A Broken Vessel #3
The thing shifted in place, having finished with Hoff. It stared at the ruckus on the road; then, with a grunt like an eight-hundred-pound hog, I heard it shuffling back into the blackness.
I finally allowed myself a breath.
It took the officers ten minutes to find me.
On some level I wondered if I could still take off, disappear into the night like the thing that had done for Mikey and Hoff—but my brain was beyond putting a spin on things.
With that creature still out there, all I wanted was four solid walls and a light to push back the darkness.
The sensation of two cops lifting me to my knees while another snipped my restraints has to be one of the happiest of my miserable life.
* * *
They’d found us because of the van. I knew we shouldn’t have used it—the timetable of the job had us so turned around that we’d neglected the basic rules.
Some unmarked cruiser had made us on the 34 as we drove out to the farm, and tailed us to the turnoff.
They’d radioed it in and waited for reinforcements. I only wish they’d got there sooner.
The confusion started while I was still at the station, waiting for my lawyer to show.
We may have been victims, but that don’t matter much to Chicago cops.
They’d given me a clean pair of pants and a cup of hot coffee at least, and didn’t make too much of my tears when I lost control from time to time.
I knew better than to speak. I may have lost my senses, but that stuff’s drilled into you from the day you choose this life. You don’t talk to the cops, not ever.
I heard them talking, though. Outside the doorway, like they didn’t know I was listening and this wasn’t all an elaborate game they played.
One said he wondered why I’d taken the van out there all by myself.
The other—a deeper, older voice—said they were still searching the field for signs of any “associates.”
It was enough to bring Mikey and Hoff back to my mind, and I almost choked on my coffee.
“Hey,” I called through the door. “You know I wasn’t alone in that field, right? You found the pricks who tied us up yet, fed us to their gimp?”
A round face poked through the door, balding and sporting a mustache that wouldn’t look out of place on NYPD Blue .
“‘Us’?” It was the deeper voice; I should have guessed. “Who’s ‘us’? They just found you out there, tied up like Thanksgiving dinner. Your partners ran off and left you, did they, McGinnis? Who you hanging with these days, anyways? Don’t have you pegged for a loner.”
I clammed up. I knew it didn’t matter to Mikey and Hoff anymore—hell, they wouldn’t be worrying about anything ever again—but it’d save Nancy and Hoff’s family from facing the fallout.
The First Midwest cash was still stowed, and if my lawyer did his job then at least they’d have something to make their grief a little easier.
I’d been upside-down enough to open my mouth, but I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t know how to close it again.
When council finally turned up, I answered the cops’ questions with as little as I could, then they let me go.
Their case amounted to a whole heap of nothing, and anyone could see that I needed a shower and medical attention.
Maybe it was the way I collapsed in tears at mention of what happened in the field that sealed it.
I left it ’til the next morning to go see Nancy.
She had a right to know what happened, and she wouldn’t be getting that through official channels.
They didn’t know half of what went down that night.
Mikey hadn’t always been the best husband, but I knew she loved him all the same.
She wouldn’t have put up with him otherwise.
I parked across the road from their bungalow and waited until the lights were on before I rang the doorbell.
Felt kinder to let her have a few minutes first; I don’t know why.
I should have known something was off as soon as she opened the door. Me and Nancy have known each other since high school, we were always part of the same circle—Mikey too, it was how they’d come together. She looked at me like I was a bolt out of the blue, though.
“Oh, hey,” she goes, her face screwed up against the rising sun. “Brandon? What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you since…when would it be. Must be at least ten years, no?”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d had dinner with her and Mikey only last week, at that Italian place he liked. When I said so, she only screwed her face up even more.
“Mikey? Who the hell’s Mikey? Am I meant to know what you’re talking about?”
In the end I mumbled my apologies and retreated to the car. I didn’t know what had happened, but I figured Nancy was having some kind of incident, amnesia caused by the shock of her husband being eaten alive by God-knows-whatin a derelict field. That would break the best of us. It almost broke me.
Turns out she wasn’t the only one, though.
Hoff’s family had never heard of him. Our friends looked blank when I mentioned him and Mikey.
Even the cops didn’t have us pinned as a crew anymore; they had me doing the First Midwest job solo.
For a while I thought I was the one losing it, that they must have hit me on the head harder than I thought.
But then I remembered Southey’s words, in the stark loneliness of that night: “When he’s done, it’ll be like you never existed.
” That thing had taken more than just Hoff’s and Mikey’s bodies away with it into the darkness.
I guess because it hadn’t finished with me, I was the only one who could remember.
It had eaten everything they were, or would ever be.
Now, where my friends had stood, there was nothing but empty space.
I keep Tiffany closer to me, these days.
I don’t leave her with childcare anymore.
Every morning, I look at her face and commit its features to memory, the sound of her voice, the smell of her hair.
In this way I put a wall around my daughter.
Because it troubles me that I can’t remember her mother any longer, or the way we used to be.
And I wonder how many others I have forgotten along the way.