orrin fell back, exhausted, letting it loose. Bose took the gun away and tucked it into his belt. He pulled out the gunman, who crouched in a pool of ponded rainwater like a cornered animal, clutching his wrist, teeth bared, looking at Bose and at the gun. Then he turned and ran. Bose let him go.

The burning van was the brightest light on the block, casting long and hectic shadows down the slick street. Sandra looked over at Orrin, who was slumped against the seat. He turned up his face, wincing with pain. “I’m all right, Dr. Cole,” he said. But he wasn’t. The second shot from the pistol had cut across his shoulder, furrowing a wound. Sandra looked at it professionally, as if she had been transported from this madness back to her internship. The med school basics. Apply pressure. The wound was bleeding, but not too badly.

She guided him out of Findley’s car and into Bose’s. When she straightened up Bose put a hand on her arm to keep her still and examined her face where the gunman had hurt her. She said, “It looks worse than it is,” then contradicted herself by spitting a wad of blood onto the wet sidewalk.

“We need to get away from here,” Bose said.

Findley stood in the road, staring at a figure across the street.

The figure was his son, Turk. Sandra imagined she could see waves of surmise and dismay working their way into Findley’s shocked consciousness.

“He knows what you are,” she said—sternly and loudly, though the words were slurred by her loose tooth and swelling cheek. “He knows all about it, Mr. Findley.”

Findley turned to her, his face a mask of rage and confusion.

Sandra ignored him. She was watching the boy now. The kid. Turk. The kid yanked the hood of his poncho up over his head and turned away from his father in a gesture that was eloquent with contempt. He was bound away from here, Sandra realized. She could read that in his body, the way he hunched his shoulders and straightened his spine. It wasn’t the way it had happened in Orrin’s story but it was the same, somehow. The boy was heading for his own unspeakable land… though perhaps not the one Orrin Mather had imagined for him.

Findley saw his son begin that long walk away from him. “Wait,” he called out, weakly.

But Turk ignored him. He walked past the window of the coffee shop, casting a reflection on the rain-slick, fire-bright asphalt. He turned a corner into darkness. Findley stared into the falling rain until there was nothing to see.

Sandra slid into the backseat of Bose’s car, looking for something she could use to bandage Orrin’s wound. Bose gave her a roll of cotton from the first-aid kit he kept in the glove compartment. Orrin had bled a lot—blood and rain had soaked the loose weave of his shirt—but a few sutures would close the wound. Sandra could do it herself, she supposed, if Bose decided they couldn’t risk an emergency ward. “Hold this here,” she told Orrin, putting his free hand on the cotton wad. “Can you do that?”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm.

Bose drove past the burning van, a few barren blocks to the highway. The highway was almost empty of traffic and the storm was as dense as fog, a rain-slashed darkness. He drove at a steady pace toward the city he couldn’t see.