The Empty Seat

I was still holding the microphone when Devon came back.

I had been holding it for what felt like a year. I had my thumb on the key and my mouth against the grille, and I had been saying, over and over, in a voice that cracked and thinned with each repetition, Mom, Mom, get away, Mom, run. There was no answer. The earpiece in the van's roof gave out a high flat hiss like a kettle left on, and the hiss did not change when I spoke. I had shouted into it until my throat was raw. I had understood perfectly well, by the third time, that the channel was dead.

Still I said it. It was the only thing I could do.

The door crashed open.

Cold air poured in, and with it Devon Tran, bent double, gasping, one hand on the frame. His hair was plastered to his forehead. There was mud to the knees of his uniform and a long scratch down one cheek, and in his free hand he carried his flashlight like a club. He fell across the threshold and slid the door shut behind him with a bang that shook the van.

"Gone," he panted. "He's gone. Little bastard went over a wall."

"Devon—"

"I had him. I had him, I was twenty feet—a kid. Seventeen, maybe. Cap pulled down. He bolted before I rounded the tree. I chased him through two lots and a hedge and he just—" He drew a heaving breath. "He went over a wall. Like a cat. I lost him in the dark."

"Devon, listen—"

"There's something wrong with the net. I couldn't raise Yoon. I couldn't raise anyone." His eyes went to the radio in my hand, and the whole of his face changed. "June. What happened?"

"Look at the screen."

He looked.

…

I do not know how to tell you what was on the screen.

There were six squares, as there had been all night. Four were black. I had watched them go, one after another, in the time it had taken Devon to run to the tree and back, each blinking out with a tiny click, like a window shutting. The gate was gone. The bench was gone. The angel, the road. Only two remained, the lodge and the hill, and the lodge was a gray blur of snow.

The sixth square was still bright.

It showed the clearing at the end of the lane. I saw the stone with no name. I saw the rust-eaten bowl on its three iron legs. I saw a hole, a dark neat rectangle in the earth, and a bundle in the hole, and two figures standing over it.

One was my mother.

She stood very still with her arms at her sides. Her hair was loose. Her face was turned up and a little away, and I couldn't tell from that distance what it showed, but the line of her shoulders was a thing that I have never forgotten: a straight, taut, bowed-back line, like a tree in a high wind that has made up its mind not to break.

The other was a tall man in a coat.

He had risen from his knees. He stood with his back three-quarters to us, a big dark shape with a mask over the lower half of his face and a cap pulled low, and in his arms, held against his chest like a sleeping child, he had the bundle. He had unwrapped a corner of the oilcloth. It hung from his forearm in a long black tongue. His head was bent over it. He seemed to be listening.

"Who's that?" Devon whispered. "June. Who's that with her?"

"I don't know."

"Where's Brandt? Where's—"

"I don't know."

We watched. There was nothing else to do. Devon's hand closed on the back of my seat, white at the knuckles. He leaned toward the screen, so close that his breath fogged the glass, and I saw his lips move without a sound, come on, come on, come on.

And on the screen, the man in the coat raised his head.

…

It was a long, slow, deliberate movement.

He turned. He turned all the way round, the whole broad body, until he stood square to the hill and the dark and the pines. He stood in the moonlight with the bundle in the crook of his arm. And then, with the air of a man who has been waiting for a particular instant, he lifted his chin and looked straight up into the lens.

There was a camera in the pines. It was a small black box clamped to a branch fifty yards above him. I had known it was there. I had watched it, all night, as a child watches a sleeping animal. And I knew, as one knows such things, that he had known too. That he had known the location of every lens and every wire since the day the Captain put them up. He did not search for it. He looked straight at it, across the gap of dark, with a calm, mild, unhurried gaze, as one looks at an old friend across a crowded room.

He raised his hand to his face.

He took hold of the edge of the black cloth with two fingers. He drew it down, slowly, with a kind of ceremonial grace, over the chin, over the throat, until it hung at his collar like a bib.

I saw the face.

It was a big pale face with a gray crew cut. It was a mild, lined, patient face, the face of a man who has spent his life listening to other people's troubles. The eyes were small and bright behind a pair of rimless glasses. The mouth was a thin, kind, regretful line. It tilted at the corner. It smiled.

I knew it.

I had known it all night. I had sat across a van from it for two hours. It had given me a stick of gum. It had said, Your mother's very brave, miss. It had said, My knees, and Would you mind terribly, and I had undone the lock for it with my own hand.

"No," said Devon.

"It's him."

"No. No, that's not—that's Pruitt. That's Ray."

"He was in the van." My voice came out high and strange. "He was just here. He was sitting right there."

I turned my head.

…

The folding seat by the door was empty.

It had been empty, I realized, for a long time. It had been empty since the moment he had said my knees, since the click of the lighter and the little orange bloom outside the window. I had looked at the glow of his cigarette and told myself that he was stretching. I had looked at the corner of the van and seen a man's shape and told myself he was waiting. I had not once looked back. I had been so busy watching the trees.

The seat was a plain gray plastic thing, cracked, with a torn cushion. In the middle of it, neatly set, as though it had been placed there by a servant, lay a policeman's cap.

It was dark blue, with a black visor and a silver badge. Under the brim, pinned flat against the cushion by its own weight, was a small white card. I leaned out of my seat and drew it forth with two fingers. It was laminated, the size of a driver's license. The photograph was of a heavy pale face with rimless glasses, a face I had been looking at on the screen not thirty seconds before. It was a good likeness.

The name, printed beneath in block type, had been struck out.

Someone had drawn a single hard line through it, with a black marker, from one end to the other. They had pressed so hard that the pen had torn the plastic. Where the first name had been, and the surname, there was nothing but a smear, like a dark wound. Below, in small print: CLEVELAND POLICE, SECOND DISTRICT.

Never his name, I thought. No name at all.

"Devon," I said.

"Yes."

"Open the door."

…

He tried it.

I watched him do it, as I would watch a man try a wall. He put his hand on the latch, a plain chrome lever, and pulled, and it clicked and rattled and did not move. He pulled it again. He braced his boot against the side and threw his weight back, and the whole van shuddered on its springs, and the door did not give an inch.

"It's locked."

"From the inside?"

"From the—" He stopped. He bent and peered at the sill. The little plunger, the button that sits flush with the panel, was pressed down into its socket. He ran his fingers along it. "No. It's—someone's pushed it. From the outside. There's a way. A strip of wire through the seal." He looked up. His face in the screen's cold glow was the color of a candle. "All four. All four are down."

"The window—"

"The windows are armored. They're bulletproof. It's a surveillance van, June; it's meant to be—" He swallowed the rest.

He seized the radio from my hand. He turned the dial. He slammed the key. A tide of gray static poured out, a rushing, hollow, ocean sound, and he held it to his ear, and turned the dial, and turned it, and it did not change. There was no channel. There was no Captain. There was only the hiss of an empty sea.

Then, under the hiss, under the floor, I heard it.

Tick.

It was a very small sound. So small that I thought for a moment it was my pulse. Tick. Tick. Tick. It came up through the metal and the rubber of the floor mat into my sneakers. It was dry and quick and even, a cool precise patter like rain beginning on a roof. And in the air of the van, beneath the damp and the diesel and the sweet rot of florist's leaves, there stole in a new thin smell. Sweet. Hot. Burnt sugar in a pan.

Devon heard it, too.

I saw him hear it. I saw his head go up. His mouth opened and shut, and the radio dropped from his hand and clattered on the floor.

"What is that?" he whispered.

I didn't answer. I had gone very cold. The cold came up through my knees and my belly into my chest, and it carried with it a thing I had not felt since the bathroom of apartment 1704, the first night, the first life. A small bright clear thing. A voice that said, quietly, you know this.

You've heard it before.

I looked at the van.

It was a plain white panel van with a rack of shelves and a folding bench, a stack of empty bouquet boxes, a roll of green paper. A tin pail of wilted gerbera stood in a corner, a cheerful orange. A hundred things, none of which meant anything. Then, in the rear corner, bolted to the pillar by two red plastic brackets, my eyes found a squat steel tool the size of a hatchet.

"The hammer," I said.

"What?"

"The emergency hammer. On the pillar." I was already moving. "Every van has one. It's the law."

I wrenched it out of its clips. It came away heavy in my hand, ugly and blunt, with a point on one end like a bird's beak. I stumbled across the swaying floor to the back window, a small square pane of tinted glass, and set my feet, and lifted it in both hands over my head.

Tick. Tick. Tick. It had quickened.

I brought it down with all my weight.

The hammer rang like a bell. The shock went up my arms to my shoulders and exploded in my teeth. My hands went white, then red, then numb, as if I had struck an anvil. The glass did not crack. It did not so much as scratch. I looked down at the point of impact. There was a tiny pale star in the center of the pane, no bigger than a dime.

My fingers would not close.