Twenty Minutes

They found the jacket first.

It lay in the road beside the ruined van, folded, I swear it, folded in thirds with the sleeves crossed over the chest like the arms of a dead man. The smoke had cleared by then. The white cloud had thinned to rags and tatters that drifted off over the fence into the black trees, and the van sat in the lamplight, stripped and empty, with its back window punched out and a long scorch down the undercarriage. Someone had set the jacket neatly on the gravel at its nose. A dark blue patrol jacket. Silver buttons. A name tag on the breast.

Devon crouched and turned the tag to the light.

"Pruitt," he read.

"That isn't his name," I said.

"No." His voice was flat. "It's the name on the coat."

…

I will tell you what the rest of that hour was like, because I have never told it to anyone, and I think it was the longest I ever lived.

It was not loud. I had thought it would be. I'd thought there would be sirens, shouting, blue light on the trees. But the noise came in pieces, the way sound comes through a wall. Down at the west gate a hearse was parked at a crooked angle with its hazard lights blinking and its door flung open. Beside it, bolt upright, with his clipboard clutched in both hands and a look of the most profound personal affront on his face, stood Mr. Pell.

"I did it as he said," he told Dunleavy, for the third time. "One long and two short. I held the telephone to the steering wheel, as the young man showed me, and I did it eleven times. I should like it noted that I did it eleven times."

"It's noted, Mr. Pell."

"I should like it noted that I have never in my life—"

"Mr. Pell." Dunleavy put a heavy hand on his shoulder. "You're the best undertaker in the city of Cleveland. Go and sit down."

He had come down the hill at a run, and it had cost him. His face was a slab of wet putty in the glare of the lamps, his collar was torn open, and he held his left side with one hand as if something under his ribs had given way. He had a smear of black soot across his forehead. When he reached me he did not say anything at all. He simply put both arms around me, big and rough and smelling of sweat and gun oil, and held on.

I let him.

I counted to ten. Then I said into his coat, "He's got her."

"I know, kiddo."

"He said half past nine."

"I know." His arm tightened once. "I heard you on the phone. Brandt's got a recording."

"Brandt's alive?"

"Brandt's alive."

…

They'd been in the lodge.

I heard it in pieces, from Devon and Yoon and a medic who was wrapping my hand. A coffee thermos on a desk. A pair of paper cups, a sweetish chemical smell. Detective Brandt had been found in the caretaker's chair with her chin on her chest and her braid hanging over her shoulder, breathing slow and deep as a sleeper. Officer Yoon lay on the floor beside her. Yoon's dog, a small brown mutt with an anxious face, was curled in her lap in a heap and would not wake up either, and she wept over it, a short round woman in a black coat, with her face in its fur.

"It's a sedative," said the medic. "Not a heavy one. They'll be sore." He knotted the gauze. "They're lucky. He could've done much worse."

"He did what he needed," said Dunleavy.

He stood a little apart, with his arms crossed, and he was looking at nothing. He had been looking at nothing for several minutes. At the top of the hill, in the white beams of the lamps, men in dark windbreakers moved among the stones in pairs. There were four of them. I had counted. They were the men he had hidden in the pines that afternoon, with no radio and no wire, on his own authority and against his word, and when I'd asked him he'd given me a crooked tired smile.

"Eleven," he'd said, "is a number I made up on the way down the hill."

…

"Pruitt," said Devon.

He had the jacket spread out on the hood of a squad car, with its lining turned out, and he had a pen-light in his teeth. He took it out. "Raymond Joseph Pruitt. Patrol, Second District. It's right here. Badge number, serial, the lot." He swallowed. "He's real. There's a real one."

"Where is he?"

"He hasn't been seen since Sunday. His wife thought he was on shift." Devon's face was gray. "The man who came in Monday had his number, his file, his transfer sheet. Frank, I ran it. It all checked out."

"It would."

"He sat in the van."

"He sat in the van," said Dunleavy. "He came with a transfer sheet and a letter, and a sergeant who'd been told to expect him. You don't forge that, Devon. You buy it. Somebody in a building I walk past every morning sold him a dead week and a real man's name." He took a breath and let it out through his teeth. "Somebody's gone to the real Pruitt's house. Somebody's going to find something I won't like."

Nobody said anything.

"It's not your fault," said Dunleavy, quietly.

"It is."

"It's mine. I signed off on you both. I picked the van." He rubbed his face with a thick hand. "Boy, I'm sixty-one years old. I've been fooled by better. I'll be fooled by worse."

I looked at them, the old man and the young one, with the dark hill behind them and the broken van in the lamplight, and I thought, they're afraid of me.

I don't mean that cruelly. I mean that they had stopped looking at me as a girl in a coat and begun looking at me as a clock. Dunleavy glanced at his wrist.

"Nine-oh-eight," he said.

…

"Twenty-two minutes," I said.

I'd been counting in my head since Voss's voice had left the phone. It was a thing I had learned to do in the other life. You count, and you hold the number in your hand like a stone, and it keeps you from floating off.

"It's twelve minutes by car to the lake end of the lane," said Devon. "If there's no traffic."

"There's traffic."

"We'd have to leave right now."

"We're not going," said Dunleavy.

I turned.

He was looking at the dark hill. "There are three places in this city called Riverview," he said. "A street, a park, a bridge. He's given us one name, and a time, and no direction. He's counting on the girl to know which."

"I don't."

"I know you don't."

"I might."

He looked at me.

I had not said it as a boast. I'd said it as one says the weather. But I saw him hear it, and I saw his shoulders change, and he beckoned to a man at the edge of the light. "Brandt's sitting up. Get me a map. A real one, paper, not a screen." He turned back. "Show me, kiddo."

…

They spread it on the hood of the hearse.

Mr. Pell gave up his flashlight with a stately bow. It was a street map of the old city, the kind they sold at gas stations in the days before screens, soft with age and ironed flat. It smelled of dust and coffee. A man pinned its corners with a pair of radios and a battered thermos. I knelt on the bumper in the cold and the bright and bent over it, and above me the faces came crowding in a ring, Dunleavy, Devon, Yoon with her eyes swollen, Brandt, white as milk, leaning on her arm.

"The strip," I said.

Someone put it in my hand.

They'd found it in the hollow, I learned later, lying in the ivy beside a place where the leaves were crushed flat in the shape of a body. There was no body. There was a smear of earth, a lost button, a single glove. They had followed a trail of broken stems to a service gate in the east fence, locked, and a pair of tire marks beyond it in the mud. And there, in the black ground, wrapped carefully in a handkerchief where a pair of hands had laid it, lay a flat rusted blade of iron, the length of my hand.

RIVERVIEW.

I laid it on the map.

I did not place it anywhere. I only held it in my fingers, with its pointed end hanging over the city like the needle of a compass, and let my eyes go soft. It is a thing I do. The spaces between the streets swam together. The blue of the river bent in its elbow. And gradually, as the mind clears its throat, four small shapes came forward out of the lines and stood.

"There," I said.

I put my finger down. It was a small gray square at the edge of the river flats. Riverview Photo, said the print. A single narrow lane behind it.

"There." The old Vital Records annex on the hill.

"There." The Harmon Street Bridge, a thick black stroke across the water.

"And there." A square building near the lake, with a name I knew from a dream: Brightpath.

"Four," said Brandt hoarsely.

"Four points. Four places where something's happened." I took a breath. "A photo shop. An annex. A bridge. A school. And look." I moved my finger. "Under all of them. Here, and here. There's a line."

They leaned closer. It was a faint, broken line of dots, hardly visible, printed in a gray lighter than the streets. It ran from the river flats up through the cemetery's western edge, along the bluff, under the old rail yards, to the lake. I had seen such dots on maps in the library. They marked something that wasn't there anymore.

"The air-raid tunnels," said Dunleavy slowly. "From the war. They dug 'em under half the east side. The city sealed 'em in the sixties. I thought they'd all been filled."

"They weren't."

"How would you know?"

"Because he walked out of a flower house in the middle of a ring of a hundred men." I swallowed. "And you didn't see him go."

…

For a moment nobody said anything. The wind moved the pines. In the distance a train sounded, long and low and mournful.

I looked at the map. I looked at the iron strip, with its crude hammered letters, and at the four little squares. And something that had been a knot in my chest for an hour slowly came undone.

"He wants me to come alone," I said.

"No," said Dunleavy.

"Listen to me. If he knew which Riverview, he'd have said so. He'd have said a street. He'd have said a door." I tapped the paper. "He said Riverview Alley. It doesn't exist. There's no such place on this map. There's no alley called that in the city. He gave us a name, and a time, and an empty space. Because he doesn't know where it is."

Brandt drew a breath.

"He's been looking for it for twenty years. He's followed every road she laid. He's dug up every box. And every time, there was nothing there." I laid my hand flat on the map. "He thinks I can read it. He thinks I'm the one thing Grandma made that he can't buy and can't burn. He doesn't want me to meet him, Captain. He wants me to show him."

"Which is precisely why you're not going in there."

"If I don't, he kills her."

"He may do it anyway."

"He won't." I looked up. "Not until he's got what he's come for."

Dunleavy stared at me. His jaw worked. The toothpick, which had been gone since the van, was back between his teeth, and he rolled it from one side of his mouth to the other.

"No one goes in," he said.

"I'll go to the head of the alley."

"June."

"The head. Where the street ends and it begins. I'll stand where you can all see me, with the lamps on and your men on the roofs and the whole of the lane lit up like a ballpark." I held his eyes. "It's the only place he'll let me stand. And it's the only place you can reach me from."

He didn't answer.

I watched the muscles in his face, in the bright of the hearse's light. I watched him weigh it, a man who had spent forty years deciding which of two bad things to do. I watched him think of a bathroom in a burning apartment, and a lamp-lit annex, and a girl who had never once been wrong about a door. He closed his eyes.

Two seconds. Three.

When he opened them they were calm.

"Right," said Dunleavy. "Team one. Open. In the street, in uniform, at the head of the lane, where he can see you. Let him look. Team two. Every manhole, every grate, every cellar door along the river flats. I want the tunnel mouths sealed before she walks in." He pointed. "Team three comes with me, to the annex. If there's a door under it, I want to be on the other side."

"And me?" said Devon.

"You stay with the girl. You don't leave her. Not for a second. Not for a cup of coffee."

"Yes, sir."

Dunleavy turned. He looked down at me a long moment. I saw, for an instant, the deep exhausted fear in him, and under it a flicker of something that I will not call pride, because I am not vain.

"Only the head of the alley, kid," he said. "Not one step more."

"Only the head of the alley, Captain." I folded the iron strip into my palm, and it bit me with its rust. "If I take one more step, you take me away."