Red Shoes

I was out of the car before Devon could stop me.

I don't remember opening the door. I remember the cold slapping my face, and the gravel of the shoulder under my sneakers, and the long concrete flight of steps that led down from the road to the river, thirty-one of them, each with a worn lip and a crust of frozen mud. I took them two at a time. I took the last six in a leap. Behind me Devon was shouting my name in a voice that cracked at the top, and I paid no more attention to it than I would to a bird. I had heard it. I had heard the small tinny ringing of a telephone in the dark under the bridge and the sound that came after, a woman's wail, thin as a wire. And I knew.

I had known since the list. Since the last line.

They always come at the person standing next to you.

By the time I reached the bottom, Dunleavy had the phone clamped to his ear with both hands. He stood in the weeds at the edge of the stones with his back bent and his shoulders hunched, as though he had been struck in the stomach. My mother was beside him with her hand half raised toward his arm, not touching. The ring of watchers had closed, a loose circle of plain people in coats, no longer pretending to do anything. The old man with the dog had put the dog down.

"Colleen," Dunleavy said. "Colleen, listen. Listen to me."

I stopped three feet away.

The voice from the phone was too loud. It leaked out of the speaker like steam, in bursts, in hiccups, a sound I knew from the stairwell, the sound of a person who has been crying so hard that she has to stop in the middle of words to breathe. I caught pieces. School. Four o'clock. He said. His brother. Pete. Said you couldn't. Said you got held up—

"Slow down."

"—said you sent him, Frank, he had the card, the pickup card, I didn't—I wasn't there, I got the call from the school, Mrs. Abbott called, she said Danny's gone home with his uncle and I said he doesn't have an uncle, and she said—"

"Colleen."

"—I don't have a brother-in-law. You don't have a brother. Frank, you're an only child—"

"Colleen. Stop."

He said it quietly. It was an extraordinary thing, how quiet he said it, in that voice like a wooden plank. And the woman on the phone stopped. I heard her gasp in the silence, the hitch and rasp of a swallowed sob, and the faint hum of an empty room.

"I'm here," Dunleavy said. "I'm right here. You did right to call. Where are you standing?"

"The kitchen."

"Is anyone with you?"

A pause.

It was a very short pause. A breath's width. But I was watching his face when he asked it, and I saw his eyes narrow, and I saw the corner of his mouth go still.

"No," said Colleen. "No. I'm— I'm alone."

…

"What color shoes is Danny wearing today?"

He said it so gently that for a moment I didn't understand what he'd asked. It seemed a mad question. It was the question of a man asking about the weather while the house burned. My mother glanced up sharply. Devon, coming down the last of the steps with his hand on his holster, stopped as though he'd hit a wall.

There was a silence on the line.

It went on. It was a long silence, and an odd one, filled with a faint electronic grain, like the sound of a held breath over a bad connection. I could hear a refrigerator hum. I could hear, behind the humming, very far off, a clock. I thought of a kitchen with a yellow floor, a table with a checked cloth, a woman in a cardigan standing with her back to a wall. And I thought of a boy of ten in a school hallway with his coat half on and a stranger's hand around his wrist.

Then Colleen said something, so low and so choked that I only heard the shape of it. Dunleavy pressed the phone harder to his head.

"Say it again."

"Red."

The word cracked in the middle.

"Red. They're red, Frank. His red ones."

I watched a change come over Frank Dunleavy.

It was not what I expected. He did not shout. He did not run. He did not do any of the things that a man does in a film when a child is taken. The blood did not leave his face; it was already gray. What happened was smaller and more terrible. Everything in him went tight and still, the way a rope goes still when it has taken the whole weight of what hangs from it. His hand on the phone did not shake. His eyes, in the white wash of the flashlight, became two hard bright flat disks.

He lowered his head.

"Thank you, honey," he said. "That's good. That's very good. You did exactly right."

…

My mother touched his sleeve.

"What does it mean?" she whispered. "Frank, what is it? What's wrong with red?"

He didn't hear her. Or he heard and couldn't answer, because the voice on the phone was speaking again, hurried and faint, and he was listening with his whole body. I took a step closer. I was not supposed to. I couldn't help it. I put my hand on my mother's arm and drew her down to my level, and she bent her head, and I said it into her ear as softly as I could.

"Danny doesn't wear red."

"What?"

"It's a code. He told us at the station. This morning. He said, 'Colleen and I have a thing, a word, for when it's bad.' I wasn't supposed to hear." I drew a breath. "Red shoes. Danny hates them. He's had them since he was six and won't put them on. When Colleen says Danny's wearing his red shoes, it means—"

"It means somebody is standing next to her," said my mother, very quietly.

"Yes."

"And she can't say."

"She can't say, and she can't say no, and the line's not safe." I felt my own voice shake. "It means he's listening, Mom. Whoever picked Danny up. He's in the house, or the phone is, or both. And she's telling Frank to be careful what he says."

My mother's face went blank. She put her hand over her mouth.

Dunleavy straightened.

"Colleen," he said. "I want you to do something. I want you to do exactly what I tell you, and I don't want you to be afraid. You're going to be fine. We're going to be fine. Do you hear me?"

"Yes."

"Whatever anyone tells you to do, you do it. Don't argue. Don't try to be brave. Don't hang up on me. Stay on the line, no matter what. If he asks you to go somewhere, you go. If he asks you to give him something, you give it to him." He swallowed. "Whatever he wants, honey. Whatever. It's a thing. It's only a thing."

"Frank—"

"I love you," said Dunleavy. "I'm coming."

He had a pad of yellow paper in his coat, a small cheap thing with a spiral at the top, and a stub of pencil. I watched him take them out with his free hand. He did it without looking, the way a man reaches for his glasses. He put the pad against his thigh and wrote, in square capitals, pressing hard, and tore off the sheet and held it up to Devon without a word.

The page said: PHONE COMPROMISED. HER LINE + MINE. NO NAMES. NO PLACES.

Devon read it. He read it twice. Then his face closed, and he turned and ran back up the bank, two steps at a time, with his radio to his mouth, and I heard his voice rise, thin and urgent, snapping out the name of a school and a street.

…

I stood on the stones under the bridge with the river at my back.

I want to say what I felt, because it surprised me. It wasn't fear. I had been afraid so long, for so many nights, that the thing had worn smooth, like a stone in a creek. What I felt, standing there, was recognition. It was the slow cold click of a lock that fits.

I knew this.

I had seen it before. I had seen it in a stairwell with a card jammed in the latch and a shoe on a landing. I had seen it in a hallway full of smoke. It was a pattern. It was a game, and I understood the rules at last, as one understands a language one has heard for years without a word of it in the head, and then, one day, in the middle of a sentence, it all falls into meaning.

He didn't hit hard. He hit exact.

He found the thing you loved. Not the thing that made you strong, not your gun, your badge, your years on the force, but the one small soft place in the armor, the child's red shoe, the code you'd made in a kitchen at midnight, and he put his thumb on it. He did it quietly. He did it from a long way off. He didn't even have to be there. And he did it to each of us in turn, as if laying out a row of cards. My mother, with her box and her mother. Me, with my death. Lyle Cobb, with his cough. Rhonda Tillis, with something he held over her. And now a tired old cop with a toothpick, and a boy of ten who hated his red shoes.

He puts the weak places on the table, I thought. And then he turns them over, one by one.

A card at a time. And the person watching never sees the hand.

"June," said my mother. "What is it?"

I didn't answer. I was looking at the bridge.

It stood above us in the dusk, a flat black bar against the red, and I looked at it and thought of all the things in my life that had pulled me away from a place at exactly the moment I had to stay. A fire alarm. A phone call. A friend at the door. It was always something good, something kind, something that called you by name. Someone picked Danny up from school. A child. A sweet boy. A father's heart.

The list. The tube. The brick. The phone.

I looked at the tube in Dunleavy's pocket, and the hole in the pier, and the quiet black river sliding by. And for the first time in many days, I felt a small cold clear thing rise inside me, like a bubble through dark water. It was not hope. It was something older and harder than hope. It was the feeling you get when you are playing a long game against someone smarter than you and you finally, for one moment, see the board.

I took my mother's hand.

"Mom," I said, very low. "Listen. He didn't call him here to scare him."

"Then why—"

"Because he wants him gone." I tightened my grip. "He's pulling him away. The whole bridge. The evidence, the men. The meeting. All of it. They don't want him here."

I let go of her.

I turned. Dunleavy was still on the phone. He had his eyes closed and his free hand pressed against his chest, over the pocket where the folded list lay, murmuring, I know, honey, I know, hold on. I walked straight up to him over the loose stones and stood in front of him until he opened his eyes.

"Sergeant Dunleavy," I said.

He looked down at me. His face was shattered.

"They're pulling you away from the bridge."