Kay thought about those holes in the fence. But now wasn’t the time to argue about it, they had more important things to do. When Kay returned to the theater she found Fortune standing in front of the screen. He took his index finger away from his earpiece when he saw her.
“The video center hasn’t come up with any images of Gomez on any cameras after he came in here.”
“Okay,” said Kay. She looked out across the rows of seats. Fifteen to twenty men, all seated in such a way as to maximize the distance between them, the way she’d heard men automatically do at the urinal trough or around the poker table. “Everyone still sitting in the same seats?”
“Yep,” said Fortune.
The eyes of the men—all of them were men—were fixed on the floor, the walls, or their phones and watches. Only one met her gaze, a big black man in the second row from the back wearing a red bowler hat and smiling, as though he was enjoying himself. Maybe it was stereotyping, but her first thought was pimp. She made her way up to the back row where a thin white man sat. He was wearing a flat cap and looked like a family man. Another of my racial prejudices, she thought.
“Excuse me, sir, but did you see anyone come in just before we did? I mean a maximum of five minutes before we did?”
“No,” he said. “No one.”
“If someone had, you would have seen it, right?” She nodded toward the door leading to the foyer.
“That’s correct,” said the man. He seemed more curious than actually anxious, as though he was still a spectator, which of course he was. Kay wondered what it was that caused men to gather—and yet not gather—in this way.
“What’s in there?” she asked and pointed to the paper bag on the seat next to him.
“It’s my daughter’s birthday today.” The man smiled as he held up the bag. Kay recognized the logo of the toy store—a little boy wearing a mushroom as a hat. “She wants a Marlin’s princess dress that makes you invisible to grown-ups.”
Kay looked at the bag. She was back in Englewood. It was her twelfth birthday, and her father was kneeling at the foot of the steps down to the street. His eyes were crazed, he was badly strung-out. He told her he had a present for her and she had to go with him to the place where he was keeping it. He pointed to a car waiting on the other side of the road. She saw the man sitting in the car. And she did what she was best at doing: she ran. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever stopped running.
“Happy birthday, then,” said Kay. Then she cleared her throat and called over to Fortune. “Okay, they can go!”
“Excuse me,” came a voice from one of the seats, “but actually we paid to see this movie and it isn’t finished.”
Kay didn’t respond, she just hurried out through the door to the foyer. She stopped directly outside and heard, before the door closed, Fortune’s voice:
“Sorry for the interruption, folks. Kill the lights and roll the movie!”
Kay stared at the door to the men’s room that was next to the entrance to the auditorium. She had no reason to suppose the woman in the ticket booth had been lying, but it would have been impossible from her position to see which of the doors Gomez had gone through.
Hanson appeared beside Kay.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I’m thinking he went in here,” she said, pointing at the door to the men’s room. “Can you check if it’s empty?”
Hanson went in, reappeared a couple of seconds later and beckoned to her. She went in. A weak trickle of water dribbled down the urinal and the mirror on the wall was cracked. But the air inside was fresher than she had expected. She looked up and saw why. A window high up at the back was wide open. She groaned.
“Aha,” said Hanson, who was now obviously seeing the open window for the first time.
“What’s outside?” she asked.
Hanson stretched up on tiptoes and peered out. “An alleyway.”
“Shit!” Kay slapped a hand against the wall and made a mental note to wash it the first chance she got. “That’s why none of the cameras picked him up. He’s using backstreets, he might have got all the way to the river by now without being seen. He’s playing with us. Why is he playing with us, Hanson?”
Her blond-haired colleague looked at her like he was giving the matter some thought. Then he said: “Maybe he…likes to play?”
Kay closed her eyes. She needed someone else. She needed Bob Oz. But when she opened them again it was still Olav Hanson standing there.
—
They couldn’t see me. But I could see, hear and imagine them. How they were all still chasing around like headless chickens after the suddenly so famous Tomás Gomez. I had made it from the movie theater down to the riverbank, and was now sitting there, my heart pounding in my chest, watching the water flow. Like time, it took everything away with it. That ought to have brought some comfort. Like those old words of wisdom, “This too shall pass.” But it didn’t. Sooner or later, the same atoms in the molecules of water that ran by here yesterday would return, and history would repeat itself, it was just a matter of time. I took the hypodermic out of my breast pocket. Thought about how he jerked when he felt the prick, how he turned and stared at the seat back. Guess he must have thought a spring inside the seat had gone. I pressed the plunger down so what was left of it arced out into the water. For water it was, and unto water shall it return.
34
