City of the Sun

THIRTY-TWO

Finding a place to drink wasn ’ t difficult. They didn ’ t know Ciudad del Sol well, but all cities were the same basic mixture of humanity. They all had aspects of beauty and ugliness. All had at least one church and one jail. Paul and Behr had been there long enough to start to understand the geometry, and they found a bar on Calle Maria del Monte that served the local tequila out of clay gourds. It was a clear, fresh-tasting distillation that had salt and lime undertones, as well as some flavor of the clay in which it came. The first drink was had in silence. Paul quickly re-poured.

“I tell you, I don ’ t like doing that shit.”

“I know, Frank.”

“You get to the point where you ’ re tired of being fucked around.”

“I can ’ t tell if you ’ re talking about the case and this trip, or life in general,” Paul wondered.

“I ’ m not sure, either.” They both laughed.

“I don ’ t know that the kid has information and was holding back,” Paul said over the rim of his glass.

“He knows something. Everybody does. And when they hold back it ’ s not always conscious.”

Paul realized that he was getting a lesson learned of years. They drank more. Behr had a distant expression in his eyes.

There was a row of men at the bar who wore paper-thin T-shirts streaked with ground-in dirt. Long hair shot out from beneath ball caps and straw hats. Their fingernails were ringed with black earth. They drank quickly and talked among themselves, and began drifting out before long.

Behr ordered another gourd of tequila. Paul started to go hazy, between the liquor and the fatigue, a more tolerable distance from the hard edges of reality. He let out a deep breath. It felt like it went on forever, like he ’ d been holding it in for a year. He reached for his wallet, but not to pay. He pulled out the photo of Jamie that he carried now. It was one of the last taken before he went missing. It was shot in their backyard. Jamie wore a red polo shirt and a half-smile. Paul felt his eyes burn into his son ’ s eyes in the photo. He wondered at the face, at what it would have become. After a while it was enough; he put away the photo and looked across at Behr.

Behr finished his glass and set it on the table. He reached for his own wallet. He flipped through several credit cards and business cards to where he kept it, his photo of Tim. He didn ’ t keep it on top. He couldn ’ t handle that kind of thorn on a daily basis. He looked down at his son, handsome in his blue sweater over a pale blue button-down shirt, standing in front of a felt background cloth, his hand posed unnaturally by the school photographer on a fence-rail prop. Behr looked at the photo for a long moment, then passed it to Paul, whose head bent over it reverentially.

“Tim, right,” Paul said.

Behr nodded. “His first-grade school portrait,” he began. “I still remember the day, even though he ’ s been gone longer than he was alive.” Behr poured himself another drink, his hand steady. “Linda had taken extra care in combing his hair and getting him ready. The class pictures were at nine thirty in the morning, and that was a good thing. By lunch Tim ’ s shirt would have been untucked, rumpled, the sweater in a ball at the bottom of his cubby, his hair a mess. By the time he came home he ’ d be grass-stained at best, if a piece of clothing wasn ’ t ripped outright. Linda told him every day to keep himself nice. It didn ’ t work. The day of the picture she ’ d told him at least twice and maybe because of that we ended up with that good a picture.”

Paul smiled and handed it back. Behr put it down on the table between them, unwilling as yet to return his son to his wallet crypt.

“You never told me how he died,” Paul said.

Behr straightened and spoke in a measured way. “I ’ d been on night watch. I was sleeping during the day. At the end of shift we ’ d go to Loader ’ s. A cop bar. They ’ d be opening for the day and we ’ d have a few pops. I ’ d been pulling overtime and it added to the exhaustion.” He knew he sounded like he was on the witness stand or giving a deposition; the dry facts were what he drew on to get through it the few times he ’ d told it aloud.

“It was funny, because I didn ’ t feel so tired that day when I got home, so I sat down on the couch and started watching sports highlights,” he continued. “I fell asleep there. The gunshot woke me up, and by the time I made it into the bedroom, blood was everywhere.” Now he had to pause, because the memory was twisting in him like a rusty knife. Bitterness overtook his measured testimonial.

“You don ’ t put your gun up proper one motherfucking day, your lockbox isn ’ t closed tight, or your boy ’ s watched you open it one too many times and knows how to do it, and that ’ s what you motherfucking get.” Behr reached for his drink. They both saw the tremor in his hand then, and Behr pulled it back and put it under the table. “He was in a coma for three weeks before he died. Three goddamned weeks.” Horrible images played in his mind while he fought his uneven breathing.

“It would ’ ve ended quick with this.” He placed a hand, now stable, he thought, onto the tabletop. Beneath it was the black silhouette of his gun, the Bulldog. 44. “In case of accident, or if you have to use it, you don ’ t want there to be any question. That ’ s my takeaway. How ’ s that for stupid?” Behr made the gun disappear and then his tequila. He tapped his wristwatch, a stainless steel Omega Speedmaster. “So this is the sum total of my family. Wife gave it to me for our fifth anniversary. It ’ s all that ’ s left. Guess it was better made.” There was a mad look on his face that he could feel and was sure Paul could see.

“Ah, Frank,” Paul said, unable to offer anything else.

“I ’ m drunk enough.” Behr stood.

The night was dark black. Whatever streetlamps there were in the town must have been uniformly broken or extinguished at a set time, as none of them threw any light. They made their way intuitively back toward their motel, turning down one street, rethinking it, turning back and going down another. They rounded a corner and walked along a long chain-link fence that surrounded a used-car lot they recognized from earlier in the day. Suddenly, a blur of black fur and white gnashing teeth came smashing against the fence. A pair of yellow-eyed guard dogs, growling low and throaty, had come out of the darkness and went after Behr and Paul. The animals bounced off the fence, only to lunge again. Paul had jumped back out of instinct while Behr had turned to face them. He hooked his fingers through the fence and let out a growl of his own, which was lower and more menacing than what the dogs had mustered. Behr ’ s hands on the fence gave the dogs ample opportunity to snap at him, but instead the dogs shrank back. They shimmied down on front paws and tried to put up another wall of growls. Behr began barking at them. He sounded like a deranged human mastiff. Paul stepped up next to him and grabbed the fence. He started barking, too, his sounding like a frenzied hyena ’ s. The real dogs, fear-ridden and confused, let out squeals and disappeared back into the darkness of the lot.

After their fingers had gone white from gripping, Behr let go of the fence and started laughing. Then Paul started in laughing, too. It came in waves. They snorted and howled, doubling over at the waist. Eventually whatever was funny about it petered out and there was only silence. They straightened and headed back to the motel, where sleep awaited, black and dreamless.