One

He hated seeing people lined up like that, hunched over those goddamn smorgasbord tables, piling some of everything on their plates, eating until they were sick, only to throw half of it away.

This is what he thought about when she mentioned plans for the holiday.

Well, maybe we could go up to that place, she’d offered. Where they have all you can eat.

She read his eyes.

Forget it, I’ll come up with something, she said.

The holiday had no meaning to him. They were childless. He was forty-six; she, two years younger. Her parents had passed, and her sister was in Seattle. Throat cancer took his mother ten years ago. His father was an older story. Maybe they could have the old man over next Thanksgiving, or the following year. It would take that long to find him. If he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t worth the effort, above or below the ground.

I’m going to shower, he said.

Afterward, he went out the back door. Left her in the kitchen where she fussed with something. The cool air and Lilac Vegetal tightened his pores. He took five minutes to walk the perimeter of their lot. It was an old habit, inspecting his lot line, eighty by one hundred and twenty feet.

Today, he stopped at the west fence, looking across the other back yards, looking at line after line of chain-link. Today, he thought about the tin men, the way two of them sold a thousand dollars worth to his mother, even though their bungalow was brick. They’d worked the area real good that summer. They’d sold a couple of truck loads of aluminum awnings, because a lot of houses were like his mother’s. He’d taken the damn awnings down when he took title. They served no purpose, really. But everywhere else, most of the tin was still up.

The tin men must have been real good to sell a product so marginal, he thought. They knew their jobs. He had to give them that. In his way of thinking, he’d rather see somebody sell an average product well than do a poor sales job on something of quality. He learned that in the Marines. You did your job, and you did it well, no matter what. He liked that old public service announcement, that TV commercial where a guy signed his name on a line he’d just painted on the street. What if you had to sign your name to everything you did? Would you do a better job? That’s the standard he’d embraced.

At the side of the garage, Laurel Kring slid his key into the dead bolt. He’d removed the big garage door and walled in the front. He’d made the garage his study and workshop, built a fake window with a flower box so his wife could dress it up with flowers. He didn’t want some neighborhood punks breaking in, or any niggers. Just last year, two families had moved in up the street. He liked the privacy. He didn’t need windows. He liked exploring worlds more vast than all he could gather with a line of sight through glass.

The sound of the cooling fan from the Compaq desktop greeted him. He’d sunk five grand into the PC and its peripherals. He never turned it off. He liked the sound of the running computer when he came through the workshop door.

When he was working, he listened to Coltraine, or Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He had all their works in vinyl. When they were reissued on CD, he’d bought his favorites and a player for the workshop. He’d been listening since he was a boy, back when WJZZ played beebop and the cool movement, back when he was spending nights alone with the FM in his room. Roland Kirk was a story. A negligent nurse, not doing her job, blinded him when he was two. From this crime and its pain would emerge a prodigious gift. Kirk learned to play forty instruments. He could blow three horns at once. No man could do that. He liked Coltraine’s wailing, but he identified with Kirk.

Today, he loaded A Love Supreme and sat down at the computer. The sweet dissonance of Coltraine’s tenor soon filled the room.

The file was labeled FINAL.LTR. He’d been working on it a little each day, through the first week of his vacation, trying to polish it. The mechanics of writing, conventional sentence structure and organization, had never come easy for him. But he knew his ending. That was good. He was saving it in another file, planning to tack it on the final draft.

Today, he worked again on the part again about his wife. She had been very faithful. He never questioned that. She was there for him when he was discharged in ’68. She was the reason he stayed away from the Saigon whores. Because of her, he’d decided not to sign up for a second tour. That’s what he remembered most when he thought of the first years of their twenty-five.

As for the long haul, most men would never know such a woman. She didn’t run his ass like others he knew, guys who let their wives keep their social calendar, or ran guilt trips when they wanted to do something alone. He never understood that. Women who turned men into little fucking Ken dolls, perfectly good men you could once count on who now had to go to baby showers and birthday parties all the time at their in-laws’. Guys who couldn’t go fishing anymore, or whack clay pigeons at the range. Guys crying at work about their wives saying they needed to spend more time together. You’re fucking them and sleeping with them seven days a week, he used to tell them. Doesn’t that count as time? he’d ask. That’s how he lost all his friends.

No, his wife did not do that shit. And she did not deserve to endure any discomfort, as far as he was concerned. When it came to the issues at hand, she was purely innocent. She had stuck by him, regardless.

He wanted to make that clear.

He moved a couple sentences around. Took one or two words out that might be misinterpreted. Then read the entire letter out loud, listening to see if his tongue tripped over any of the words.

When he was done, he removed the North American Arms Mini-Master Black Widow from his desk drawer and inspected it. The .22 revolver had an oversized black rubber grip, but still was easily concealable with its bull cylinder and two-inch barrel. You could easily slip it into a pair of baggy pants, though one had to be careful of its Millett adjustable rear sight. That could hook on clothing if you had to pull it fast.

When he returned to the living room his wife said. Say hello to Margaret, honey.

Hello, Margaret.

Margaret half smiled, setting down her coffee. She was sitting on the couch, his wife in an easy chair, folding laundry. Oprah droned at low volume on the TV.

Would you like something?

Yeah, ginseng if we got it. He’d discovered ginseng in the East. It didn’t rattle his nerves like coffee.

As the microwave hummed in the kitchen, Margaret, the neighbor, made no conversation. She never said much to him. He’d never heard her say much to his wife, for that matter. Once in a while her mouth would open and produce some mindless statement. Something about sewer work being done up the street or a turn in the weather.

Today, she didn’t even seem capable of that.

He stood and watched the people on the talk show, something about mothers who fucked the boyfriends of their daughters. He really didn’t care what they were saying. He was wondering why they’d all bothered to dress up, buy new clothes and get new haircuts for that show, only to be presented like circus freaks.

He looked again at Margaret. She had a fat ass, but hardly any upper body. He wondered what his wife got out of visiting with a dumb bitch like that.

When his wife returned with the tea, Margaret said, I better go.

I understand, his wife said.

He sat on the couch, but not on the spot where the neighbor had sat.

Here, take your chair, his wife said.

No, you’ve got the laundry.

He liked the way she did the towels. She line dried them right into the final weeks of November. The way he asked.

That was a good woman.

She draped a terry cloth across her lap, taking the corners, folding it neatly. It was very white, he thought, almost glowing. His mouth was dry now, his tongue peppered with ginseng.

We’ll be right back, Oprah said.

He got up now and walked over to her, taking a white hand towel out of the basket, walking behind her. He raised it to his face.

She kept folding.

The towel smelled clean. He felt very clear.

Smell this.

She held it up to her nose briefly.

Yeah, so?

When she turned, he studied her face momentarily. He could see pale skin showing in a crevice untouched by her makeup. He could see a grain of brown in her blue iris, but mostly he saw her smiling. He remembered how she smiled at him like that when he got off the transport from D’Nang. Not all flipped out, just smiling.

No, he said. Really smell it. Like this.

He picked up the towel, laying it flat between his hands and his face, inhaling deeply.

She took the towel.

As she breathed in deeply, he slid the Ruger out of his pants, being careful not to hook the Millet sight on the interior of his pocket. He did it in one motion, the tip of the barrel coming to a stop behind her right ear.

You can smell autumn, he said.

The Black Widow hardly made any noise at all.

A half hour later, he finished the letter, transferring the conclusion from another file, but not letting it stand alone as a separate paragraph. It was from Profiles in Courage, by John F. Kennedy. He’d read one part of that book many times: Kennedy’s description of the Jap destroyer as it steamed down upon them out of the darkness, cutting the PT 109 in half.

John Kennedy did his job, saved his crew, with hardly anything to work with.

Like the tin men.

Laurel Kring pressed the paste key. The text appeared on the screen.

A man does what he must, in spite of obstacles and dangers and personal consequences—and that is the basis of all human morality.

As he printed out the letter, he could hear Coltraine’s notes bouncing off the walls like flies trying to fly through glass.

Two

After the cardiopulmonary technician asked him to open his shirt, she said to Riker, You’re lucky. You don’t have a lot of hair on your chest.

Lucky? he asked.

She held up one of the sensor pads and peeled off the backing.

Adhesive, she said.

She slapped seven of them, one by one, on his bare chest. That pattern looked like somebody had sprayed his upper body with a semiautomatic.

You wouldn’t believe some of the hairy guys that come in here. I always offer to shave them, but no, they want to be tough guys.

When she talked he could smell the Juicy Fruit she was chewing.

There, she said, stepping back to admire her work. You don’t seem like a tough guy. What’s your gig?

Gig?

Yeah, what do you do for a living?

Cop.

Where?

At the airport. Metro.

"Well, I guess you are a tough guy. But most guys your age, they seem to be trying to prove something."

My age? Riker asked, eyeing her.

Riker was forty-six. Give her a bad hangover, deprive her of sleep, she might look twenty-five.

Maybe, Riker said, "These tough guys, as you call them, might just be trying to prove to a young, attractive woman like yourself that they’re not about to drop dead from a heart attack. I mean, Christ, they wouldn’t be in here, would they, if they were the picture of health."

She held up a handful of wires. Okay, now we gotta wire you up.

Worker on autopilot, he thought, running her mouth. She just wanted to hear herself talk. He wondered what she’d be like off the job. Put her in jeans and buy her a couple of beers. She had a nice ass. He liked Juicy Fruit.

He looked her in the eyes. She might as well have been looking at the medical certificates on the wall.

Don’t get me wrong, she said. "You’re not old or anything. What I was saying was just that some of these guys come in here to get one of these monitors. They don’t want to be shaved. But they do have to come back in twenty-four hours. You know? What goes on, must come off."

Riker could feel the adhesive on the silver-dollar-size sensors gripping his skin as she snapped the wire harness onto the pads.

When I take them off, I do it real fast, she continued, mouth running. It usually doesn’t hurt that way. But if you’ve got a lot of hair, well that’s different.

How different?

When you remove about the fifth or sixth one, and you’re taking clumps of hair with each one, you get to see somebody’s real personality, you know what I’m saying?

You’re telling me they don’t fall on their knees and beg you to stop?

Something like that. Most are real jerks.

The technician plugged the wire harness into a data recording device that looked like a cassette recorder.

"Now this, she said, is your Holter monitor. It’s like a cassette recorder, really. There’s a strap so you can carry it like a purse over your shoulder."

He looked at her blankly.

But most men, she continued, Prefer to wear it on their belts. There’s a loop here.

That’s fine.

Riker pulled out his belt a couple loops so he could slip it on.

Now, on the side there is what we call an ‘event’ button, she continued. If you have any symptoms, chest pains, arm pain, light headiness, anything, you press that button and it marks it on the tape that your doctor will analyze later.

I haven’t been having those kind of symptoms, Riker said.

Well, if you do, that’s the button you press.

I’ll be sure to press it before I hit the ground.

She handed him a piece of paper.

"And this is your log. On here you note the time from the monitor and what you’re doing. See, here’s a sample. Five o’clock: driving. Seven o’clock: watching TV Seven thirty: jogged. You get the idea. The more detailed the better."

A log. The goddamn doctor didn’t say anything about a log.

The doc said all I had to do was wear this thing for twenty-four hours, Riker said.

That’s right. But you have to keep a log, too. Otherwise, the cardiologist will not know how to interpret your results.

His heart sometimes felt like it was skipping. That’s all he’d told his doctor. Christ, now they were wiring him up like Boris Fucking Karloff.

I just need you to wear a monitor one work day, the doctor had insisted. Preferably a stressful one.

Riker picked the day before Thanksgiving. A real ball buster. The busiest day in aviation. The day more shit than ever flowed through what Jack Riker liked to call the big pipe.

After the technician taped the wires down, he stood up and buttoned his shirt, moving his torso around to test drive the setup. It was more comfortable than it looked. He hardly felt the sensors anymore on his chest. He reached for his tie. Still wore a clip-on. Been wearing one since he was in uniform. He’d never forgotten what he’d learned at the academy: Real ties looked good, but they gave ass holes something to grab.

The young tech wrote his name and his doctor’s at the top of the log sheet, then handed it to him. There were forty-eight lines, designed for time, activity, and symptoms.

She wrote the first entry in for him: 8 A.M. Holter on.

Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Riker said.

No you won’t. Tomorrow you go to Emergency. They’ll remove everything. We’ve got the holiday off. They’ll make sure we get the monitor and the log.

Jack Riker was a little disappointed. He was looking forward to checking out her technique.

As he headed back to Metro on 1-94, he wrote driving on the log sheet. Jesus Christ, he thought, this was going to be a real pain. He started thinking about what he should write down, what he should leave out. Some things had a tendency to work him up. Lieutenant had his head up his ass. Or, Another bullshit memo from the director of airports. Better just stick to the routine, or the biological stuff, like, took a healthy piss.

He had a 9 A.M. meeting, a favor for the executive lieutenant. The local FAA wanted to talk about a so-called phantom controller. For the past few weeks, somebody with a radio was butting into tower transmissions with aircraft. Department cruisers had been told to watch out for cars with CB-like antennas, but beyond that, there wasn’t much airport police could do. Riker figured it was some introvert who’d spent too much time in a Radio Shack. Don’t give him the publicity, he had told the executive lieutenant, and he’d eventually move on to more ambitious pursuits like letter bombs.

Riker liked to leave high-level meetings with high-level officials in other airport agencies to the police brass. He was a detective sergeant, which basically meant he did well ten years ago on a test and got paid better than nonranking detectives. The rank did not require him to play politics. He took orders, and gave few, and he liked it that way.

But for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the airport brass had gone hunting. The commander, the executive lieutenant and the DB lieutenant had left the night before for the Upper Peninsula. There were only four days left of the Michigan deer season, the commander told anybody who would listen, and goddamnit, they all were going up to his rustic cabin and get a goddamn deer.

How rustic? Riker asked the lieutenant.

No telephone, he said. Thirty miles from the nearest town. But he does have electricity. He said he needed that for the ice maker he put in behind the bar.

The commander extended an invitation to Riker, but he politely declined. Jack Riker hadn’t had a drink in five years. And he figured there’d be a lot of that, and not too many deer.

Sometimes people would ask him.

Oh, I retired champion, he’d say.

He’d quit without some kind of treatment center or AA meetings or some drug that would make him puke if he smelled too much of his Mennen’s Skin Bracer. He took care of it the way he took care of most things in his life. He’d done it alone, and took a certain amount of quiet pride in that.

Five minutes from the airport, Riker picked up his cellular phone and dialed the department radio room.

Leo, this meeting the lieutenant scheduled with the FAA, could you call over there and find out where I’m supposed to meet this guy? His name is Cleage. The lieutenant never passed that along. Is it the new tower, or the old one in the Smith terminal?

Do I look like a secretary, Riker? Leo asked.

Leo was built like an old Packers line backer. He still wore a flat top and bared an uncanny resemblance to the fifties actor, Aldo Ray.

No, Leo, you don’t. But I don’t have the number here with me.

Turn your goddamn radio on.

He hung up before Riker could respond.

Riker didn’t use the radio too often, or his handle, which was the number four sixty. He carried a handheld. Too many news organizations monitored the police frequencies. Not that anything he did was all too newsworthy. And other cops listened. He just didn’t like his business out on the street.

The county just finished building the new tower for the FAA. The old one sat on top the south terminal, known as L.C. Smith. The new tower was free standing, located in the flat land between runway six, three left, and three center. The old tower looked like an afterthought in faded green aluminum, a relic from the fifties, not four stories higher than the terminal observation deck. The new tower looked like the Seattle Space Needle in cream precast concrete. If the meeting was in the FAA offices under the old tower, Riker knew parking was going to be a pain in the ass.

Base to four sixty, Riker’s radio crackled.

Yeah, Riker said, ignoring radio protocol, a move he knew would piss Leo off.

It’s in the new tower, four sixty.

Before he could respond, Leo said, Base clear.

The last time Riker was in any tower was ’67, during the Detroit riot. Somebody downtown came up with the idea that a hundred thousand spades were going to drive twenty miles out 1-94 and trash Metro. Head right for the tower and cocktail the controllers and their screens. The shift sergeant handed Riker, then a rookie, an M-1 carbine and three fully loaded magazines and stationed him just inside the tower door in the Smith terminal. Riker knew the weapon. He was only a year out of Nam. Two weeks before the riot, Riker had also picked up his first and only sidearm, a .38 Colt bought at a hardware on the east side. He still carried the revolver. But other than the range, he’d never had to fire the gun. The rioters, of course, never came. That the command even thought they would taught Jack Riker early on about the mentality of the brass downtown.

Those controllers were a breed, Riker remembered. Always brought their own food. They had coffee pots and soup cubes and hot plates, browning Smokey Links for breakfast while talking a bunch of inside vector lingo. The controllers didn’t give a shit about the riot. They didn’t even watch it on their breakroom TV. They never got rattled. Their brains were a bunch of compartments. Those guys might as well have worked on the moon.

In ’67, Riker never would have predicted he’d end up back at the airport. He’d worked all the jobs. County road patrol, a one-man car. Solo surveillance. Drug buys. Served on a serial killer hunt, but didn’t really like that. He didn’t like teamwork. Brass that knew him, knew you got the most of Jack Riker if you turned him lose on his own.

The best assignment was out of the sheriff’s department headquarters, in Greektown in downtown Detroit. He worked the organized crime task force, trying to make contraband buys from Sicilians as well as Greeks trying to act like Italians. The command thought with his black hair and black mustache, he could play the part. That was his favorite, back when he still got a good click from Windsor Canadian on the rocks. He used to drink every night at the Athens Bar in Greektown, putting them down with the guys he was trying to put away.

Riker always was cordial when he made his move. Treat criminals like gentlemen. If he had a philosophy, that was it. You treated your collars with respect. He’d refined this approach in interviews. The other dicks nicknamed it the Spencer Davis routine, the recording artist who did I’m a Man.

It went something like:

Look, he’d say, You’re a man, right?

Yeah, man.

And I’m a man, right?

Yeah.

Then, I think we need to deal with this from that perspective. Man to man, why don’t you tell me what happened?

This worked more times than not. Riker believed a good number of people on the low end of the crime chain really wanted to be caught. They didn’t want rehabilitation. Rehabilitation required change and hard work. That’s why so many ex-cons went back. They wanted a controlled, stable environment with three squares. He’d accumulated enough thank you letters from various Michigan prisons to effectively argue his point.

Rapport. If Riker had a talent, that was it. He had good rapport with criminals. He had good rapport with victims, trying always to send them away from a case with something. He liked being able to meet their needs, whether they knew what they were or not.

As for people untouched by crime, Riker had little patience. Maybe he spent all of his patience on the job. People in general just weren’t aware of what was going on around them, he thought, and they created no end of trouble for those who were. When he heard someone say I like people, he wanted to just slap sense into them. Riker liked Truman Capote. He read once that the guy kept a book of friends and associates, rating them by importance on three lists. He identified with that. Except if Riker kept a book, he’d have only one inventory, and they’d all be cops.

Perhaps he had everything backward, his ex pointed out more than once. He treated troubled people kindly, but had free-floating disdain for normal people, as she called them. Treat a lady like a whore and whore like a lady. That was the old cop line. Maybe the job had done it to him, or maybe it was some kind of character flaw. He didn’t know. Shit, he couldn’t remember what he was like before the job.

Riker didn’t particularly like the airport because it always had a lot of normal people flowing through it, twenty-two million a year, to be exact, and everybody was short on time. That’s why he called it the big pipe.

He’d also gotten off to a miserable start. His first day on the job six years ago, an MD-80 went down. Flight 225 to Tucson rose fifty feet off the ground, rolled, clipped the corner of the Hertz building, then dove under an 1-94 underpass, killing one hundred fifty six people on board. Riker spent his first six days on the job working with the county medical examiner’s body identification team. He still avoided getting off on that freeway ramp.

After the crash, people around him started changing. His wife of seven years started bitching that their two-story in Hamtramck wasn’t stylish, the neighborhood too ethnic. Riker liked Hamtramck. Pollacks were hardworking and clean, his old man always said. He grew up there. His father moved from Toronto and started a small machine shop that supplied the Hamtramck Chevy plant. Prided himself on getting his American citizenship, prided himself in working for nobody. Son, I don’t care what you do with your own life, he always told him. "But unless you work for yourself,