Icepick Read online

  It was a clear night, and the moon was high, so the light on the water was just about as silver as you could get, and the rolling waves looked like liquid shadows.

  The kids stood in the doorway. I got the impression they were afraid to go in.

  ‘What’s the hold up?’ I asked, standing behind them.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ the girl whispered.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll break something,’ the boy said, even softer.

  I understood. I remembered John Horse’s house in the swamp land. It was made of cinder blocks and had a dirt floor. It was poorly lit by a single oil lamp. There was a beat-up old chair that a junkyard wouldn’t take, a dining table that wasn’t much better, and various spooky paraphernalia. On the floor next to his dining table was a two-burner Sterno hot plate. There was nothing on the walls – it was all bare concrete block. There was one window in each wall except for the one with the door. That was it.

  And his house was the nicest one in the village.

  I ushered them past the threshold and closed the door behind me.

  ‘Not to worry.’ I pointed to the 1930s couch. ‘Sit.’

  ‘It looks like a movie set,’ the girl said, staring at the couch.

  ‘Thrift store,’ I explained, heading for the kitchen.

  Ten minutes later we were all sitting in the living room and drinking. They were on the couch with hot chocolate. I was in an overstuffed chair finishing my first Scotch, my feet up on the coffee table.

  I hadn’t asked them a single question. A kid will talk when a kid is ready. I drank.

  At last the girl set down her mug, careful to put a coaster under it – yes, I had coasters – and cleared her throat.

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘Your name is Foggy.’ She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking down at her hands.

  ‘Yes.’ I sipped.

  ‘What kind of a name is that? Is it a Jewish name?’

  ‘It’s more of a pejorative descriptor,’ I answered her. ‘I pretended to be confused a lot when I was younger.’

  ‘Why?’ She looked up at me.

  ‘Why?’ I tossed back what was left of my Scotch. ‘The last thing you wanted to be was smart in an enclave of hoodlums and wise guys such as comprised my boyhood cohorts in Brooklyn.’

  She sighed. ‘I know what most of those words mean,’ she said, ‘and I appreciate that you’re talking to me like I’m an adult. But you speak your own language with a funny accent too, and maybe you use words to trick people just as much as you use them to talk.’

  I nodded. ‘Precocious means that you’re mentally advanced for your age, which is what you are. You just proved that.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sat back.

  I glanced over at the younger brother. His eyelids were heavy, and he was about to drop his cocoa.

  ‘Maybe your brother would like to go to sleep now,’ I suggested. ‘He can camp out on the sofa. I got a sleeping bag or two.’

  ‘Catsha Tuste-Nuggee!’ she said sharply to her brother.

  He snapped awake, eyes wide.

  ‘Wait,’ I told her slowly. ‘I think I know what some of that means. His name is Little Cloud?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I would like to go to sleep now,’ Little Cloud said.

  I was up in a flash, into my bedroom and back without a word, delivering two sleeping bags. One was black and half-sized, perfect for the boy. The other one was an adult bag with some sort of crazy pattern on it.

  I tossed the black one to Little Cloud.

  ‘Crawl in,’ I told him. ‘We’ll worry about brushing your teeth and everything else, like, tomorrow, OK?’

  He smiled. ‘OK.’

  He was inside the bag and out like a light two minutes later.

  The girl and I went into the kitchen. She sat on the counter and I got a good look at her for the first time. Her face was oddly shaped and her eyes didn’t look like they belonged to a child. Her T-shirt said FLORIDA PANTHERS in all capitals across the front of it, and her sneakers were a size too big: thrift store or donated clothes, I figured. She had no coat, as I may have mentioned, on a very chilly night.

  I poured another Scotch.

  ‘Florida Panthers,’ I said, nodding toward her shirt. ‘That’s, like, a joke, right? A hockey team in Florida?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘OK – you want something to eat?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Why did you ask me about my name?’ I wondered, not looking at her.

  ‘You can’t trust a person if you don’t know what that person’s name means,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t want me to trust you, then.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I don’t know who you are yet,’ she told me.

  ‘I’m the director of Child Protective Services for the county of—’

  ‘Not your job,’ she interrupted. ‘Who you are.’

  ‘Ah. That.’ I took a healthy slug of Scotch. ‘Well, I am a Jewish car thief from Brooklyn. I was responsible for something bad happening to a kid, a baby, about five years ago. I took it on the lam and ended up here. Then God, who is certainly a very strange comedian, set me up here in Fry’s Bay protecting children. From people like me. Enough, or do you want more details?’

  ‘It’s enough for now.’ She looked me in the eye. ‘My name is Topalargee.’

  ‘I don’t know that word. Do you know what it means in English?’

  ‘The Wonder,’ she said plainly.

  ‘And you are named that because …?’

  ‘John Horse named me that,’ she answered, ‘when he found out that I could read other people’s thoughts.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I can read minds. For example: you stole some woman’s car, in Brooklyn, but she’d left her baby in the back seat. She chased after you and died. You made the baby an orphan. And your people, I mean whites, they don’t take care of orphans the way human beings do. You feel guilty. That’s why you do the work you do.’

  I stared at her for what seemed like a long time, then smiled.

  ‘John Horse told you all that.’ I knew because I had told John Horse all that.

  She looked down with a little smile of her own. ‘Yes. But it would have been a good trick.’

  ‘Had me going for a minute.’

  ‘Usually works on whites.’ She shrugged. ‘I actually got my name because I was born dead but came alive after a few minutes. I was named Topalargee right away.’

  ‘Good.’ I finished the Scotch and set the glass on the counter beside her. ‘Tell me what you’re doing in Fry’s Bay in the middle of the night with a little brother and a big knife.’

  ‘Our mother didn’t come home,’ she said right away, ‘so we came looking for her.’

  ‘Your mother – what? Works here in town?’

  ‘For the hotel. She works there, cleaning rooms.’

  ‘You mean the Benton Inn or the Flamingo Motel?’

  ‘Benton,’ she said, glaring at me. ‘The Flamingo stinks.’

  ‘Right. Your mother didn’t come home tonight and—’

  ‘Three nights ago,’ she corrected.

  ‘She’s been gone three nights? Is that normal?’

  ‘No,’ she explained. ‘She sleeps in town sometimes, at the Benton, if it’s too late to walk home. But not three nights in a row.’

  ‘She walks to your house from the Benton?’ I shook my head. ‘That’s, like, ten miles.’

  ‘Seven,’ she told me. ‘Takes her about two hours.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I sighed, ‘I wouldn’t want to walk through the swamp that time of the night. But three days is a while. So you came to town with your brother.’

  ‘He wouldn’t stay home. He kind of insisted on coming with me. He thinks he’s being protective.’ She was trying to seem tolerant, but it sounded an awful lot like being proud.

  ‘And you both … what? I assume you went to the Benton first.’

  She nodded. ‘The
y said she hadn’t come to work in two days.’

  I was beginning to admire the kid’s stoicism. Most people her age would have been a mess. She was a rock.

  ‘So, you went looking … just in general?’

  ‘No. I went to the room where she usually sleeps when she stays at the inn. All of her stuff was still there.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Walking clothes and shoes, tribal necklace, pictures of me and my brother.’

  ‘It was all still in her room.’ I nodded. ‘She’s somewhere still dressed in her fancy hotel uniform. That’s a suit coat and dress, probably heels, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What were you doing over there on Blake Road?’

  ‘Following the trail.’

  ‘Trail?’ I asked her.

  ‘My mother left a trail, Foggy,’ she said, still without a trace of panic. ‘I don’t know why. We were following it.’

  ‘What kind of trail?’

  ‘Markings. We lost it, though. If it was in the swamp, we’d probably be all right. But town is confusing.’

  Then, before she could stop herself, she yawned.

  ‘OK,’ I said, concluding our little tête-à-tête, ‘time for you to visit dreamland and me to finish my own sleep routine which you so rudely interrupted.’

  ‘No,’ she said immediately, ‘we have to go back out to pick up the trail.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ I interrupted firmly. ‘We catch a few Zs so we’re worth a dime, and we’re up with the sun, right? Then we go back over to Blake Road, and we find your mother before lunchtime!’

  She tried to object, but she yawned again instead.

  ‘Yeah,’ I told her, ‘hop down. Sleeping bag.’

  Against her will, she knew I was right. She slid off the countertop and made her way into the sleeping bag. After a minute, her breathing sounded like she was asleep. But just in case, I locked all my doors from the inside with a key that I hid in my bedroom. I couldn’t have her slipping out in the middle of the night, which is exactly what I would have done if I’d been in her oversized shoes.

  THREE

  The sun was a very rude alarm clock. I’d deliberately left my curtains open so that it would get me up, but I objected to the amount of joy it got out of waking me. In other words, it was a very beautiful morning.

  I had my clothes on and my tie halfway tied before I heard a ruckus at the door. The girl was trying to bust out, her big old knife strapped to her back like a sword.

  ‘Hey, Wonder Girl,’ I called out. ‘The door’s locked from the inside. Give it a break. We’re going out in about five, so why don’t you help yourself to some juice or whatever it is you like to have in the morning when you wake up.’

  ‘I’ve been awake for an hour,’ she grumbled, ‘and I usually like to kill a chicken and eat its raw carcass for breakfast.’

  ‘No,’ her brother corrected from inside his sleeping bag. ‘She likes Cheerios.’

  ‘Oh.’ I ambled in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Well, I have neither a live chicken nor said cereal. How about some toast?’

  ‘Are you circumcised?’ She stared at me.

  ‘Cut it out!’ I’m pretty sure I scowled at her, which would have been unlike me to do, but she was provoking me.

  ‘She’s just mad,’ the boy, Little Cloud said, stretching, ‘because she thinks we ought to be out looking already, not eating breakfast. When she’s mad, she tries to irritate people. I hate it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I conceded, ‘but I would probably irritate a lot of people if my mother was missing.’

  Half an hour later the three of us were in the cold shadows of the building near the abandoned bakery on Blake Road, the place where the kids had holed up the night before. It was hard to see anything. I leaned in close to the wall. I knelt and examined the floor. Just as I was about to give up, I saw it.

  I stood.

  ‘What’s your mother’s name?’ I asked. ‘Does it have something to do with water?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ Wonder Girl folded her arms.

  I pointed to a place on the wall. There was a quick image scraped there, maybe by a nail, that looked very much like a snake and waves.

  ‘Echu Matta is her name,’ Little Cloud told me.

  ‘It means Water Serpent,’ I said.

  What we didn’t talk about was the smear of blood, relatively fresh, right next to the picture.

  ‘She was here, your mother,’ I went on. ‘That’s her doing.’

  Little Cloud nodded. ‘It’s the last thing we found last night, before the gunshot and the dead body in the bay.’

  ‘Didn’t think you would see it,’ the girl added.

  You had to admire the kids: lost a mother, heard a gunshot in the dead of the night, saw a body in the middle of the bay – and just as matter-of-fact as Brooklyn wise guys.

  ‘So, all that brouhaha with Brady scotched your search,’ I said.

  Wonder Girl nodded.

  I took a gander around the room. The smell was unpleasant, but the air of oppression was more significant. Something weird had happened there, and recently.

  Then I caught sight of something in the shadows. Hard enough to see in the daylight; would have been invisible at night.

  ‘And what about that mess?’ I asked after a second.

  Their eyes went to what I was staring at: two cans of Sterno and an overturned pot. Next to that there were four or five ratty pillows.

  ‘Somebody stayed here,’ I said, ‘at least overnight.’

  Fry’s Bay was too small to have vagrants. Sometimes high school kids would squirrel into someplace like this, but it was mostly to make out or smoke weed. People had cooked here. People had slept here.

  ‘You think my mother slept here?’ Wonder Girl asked. ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered. ‘Good question.’

  The boy edged over to the pillows and began sniffing like a hound. He turned to his sister.

  ‘She was here, though.’ He pointed to one of the pillows. ‘Put her head there.’

  ‘We would have figured this out last night,’ Wonder Girl said angrily, ‘if it hadn’t been for that dickweed Brady.’

  ‘Let’s think about this,’ I ventured. ‘Could she have been hiding out here? Maybe with some other people?’

  ‘Hiding from who?’ the girl snapped. ‘And what other people?’

  ‘Are there other Seminole women who work at the hotel?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered slowly. ‘And when we went there, I didn’t see any of them.’

  ‘Could be coincidence,’ I told her. ‘Could have been working in some other part of the place.’

  ‘But.’ She squinted.

  ‘But,’ I agreed.

  ‘Don’t you smell that?’ the boy asked, shaking his head.

  ‘That rotten cardboard smell?’ I made a face.

  ‘Fear,’ he shot back. ‘They were afraid, the people who stayed here. And they were mostly women. Only one man.’

  I turned to the girl. ‘Is he really this good?’

  She nodded. ‘He’s the first person John Horse comes to for something like this.’

  ‘Could he, like, track the smell?’

  She looked at her brother.

  ‘The problem is all the other smells,’ he admitted. ‘That cardboard smell, the rat shit, mold – very difficult.’

  ‘OK then,’ I told them both, ‘let’s look at it this way. If you had a couple of people you wanted to hide from the police and the general populace, you wouldn’t go out of this dump that way, toward the main drag. You’d head up the alley. Toward the bakery.’

  ‘Why not just stay here?’ the girl asked.

  ‘The storefronts on Blake Road get checked every once in a while, but the patrol guy never goes up the alley. Partly because it’s too hard to turn the squad car around, and partly because the patrol guy might find kids up to mischief, and there goes his quiet night. He’d just as soon live and let live unless it was s
omething really wild.’

  ‘Meaning the bakery is a safer place to hide.’ She looked around. ‘So why did they spend the night, or a couple of nights, here?’

  ‘By me?’ I gave them a little shrug. ‘Indicates out-of-towners. Found an abandoned building, didn’t know the score, stayed here until they saw the way the patrol cars operated, then moved.’

  ‘To the bakery,’ she said, heading out the door.

  Her brother and I followed, up the alley toward the loading dock. The bay was down but there was a half-open regular door to one side.

  The inside of the bakery was colder than New Jersey cement. The brick walls had moss and ice on them. The abandoned machines and conveyer belts looked like something out of a horror film in the dim light. High windows, nearly at the top of the thirty-foot walls, let in just enough morning light to confirm that the rest of the place was a crypt.

  The floor of the open factory was littered with bird crap in layers and patterns like a Jackson Pollock. But there was a place untouched by such avian artistry: a large rectangle, about the size of a small mobile home. Beyond that, at the far end of the whole place, there was a rusted iron staircase that led up to a small, glass-faced office.

  Little Cloud looked at the clean space on the floor.

  ‘There was something here until last night,’ he said softly.

  ‘There was something there,’ I agreed. ‘You’re sure it was that recent?’

  He looked up at me. ‘It was like a big truck.’

  ‘Or a storage container that goes on a big truck,’ I told him, ‘and then maybe on to a train.’

  He looked back down. ‘Yes.’

  ‘My brother has learned to follow trails better than anybody,’ the girl said to me, ‘but you’re not half bad yourself.’

  What I thought was that something very bad had happened to the kids’ mother, something that involved being shipped in a storage container. But what I said to the girl was, ‘Who taught him the tracking thing?’

  ‘John Horse.’ Her voice suddenly sounded strange to me.

  John Horse again. He always claimed to be the region’s oldest living Seminole citizen. Some people had told me that he couldn’t die. Unless he just felt like it one day. He’d been around for a while, and he knew a lot. He wasn’t a chief or anything, more like the village grandfather. He wouldn’t ever tell anyone his real name, but apparently a long time ago people started calling him John Horse after another Seminole from a longer time ago. The old John Horse was a great leader, so at first our guy was called New John Horse. But since the old John Horse had been dead for more than a hundred years, most people dropped the ‘New’ and let it go at that. I had a lot of respect for the guy – a genuine rabbi if I ever saw one.