The blue edge of midnight - By Jonathon King Page 0,2

the Hollywood version, the kid didn’t get blown back from the impact. He didn’t get spun around. He didn’t slowly crumple to his knees or try to reach out and call someone’s name. He just melted.

The noise of my own gun was ringing in my ears and I must have been getting up because the angle of the scene was changing, but I didn’t know how my knees were working.

Casamir was standing over the bodies by the time I made it thirty feet. He looked up at me, the old .25 hanging from his hand.

“Max?” he said, confused at my presence. His face was blank. His smile was gone. Maybe forever.

The first boy was facedown, the pistol that he had fired, first at Casamir and then at me, had clattered off into the gutter. The younger boy, mine, lay oddly twisted, his clothes, all baggy and black, seemed comically empty. But his face was turned up, his open eyes gone cloudy through long, childlike lashes. He couldn’t have been more than twelve.

I was staring into that face when Murph, trailing from the newsstand, stepped up to my side and looked at me and then down at the kid.

“Fuckin’ idiot,” he says. But I wasn’t sure which one of us he was talking about.

I was still staring into the boy’s face, trying to breathe through a liquid burbling in my throat, and then I heard Casamir repeating my name: “Max? Max?” And I looked up and he was staring at me and pointing to his neck and saying, “Max. You are shot.” And suddenly that night, and that world, went softly black.

CHAPTER 2

“Sweet Jesus. Not again.”

On the river I am still looking at the child’s face, glowing in the moonlight, bobbing in the water, and my first reaction is to help. My second is to get the hell out. My third is to calm down.

The sound of a billion chirping insects is overpowering the silence. I draw a breath full of warm humid air and force myself to think. I’m a mile from my shack and a good two and a half miles from the ranger station. I’m staring at a dead child and a crime scene. I’m a cop too long, despite bailing out of the title two years ago, and if my isolation has taught me anything it is that you can’t flush everything out of your head for good.

I start organizing, running through a list. The bundle was wedged up into the roots of the cypress tree but it could have been pushed there by the current, or placed there on purpose. The body is neatly and tightly wrapped, but the face is exposed. Why? Why does it need to look out? The skin is so pale that it looks preserved, but who knows what effect the brackish water has had? And if it’s been floating upright, the settling blood could already be drawn down from the face.

The sailcloth of the bundle is a rip-stop nylon. Too clean, I think. Too new. I start to reach out and hook it with my paddle but I look at the face again and stop. Crime scene, I say to myself. Let the crime scene guys do it. It’s not going anywhere. Go call it in.

It’s two and a half miles, downstream, at least a hard hour to the ranger station at Thompson’s Point. Cleve Wilson, the senior ranger, would be there on his monthly, twenty-four-hour live-in shift. I spin the canoe and start back north, heading for the falls. In eight or ten deep strokes I pick up speed and then lean back and launch myself over the four-foot dam, whumping down onto the lower river, kicking a spray up on either side. On the bob up, I grab another purchase of thick water with the paddle and pull back on it and shoot the canoe forward. The face of a dead child is chasing me again.

In seconds I fall into the stroke. Efficient, full, with a swift lift at the end. Same power, same pull, same finish. I glide through the wet forest, backpaddling only to make the quick corners, swing stroking only to pull around the rounder ones. In minutes I am running with sweat but don’t even try to wipe it from my eyes, just whip the droplets with a head snap and keep digging. I know the route by memory and in forty minutes the river widens out and starts its curve east toward the ocean.