Jimmy had no clue why all this was flooding back to him suddenly, or why he stood frozen by the guardrail, eyes gaping down at Sydney, except that it had something to do with those dogs, the way they pranced nervously in place after they'd hopped from the van and pawed the asphalt. One of their handlers raised a walkie-talkie to his lips as a helicopter appeared in the sky over downtown and headed for them like a fat bee, growing fatter every time Jimmy blinked.
A baby of a cop stood blocking the purple stairwell and a bit farther up Roseclair, two cruisers and a few more boys in blue stood guard in front of the access road leading into the park.
The dogs never barked. Jimmy turned his head back as he realized that's what had been bugging him since he'd first seen them. Even though their twenty-four paws jittered back and forth on the asphalt, it was a tight, concentric jittering, like soldiers marching in place, and Jimmy felt a terrible efficiency in their black snouts and lean flanks, had an image of their eyes as hot coals.
The rest of Sydney looked like the waiting room to a riot. Cops filled the street and walked methodically through the weeds leading into the park. From up here, Jimmy had a partial view of the park itself, and he could see them in there, too, blue uniforms and earth-tone sport coats moving across the grass, peering off the edge into the Pen, calling out to one another.
Back down on Sydney, they gathered around something just on the far side of the K-9 van and several plainclothes detectives leaned against unmarked cars parked on the other side of the street, sipping coffee, but none of them bullshitting the way cops usually did, cracking each other up with war stories from recent shifts. Jimmy could feel pure tension? in the dogs, in the silent cops leaning against their cars, in the helicopter, no longer a bee now and roaring as it swept above Sydney, riding low, and disappeared in Pen Park on the other side of the imported trees and drive-in screen.
"Hey, Jimmy." Ed Deveau, opening a package of M&M's with his teeth, nudged Jimmy with his elbow.
"What's up, Ed?"
Deveau shrugged. "That copter's the second one gone in. The first one kept doing passes over my house 'bout a half an hour ago, I says to the wife, 'Honey, we move to Watts, no one told me?'" He poured some M&M's into his mouth and shrugged again. "So, I come down to see what the fuss is about."
"What'd you hear?"
Deveau slid the flat of his hand over the air in front of them. "Nothing. They're locked up tighter than my mother's purse. But they're serious, Jimmy. I mean, shit, they got Sydney blocked off from every possible angle? cops and sawhorses on Crescent, Harborview, Sudan, Romsey, all the way down to Dunboy, what I hear. People live on the street can't get out, they're fucking pissed. I hear they got boats running up and down the Pen, and Boo Bear Durkin called, said he saw frogmen going in from his window." Deveau pointed. "I mean, look at that shit there."
Jimmy followed Deveau's finger and watched three cops pull a wino out of one of the scorched three-decker shells on the far side of Sydney, the wino not liking it much, struggling until one of the cops chucked him face first down the rest of the charred stairs, Jimmy still half-back at that word Ed had said: frogmen. They didn't send frogmen into a body of water if they were looking for something good, something alive.
"They ain't playing." Deveau whistled, then looked at Jimmy's clothes. "Why you all decked?"
"Nadine's First Communion." Jimmy watched a cop pick the wino up, say something into his ear before manhandling him to an olive sedan with the siren stuck cockeyed to the edge of the roof above the driver's door.
"Hey, congratulations," Deveau said.
Jimmy smiled his thanks.
"So, the hell you doing here then?"
Deveau looked back up Roseclair toward Saint Cecilia's, and Jimmy suddenly felt ridiculous. What the hell was he doing here in his silk tie and six-hundred-dollar suit, scuffing his shoes in the weeds that sprouted up from under the guardrail?
Katie, he remembered.
But that still seemed ridiculous. Katie'd blown off her half sister's First Communion to sleep off a drunk or listen to some more pillow talk from her latest guy. Shit. Why would she come to church if she wasn't dragged? Until Katie's own baptism, Jimmy himself hadn't been inside a church for a solid decade. And even after that, it hadn't been until he'd met Annabeth that he'd started going regular again. So what if he'd walked out of the church, seen the cruisers banging the turn onto Roseclair, and had felt a? what, premonition?? of dread? It had only been because he'd been worried about Katie? and pissed at her, too? and so she'd been on his mind as he watched some cops lead-foot it toward the Pen.
But now? Now he felt dumb. Dumb and overdressed and really fucking silly for telling Annabeth to take the girls to Chuck E. Cheese's, he'd meet her there, Annabeth looking into his face with a mix of exasperation, confusion, and anger held barely in check.
Jimmy turned to Deveau. "Just curious like everyone else, I guess." He clapped Deveau's shoulder. "Outta here, though, Ed," he said, and down on Sydney, one cop tossed a set of car keys to another and the second cop hopped in the K-9 van.
"Awright, Jimmy. You take care."
"You, too," Jimmy said slowly, still watching the street as the K-9 van backed up and stopped to shift gears and cut the wheels to the right, and Jimmy felt that mean certainty again.
You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes? beyond logic? and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn't want to face, weren't sure you could. That's what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes? to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.
Jimmy felt that mean certainty drive nails through his shoes and plant him in place even though he wanted more than anything to run, run as fast as he ever had, do anything but stand there and watch that van pull out into the street. The nails found his chest, a fat, cold grouping of them as if shot from a cannon, and he wanted to shut his eyes but they were nailed, too, nailed wide open, as the van reached the middle of the street and Jimmy stared at the car it had been blocking, the car everyone was gathered around, dusting with brushes, photographing, peering inside, passing bagged items out to cops standing in the street and on the sidewalk.
Katie's car.
Not just the same model. Not one that looked like it. Her car. Right down to the dent on the right front bumper and the missing glass over the right headlight.