The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

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       TWO

      Grace couldn’t stop shivering. Dark was settling over Ocean Beach, the sun a fiery ball sliding into the Pacific. Four blocks away the sand on the beach would be cold now, latched in kelp, the good-natured mothers and toddlers gone, the tourists with white legs sucking Diet Pepsi and eyeing the tattooed volleyball players gone, everyone to their own warm rooms and hot baths and Olive Garden dinners. The beach belonged to the skittering creatures of the night pushing Safeway carts and muttering, runaways with studded ears and vacant eyes, the predators. The world she worked so hard to keep away from her daughter.

      And now look what happened. Look how good she was. She couldn’t even give the kid a dad, and now she’d almost made the kid an orphan.

      Her stomach hurt, acid roiling up. She gripped her knees and bit her lip to keep from wailing. She should be home now, that was the deal, that was the whole thing. Katie had that pen pal assignment she’d been postponing, had to get it done tonight.

      ‘Did you hear me?’

      Grace pulled herself back, looking through the window of the squad car, refocusing. The crime scene glowed yellow in a surreal splash of police car lights, television crews, crime scene technicians. The neighbors were back in force, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and joking. The two cops on traffic detail pressed the cars forward, gesturing savagely, sweat and weariness on their faces.

      Grace chafed her hands together under the thin wool blanket and shifted on the backseat of the patrol car. ‘I’ve already gone through it. I gave my preliminary statement. I’m coming in tomorrow to sign it.’

      ‘Grace.’ Sid Felcher, her crime lab boss, sighed heavily and swiveled in the front seat, his face oily. It wasn’t his squad car, it belonged to the detective who’d taken her statement, but Sid had climbed into the front seat when the detective had gone inside the meth house, and now he rested his arm along the top of the seat as if he were polishing the leather with his forearm.

      ‘Another study just released, found it on the Internet, two biggest stressors for supervisors. Causes ulcers, heart attacks, groin injuries.’ He raised his eyebrows and they inched together like furry mating caterpillars. ‘Well?’

      ‘Sid, I need to call Katie. I need to go home.’

      ‘We already took care of that, remember? She’s fine, your daughter’s fine. Okay, so the answer is, ta dah!’ Sid waved his hands expansively. His nails were bitten. ‘Two main stressors for guys like me, poor working-class schmos just trying to make a living, is having to discipline, take action, against a subordinate. That means you. Huge stressor, stroke city. Other one is having to deal with the public, explain what the subordinate did that was so wrong we’re going to have to apologize for about a million years and maybe even pay big bucks to get things straightened out.’

      This couldn’t be happening. Even with Sid at his most dysfunctional.

      ‘Sid, in case you forgot, he had a butcher knife.’

      ‘But he wasn’t swinging it, right? I mean, not at you. Just that little side-to-side thing, you said, but not actually at you.’

      She sat back in the seat. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

      ‘Grace, be more specific. What you don’t know could –’

      ‘About what just happened,’ she interrupted. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘Like have they ID’d him?’

      He hesitated a beat too long. ‘Whoever it was, it was a human life.’

      She felt rage surge under the exhaustion. ‘Are you suggesting I did something wrong shooting a man with a butcher knife who had just killed a drug agent, a sergeant detective, and a uniformed cop?’

      ‘Whoa. I’m not suggesting anything, Grace, I’m just passing the time, sharing a survey I downloaded from Yahoo.’ He grinned. His gums were receding.

      ‘I need to go home.’ She pressed her fingers into her temples, fighting the impulse to bite him.

      ‘See, this is what they call a critical incident.’

      ‘I know what a critical incident is,’ Grace snapped.

      A man darted out of the house and under the police tape, Paul Collins from Trace. Bags sagged under his eyes, heightening his resemblance to an aging basset hound on speed. He lumbered toward his car, face grim and an evidence kit clenched in his hands.

      ‘Thing is, another study.’ Sid unwrapped a toothpick and massaged his gums. ‘Some shooters, they get permanent emotional trauma, they go a little cuckoo, they visit la-la land and never come back.’

      He sucked noisily on the toothpick and twirled it. His lips were wet.

      ‘Supervisors – we’re responsible, I’m responsible – as your boss, like it or not. I mean, I don’t take you in, get your head examined, you could sue me for mondo moola, retire to Florida, you and your kid, how old is Katie now? Two?’

      ‘Five this Saturday. She’s already in kindergarten.’

      ‘Even better. Closer to college.’ Sid fished car keys out of his Hawaiian shirt pocket and jangled them. ‘See, the thing is, you don’t have a choice.

      Nobody wants to see a shrink, ever, fillet out their personal life, spill their guts to some stranger with a clipboard. I wouldn’t. Who would? You’d have to be crazy.’

      He grinned at his little joke.

      ‘So the way it comes down, the department policy is, you have to go whether you want to or not.’

      ‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She shifted in the seat.

      ‘Which was?’

      ‘Who’d I shoot, Sid?’

      Sid looked out the window and stared at the sky. Grace saw it seconds before she heard it, the heavy whup whup of rotor blades. A helicopter.

      In Guatemala, СКАЧАТЬ