Blood Hunt

8

“From there” launched an intense two weeks…applying, being fingerprinted to prove he was who he claimed, sliding through a physical with a Dr. Staab tut-tutting over the usual low blood pressure and heart rate, hypnotizing a lab tech into reading normal values in the blood work, being tested for a Kansas drivers license, interviewing with the mayor and city council. No one hires on to a new department in two weeks, Garreth would have thought, but they seemed to be fast-tracking him, as if afraid of him changing his mind. They apparently considered his records from the SFPD enough of a background investigation.

Every night he continued riding along with Nat, learning the radio codes the department used, memorizing the town and people. He saw how the cruise traffic changed Fridays when the Baumen Timberwolves had home games. Sparse early — everyone went to the games — it ramped up afterward, game-goers howling and waving banners as they circled up and down Kansas. Especially when Baumen won, Nat said.

Riding along, he wangled invitations into homes when possible, and learned to recognize the voices of various sheriff departments’ personnel on the radio. Including a Trego County dispatcher named Lila, with whom their own night dispatcher Doris Schoning, though thin as Sue Ann was plump, exchanged recipes in the wee hours. After the shift he studied the Kansas Criminal Code and Vehicle Code until dawn.

All the while feeling wretched. Sending the SFPD his resignation left him gutted, despite the conviction he must be here. Phone calls home, full of lies, made him feel even worse. On Saturday he laid groundwork by telling Harry and his father he was in Kansas…having met a police chief who invited him deer and turkey hunting here. When talking to Harry, he said the meeting occurred in Davis; talking to his father, it happened on the fictitious Montana hunting trip. Late in the week he called home enthusiastic reports of the hunting and the area. The next Tuesday he broke the news of being so taken with Baumen he had applied to the department here.

An exasperated Serruto said, “I think you’re totally screwed up and thank god you’ll be someone else’s headache now. But I hope the new job works out for you.”

It baffled Harry, moved now to rehab. “Don’t do this. You’re over-reacting. You’re too hard on yourself and you’re underestimating the understanding of your fellow officers. What are you going to do when you wake up a few weeks or months from now and realize what a mistake you made? ”

He told Lien the truth about joining this department, but it baffled her, too, even as she agreed to put his personal belongings in storage and sublet his apartment. “I understand how much you want to catch Lane but why must you give up everything here to do it? Isn’t your leave of absence enough time to stake out this town?”

“Remember I Ching,” he told her. “Acting to re-create order must be done with proper authority. This badge gives me proper authority.”

“Doesn’t your San Francisco badge? The rest of that text warns against setting yourself up to alter things according to your own judgment, which can end in mistake and failure.”

That disturbed him. Was he doing that? “I’m trying not to do that.”

“And if or when you do catch her, what then? How can you come home again.”

He could not of course. He could never go home again. With luck, though, that would never be an issue. He would be…crumbled to dust or something. “I’ll just have to wait and see.”

The most difficult call of all was to his parents, worse than telling them about Judith divorcing him. The phone lines fairly melted from his father’s anger. “I swear I don’t know what the hell is going on in your head! You want throw away your whole career with the SFPD for a one-horse department because you’re buying a load of bullshit from this hick police chief on the basis of him being a good hunting host! What is it, you think it’s going to be a soft job where you’ll never face another situation like the one with Harry? That isn’t starting over. It’s burying yourself!”

A fitting choice of words if only his father knew it. Garreth hung up in abject misery.

“I take it the news didn’t go down well at home,” Nat said when Garreth walked into the station that night.

It showed that much? “Not exactly.”

As usual Maggie Lebekov remained after her shift typing reports. She looked up. “I can see why it’s hard to understand you giving up a being a detective in a city like San Francisco.” Though the frost had been melting since that first meeting, her attitude remained: what was he doing here. “It’s a job most cops would die for. What!” she said as Nat choked.

“He did die for it.”

She frowned. “What?”

Garreth sighed. Some general details were bound to leak out. “After being assaulted by a suspect I was mistakenly declared dead.” She wondered why he wanted this job. Let her consider this. “There’s nothing like waking up in cold storage to make you examine your life and priorities.”

Her eyes widened. “You were actually in the morgue?”

“Ewwww!” Sue Ann waved her hands in front of her face like someone shooing flies. “That would freak me out!”

A statement hardly touching the horror of it. Garreth clamped down on the memory and gave them a shrug. “Sometimes it’s enough to realize you’re still alive.”

He followed Nat out, with Maggie staring thoughtfully after him.

In the car, Nat made a right turn out of the parking lot instead of the usual left toward Kansas Avenue. “I have one piece of good news for you. You know how you’ve been wanting a place of your own?”

Oh yes…somewhere with privacy, without Violet, friendly as she was, watching his coming and going. Even at local prices, a house was out of his range, and the closest Baumen came to apartments were duplexes…currently all occupied. “You know of something?”

“Helen Schoning, cousin to Doris’s husband, has an apartment over her garage. The widower renting it before married a woman in Russell and moved there. It’s just three blocks from the station when you want to walk to work. Helen invited us to come look at it this evening.”

Garreth liked the house…two stories, built of the native sandstone with a driveway running under a portico on the side. He liked the woman who appeared in answer to Nat’s push of the doorbell, too…an attractive, slender woman in her late forties with only a trace of grey in short chestnut hair.

She extended a hand to Garreth. “So you’re the Frisco Kid. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Call me Helen, please. I’m Miss Schoning only when we meet while I’m on duty as clerk of the municipal court. The garage is this way.”

Out a side door into the portico and back along the drive to a large two-car garage.

She led the way up a set of steps on the side to the second floor and after unlocking the door, stood back to let them enter first. “This used to be my father’s den.”

It looked like a man’s place, wood-paneled with built-in bookcases and a large leather chair and a leather couch that opened out into a bed. A rear corner had been partitioned for the bathroom. Between that and a set of french doors leading out onto a deck above the garage doors stretched the cabinets and small appliances of an apartment kitchen. Including a small refrigerator! No more need for the ice chest. Too bad it could not be a basement apartment but with the French doors blocked by heavy curtains, which he would buy tomorrow, it ought to serve his needs. It only remained to buy a few non-perishable food items and some cooking utensils and tableware at the thrift store so, in case of visitors, his kitchen did not look as oddly bare as Lane’s.

Helen said, “I can provide sheets and blankets until you buy your own. The phone is an extension from the house. You can use that and pay part of the bill or put in a private line. Half the garage is yours to use, too.”

She took them downstairs and raised one of the garage doors.

“This is your side. If you want to work on your car, feel free to use my tools. Just ask first and put them back afterward.”

Garreth stared around the garage. With these tools, Helen Schoning could open her own auto repair shop. “You use these?”

Nat grinned in his peripheral vision.

She smiled and went over to stroke the fender of the car in the other half of the garage. “Someone has to keep this baby running.”

A gleaming old Rolls Royce. He felt his jaw drop.

“My father bought this in 1955 when his first oil wells came in. He was so proud of it. It was the only car like it in Bellamy County. Still is.” She paused, chin down, looking at him through her lashes. “Mr. Mikaelian, I do have one favor to ask.” She pulled him to the other side of the Rolls and dropped her voice. “If you should come home some night and find a car in your side, will you please park on my side of the drive so the other car can get out? And say nothing about it to anyone?”

He felt himself staring again and closed his mouth with a snap. “No problem.”

She smiled. “I hoped you’d understand. I enjoy being single but I also like companionship from time to time. Discretely, of course. This is a small town and some of my friends are married.”

Garreth regarded her with amazement. She was not what he expected to find here. “You don’t miss the stability of a long-term relationship?”

She smiled. “What stability? Nothing ever says the same. People, either. Each of my relationships has suited my needs at the time. There’s a quote by Henry Ellis I like: ‘All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.’ It seems to me you’re practicing some of that yourself.”

Except his mingling felt more desperate than fine.