Free City of the Sun by David Levien Page B

for the jogger. His hair still wet from the scalding shower he had hoped would disinfect him, he sat in his car swilling Maalox and praying it would quiet his churning stomach. It was Saturday and by ten he believed the runner wasn’t going to show up, but he sat there until five in the afternoon, anyway. He repeated the drill on Sunday, trying to keep from his head the idea that the man could’ve been from a nearby neighborhood and hit Tibbs by coincidence, not custom. The guy could’ve been visiting from out of town. Sunday was a bust, too.
    Monday, though, at ten after six in the morning, there he came, chugging up the street. He was in his early forties, barrel-bellied on spindly legs. Behr lumbered out of his car and ran up next to the man.
    “Sorry to bother you,” Behr said, no real apology in his voice, as he jogged along with him like a moving brick building. “I’m investigating a disappearance.”
    The man stopped his forward progress but kept moving in place, wiping his sweat-soaked sideburns, his breathing coming heavy. “A kid went missing here last October twenty-fourth. You know anything about it?”
    “No, I don’t,” the man wheezed.
    “Can I get a name?”
    “Brad Figgis.”
    The man, Figgis, didn’t know anything about it. “Time to time I saw a kid whiz by on his bike,” he did volunteer.
    “Were you ever questioned by the police about this?”
    “Nope. I’m not from around here.”
    Behr looked the man over. He didn’t look like he could cover that much ground.
    “How far you run?”
    “My loop is four and a half. This is about halfway.”
    “You remember anything unusual back then?”
    Figgis sweated and thought, and slowly nodded.
    “I remember a big old car out here a few days in a row. Parked right over there so I had to run around it. Then I never saw it again. It was a Pon-tiac or Lincoln. Big and gray.”
    “Plates?”
    “Nah. Didn’t catch that.”
    “Why’d it strike you?”
    “There were two guys in it. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like, only that they were eating. I thought they might’ve been landscapers or painters waiting to start work, but the car was wrong. Those types of guys seem to drive pickups or tiny Corollas. This car was huge. Slabs of gray fender. The kind that drinks gas.”
    Behr took a number and an address off Figgis, and watched him puff away into the morning. Then Behr went home to hammer away at DMV databases.
     
TWELVE
     
    MORNINGS WERE THE WORST for the Gabriels, and without coffee Carol was sure she’d have curled into a ball, dried up and blown away. She’d never been the early riser type. In college, she’d worked scrupulously to schedule her classes after ten. Then, when she’d gotten married and Paul had to wake up at quarter to six every day for work, she’d grown to feel so guilty at sleeping past him that she’d forced herself awake to make coffee and breakfast while he took a run. Then she’d sit at the kitchen table and make a pretense at conversation, but all she really wanted was to get back in bed.
    That all changed with Jamie. The moment he was born she was filled with energy, a purpose, for which she had never known to even hope. When he was a baby and his crying filled their apartment, and later their first small house, she would get up to attend to him. There was no bitterness, no black exhaustion in her step as she walked to his crib. When he got older and could sleep through the night before popping up to play at six or so in the morning, Carol felt that she barely needed sleep anymore. And by the time Jamie reached school age, Carol was getting up before he was. She faced the morning like a drill instructor, with energy and gusto, with near aggression. She’d rouse Jamie, corral him into the bathroom for a face washing and teeth brushing, get him into appropriate clothes, hustle him down for breakfast and take his lunch order, then putting it together and snapping it into his lunchbox, before he had