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Oddly enough, this turned out to be one of those times.
The first squad car was on the scene in less than five minutes. I heard the approaching siren, and a dutiful citizen would certainly have ignored his total weariness and the dozens of tiny puncture wounds that covered the front of his body, and leaped to his feet to greet them. Not Dexter. Not tonight. I had Had Enough.
So I lay on the floor with my eyes closed and listened to the inhuman caterwauling from the partiers. Of course, they had been much closer to the blast, and so presumably might have more serious injuries. But in fairness, they had also clearly consumed a great deal of alcohol, which should have deadened the pain. Instead, it had only loosened their inhibitions, especially those dealing with making truly stupid noises. No injury I could imagine would justify the repulsive clamor coming from the revelers. They sounded like sheep who had been lobotomized and then beaten with heavy clubs festooned with fishhooks.
But I didn’t care; let them bleat. It had nothing to do with me. It didn’t even touch me, not in any way. I was all done. I was so completely Finished with It All that nothing could affect me. I was the New Age guru who had attained a perfect state of Enough Already, and if the world wanted any more from me they could damn well come and get it.
So I just lay there as the siren got close enough to drown out the moaning and wordless mindless hollering, and I didn’t move as the squad car screeched to a halt and the two officers in it jumped out and began to catalog the chaos. I didn’t even sit up when the ER techs arrived in their ambulance and began to treat the blathering ninnies from the party rooms.
It wasn’t until I heard the authoritative pounding on my door, accompanied by a hard-edged woman’s voice calling, “Sir? Sir!” that I managed to stir myself. Opening my eyes was the hard part. After that, it was mere unendurable burdensome drudgery to climb to my feet and open the door.
An African American woman in a blue Miami-Dade police uniform gave me a once-over that was as hard-edged as her voice. “Are you all right, sir?” she said. She sounded concerned but completely without compassion, which I thought was a nice trick, and probably much harder to do than it sounds.
“Some cuts,” I said, holding up my hands and then waving at my shirtfront. “Other than that…” I let my arms drop. The weariness was returning, fed by my realization that whatever else happened here tonight, they were almost certainly going to take me downtown when they found out who I was.
“Right,” the cop said. “Why don’t you come with me, sir,” she said. She put a firm hand on my arm and led me out the door.
My first weary glance at what was left of the little hotel was enough to open my eyes to their widest, and I stumbled and might have fallen if not for the cop’s steadying hand. Of course, I knew a bomb had gone off—but knowing that and seeing what that really meant were two entirely different things.
Down at the far end, where I had parked my poor, ill-fated rental car, the devastation was most impressive. Nothing at all remained of my car, except a plume of smoke and some blackened, twisted metal. A trio of firemen was putting out the last few flickers of flame.
The cars on either side of mine were demolished, almost as totally evaporated as mine. And the front of the hotel where they had been parked was blackened, paint burned off, windows blown out, doors off the hinges, and several more firemen were rushing in and out.
All along the walkway, from the firemen to where I stood, there was destruction, ranging from blistered walls to shattered windows and doors. I had seen bomb damage before in the course of my work, but this was something rather special. And all to get little old me? Somebody obviously thought I was rather special, too. “Wow,” I said.
The cop just nodded. “Come on,” she said, and pushed me gently the other way, toward the hotel’s office. The ER guys had set up a little triage station in front, where the driveway curved under an overhanging roof by the office door.
Like most of their ilk, the emergency medics were cheerful, brisk, and efficient. They saved me a trip to the Dumpster by removing my ruined shirt and tossing it into a large plastic bag. Then one of them, a small and wiry woman with short dark hair, probed all the cuts quickly and thoroughly. She took out three or four small pieces of glass, and then swabbed out all my cuts with antiseptic. “We’re a little short on the tiny Band-Aids tonight, sport,” she told me. “So you might want to keep the shirt off till the cuts scab over.” She smiled. “Lucky for me, you can get away with it. You look like a fireman.” She slapped my shoulder, as if I’d done well, and urged me up and onto my feet. “You’ll be fine,” she said, and she moved away to the next victim of the evening’s tragedy.
The same cop was waiting for me when I turned away from the aid station. “Can you answer a few questions, sir?” she asked me.
Nothing that had happened in the last twenty minutes had made me less tired, and each one of the two dozen small perforations that covered the front of my body was now stinging. But neither of those reasons was an acceptable excuse for dodging a police inquiry, as I well knew. So I just nodded wearily and said, “Yes, of course.”
She went through a standard set of questions, the ones that are always the same. They’re designed for two important purposes: first, so that when the detectives eventually get involved they can be certain that the correct questions, and the same ones, have been asked. The second vital purpose is to make sure that the first-responder cops, usually in a patrol car, don’t come across as vacuous idiots. This is important, because most detectives seem to think that the beat cops actuall
y are vacuous idiots. And quite honestly, sometimes they are—but then, the same can be said of the detectives, as my recent experience had so thoroughly proved.
My questioner—her name tag said POUX, but offered no suggestions on how to say it—seemed very far from vacuous or idiotic. Possibly having a name that was impossible to pronounce correctly had made her smart. She went through the standard questions, recording my answers on a little steno pad, and she did it very briskly and impersonally, until I finally let it slip that it had been my car that exploded. At that point, she glanced around her in a way that I have to call furtive. I assumed she was looking for a superior officer—but none had arrived on the scene yet.
Officer Poux nearly smiled. She licked her lips and returned her attention to me with a look of feverish concentration taking over her face. She was still in charge, and she had a hot one. There were no standard questions for this, and if she screwed up she’d get a tongue-lashing at the very least. But if she did well, it might mean advancement, and clearly Officer Poux did not intend to remain in a plain blue uniform forever. Among other things, it did nothing at all for her figure. So she began to improvise questions.
“You’re certain it was your car?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said. “Um, rented, actually.”
“You rented the car?” she said. “How long ago?”
I tried to think how long ago it had been. Aside from the fact that I was exhausted, too much had happened too fast, and I found it almost impossible to separate the recent past into coherent chunks of days and nights. It all seemed to be wadded up together into a lump and frozen into a bubble of simultaneous time, more like one of those insects captured in a glob of amber than a well-ordered history. But I puzzled through it and found what I thought was the right answer, as impossible as it seemed. “Yesterday?” I said at last. “I think.”
She asked where I had rented the car, who had rented it to me, whether I had left it unattended, where I had been when I did. I answered truthfully, and she wrote it all down. And then she hesitated, licked her lips, and perhaps she thought to herself, This could help me make detective. “Is there anybody that, in your opinion, might want to kill you?” she said.
And there it was, the last straw, the final brick in the wall, the one tiny nudge over the line. Was there anybody who wanted to kill me? In all this violent, wicked, sinful world, was there anybody left who didn’t? I could think of no way to begin, no possible starting point, and the thought of even attempting a complete list was so ludicrous that I looked at her for just a moment—and I started to laugh.
I do not actually feel real emotions, so laughing was not something that came naturally, or easily, to me. In fact, I had spent a good chunk of my youth learning when and how to laugh properly. I prided myself on the final result, which sounded dignified, restrained, and natural, and it was nothing at all like the sound that came out of me now—a crackly, high-pitched, gasping kind of noise that sounded like an endless cough by a second-rate tenor. Even if you could find somebody who liked me, they would not have said it was an attractive sound.
But it came pouring out, an interminable wheezing cackle, and I couldn’t stop it. Officer Poux just watched, and waited patiently for me to stop laughing for perhaps half a minute, and just as I began to slow down, she hardened her face into a near-perfect imitation of Deborah’s Stone-faced Cop look, and I had to laugh some more.
Officer Poux waited it out only a little longer, and then she turned away. I thought I had offended her, which seemed funny, but she came right back with one of the med techs, not the one who had treated me. This one was an African American man, about thirty-five, who looked like he should be playing linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He walked right up to me, peered into my eyes, grabbed my wrist and felt my pulse, and then turned to Officer Poux. “I don’t know,” he said. “Not really a psych expert.” He shrugged. “Probably just shock. Let him laugh it out.” And he went back to the victims with more interesting injuries.
