The Photograph 7.1: Cell Phones  

7.1:

Pounding.

Incessant pounding behind my eyes.

Way past the ballpeen hammer throb.

More like an ice pick gouging out my eyes.

Two of them in fact.

Jesus.

This hurts.

Eyes that didn't want to open reluctantly pried apart to allow a sliver's wedge of light inside.

The pounding continued, both inside and without.

My eyes forced back the shades and squinted against the harsh glare of daylight.

I lay on the sofa at a catty-corner angle, head wedged between the armrest and the back cushions and legs draped over the opposite corner and hanging onto the floor. I propped on my elbows, the vertigo this time more intense, the headaches more severe.
I tasted grit on my teeth and when I swiped the back of my hand across my mouth it came away bright red.

I’m bleeding.

Not from the mouth… from my nose.

Blinking away the dregs of sleep… and I couldn’t really call this sleep, more like that state of unconsciousness you enjoy following an all-night bender.

That’s what my head felt like anyway.

I sat up, elbows propped on my knees, trying to sustain this tenuous grip on lucidity.

The pounding continued on the outside, more urgent, almost demanding, that it would not quit until it had been dealt with. It kept time with the ice picks stabbing at the back of my eyes from the inside out.

Ringing too.

The front door.

And then a voice.

“John, I need to speak with you now.”

A man’s voice, a voice I heard in my sleep not an hour ago.

Bob Quillan’s voice.

Urgent.

Demanding.

More than mildly irritated.

A voice that said it didn't care what god damn time of the morning it was, 7:10 AM when I was finally able to focus on the wall clock, I need to talk to you now.

This is starting to become a bad habit.

Like Friday with Frank, I stood on card table legs and shuffled to the front door, sniffing back the old blood -- the bleeding had stopped a while ago but had not yet congealed. I unlatched the lock and pulled open the door.

One of Bob Quillan's legendary traits is that nothing ever gouged out a crack in that thick armor of steely reserve and iron-willed composure – nothing surprises me anymore, he liked to say, but when I opened the door, he looked at me and blanched, the hard iron gray in eyes fading as they whites around them grew in shock.

"Jesus, Joseph and Mary," Bob Quillan said. "What happened to you?"

"Rough night," I said and tried to squeeze the ice picks away. "What's wrong?"

"I think I need to ask you that," Bob said sniffing back the cold air.

"You want to come inside?" I asked and opened the door.

"I don't, he replied. "What have to say can be said out here. We have a problem."

A spike of concern pierced the roiling nausea swirling around my insides. Bob Quillan was all business and no nonsense. He expected no less of his subordinates.

"What kind of problem?"
"Where have you been?"

"I took a couple of days off."

"Odd sense of timing from someone who hasn't taken any vacation in almost ten years," Bob said.

"That's the problem?"

The cold helped suck away the vertigo and nausea and drew the bright light of the crisp fall morning into sharp focus. The sun had yet to crest the treetops to the east but the night had been bled dry by the false light of pre-dawn.

Bob Quillan sighed and I compared him to the Bob Quillan I sat across the table from last night, the one who had drawn the gun on me, and the one who admitted to being an anomaly of computer generated imagery.

Same white hair cropped short in the crew cut.

Same hard iron gray eyes.

The lines aren't his eyes may have been chiseled a little deeper, but don't think the rigors of advancing age dulled the light that flashed behind his eyes.

"I want to know," he began, "why my god damn Sunday morning worship of the God of my choice has to be postponed because at 7:15 on this same Sunday morning I am standing on the front porch of one of my best detectives to ask him why his cell phone was found at a recent crime scene and he, one of my best detectives, was not attached to it?"

He reached inside his blazer pocket – part of the Bob Quillan uniform, blue blazer white shirt, conservative tie – and removed a sealed plastic bag marked EVIDENCE in black Sharpee.

My cell phone was inside.

Damn.

"Care to explain how and why this was found three feet from the body of Darius Murphy and you weren't around investigating the crime scene like the good homicide detective the City of Atlanta pays you to be?"

Double damn.

I never realized I didn't have it. I dropped the phone when Darius Murphy had been shot.

One thing I realized standing there in the cold of the November Sunday morning. You try to bullsh*t Bob Quillan, he'll catch on eventually, and then there will be hell to play. It's better to tell him the truth now, regardless how unpleasant that truth might be, and deal with the consequences then, rather than lie to him and deal with the truth when he eventually and inevitably finds out, compounded with the fact that you lied.

Regardless of the justification, lying is not an option.

"Darius Murphy asked to meet with me."

“About what?”

“You got time for coffee?”

Bob Quillan cut a look at his watch and then at the advancing light of the Sunday morning up and down my street. He was as much angry as he was troubled.

“You have put me in a very compromising position here.”

“You have to trust me on this.”

“Trust you?” he said and stepped inside. “My lead investigator is a material witness to a crime he did not report. You fled a crime scene. You are a part of the crime scene for chrissakes. I’m trying to come up with a reason not to ask for your gun and your badge and haul your a$$ downtown and arrest you myself on obstruction of justice, among other things. We passed ‘trust me Bob’ a long time ago, John. I’m going to need a helluva lot more than trust here.”

Bob sat down at the kitchen table and I put water on for coffee.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” I said as I sat down at the table across from him, a wild sensation of déjà vu washing over me.

“Crazy would explain a lot,” Bob replied with a humorless chuckle.

Fighting the déjà vu and the nagging irony that I’d told him all this already less than an hour ago, I told Bob Quillan everything, from the Raybans to Darius Murphy having information about Mary’s murder.

And for the pure hell out it because at this point I didn't have anything else to lose, I even told him this was second time we'd had this discussion today and left it at that.

Call it my own concession to the fantastic.