civilian watched, puzzled, simultaneously trying to figure out what was going on and why he had bothered to put on a tie. He didn’t usually wear one, after all.
Somehow, though, going to talk to a police lieutenant had seemed like an occasion that called for a tie— something like jury duty, perhaps. He had put one on, a blue print to go with his powder-blue shirt, but he had tied it badly, and it hung askew.
“Your name?” the lieutenant asked, holding up a pocket tape recorder. Under a thick layer of tinted plastic the tape-reels were turning.
“Smith,” he replied, “Edward J. Smith. And yes,” he added wearily, as he always did, “My name is really Smith, it’s not an alias; do you want to see I.D.?”
“If you have any handy, this man will check it,” the lieutenant replied, completely seriously, nodding to a small, balding man in plainclothes.
Smith fished his wallet out of his pants pocket, unclipped the set of plastic windows that held his driver’s license, insurance cards, and credit cards, and handed it over.
The lieutenant watched silently. When the other man had the cards securely in hand, he asked, “Mr. Smith, did my men tell you anything about what’s going on here?”
“No,” Smith replied immediately. He started to say more, then thought better of it.
Buckley nodded. “Well, that’s probably because we don’t know what the hell is going on here,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. We’re hoping you can tell us.”
“I’ll tell you anything I can,” Smith replied.
The lieutenant glanced at the clipboard, without moving it from where it sat atop the retaining wall, then asked, “What do you do, Mr. Smith?”
“I’m a programmer,” he answered.
“Computers, you mean?”
Smith nodded. He supposed that there could be other jobs where people called themselves programmers.
“I see,” the lieutenant said. “If you don’t mind, why are you home today? Were you sick?” He peered searchingly at Smith’s face, as if looking for some trace of illness.
“No,” Smith said, “I just needed a day off. I’m ahead on my work, and I didn’t sleep well last night because of the heat— the air conditioning unit in my apartment’s busted, and I couldn’t get maintenance people out here yesterday because it was after four-thirty when I got home, and I’m up on the top floor, which makes it worse, so I wanted to sleep while I could and I didn’t set the alarm.”
The lieutenant nodded. “Yeah, it was a scorcher yesterday.” He looked down at Smith’s shoes for an instant, scratched an ear, and then looked up again.
“Did you see or hear anything strange last night, or this morning?” he asked. “Or smell anything, maybe?”
“No,” Smith said, automatically. The memory of the nightmare, that monstrous face at the window, came back to him suddenly, and he started to mention it, but then he stopped. That hadn’t been real.
It couldn’t have been real.
The lieutenant was watching his face. “You’re sure there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary?”
He shrugged. “I had a nightmare, first one in years, but that’s all. I figure it was the heat.”
“Uh-huh.” The lieutenant nodded, glanced down again, then back at Smith’s face.
“Mr. Smith,” he said, “We’ve had more than a dozen calls this morning about people who live here, in this complex. A bus driver who was supposed to pick up here for day-camp was one of them; there wasn’t a single kid at the bus stop at the entrance this morning, where there were supposed to be eight or ten, and that was strange enough that he let us know about it. We’ve had people call who were worried about senior citizens who don’t answer the phone, and people who didn’t show up for work and didn’t call in sick— people like nurses and airline pilots who just don’t do that sort of thing. Nobody could reach the rental office, not even the company’s other offices. It was pretty obvious by nine o’clock that something was wrong here, and we came out to see what it was.” He paused, took a breath, and went on, “Mr. Smith, my men have checked through all sixty-four apartments here, with pass-keys we got from the management company’s home office down in Silver Spring, because there wasn’t anybody in the office here. And before you ask, yes, we have a warrant; a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty, whatever it is, that many people missing is pretty good probable cause for something. We don’t know what, but something. So we checked all sixty-four apartments, and sixty-three of them were empty, as if everybody had suddenly gone for a stroll last night and hadn’t come back. Nothing disturbed or broken, but nobody there. Not so much as a dog, or a cat, or even a canary. Hell, we haven’t even seen a stinking cockroach! You, Mr. Smith, are the only living thing we’ve found in this entire apartment complex. The only one. The only person living or dead. We estimate that at least a hundred, and maybe as many as two hundred people have vanished overnight, along with a few dozen cats, dogs, parakeets, and hamsters. You, and you alone, didn’t vanish.”
The lieutenant took a breath, let it out, glanced around, then turned his gaze back to Smith.
“Now, think carefully,” he said. “Are you really sure that you didn’t see or hear anything strange last night?”
4.
He told them about the nightmare, and the heat, and the broken air conditioner. He told them about his clock-radio that didn’t tick, and his neighbor in C42, Mrs. Malinoff, who creaked when she walked, and his neighbor across the hall in C44, whom he never saw but whose name was on his mailbox, Attalla Sleiman, who kept a cat that meowed occasionally. He told them about his mother back in Boston, and his sister in Ohio, and his father who’d been in Florida last they’d heard. He told them about answering an employment ad from DML Communications and getting hired to work in Rockville, and moving to Diamond Park because he couldn’t afford to live any closer in toward Washington. He told them about driving out here in April and finding an apartment, and about the Goodwin kids from downstairs who had helped him carry in all his stuff and had wanted to play games on his computers.
He told them everything he could think of, over and over again, while the sun beat down on him and his sweat oozed from every pore. He drank lukewarm lemonade from a cop’s thermos, and then told them everything all over again.
And somehow none of it made any sense at all.
The lieutenant’s tape recorder ran out of tape; he put it back in his pocket, sighed deeply, looked around at the cars that jammed the parking lot, and said, “All right, Mr. Smith, thank you. If you want to go back to your apartment, you can, but I’d appreciate it if you let a couple of my men look it over first. You can wait out here; sit in my car, if you like.”
“I’ll use the bench,” Smith said, pointing to the park bench that stood against the retaining wall, beside the steps between his building and the next— between C Building and D Building.
The lieutenant nodded, and Smith walked nervously over.
Nobody paid any attention to him. He brushed away imaginary dirt, and then settled down onto the wooden slats, slats that were faded and warm from the sun.
The
