The Decoy Burns

I have watched a good many things happen slowly in my life. A teakettle coming to the boil. My mother's hands, in the last year, losing their grip on a cup. A child's face as she works out that the world is bigger than the room. But I have never watched anything happen so slowly, or so fast, as that car pulling away from the curb.

It moved at a walking pace. It had its low beams on, two soft yellow cones on the wet road, and its taillights, which were red, and the little amber blink of its signal, flashing patiently as it eased into the lane. The two officers inside sat upright and still. I could see the back of the driver's head, the sandy hair, the shoulders squared like a man at a driving test. They were being very careful. They were carrying the most precious thing in the world, in a gray steel box on the back seat, and they were being very careful with it, and that was the point.

Under the bridge, we watched. Nobody spoke.

I stood with my back against a pier and a borrowed coat buttoned to the chin. June was on my left, so close that her shoulder pressed my arm. On my right, Dunleavy stood with the canvas duffel over his shoulder and the empty flashlight in his fist, rigid as a post. A dozen faces turned to the road above us, pale ovals in the dark. The river slid by behind, soundless.

Ten minutes, I thought. Ten minutes, and then the clock begins.

The car reached the end of the block.

It slowed for the red light at the corner of Harmon and River. I saw the taillights brighten, and the signal blink twice more, and the whole machine settle into a patient idle. The light changed. The car rolled forward. It was three lengths from the bridge approach, four. It was passing the mouth of an alley, a narrow black slot between two warehouses, where a streetlight had gone out and a chain-link gate stood half open on a drift of litter.

"There," said June.

She said it very softly. It was not a cry. It was the voice of a girl who has found the last piece of a puzzle on the floor.

…

The motorcycle came out of that alley like a bullet from a barrel.

I did not see it start. I saw it already in motion: a low dark shape, blacker than the dark, with a single headlight that was not lit, and a rider crouched over the handlebars in a hooded jacket, and behind the rider, clinging to his back with one arm, a second figure. A roar tore the evening in two. It was the bark of an engine opened up to its limit, a flat savage howl that bounced off the warehouse walls, and the bike leaned and swerved and shot out across the road at an angle, scattering a puddle in a fan of silver, and came straight at the side of the sedan.

The passenger had something in his hand.

I saw it in the glow of the streetlamp as the bike flashed by: a clear glass bottle, a liter of something, with a twist of white cloth stuffed in its neck. I saw a small orange point at the end of the cloth. A flame the size of a thumb. He drew back his arm, a long, easy, practiced throw, the motion of a man pitching horseshoes. His hand opened.

The bottle turned over once in the air, end over end, turning slowly, spilling a thin bright thread of light.

It struck the hood.

There was a whump, a hollow gulp of sound, a breath of air being inhaled. A sheet of flame sprang up from the front of the sedan and rolled across the windshield and over the roof in a smooth bright wave, orange and yellow and curling blue at the edges. The glass cracked with a pop. The tires screamed. The car lurched sideways, the wheel yanked hard, and plunged across the lane and struck the guardrail with a screech and a boom of crumpling steel, and stopped, steaming, with its nose in the weeds and fire pouring from under the hood.

The motorcycle was gone. I heard its engine rise and fall and rise, tearing off through the warren of lanes behind the warehouses, a thin metallic laughter dwindling to nothing.

"Down!" shouted Dunleavy. "Everyone down!"

But we were all standing. We stood under the bridge and stared at the fire, and I heard my own voice say, quite calmly, "Oh."

…

The doors of the car flew open.

The two officers fell out, one on each side, rolling over and over on the wet asphalt with their coats afire at the hem and their hands over their faces. The woman was screaming. The man was beating at his sleeve. Both of them were alive, I saw, both whole, both thrashing and coughing and crawling away from the burning shell on their elbows, shouting for water, for a fire extinguisher, for anyone.

"Medic!" someone bellowed on the road. "Officers down! We need a medic at Harmon and River!"

The woman on the bench leapt up. The joggers broke into a run. A man in a puffy coat dashed down the embankment with a red extinguisher in his hands, and I realized he was the one who had been walking the dog. Cars on the road braked and honked. Horns blared. People climbed out of their vehicles and stood in the headlights with their hands to their mouths. And above all of it, the burning sedan stood with its back to the sky like a funeral pyre, sending up a thick black column of smoke that unfolded against the last sullen red of the west.

I heard June draw a quick breath beside me.

My knees went.

It happened without my permission. One moment I was standing upright, and the next the strength simply ran out of my legs, like water from a cracked jug, and I slid down the face of the pier until I was sitting in the mud with my back against the stone. The stones were wet and cold. I put my hands on my face.

I had seen it.

I had seen the gray case. I had watched two officers carry it across the road between them with their heads up, like pallbearers, and place it carefully in the back seat. I had watched the lamplight shine on it. And I had stood there, in a borrowed coat, in the dark, watching it go. In my mind I had followed it all the way: down the block, past the light, into the alley. I had known what was in it. I had known it was only books. I had known all of that, and still, as the flames reared over the windshield, a thin high voice at the back of my skull had cried out, Mother's secret! It's all she left me!

Because if I had put the real thing in that box, if I had let it go in the car, as I would have, as I'd have done a hundred times out of a hundred, if I had been alone, if I had been the careful, trusting woman who believed in procedure...

"Mom."

A small hand took mine.

"Mom. It's all right. It's all right. Look at me."

I looked up. June was kneeling in the mud, her face a pale blur in the firelight, her hair stuck to her cheeks. She was smiling. It was a shaky, startled, terrible smile, and I knew at once that she was frightened out of her wits, and that she was doing it for me.

"We won," she whispered. "Mom. We won. It's not here. They took it. They took the wrong one."

"They—"

"They took the box with the books in it."

I started to laugh. It came up through my chest in a thick wet choke, and I put my hand over my mouth and held on, and I couldn't stop. I laughed and cried together, in the mud, while the sedan burned. My daughter held my hand in both of hers.

…

"Your daughter guessed right."

Dunleavy stood over us.

He had not moved from his place. He had not so much as turned his head, I think, while the world exploded on the road. He stood with the canvas bag over his shoulder and his eyes fixed on the fire, his face hard and carved and unreadable, red on one side with the glow. His voice, when he spoke, was low and very rough, the voice of a man who has been holding something up for a long time with his bare hands.

"She did," I said.

"Hell of a kid."

"Yes."

"I've been wrong about most things today." He did not look down. "But I'm not sorry I was wrong about her."

Above us, the bridge had gone to pieces. The traffic had stopped dead, a long line of cars in both lanes with their hazard lights blinking, and the pavement was full of people. A woman in a business suit was screaming something about her phone. A man in a Browns jersey had taken out a camera and was filming the flames. Sirens had begun to wail in the distance, rising and falling, coming closer. In the confusion, two uniformed patrolmen had run to the burning car and pulled the officers clear, and a third was dragging a fire extinguisher across the road.

I watched it all from under the pier, from the mud, from a long way off.

I did not see the man go by.

I don't think anyone did. It was June, again, who saw him, with that sidelong glance of hers, the quick, bright, unfocused look of a small animal that senses a shadow in the corner of its eye. She stiffened. She lifted her chin.

"There," she said.

I turned my head.

At the edge of the light, thirty yards away, a figure was moving along the base of the embankment.

He kept low. He kept to the shadow of the wall, where the glow of the fire did not reach, and he moved quickly and lightly, in a crouching run, with his elbows tucked in. A hood, I thought. A hat. He was not tall. He was slight, narrow in the shoulders, and he ran like a boy, springy and tireless, on the balls of his feet. As he passed under a gap in the bridge deck, a shaft of orange light from the burning car fell across his head and showed me, for half a second, a cap.

A baseball cap. Gray. With a curved bill, frayed at the edge.

"The hat," June said, in a voice that did not sound like hers.

"What?"

"The boy. The hat. He was at my school." She was on her feet. "Mom, that's him. That's the one with the card."

He did not run toward the fire. He did not run away from it. He ran straight along the foot of the embankment toward a square dark opening in the stone, a wide round mouth with a rusted iron grating hanging askew, the outfall of a storm drain, big enough for a man to walk upright. I saw him glance back once. I saw the shadow of the cap's brim cross his face. Then he swung himself over the lip of the pipe and dropped, light as a cat, into the dark.

"Tran!" roared Dunleavy. "Tran! The drain!"

Devon was already running. He crossed the stones in great bounding strides, pistol up, and I heard him shout something, and I saw his flashlight beam leap into the black pipe and swing wildly along the wet ribbed wall. Nothing. A dripping. A hollow echo. A scuffle of feet on the stones, fading.

…

It was then that I noticed the old man.

I would not have seen him at all if I had not been looking for something, anything, to take my eyes from the fire. He stood on the other side of the pier from us, a little apart, at the edge of the shadows, where the stones ran down into the river: an old man in the faded blue uniform of a city sanitation worker, with a reflective stripe across the chest and a knitted cap pulled down over his ears. He was bent. He was small and stooped and slow, with a thin white mustache and a face as seamed as a walnut. In his right hand he carried a tool I had seen a thousand times in the hands of men who pick up trash along the highway: a long steel rod with a handle at one end and a pair of jaws at the other, a grabber, a pincer, the kind that closes when you squeeze the trigger.

He was walking toward us.

He was not hurrying. He moved at the careful trudge of a man with a bad hip, picking his way over the stones, and every few steps he stopped and bent and jabbed the pincer at a scrap of paper or a bottle cap, and dropped it in the canvas sack at his belt. A man at work. A man who had come to do a small, dull, thankless job on a night when nobody else would. I had seen him a dozen times, I thought, working the roads, in the rain, in the dark, and never looked.

His eyes did not follow the fire.

I noticed that last of all. Everyone else on that river bank, every living soul, had their face turned toward the flames, the burning car, the broken guardrail, the shouting men. His was turned the other way. His pale eyes, under the shelf of the cap, were fixed, quite steadily, on one thing, and they never wavered. He was looking at the stained canvas duffel on Dunleavy's shoulder.

He came on. Step. Tap. Step. Tap. The long steel rod swung at his side.

"Sergeant," I said, in a thin voice.

But Dunleavy was looking at the drain.