A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0038

Chapter 38

The car stopped half a block before the end of the street, and Captain Oliver Jones knew, even before opening the door, that this wasn’t the kind of place where the police arrived early. I knew the address from what it had been and what it had become. It was the city’s outskirts, one of those areas that San Diego loses as it moves away from it, the lots increasingly wide and abandoned, the houses increasingly far apart, until the whole area acquired an almost rural air, a suburb that the metropolis forgot to finish. Months before, it must have been an honest neighborhood. Now it was a runaway neighborhood. Windows boarded up, toys left on lawns that no one mowed anymore, dead cars along the gutter with shattered windows, and every lamppost broken, without exception, not through carelessness, but by choice. A dark neighborhood belongs to those who can see in the dark, and it had been a long time since the police had been the ones who could see there. The department had stopped going into that part of town house to house over the past year, and Jones had signed too many reports on the subject to pretend he didn’t know exactly what he was getting into.

At the end of the dead-end street stood the only house with light. Two stories alone in the darkness, seeming larger than they were because of the surrounding neglect, and in front of it, now, eight vehicles parked haphazardly, some parked on the curb, one positioned sideways as if it had arrived in a hurry and no one later thought it worthwhile to correct its position. The red and blue lights swept the empty facades in silence, without sirens, because the siren no longer had anyone to warn. Jones got out, adjusted his cap, and stood for a moment on the sidewalk reading the scene from afar before approaching it, the way he always did, the way he had first learned in a desert fifteen thousand kilometers away and then in a department that by then no longer existed with the same name.

Too much noise for a street that should be dead. Jones counted the police cars, counted the men standing on the front lawn, and didn’t like the proportion between the two numbers. People standing still don’t work. People standing still are waiting for orders, or they don’t know what to look at . He crossed the lawn slowly, the gravel crunching under his soles, registering each thing without lingering on any. Tire marks in the grass that weren’t from the police cars. The side gate ripped from its path. And in the back, behind the house, the brightest light of all, the white light of the forensics spotlights, and against it the coming and going of silhouettes that walked from one side to the other with the restrained haste of those who have already understood that there is nothing left to save there, only to catalog.

That’s when he saw the man with the camera.

Leaning against the side fence was a large man with his equipment slung over his shoulder, and beside him a woman was trying to persuade one of Jones’s officers to let her pass. The officer wouldn’t budge. He kept his arm outstretched over the gap like a physical barrier, and the woman talked and talked, but the officer said nothing. It was during this impasse that she looked up and saw Jones crossing the lawn. She let go of the officer in that same second. Jones saw the calculation flash across her face, the instantaneous exchange of an obstacle for a better opportunity, and before he could change course, she was already in front of him.

“Good evening, Captain Jones. This is Ashley from Channel 8.” The voice came out quick, practiced, without a pause between sentences for him to insert a refusal. “Can you confirm for us that the commotion tonight is the work of the vigilante who’s been operating in the city?”

Jones stopped. He looked at her for a moment, young and beautiful and far too awake for the hour, her makeup still intact from getting ready in the car on the way to the scandal, and behind her the cameraman already raising his camera to his shoulder, the little red light flashing. She already has the headline. She just wants my face on it. The vigilante. The word had been circulating for weeks, first in the department’s hallway conversations, then in the news captions, and he had learned to detest how good it sounded coming from people, how comfortable it was.

“We have nothing conclusive,” he said, and the coldness came out in the most natural way in the world, because coldness was his resting state. “The investigations are still ongoing. Until then, I have nothing to declare.”

He walked past her without waiting for a reaction, shoulder firm, stride long, the way he crossed any room he didn’t want to cross twice. He heard her voice behind him change register, abandon it mid-question, and turn completely to the camera, putting together the report with what she had, “the investigations are still ongoing, but know that you from Channel 8 will be the first,” and Jones dismissed that thought as easily as turning off a poorly tuned radio, climbed the two steps, and entered the house.

The smell came first, before anything his eyes could confirm. Burnt gunpowder, thick, fresh. Blood, that smell of old coins he knew better than he cared. And, beneath the two, a third layer that had no place inside a house, something damp and animalistic that he couldn’t immediately name and that made a muscle twitch deep in his memory before he even knew why. That one stays . He filed the nameless smell away in a corner of his head and moved on, behind it, because it was stronger towards the back.

The front room had been transformed into a testing ground. Scattered across the floor in an arc, dozens of numbered yellow tags marked each fired cartridge, each drop, each displaced object, and the forensics team had already been there and moved on to the back, leaving the room behind as conquered territory. In the center was a long, solid wood table, and on it lay the reason for everything. Packages wrapped in plastic, some still stacked, and beside them a handful of white powder scattered across the tabletop. Jones didn’t even need the analysis. He recognized it from afar, by its arrangement, its quantity, the way it was arranged to be weighed and divided, not to be used. Cutting room. Storage point. He walked around the table, reading what was missing as much as what remained, and what was missing said more. There were clean rectangles in the dust on the tabletop, spaces where packages had been and were no longer there. There was no money anywhere, no box, no bundle, nothing that a place like that should hold. And when he looked up at the staircase leading to the second floor, he saw, up there, open drawers emptied onto the landing, the space hastily turned upside down.

Someone took the merchandise. And they took it in a hurry. Jones recorded it and found it strange, because it didn’t add up. A settling of scores doesn’t steal the entire stock. Whoever kills to send a message leaves the drugs where they are, precisely so they can be found. This was something else, or two things at the same time, and he kept the contradiction along with the others that the night had been piling up.

He bent down beside one of the small plates and looked at the cartridge case it marked, without touching it. Nine millimeters. He raised his eyes, scanned the floor, and found others, many, too scattered to be from a single weapon, and among them, thicker, the red casings of twelve-gauge cartridges. Pistol and shotgun. There had been a shootout there, and a heavy one. Near the wall, two of the living lay leaning against each other, unconscious, their wrists tied, and in the light of the room Jones noticed what they had on their skin. Skulls drawn one on top of the other on their arms, a tear marked under the eye of one of them, the scraped skin covered in scratches. Cartel. Their uniform, that aesthetic of men who deliberately erase everything that individualizes them and engrave in its place what makes them equal. He had seen too much skin like that in too many rooms. He straightened up and went into the corridor.

And it was there, under the bright light, that the night truly began to make no sense.

The hallway was destroyed. Not overturned, not a mess. Destroyed. The walls on both sides were riddled with bullet holes at different heights, and Jones read the sequence as he would read a sentence, from left to right, bottom to top, and what the sentence said was that someone had fired on the move, moving quickly, correcting their aim as they retreated, and that the target wasn’t even close to where an ordinary man would put his head. The shots went high. Too high. But it wasn’t the shots that held him there. It was the rest. The plaster on both walls was ripped off in long strips, not spots, long furrows torn at chest height and higher, and the ceiling, the ceiling itself, was torn apart in three places, plaster falling off, planks exposed, rubble scattered on the floor underneath. The floor, in the middle of the hallway, was open, the boards bursting upwards as if something had come from below.

Jones stopped in front of it and stared for a long time, and a feeling of something wrong rose up in his stomach.

This wasn’t a fight . It wasn’t thought, it was weight. He’d been in many fights, seen many corridors that men had left behind, and none had this aspect. A fight marks a point, opens a hole where a body hits and stops. These weren’t points. They were tears, long and continuous, wall, floor and ceiling bruised by the same thing in the same movement, as if something long and heavy had whipped the entire corridor from end to end, several times, without finding what it was looking for. Nothing I know how to name does that to a wall. There were no burn marks. There was no smell of explosives, only the clean gunpowder of the shots. It was force, and it was reach, and neither of those things had human size. The word hung in his head like words that we recognize but refuse, for now, to develop.

She continued walking alongside the rubble, without stepping on it, went around the hole in the floor, and arrived in the kitchen.

Here, the chaos was of a different nature. The kitchen had seen better days long before that night, and seemed to have given up hope for another. Bread hardening on the counter, plates piled with dry scraps, silverware in the sink among pans encrusted with grease, the stove dark with burnt residue around the burners. The underlying smell was of forgotten food and cigarette smoke ingrained in the plaster, but above it came again, stronger now, the gunpowder and blood and that damp, animalistic breath he had smelled at the door. The table was overturned, one leg bent under the tabletop. Broken plates were scattered all over the floor. And there were signs of a swift melee in a small space, of someone who had moved quickly between the sink and the counter looking for a way out, marks of a fight that hadn’t lasted and had ended elsewhere.

It ended with the back door, which no longer existed. The door frame was there, empty, and the entire door had been ripped from its hinges and thrown out, the hardware twisted, the wood broken. Whoever passed through it didn’t walk. They were thrown.

But it wasn’t the door that trapped Jones in the kitchen. It was the floor.

In the middle of the linoleum floor there was a gaping hole. Not a crack, not a depression. A hole opened downwards, the cement screed shattered, the earth exposed at the bottom, and from there a groove ran across the rest of the kitchen and outwards, under the broken threshold, towards the backyard. Jones crouched at the edge of the hole and looked inside, then followed the groove with his eyes until it disappeared under the house.

Something had sunk into the floor here. The idea was absurd, and he allowed it to be absurd, because the floor didn’t lie. Something had plunged through that floor into the earth, in the kitchen, and had followed it underneath to the backyard, tearing up the soil along the way like a violent root. It wasn’t digging. There wasn’t a tool in his world that could open up a floor like that, from top to bottom and then horizontally, in a single movement. Jones stood up slowly, feeling his knee protest, and stood in the middle of that narrow kitchen with the very clear and very old feeling of being faced with a scene that refused the explanations he had saved up to offer.

And that’s when the memory that had been trying to climb up from the doorway finally did.

He’d been in scenes like this before. Twice in his life, exactly twice, and he’d done everything he could to avoid thinking about either one too often. One was far away and long ago, in a sandy place where destruction of that magnitude was the work of artillery, and where he’d learned, too young, to distinguish what a war machine does to a body from what a man does. The other was right here in the city, years later, already a detective, when he was called to a warehouse and encountered a level of force that none of the human tools he knew could produce, and he had, for the first time, to write a word in a report that wasn’t police-related. Both places smelled like that. Both had that quality of damage that exceeded the instrument. I know this . Jones took a deep breath, and the air brought back the gunpowder and the blood and the beast, and he knew, without having seen the body yet, that he would hate what was in the yard.

He slipped sideways through the torn-off door. On the other side, what had been a wooden deck connecting the house to the backyard was buried beneath the roof itself. The pillars supporting the back roof had broken, and the entire structure had collapsed onto the planks, broken wood, and shattered tiles piled on the deck. Jones ducked under a fallen beam, circled around the collapse, and reached the open backyard.

Outside, under the spotlights, he stopped.

Before that night, the backyard had been a dumping ground for everything those men had broken and no longer wanted. It was possible to reconstruct it from what remained on the edges: rusting scrap metal in the tall grass, rubble piled against the fences, torn garbage bags, a rotting sofa lying face down in a corner. But the center of the lot was nothing like that anymore. It was a crater. The entire lawn had been torn up, ripped in slabs, and the ground sank into a shallow, wide hole with irregular edges, the earth exposed, compacted and churned up as if two enormous weights had trampled it in the same spot for far too long. Around it, the grass was waterlogged and black with churned-up mud.

And the fences. Jones scanned the perimeter with his eyes and counted the holes. The side fence was broken from end to end, knocked down into the property, the posts broken at the base. The back fence, on the opposite side, was open in a huge hole, the boards bursting outwards, towards the neighboring lot. And between the two points there was a trail, a corridor of destruction that crossed the yard and continued beyond it, plowed earth, crushed grass, and when Jones approached the back hole and looked at the adjacent lot, he saw that the destruction didn’t stop there. It continued into the abandoned lot, and then back. Something had left that yard dragging something else, crossed the neighboring property breaking everything in its path, and then returned through the same hole.

Whatever had done this didn’t fit in the yard. Jones stood for a moment before that passage, and the word he’d been holding back since the hallway became a little harder to suppress. No gang fight could produce this. Gangs don’t tear down three fences and carry the fight to the neighbor’s yard and bring it back. This thing was the size of a vehicle, and it moved like an animal, and it had a will of its own.

That’s when the smell of animals claimed what it had promised at the door.

At the back of the yard, near the broken fence, lay the remains of a doghouse, crushed, its boards broken and scattered as if an enormous weight had suddenly fallen upon it. Beside it, still embedded in the ground, was a short, thick chain, the kind used to restrain a large guard dog, with its open, empty collar at the end. Around it, in the trampled grass, were tufts of dark fur and splashes of blood, and nothing else. Jones crouched near the collar and looked closely, counting what he saw and what he didn’t see.

There used to be a dog here. A big one, chained up. And it’s gone. There was no carcass. No trace of an escape, no gap in the fence through which a cornered animal would flee, and the chain was still in place, fastened to the ground, the collar still fastened to the buckle as if they had ripped the animal from inside it without unfastening anything. There was the fur, there was the blood, there was the crushed doghouse, and after that, nothing. A big dog doesn’t evaporate from a yard. A big dog, when it disappears, disappears whole or disappears in pieces, and Jones wasn’t seeing either. He stood up slowly and remained there, at the back of the property, with the physical, ancient, and unwanted certainty of being before a scene that didn’t obey the rules he had learned to apply.

All that remained was the tree.

At the far end of the plot stood a large, old tree, its trunk split open from top to bottom on one side, the bark torn away in an area the size of a man, broken branches still hanging by their fibers, and leaves, many of them, covering the ground beneath as if the entire tree had been shaken by a single blow. And beneath it, lying on its back across the exposed roots, was the body.

Jones crossed the yard slowly, skirting the signs, and the experts working around the dead man moved aside to give him space without him having to ask. One of them was crouched a few steps from the body, using tweezers to pick up a piece of dark, damp fabric that had fallen on the grass, and Jones noticed the way the man handled it, with the hesitation of someone unsure of what he was picking up. He didn’t go back there. He stopped beside the dead man, his hands clasped behind his lower back, and looked.

It was a man. At least, the body still was, though it was hard to say for sure. It was torn apart in a way that Jones had to catalog in parts, because the whole thing was too much for one look at. The torso was sunken in the middle, the ribs pushed inward like a crushed box, and no human fist does that to a chest, none, Jones had seen what human fists do and it wasn’t that. There were broken bones everywhere, the arms twisted at angles that weren’t angles, one leg turned outward at the knee. There were cuts. Clean, deep lacerations, distributed across the body with a coldness that contrasted sharply with the rest, cuts behind the joints, in the bend of the knees, in the tendons, in the exact way of someone who knows where to cut to take away the strength of a limb, blows from someone who understands anatomy and not rage. And there were gunshots. Many. Scattered across the body, in the shoulders, in the joints, like those in the hallway. But in his chest and head there was something else, a close cluster of point-blank shots, precise, organized, heart, lung, skull, one after the other, the mark of burnt gunpowder on the skin around each hole, the kind of shot you don’t take in the middle of a fight. The kind of shot you take afterward.

Jones stared at it for a long time, and felt the old unease settle in, the one he had learned to trust more than any proof, the physical sensation of two things that don’t belong together in the same place.

There’s more than one hand here .

It was the first clear thought of the night, and he let it grow. He looked at the cuts, and the cuts were from one hand. He looked at the precise shots in the joints, and they were from the same hand that made the cuts, the hand of someone who works carefully, economically, methodically, a hand he already knew from other scenes, from other reports, from the recording that was locked in the mayor’s office by this point. The vigilante . The attire, the blond hair, the restraint, the way of crippling without killing. That he recognized. But the sunken chest wasn’t the vigilante’s. The corridor torn from end to end wasn’t the vigilante’s. The three fences knocked down, the crater, the trail that went from the yard back to the neighboring lot, the dog ripped from a closed leash—none of that belonged to the quick and economical man he had been hunting, the man who cleaned a room like he was setting a table, without destroying what didn’t need to be destroyed. This man doesn’t create destruction for no reason. I saw the recording. He doesn’t do this . And yet his signature was there, sharing the same body with a second signature that was pure brute force, the strength to throw a grown man against a tree and crush his chest with a single blow.

Jones straightened his back, looked around at the crater, the fences, the trail, and counted the survivors.

There were eight of them, inside and nearby, all unconscious and all breathing. Their wrists were tied, each one firmly, with tape, in the same way, left safely in the corners for the police to find. They were shot, yes, in the shoulder, in the knee, in the legs, but in places chosen to bring down and not to kill. Eight whole men, alive, wrapped up and delivered. That’s his mark. Everything Jones knew about the vigilante was there, in that restraint, in the methodical refusal to kill, in the man left for the police instead of being left for the morgue. Everything, except one thing.

Except for the body under the tree.

“Good evening, sir.”

Jones turned. Detective Richard had crossed the yard and stopped a step away from him, tall, his pale skin worn thin, the little hair he had left gray in the harsh spotlight. He was one of the men Jones trusted most, perhaps the only one whose judgment he still trusted without needing to verify, and his face tonight had the particular expression of someone who had seen something he couldn’t reconcile.

“Richard.” Jones turned his eyes back to the body. “Tell me what’s wrong with you.”

“Not much has been revealed, sir.” Richard’s voice was flat, the voice of someone who had learned to deliver bad news the same way he delivered a weather forecast. “What we managed to get out of the thugs matches the description of our vigilante. Suit, blond hair, tall. One of them, the one who could still string two sentences together before asking for a lawyer, said ‘the man in the suit’ and said nothing more.” He paused. “They’re from the cartel, all eight of them. One of them is a direct man of the boss, one of those who don’t show up at a place like this for nothing. That gives me grounds to hold them all.”

“But.” Jones heard what was missing in the detective’s voice.

“But they’re not just keeping quiet because of a lawyer.” Richard crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, unable to find what to do with his hands. “Those who woke up don’t want to talk about what happened here at all. And it’s not us they fear, sir. It’s something else. There are two who keep repeating a phrase and stop halfway through, and when we press them, they frown and ask for a lawyer again. What entered this house today instilled in them a fear that isn’t of the police. They’d rather be in a cell than tell anything.”

Jones nodded slowly. It was a pattern he knew. Tough men silenced not by strategy, but by terror, and that kind of terror doesn’t come from a man in a suit who maims without killing.

“And the lower one,” Jones said without intonation, indicating the body with his chin.

“The first one. And that’s what I can’t get out of my head.” Richard uncrossed his arms again. “It’s been a week since that guy’s been on the loose, and it’s been a busy week. Dozens of arrests. Broken bones, gunshot wounds to the shoulder, gunshot wounds to the knee, people who will spend time in the hospital before spending time in jail. But alive. All of them. Every night, all alive.” He pointed to the dead man with his chin. “This is the first one. In a whole week, the only one.”

Jones nodded again, and the number settled on him with weight, because the number confirmed what his body had already begun to tell him. A week of perfect restraint and a single breach . He had spent his life reading patterns, and what a pattern screams loudest is the exception. A man who chooses not to kill, night after night, dozens of times, with every opportunity in the world to kill, doesn’t break that pattern by accident on the seventh night. It wasn’t loss of control. It was something else.

“Who is he?” Jones asked.

“Donald Dougie. Doug, for close friends.” Richard pulled the notebook from his pocket and didn’t even open it, reciting from memory. “Small-time drug dealer, from the cartel’s base, nothing on his record to justify this kind of end. The forensic investigation is still determining the exact cause. Torso ruptured, broken bones all over his body, lacerations, and the gunshots.” He hesitated. “There are shots to his legs and shoulders, scattered, like those in the hallway. And there’s a close-range group to his chest and head. Those were inflicted while he was already on the ground, sir. Already stopped.”

“I saw.”

The two remained silent for a moment over the body, and it was Jones who broke the silence, in a lower voice, more to his own thoughts than to the detective.

“Did you notice the three things?”

Richard inclined his head. “Sir?”

“There are three different kinds of violence in this man.” Jones pointed, without touching, running his open hand over his body. “The cuts are from one school. Clean, precise, behind the joints, from someone who cuts to disarm, not to wound indiscriminately. The shots in the legs and shoulders are from the same school. Careful, economical, intent to take down.” He moved his hand to the sunken chest, to the twisted knee, to the collapsed torso. “But this isn’t care at all. This is a man thrown against a tree with the force of a machine. It’s a chest sunken by a single blow. It’s what tore the hallway inside from end to end and what knocked down three fences and took the fight to the neighbor’s property. The cuts and the precise shots are the work of a surgeon. This is the work of a demolition worker.” He lowered his arm. “They are two natures, Richard. And they didn’t fight each other in this scene. They worked together on the same man.”

Richard stared at the body with slightly narrower eyes, retracing the path the captain had laid out, and Jones saw the moment he reached the end, because the detective’s shoulders lowered a finger’s width.

“Are you saying you have another one?”

“Estou dizendo que o justiceiro que eu venho caçando não faz isto.” Jones gesticulou em volta, para a cratera, para as cercas, para a casa destruída pelas costas. “Eu vi a maneira dele trabalhar. Ele entra, resolve, e não derruba uma parede que não precise derrubar. Ele amarrou esses oito e deixou todos vivos esta noite, do jeito de sempre, e essa parte é dele, não tenho dúvida. Mas alguém afundou esse peito, e não foi a mão que amarrou os pulsos.” Olhou para Richard. “Tem outro. E o único que morreu, na semana inteira em que esse homem trabalha sem deixar morto, é justamente esse.” Voltou os olhos ao corpo. “Por quê.”

Não era pergunta para Richard responder, e Richard não respondeu. Jones se abaixou de novo, perto do agrupamento cerrado de tiros no peito e na cabeça, da pólvora queimada na pele em volta de cada furo, e olhou aquilo de muito perto, e algo se encaixou.

Ele atirou depois. O homem já estava no chão, já estava acabado, o peito já afundado, e ainda assim alguém esvaziou um carregador inteiro nele, coração, pulmão, cabeça, com método, sem pressa, do jeito de quem não está matando, e sim confirmando. Ninguém faz isso num homem que sabe que está morto. Jones tinha visto execução, tinha visto crueldade, tinha visto a pressa nervosa de quem mata com medo. Aquilo não era nenhuma das três. Aquilo era cuidado. Era a precisão fria de quem já viu, em algum lugar, alguma vez, um homem que devia estar morto se levantar de novo, e decidiu não correr o risco.

Jones se ergueu, e quando falou, falou devagar, e a palavra saiu dele com o mesmo peso com que saíra anos antes, num galpão, num relatório que ninguém quisera assinar com ele.

“Esse homem é um metahumano.”

Richard não recuou diante da palavra. Apenas acenou, devagar, como quem destranca por dentro algo que vinha segurando havia tempo.

“Eu também acho, senhor.” A voz dele baixou um tom, instintivo, ainda que não houvesse ninguém por perto. “É a única coisa que explica. O tamanho da destruição. O fato de ser o único morto da semana. E o jeito como insistiram em matar ele, depois de já ter acabado. Ninguém esvazia uma arma num cadáver. A não ser que tenha medo de que o cadáver se levante.” Engoliu em seco. “A gente vinha empurrando essa palavra com a barriga faz meses, no departamento. Todo mundo vendo na televisão e ninguém escrevendo no relatório.”

“Pois alguém vai ter que escrever”, disse Jones. “Mas não hoje, e não você, e não eu, até a gente saber muito mais do que sabe agora.” Olhou em volta, para a destruição inteira sob a luz branca, e por um instante o quintal de San Diego e o terreno de areia de trinta anos atrás se sobrepuseram atrás dos olhos dele, o mesmo tipo de dano, a mesma certeza física de estar diante de uma força fora de escala. “Eu já vi destruição assim duas vezes na vida. Uma na guerra. A outra aqui, num caso que eu preferia ter esquecido. Não é coincidência ela ter voltado.”

Endireitou-se, voltou a ser o capitão, e a voz recuperou o gume.

“E você consegue manter esses oito presos?”

Richard acenou. “Acredito que tenho o suficiente. A casa, a mercadoria na mesa, a ficha de cada um, e o homem do chefe entre eles. Não saem tão cedo.”

“Então prende.” Jones olhou de relance enquanto, do outro lado do quintal, dois peritos erguiam o corpo de Doug e o acomodavam dentro de um saco preto, fechando o zíper de uma ponta à outra sobre o que restara do homem. “E quero um relatório completo dos oito. Tudo o que eles souberem. Quem entrega a mercadoria, quem recebe, quem mandou montar essa casa aqui, e, principalmente, o que foi que eles viram nesse quintal e estão com medo demais de contar.” Baixou a voz, deu um passo na direção do detetive, e o que disse a seguir disse perto, para que ficasse entre os dois. “De qualquer jeito, Richard.”

Richard parou. “Senhor?”

“De qualquer jeito.” Jones sustentou o olhar dele. “A gente está em águas que não conhece, e a gente está sozinho nelas. Tem gente comprada demais nesse departamento, problema demais aparecendo do nada, dinheiro demais sumindo no caminho até chegar na nossa mão. Não dá para confiar em todo mundo que veste essa farda, e você sabe disso tão bem quanto eu.” Endireitou-se de novo. “Você tem a minha autorização para tirar dessa gente o que precisar tirar, pelos meios que precisar. A responsabilidade é minha. Eu só preciso saber.”

Richard mediu o capitão por um instante, e Jones viu nele a compreensão exata da gravidade daquilo, e viu também que o detetive não recuava. Era por isso que confiava nele.

“O senhor vai ter o que precisa”, disse Richard.

“Ótimo.” Jones lançou um último olhar à cratera, às cercas rompidas, ao saco preto sendo erguido do chão. “Tenha uma boa noite.”

He turned his back on it all and retraced his steps, circling the house from the side instead of going through it again, past the tied-up living people and the experts and the little yellow signs, until he reached the front. The reporter was still there, setting something up in front of the camera, and she saw him leave, and opened her mouth, and Jones passed by her as if she were part of the wall, without turning his head, and got into the car. The driver started the engine without needing any instruction, and the house, the only one lit up on that dead street, began to recede into the distance.

That’s when the phone rang.

Jones took the device out of his pocket, looked at the name on the screen, and opened it.

“Good evening, Jim.”

The voice on the other end was the same as always, hoarse from cigars and sleepless nights, the voice of an old man he’d known for thirty years, who held, high above the city, the other end of the same broken rope he held below. Jones listened for a moment, his eyes fixed on the darkness filtering through the window, on the broken lampposts, on the neighborhood the department had lost.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s him. In part.”

And he listened again, a little longer, letting the mayor finish what he had to say before responding, because that was how the two of them spoke to each other, without interrupting one another, two men accustomed to waiting their turn on the radio.

“I assure you I’m close, Mayor.” A pause. Outside, the artificial and orderly city began to appear at the end of the avenue, clean and illuminated and lying about itself. “But there’s something new today, and I prefer to tell you face to face. It’s not what we expected. Our man wasn’t alone there.”

He listened to the answer. He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them.

“Good evening, Mayor.”

And he hung up the phone, and put it away, and looked back at the street, immersing himself once more in the only mystery the city had still managed to offer him in its entirety, the mystery that plagued San Diego and which, tonight, had just become bigger than him.