Intuition
Zeros and eights floated down the Lazy River. From the height of the water-slide tower, Justin saw the numbers bobbing on the water. Sometimes, he thought that the zeros were “O”-shaped (letters in other words) and the eights rotated sideways were infinity signs. But, for some reason, zeros and eights made more sense to him.
The morning was cool for Phoenix and, from the tower, Justin saw streaks of snow on the mountains surrounding the valley. He could see very clearly from his perch: freeways where metal glinted under rippling yellow blankets of smog, the skyscrapers downtown squat and helpless in the sun, the suburbs and the brown Camelback mountain at Scottsdale, a stadium dome in the distance and planes ceaselessly rising and falling over the airport. There were three levels to the tower and its walls and supports were the color of vinyl siding and, at the top, where Justin was stationed the flattened gable of the roof shielded him from the sun. The chute of the water-slide, a tilted tunnel with an oblong opening, dropped steeply down to the plunge-pool below. Another less sheer slide spiraled down to the pool from the tower’s second level. The lower “granny” slide, as it was called, was open during the height of the season, when it was very hot and the water-park was thronged with guests. But it wasn’t hot this time of year and, so, the “granny” slide was closed. A film of water flowed over the surface of the slide and Justin could see the plunge-pool rippling placidly at the base of the tower. No one was around yet, but he was on-duty and so he engaged the sound system, powering the music played from a speaker shaped like a bull-horn atop the tower and emerging, as well, from other smaller speakers posted among the cabanas, along the channel of the Lazy River, near the wading pool and the adult facility, a quarter of the size of an Olympic pool someone had told him, where an elderly woman was now swimming laps. Across from the tower, a shallow lagoon could be stirred to surf, but there was no one at that pool and so the waters were calm. At a bend in the glazed blue channel of the Lazy River, a metal shed stored the flotation tubes, some for one occupant and shaped like a zero and others for two swimmers and, therefore, taking the form of a figure eight (or infinity sign). The zeros and eights were stacked up in unsteady piles, a bit like tires at an auto salvage lot, but, already, a dozen of the floats were drifting along the shallow concrete canal, unmanned, abstract messages signaling to the blue sky. A few long-tailed birds were singing in the locust and willow trees transplanted into the water park and shading the Lazy River.
Cold Play’s song, “Clocks” sounded overhead and from the hidden speakers below. The Lazy River water feature where the tubes were floating looped and Justin wondered how the current in the artificial stream was maintained: didn’t water have to flow from higher to lower? So how could there be a closed level loop, but, nonetheless, enough current to float the tubes down the stream? Perhaps, there was some ingenious mechanism concealed from the eye powering the current. A family below was lugging several tubes to the water, dragging them across the concrete from the stacks beside the metal shed. (This was a waste of energy – the swimmers could have simply stepped into the Lazy River and seized the tubes that were floating by.) Everything looped here – the water was recycled through secret tubes and hidden siphons; the Lazy River flowed in an irregular circle; the Cold Play songs looped after about 90 minutes, repeating tunes earlier broadcast; the birds in the trees sang short melodies that they energetically reproduced exactly again and again until the heat of the day silenced them.
Jobs followed a strict division of labor at the resort’s water park. Justin was assigned to the top level of the tower where he was supposed to supervise the line of people queued up to use the water-slide. (For him, this was a bit of a promotion – the year before he was stationed at the line, usually longer and more contentious, attending the granny slide on the tower’s second level.) Three Hispanic maids with lawn-blowers and black plastic sacks for rubbish were grooming the slick-looking artificial turf where there were rows of lounge chairs for sunbathing. Another Hispanic man wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap was skimming beetles and leaves out of the Lazy River, dipping a metal ladle into the bright water. Two lifeguards, skinny girls holding noodle-shaped floats across their bellies, were ambling along the edges of empty quarter-sized Olympic pool. The boss of the water-park crew was nursing his hangover in the shadow of the shed where the flotation tubes were kept. He sat on a stool and was sipping something from a tall plastic “Big Gulp” cup, a drink (most likely Gator-Ade) purchased at a C-Store. The girl at the concession kiosk near the arched bridge crossing the Lazy River was adjusting carbonation canisters in her soda system. Justin liked her and waved from his platform. She looked up and gave him a thumb’s up. Sometimes, he watched her with the binoculars that he kept danging across his chest. Another family strolled along the sidewalk from the condominiums and time-shares. A maintenance man piloted his golf cart along the narrow lane between the four-story banks of rooms. The old lady had completed her laps and stood, now, at the edge of the pool, shivering a little in the breeze.
Justin had gone to the Catholic Academy in Mattapan, a neighborhood in Boston. A couple years earlier, his parents had sold their business and retired to Tempe. Justin had plans to enroll at Boston University, but he needed to earn some money to supplement the scholarship for tuition and student loans which he had been offered. So he was taking classes at the local Junior College, not a full load, but a few courses that were required at the University in Massachusetts and working as many hours possible at the resort. He had been on the swim team at the Academy and, for this reason, was qualified as an attendant at the water park, although his station, high on the water-slide tower, didn’t involve any swimming. Indeed, it would be difficult for him to even reach the water from the top of the tower. Justin surveyed the park with his binoculars. The girl at the food kiosk unwrapped a cake donut and ate it. Two of the gardeners had slipped through the fence into the construction site next to the water park. Tennis courts were being built there, but very slowly, and the gardeners stood between two parked graders, where they thought they were unobserved, passing a joint back and forth. Three more families with small children had entered the water-park, flashing their ID bracelets to the hungover boss sitting in the shade of the float shed. Justin glanced at the digital clock installed in the console from which he operated the rotation of Cold Play songs. He had a microphone and could access the sound system. Every hour he called a ten minute time-out ordering everyone out of the water for that period.
He heard a couple of little boys bickering on the platform below. They were daring one another to go down the big slide. A bit reluctantly, they emerged, one after the other, on the tower’s upper level. Justin’s job was to explain how to slide down into the plunge-pool. You were supposed to point your toes and cross your arms over your chest as you slid down the tube. One boy pushed the other forward. They were small, brown and scrawny kids with bony, brittle looking knees and elbows.
“Have you gone before?” Justin asked.
The two boys both shook their heads. Fear made them tongue-tied.
Justin could see that they were tall enough to use the water slide.
He told them to point their toes when they reclined in the slide and keep their legs together, ankles touching. Then, he folded his hands as if praying under his chin, pressing palm to palm.
“Keep you hands together like you’re praying, right over your chest,” Justin said.
The two boys nodded.
“Can we go together?” one of the kids asked.
“No,” Justin said. “Of course not. I’ll watch. When you hit the water below and get out of the way of the slide bottom, I’ll let the other kid go. That’s how it’s done.”
The boys nodded again.
One of the kids paused, peering into the dark wet chute dropping through the vinyl railings on the platform. Then, he muttered something to himself, clutched his hands in front of his breast, and stretched out in the tube. At first, nothing happened but, then, the film of flowing water dislodged him and he slid out of sight.
“See,” Justin said.
The remaining boy looked at Justin as if puzzled.
“You can go,” Justin said, looking down to see the first kid dog-paddling to the side of the pool.
The kid didn’t move.
“It’s okay,” Justin said. “Go ahead.”
The boy took a tentative step toward the chute opening.
“I don’t know,” he said. Then: “I’m not going. Too scary.”
But, even, as he said those words, he rolled himself into the dark tube, clutched at his heart, and dropped out of sight.
Justin wondered if whether showing the kids how to pray as they descended the slide earned him merit with God. God eyes were always open and He saw everything – not a sparrow perished without the Father taking note.
2.
It was a little before two-o-clock. Justin had just broadcast the all-clear so that the people in the water park could return to the pools and Lazy River. The Cold Play loop had just begun its third repetition for the day.
The sky was overcast and a breeze stammered in the tops of the locusts and willows. It wasn’t crowded below – sometimes, to pass the time Justin counted the guests in the water park: 23, he thought, sometimes, 24, but when one group left another arrived and so the population below, open and available to his eye, was 23. A man with two kids entered the park and turned the back of his hand to show the wrist bands there. He had all ID’s on his forearm, a row of them like wrist watches, and this wasn’t allowed - the boss should have made the man put the bands on each of the kids, but it was hard to remove the ID bracelets without ruining them and the boss just gestured that the group could enter. Now, there were 26 – to his eye, the census below showed “26-ness”. Justin wasn’t sure as to the qualities of “26-ness” but he felt the count vividly in a part of his brain adjacent to vision. Perhaps, “26-ness” had to do with the overcast skies, the hum of the air conditioners in the condominiums, the bubbles glinting between tubers on the Lazy River, the short line at the concession kiosk where the girl that he admired was lifting hot dogs with her plastic tongs and putting them on opened buns. Some guy had been bothering the concession girl, a middle-aged man with a bare chest grizzly with grey and black hair where a gold chain shone when the sun peeped out of the clouds and explored the lanes at the Resort, eroding the shadows a bit and brightening the flags on the golf course rippling in the breeze, catching the concentric rings catching rays of light on the quarter-sized Olympic pool where someone had dived into the water. The people comprising the 26-ness were either grandparents or small children and none of them showed any interest in the water-slide. The plunge pool shimmered where the flow scrolling from the bottom of the slide disturbed the surface of the water where the sky and the tower wrapped in its chutes were reflected.
Justin knew that the girl at the Concession Kiosk didn’t like him watching her with the binoculars. But he was concerned about the hairy man with the gold chain, standing just to the side of roller-grill where the hot dogs were cooking. He wasn’t in line, had already been served, and sometimes his face was half obscured by the puff of pink cotton candy that he was eating. Justin focused on the girl’s face. She was wearing a sweat-shirt (people down here thought that 75 degrees was chilly) and, suddenly, a worried look passed over her face. Her brow briefly furrowed and she looked up from wrapping a hot dog in napkins, turning her head as if to see something that she had heard. At first, Justin thought the obnoxious man had said something insulting to her, but her expression was different and told another story. She was attending to some sound that concerned her. A woman was walking toward where the Lazy River passed under arched bridge. The woman turned to her right and left as if looking for help. Then, she trotted toward the shadowy alcove under the bridge. Eights and zeros drifted unmanned down the stream.
Justin scanned the crowd – “26-ness” was no longer apparent. Something was off. A man back-floating in the adult pool rolled over on his belly and began to swim rapidly toward the aluminum ladder at the edge of the pool. The two teenage life guards with the float-noodles at their bellies were heedless, talking to a young man in a Speed-o. The numbers weren’t right: “26-ness” wasn’t visible.
Justin flipped off the Cold Play song and lifted the microphone. If he was wrong, there would be consequences: he had just declared a ten-minute break and, then, told everyone that it was all clear, but this was some sort of emergency, what kind he didn’t know, but an emergency, nonetheless, and so Justin shouted “Out of the water! Everyone out of the water! Take a break now, right now!” He could see people splashing around below, turning their eyes up to him, irritated, perhaps, and the boy in the Speed-o gave him the finger, flashing it at the tower where Justin was stationed. The two teenage life-guards looked confused. One of them dropped her float noodle and ran into the wading pool, plowing through the hip-deep water. The other girl stumbled over her noodle – it was hitched around her neck – and fell over.
People were hauling themselves out of the water, shaking drops off their shoulders like wet dogs. Justin called the name of the boss: “Bill! Bill!” he shouted. Bill stood up, disoriented as if he had been asleep. Justin looked at the shadow under the arched bridge over the Lazy River. He couldn’t see anything there, but, for some reason, the smooth flow of the water emerging from the gloom was grooved and irregular.
“Bill!” Justin cried. “Under the bridge. Go under the bridge.”
Justin put down the microphone and hurried down the steps in the tower. At ground level, the clear and abstractly schematic aspects of the water-park were concealed, no longer apparent at all. People stood in little sodden groups muttering. Others were darting to and fro. Justin ran on the slippery tile between the wading pool and the adult water, a quarter of the size of a full Olympic Pool. He almost fell on slick edge of the wading pool.
Bill was kneeling over a small body, blowing into its mouth. (Justin recoiled with the thought of Bill’s booze-tainted breath.) The little body was motionless. Several people approached tentatively and a woman was wailing. Other parents dragged their children away, putting their wet bodies between the scene with the drowned child and their own kids. One of the lifeguard girls was scrambling to find her phone in a back pack where she kept sunscreen and lotions and her combs.
The child twitched and gagged. Bill raised his head with a froth of the child’s vomit on his lips and beard. He turned the small girl over and she vomited some more.
A siren sounded in the distance.
A little later, Bill was sitting next to Justin on a chair made from aluminum and rubbery bands of vinyl. The water park was closed for the day.
“How did you know, dude?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know. Intuition, maybe,” Justin said. “But I just knew.”
3.
The Amtrak train arrived from Washington. Justin planned to board for his return to Boston. It was midday and he had been waiting at the Philadelphia 30th Street Station for an hour. The Express was slightly delayed but would depart at 12:08 according to the display in the terminal.
Marble halls echoed with voices. The great columns on the portico overlooking the river cast shadows across the broad floor where people sat, or sprawled, on wooden pews around the stone wells leading down to the platforms. The air buzzed with announcements. Justin finished his hot dog and, then, threw away the wrapper and napkin. He took out his phone and checked the ticket displayed on the screen.
An African-American man in a resplendent uniform used a key card to open the gate above the steps descending the well to the platform. Cold air rose from the stair-well. It was still winter in this part of the world and would be colder in Boston. Down the stair, the trains hummed like great dynamos.
Justin sent a text message to his girlfriend. She attended Temple and he had been visiting her over the weekend. She texted back thanking him for his nice message. He picked up his duffle bag and made his way to the open gate. Train station security varied from place to place. Here, the man in the uniform was checking peoples’ tickets before letting them through the gate where the marble steps led to the trains.
On a catwalk between the columns, a couple of people surveyed the station. Their shadows also were published by the winter sun and cast across the floor. A woman at the head of the line was pushing a cart on which luggage was stacked. Two small children, frightened it seemed, were clutching at her waist. The cart couldn’t be maneuvered down the steps and, so, the Amtrak employee gestured that she should go around the stairwell to an elevator marked by some stanchions linked together by a black band. Justin felt a sudden surge of disquiet. Perhaps, the hot dog was upsetting his stomach. A spasm clenched at his belly and he felt nauseated.
The woman with the children and the cart piled with luggage pushed back through the people waiting in the line. Justin was reminded of the water-park slide. You always felt a quiver of fear, something agitated in your belly, before plunging into the dark opening and sliding on the water so sleek and cold under your spine and buttocks, pitching downward around the black corners and, then, emerging into the Arizona sunshine to plow feet-first into the plunge pool. An old woman searched her pockets for a paper ticket. She was carrying a small plastic box in which Justin saw a tiny dog with great bulging eyes. The dog was whining.
Something was wrong. Justin sensed catastrophe and felt faint. The sensation reminded him of the day at the resort when the child nearly drowned. He backed-up and let a man behind him take his place in the line. The man must have come from a cold climate because he was wearing a heavy coat with mittens peeping out of his pockets. The man showed a paper ticket to the train employee. For some reason, he balanced on one leg as he displayed his ticket.
It was Justin’s turn. But he couldn’t make himself move forward toward the hole in the station floor and the steps there that dropped through shadow onto the platforms where the trains were waiting. He shrugged and turned away from the gate. Cold came up from the pit and brushed against his shoulders and the hairs on his neck stood up.
“What now?” he thought. The situation was embarrassing.
Justin carried his duffle bag back to the ticket office. There was a fee for the change but it wasn’t too much and, after the new ticket was issued, he felt relieved. The next train to New York and Providence and, then, Boston was scheduled to depart at 6:12 that evening.
He put his bag in a locker and went outside. The sun was shining on the river. Buses pulled up under the big columns, stopped, and people came and went. SEPTA trains on elevated tracks curved into the station.
Later, Justin learned that there was a disturbance in the route. The tracks were closed. He boarded a bus with the other travelers and rode to Grand Central Station where service resumed to Boston.
Lost Car Keys
1.
The airport hotel was beyond the freeway, south of the runways and terminal. Vacant land remained between warehouses and office buildings. Guests at the hotel could leave their vehicles in remote parking for ten dollars a night and ride a shuttle to the terminal. Parked cars occupied a lot about two-hundred yards from the hotel, a flat expanse of pot-holed asphalt surrounded by a chain-link fence. The vehicles were under surveillance by cameras mounted on nearby utility poles. In a room behind the hotel lobby, a half-dozen screens showed parked cars gradually covered by snow in this cold climate and, then, thawed by sun glinting on chrome during the bright days, tires moistened by melt-water puddles that froze to ice at night. On the hour and half-hour, the hotel van prowled the lot, ferrying people to and from their cars. Sometimes, particularly when it was cold and gusty, hotel guests seemed disoriented; after a long flight, it is no easy matter to remember where your vehicle is parked after a week in the sun or business meetings three time-zones away. Hotel staff charged with looking, now and then, at the parking lot surveillance, sometimes saw men or women lugging suitcases across the snow-heaped aisles between the cars, apparently lost. Hotel employees perused the surveillance monitors at intervals, when they knew that the shuttle van was making drop-offs at the lot. A few years earlier, someone drunk from cocktails in the first-class cabin, slipped and fell in the remote lot, was not discovered for a couple of hours during a blizzard, and suffered serious frost-bite injuries, the subject of litigation in federal court. No one wanted that to happen again.
The cars waiting for their drivers in the remote lot had a forlorn aspect. They were exposed to the weather and, in March in this climate, there were snow squalls and ice storms and, even, sometimes prolonged blizzards that buried the vehicles in stuff that seemed blue-grey on the monitors in the room behind the lobby. Sometimes, it rained on top of the snow and melted it away. The nights were long and the halogen lights lit the lot without making it bright – there was a dull, muted quality about the images on screen. People who were supposed to periodically check the screens felt that,if they were required to watch intently, measuring the increase or decrease of snow in windrows, the slow rotation of shadows around motionless vehicles when it was day, the progress of dazed passengers dragging roller-luggage over the potholes and through the puddles, cars leaving and other vehicles arriving and, sometimes, the shadow of plane landing or taking off falling like a black avalanche over remote lot – if you were really required to attend to such things minute-by-minute and day-by-day, you would go mad, you would despair and kill yourself or, perhaps, run amok.
But no one had to actually watch the surveillance images. In good weather, at least, a glance every half-hour was sufficient. And so it was that at 10:00 pm, one windy and cold night, Omodt, one of the night clerks at the hotel, observed a figure, probably a man, walking up a lane between parked cars, paying no regard to puddles that he stumbled through somehow without getting his trousers wet, then, standing next to a SUV, a black Honda CRT with an odd lesion of orange rust across its passenger side. It was odd that the solitary traveler had no luggage. Omodt saw the man fumble in his pockets, stand on one leg like a stork for a moment, brooding it seemed, and, then, grope in the pockets of his heavy coat. He couldn’t find his car keys and stood on one leg again for an instant, an angular figure, before digging in his pants pockets and, then, opening his overcoat to slip his hands into his jacket. Omodt had seen this dance before: the traveler had lost his car keys and, after a few minutes, would turn away from the parked vehicle and, then, start his hike back to the hotel lobby, a distance of two football fields, but without any direct route because of the chain-link fence enclosing the lot. In the icy wind, travelers might get disoriented and the gate to the lot, activated by the van drivers, was difficult to navigate and, so, the situation of lost keys was perilous – the traveler might slip and fall on the ice, or, disoriented on the frontage road, turn in the wrong direction and trek to another hotel down the street (all airport hotels look alike) and this mistake in turn could lead to other problems. So Omodt decided it would be prudent to communicate with the van driver who had left the man in the lot, and, contrary to policy, driven away before verifying that the traveler had safely reached (and entered) his vehicle.
The van driver, Jason, was partly disabled. He had lost a foot to diabetes and used a prosthetic, but Omodt knew that he was capable and conscientious and, so, he wondered at the strange image on the surveillance monitors, actually visible from several perspectives: the frustrated traveler searching for his lost car keys. Jason answered the radio call. He said that he wasn’t on the premises and not, even near the hotel. In fact, he was picking up several guests at the charter terminal three miles away.
“You didn’t just drop off some guy near a Honda CRT in the second lane on the west side in the remote lot?” Omodt asked.
“Negative,” Jason said.
“I’m seeing this guy on the monitors and – “
Jason said that he had to sign-off because guests were waiting with their luggage and he had to load it into the van.
Omodt looked at the monitor. The man who had lost his car keys had vanished. He studied several of the screens. There was no trace of the solitary traveler. He didn’t seem to be located anywhere within the field of the cameras. This troubled Omodt; perhaps, the traveler had fallen between the vehicles and dropped out of the camera’s vantage. He called for the night maintenance man and asked him to drive out to the remote lot to see if anyone was wandering around out there.
After a half-hour, the night maintenance man, Mehmet, came to the front desk, shivering a little and shaking his head.
“There’s no one out there,” Mehmet said. “It’s windy and very cold, but I drove all the aisles and didn’t see anyone.”
An elderly lady wearing coat, tennis shoes, and pajamas, it seemed, was waiting behind Mehmet. She complained about a noisy party in the room next door. Omodt attended to her and forgot about the incident in the remote parking lot.
Omodt was off-duty the next day. The hotel was short-staffed; there weren’t enough chambermaids to provide service to all rooms and guests staying for more than one night were left to their own devices. During his evening shift, Omodt was training an intern, LaKeisha. He told her to monitor the surveillance monitors while he manned the front desk. Some Canadians in town for a hockey tournament were drinking at the small bar on the other side of the lobby. They were watching the flat-screen TV on which a basketball game was playing. Sometimes, they shouted and cheered.
LaKeisha came from the office behind the lobby and said that there was a guest lost in the remote parking lot.
“It seems that he can’t find his car keys,” she said.
“The weather isn’t too bad this evening,” Omodt said. But he explained to her that it was important to monitor the surveillance images when the van picked up or dropped-off customers in the remote lot. “You don’t want anyone abandoned out there.” He mentioned the lawsuit still pending in Federal Court. LaKeisha nodded.
“You have to send someone out to check on this guy,” Omodt told her. He went back into the room where the monitors showed the parked cars.
“Can you see the guy?” Omodt said.
LaKeisha peered at the monitors. “I don’t see him now,” she said.
“I wonder where he went,” Omodt replied. “I hope he didn’t fall down somewhere. People come off planes drunk sometimes.”
LaKeisha nodded.
“I thought the vans came on the hour and half-hour,” LaKeisha said. “I think the van is out at the terminal.”
Omodt looked at his watch: “It’s 10:20,” he said.
He radioed for the night maintenance men.
Mehmet walked across the lobby and approached the desk.
“Another wild goose chase, boss?” Mehmet asked.
Then, Omodt remember his last shift and the man fumbling for his car keys next to the black Honda CRT with the scar of rust across its side.
A chill ran down his spine. “What the fuck?” Omodt said.
“Robert sent me out there a little after 10:00 last night,” Mehmet said. Robert was the other night clerk who was on-duty when Omodt wasn’t working.
“What happened?”
“Same thing,” Mehmet said. “Some guy was supposedly lost in the parking lot. But when I went out there, I couldn’t find anyone.”
“Well, just wait,” Omodt told him. He beckoned to LaKeisha and they went into the dim room with glowing screens. Omodt showed her how to rewind the surveillance monitor on which she had seen the man. It was a good opportunity to demonstrate to her how the system worked.
“Sometimes, we need to preserve the video,” Omodt said. He pressed the button to re-wind the footage digitally stored on the server.
The pictures tracked back to footage showing a man fumbling for his keys, groping in the pockets of his heavy coat and, then, standing on one leg for a moment like a stork, brooding it seemed. The man stood next to a Honda CRT scarred with rust.
“There’s something wrong here,” Omodt said. He checked the time-stamp on the digital images: Thirty seconds past 10:00 pm this night.
“Do you want me to go out there?” Mehmet asked. LaKeisha looked a little bewildered.
“This is happening every night,” Omodt said. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
2.
Jackson saw that Tony had a stricken look on his face. He couldn’t see much of Tony’s face because of the mask and shield, but Jackson recognized the panic in his colleague’s eyes. Sometimes, people couldn’t handle it (it was too much) and they just darted away, vanishing, perhaps, to vomit, but, then, never returning. Jackson had known this to happen.
The Recovery Team consisted of eight workers, laboring in couples in the meadow where the derailed cars had come to rest. Several big craters were gouged in the muddy field and the grass was scuffed and, where the EMTs had worked, Jackson saw rubber gloves strewn across the ground, dropped syringes, plastic sacks in which medical gauze had been packed. The ambulances had made ruts in the soft turf. Remains were marked with small orange flags, flocks of them close to the tracks in the area charred by the explosion. There was a bad smell, diesel and decomposition. Birds had to be kept at bay.
Jackson and Tony were combing the debris field for personal belongings. This would aid in identification. Several hundred feet away, at the point of impact, some lights were mounted on tall stanchions so that the crash scene looked like a movie set. The forensic teams with surveyors were mapping the place where the two trains had collided. Nearby, the recovery workers took photographs. Jackson supposed that it would be years before anyone understood exactly why this catastrophe had occurred. A baby would be at the breast when an investigation commenced and, then, playing Little League or soccer when the findings were finally released.
Tony muttered something. He stooped to photograph a wallet lying next to a tuft of seared thistle. After taking the picture, Tony removed a numbered plastic sack from the pocket in his Haz-Mat suit and carefully placed the wallet, now tagged, in the baggy. Then, he carried the baggy back to the tote centrally located in the debris field. Jackson watched Tony to see if he would return to where they were searching the meadow. Black birds in flocks sat in the trees along the railroad right-of-way.
Tony paused for a moment, sighed, and, then, squared-up his shoulders to come back to where they were searching. Near one of the fluttering orange flags, Jackson found an electric razor, a toothbrush, and a crumpled tube of toothpaste. He tagged the find and put it in a baggy, walking back to the tote as well. The plastic box was half-full of numbered sacks. There were singed photographs, a small Moleskin notebook, a vial of prescription medication, a bottle of contact lens fluid, a little plastic case for carrying an animal that was (thankfully) empty.
Tony said: “Here’s something.” Jackson returned to where they were working. A small black object was lying in the crushed weeds. “What is it?” Jackson asked.
“It’s a key-fob for a car,” Tony said.
3.
There were questions as to whether the man wearing the baseball cap really represented the next-of-kin. Some phone calls had to be made. But LaKeisha was able to verify the man’s credentials.
The man told her that the hotel’s guest had left his vehicle in the parking lot, boarded an early flight to LaGuardia and, then, later taken the Amtrak train to Washington D. C. where he had some additional business. The guest rented a car in D.C., drove to Philadelphia and, then, boarded the Acela Express to Grand Central Station in New York. This was the Amtrak train that collided head-on with a southbound locomotive hauling freight near Trenton. Of course, it was a terrible tragedy and there were many casualties.
LaKeisha said that the shuttle van driver would be arriving momentarily. She excused herself and went to the manager’s office. Her boss was on the phone confirming details for a wedding reception in the hotel. LaKeisha didn’t want to interrupt and so she wrote a note on a card: “Dead guy’s rep is here to get car. What do I charge?”
The car had been in the lot for almost fifteen days.
“Nothing,” the boss wrote on the note-pad.
The van was waiting outside the front door. Jason got out, limping a little on his artificial foot. The weather was changing and this made his stump hurt. LaKeisha told Jason that the man in the baseball cap needed a ride to the Honda CRT in the parking lot, the vehicle with the flare of rust across its side.
She decided not to mention anything about the figure on the surveillance monitor. They hadn’t seen him for about six days and LaKeisha didn’t think it would be helpful to say anything about the apparition.
The man in the baseball cap seemed to be in a hurry and he didn’t offer to pay the parking charges.
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