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“Why are you carrying a knife?”
“Because.”
Will waited.
“Things are dangerous in this city,” John said.
“Make sure it’s not used on you. And make sure you tell a police officer you have it if he ever starts to search you.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, with sarcastic emphasis.
“Relax, John. I’m not your enemy.”
John sat upright and fiddled with his pants. “Check this out, Will. Now that you’re cool and all…”
John unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis. Even in the ambient light, Will could see something like a small carabiner attached to its head. No, it was more like a crescent or curved barbell.
“What is that?”
“They call it a Prince Albert piercing,” John said. “This is what the chicks dig.”
“That looks like it hurts. Can you pee?” Will stopped looking.
“Not a problem,” John said.
“You can put it away now,” Will said, and John did. Will wished he had something stronger than the beer. He started to ask if his mother knew he had done that with the money she gave him, but stopped himself.
They drank in silence until John spoke again.
“How did you handle seeing all those dead bodies over the years?”
“You get used to it,” Will said. “Or you get another job. You try to think about doing your job, finding the bad guy.”
“I gotta go.” John stood up. “I’ll put the bottle downstairs. Want another one?”
“No, I’ll fall asleep. Can’t drink like I once could.”
In a minute, he watched John walk to his car and drive away.
As the quiet returned to the street, Will wondered why John had visited him, had chosen tonight, and had waited for him outside. Why had he put a piece of metal through his penis and felt the need to show it? Will was a man whose training and experience had made him a skeptic, even with his own family, perhaps especially with his own family. But John was no longer a boy and had long ago slipped the influence of his parents. Maybe John merely wanted to see how his stepfather was holding up.
“How are you?” John had asked. That commonplace greeting was always given in the expectation of a simple return: “fine.” The person asking it didn’t really want to know how you were. Will had done the same thing a hundred thousand times in his life before his surgery. Now he dutifully said, “fine,” even if inside he thought, “how much time do you have to hear my answer?”
How was he? His latest MRI scan had shown the area inside his spinal cord where the tumor had chosen to do its damage to be “stable,” the doctor said. That was good news. It meant no new tumor. But the neutrality of the word carried incredible weight. How was he? He couldn’t really feel touch on his belly or trunk below the tumor zone. The same numbness appeared in unpredictable patches on down his legs and feet. Thank god he could feel his right foot to drive a car.
He was usually constipated. His right leg was as strong as before. His left leg could barely make a step; he used the swing of his hip to compensate as he walked. That, and the inside muscles of both legs, which he had developed thanks to time with a kinesio-therapist, endlessly raising and lowing himself, knees pointed inward, with his back held straight against a concrete post. He walked with a cane and some days were better than others. After the activity of today, there would be hell to pay tomorrow. That’s how it went. Every. Step. Is. Hard.
How he was: it very much involved the spasms that ruled both legs now. Impulses to and from the brain and legs were scrambled by the damage inside the spinal cord. The result in the right leg centered on his quads. Quadriceps femoris—he had even learned the Latin name. As a normal man, it would have been the strongest muscle in his body. Now, the confusion between brain and muscles, and the fact that the right leg did most of the work walking, left it constantly clenching. The left quads were not so ambitious, simply jumping and thumping as it became tired. He took the maximum dose of Baclofen and Neurontin to make it bearable. Right at the moment, his right quads felt as if they wanted to tear themselves free from the bone, rip the confines of his skin, and fly out into the night like a wild creature.
How did you explain this to anyone?
This was how he was. He hadn’t been shot or otherwise injured in the line of duty. He hadn’t ended up in neurosurgery because of a crackup on a Harley he had foolishly bought to fend off middle age. Will Borders had bad DNA. Instead of a helix, it was the shape of a bull’s eye. Now he qualified for a handicapped placard. People asked him if his leg was getting better. What could you say? He had seen the MRI scans showing the inside of his spinal cord after the surgery: where once the cord had run thick and true, he now literally had threads.
And for all this, John was right: He was mellower, strangely so. It was more than the anti-spasticity drugs. His wife had left him, his body had, well, stabbed him in the back. But, most of the time, he was strangely at peace. He couldn’t understand it. Had he been the victim of an on-the-job injury, he probably would have spent many hours discussing this with a police shrink. As it was, he had the Christian Moerlein, nearly drained, the city skyline, slightly diminished as banks of lights in the towers were turned off. It would have been enough if he didn’t have a murder to solve.
He looked out on his city, wondered who had been on that boat with Kristen Gruber. He wished he knew who had tried the door to her condo. The doorman had been downstairs. They interviewed the neighbors on the floor: Two old ladies. One other condo was empty, on the market. He felt not a little pressure from the chief’s benevolent encouragement earlier that day. If he were really suspicious, Dodds-like suspicious, for Dodds had spent time in police-union politics, he would have worried he was being set up to fail. But that qualm didn’t find purchase in his mind or his maniac quads.
Maybe part of it was the “wow” view. He couldn’t keep his eyes from roaming to the left, into the little jewels of lights on Mount Adams, to Theresa, to her needless death. They had become accidental lovers, yet he wasn’t there to protect her when she needed him most. The weights on his heart that were never gone pulled painfully. Somehow, he let himself think again of Cheryl Beth, without anxiety and regret, and as he did, he fell asleep.
