Dark Winter

6

Laurel, Maryland

Monday 5 May, 10:16 hrs

I sat in the back of a taxi on the way to Josh’s house, after the half-hour train ride from Central Station to Laurel. With all the messing about and waiting, I’d probably have been quicker hiring a car, but it was too late now.

We turned the corner into Josh d’Souza’s new estate of prim and proper weatherboarded houses, and I directed the driver to his cul-de-sac. My last visit had been only six weeks ago, but it was just as hard to tell the houses apart, with their neatly trimmed grass fronts, obligatory basketball hoop attached to the garage wall, and Stars and Stripes waving in the breeze. Some front windows even displayed a blown-up photograph of a young son or daughter in military uniform, virtually swamped by Old Glory. Josh’s house was 106, about half-way down on the left.

The cab pulled up at the bottom of the concrete drive. Josh’s place was set back from the road by about twenty metres, and on a slight rise, with his front lawn sloping up towards the house. A couple of bikes, a basketball and a skateboard lay outside the garage, and his black, double-cabbed Dodge gas-guzzler stood in the drive.

I caught sight of Josh looking out of the kitchen window, as if he’d been twitching the curtains waiting for me. By the time the taxi had pulled away, he was standing at the white-painted wooden front door, agitation etched all over his scarred face.

That was nothing new. Despite the I-forgive-you stuff, I still wasn’t too sure that he liked me. ‘Endured’ would probably have been a better word. I hardly ever got the warm smile he would have greeted me with before the shooting that fucked up his face. He accepted me because I had a relationship with Kelly, and that was about it. We were like divorced parents, really. I was the errant father who popped in now and again with a totally unsuitable gift, and he was the mother who had all the day-to-day problems, who had to get up in the morning and find her clean socks and be there when things went wrong, which was most of the time recently.

He turned, closed the door behind him, and double-locked it. ‘Why don’t you ever turn your cell on?’

‘Hate the things. I just check messages. Calls normally mean drama.’

We shook briefly and he waved the bunch of keys he had in his hand. ‘I’ve a drama for you. We gotta go.’

‘What’s happened?’

He headed us towards the Dodge. ‘The school called. She got pulled up by the math teacher for being late for first period, so she told him to go eff himself.’

The indicators flashed as he hit the key fob.

‘Do what ?’ I climbed into the cab beside him.

‘I know, I know. That’s on top of walking out on her gymnastics teacher last week. The school’s had enough. They’re talking suspension. I said you were visiting today and we’d get down there as soon as you arrived. We got ourselves some firefighting to do.’

The massive engine kicked into life and we reversed down the drive.

‘You know, Josh, I sometimes think that in a past life I must have really offended someone really really deeply . . .’

‘You mean, as well as in this?’

The school was just twenty or so blocks away. I couldn’t remember if Kelly walked there or got the bus. Probably neither. Kids could drive at sixteen in Maryland, and she hung around with a slightly older crowd.

Josh waved his hand despairingly. ‘I can’t control her. She slips out at night. I’ve found cigarettes in her dresser. She’s so moody and irritable that I don’t know what to say to her. I’m worried about her future, Nick. I spoke to the school counsellor last time, but she hasn’t any answers because she can’t get anything out of her either. Nobody can.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up, mate. Nobody could be doing more than you are.’

Josh was half black, half Puerto Rican. His looks had changed quite a bit since the first time I met him. Standing next to Kelly’s family’s grave site in the sun, his hairless head and glasses had glinted as brightly as his teeth. But what you noticed first these days was the rough pink scar along his left cheek that looked like a split sausage in a frying-pan, edged with spots of dried blood where he couldn’t get used to shaving around the lumpy tissue. However much Christian-forgiveness shit he splashed around, and however much I tried to cut away, tell myself the damage was done, I still felt as guilty every time I saw it as he did about Kelly.

He was wearing a blue sweatshirt tucked into his black-leather belt with the same grey cargo fatigue trousers his Secret Service training team always wore, and a pair of Nike trainers. In the past, they’d always been accompanied by a very worn, light brown pancake holster on his belt, tucked against his right kidney, and a double mag carrier on the left, alongside a black beeper.

Five years earlier he’d been on the vice-presidential protection team, part of the Secret Service, until Geri had left him and their three kids for her yoga teacher. He’d had to sell the house in Virginia because he couldn’t afford to keep up the mortgage, and had taken a job up here at Laurel, training baby agents. We hadn’t come into each other’s lives at that stage, but I knew the first few years had been a nightmare for him and the kids. That was when the born-again Christian stuff had happened.

The Service was finished for him now. Like he told me, it had been an easy choice to make: quit, or his kids never seeing their father. Now he was a baby vicar or reverend, something like that; the God thing had given him a new career. He had another year to go before he was officially able to shout and breakdance in church with the best of them. I’d told him he ought to think bigger than that and go the TV route. I’d be his sidekick. He could talk up God for the first part of the show and after the break I would explain how the two of us, God’s little helpers, could do with a shed-load of dollars. That hadn’t gone down too well.

‘You got the devil, Nick.’

‘That’s right, I’m an agent of Satan – but my duties are now mostly ceremonial.’

That hadn’t gone down too well either.

The bell rang for the end of a period and a tidal wave of students and noise surged into the corridor.

‘I wish I could help her.’ Her maths teacher was very frustrated about the whole Kelly situation. He slowed kids down so the three of us didn’t get swept away. ‘I try to get her to talk, but I guess I just don’t choose the best days. Sometimes it’s so hard to communicate with her.’ He ran his hand over the top of his balding head and checked his fingers as if expecting to find more fallen hair. He was only in his late thirties, but already seemed broken on the wheel of life. ‘You’ve both seen it, she’s withdrawn one day, then high as a kite the next. She takes some keeping up with. The school counsellor would like to help if you’re willing to – look, here we are. I had to send her straight to the principal’s office. We have to maintain standards in the classroom for these kids. Here we are, in here.’

He opened a door and ushered us into the principal’s waiting room. ‘Now, Kelly, look who – oh . . .’ The chair I guessed Kelly should have been sitting on had a half empty paper cup of water next to it, but that was about it. The room was empty.

‘She took off an hour ago.’ The principal’s secretary was big and black, radiating efficiency but still unable to hide the distressed look on her face. ‘The principal has been trying to call you, Mr d’Souza. We were about to call the police.’ She shook her head. ‘All she said to me when she first came in was she was going to Disneyland.’

‘Save us.’ Josh sighed as he turned to me, his right hand cutting the air. He got out his cell and started to dial. It went up to his ear and stayed there for just a second. ‘Her cell’s off. OK, we go home. If she’s not there we’ll have to call in the police.’

‘No need, mate.’ I started for the Dodge. ‘I know exactly where she’s gone.’