Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,35
looked down at his former partner. “It was an incentive to get me to come back across.”
Danny took one more drag then flicked the smoke away, nodding. “Thought as much. Never struck me as anything like a game of cops and robbers anytime I talked to someone from over on your side.” The accent was deliberate, Mike knew.
Danny tossed a stick of gum to Mike, who caught it and grinned. Cinnamon: made Danny feel a little more grown up, rather than chewing the bubble gum so popular on this side. He unwrapped it and started chewing, felt some memories rush back with the shot of flavour gently burning his tongue.
After putting a stick in his own mouth, Danny walked around to the driver’s side of his car, face grim. “Climb in.”
Mike stood and looked at the car for a second, feeling a bit flustered. He either didn’t remember the car being this small, or else himself being this big. Feeling like a clown at the circus, he opened the door, slid the seat back as far as it could go, then squeezed himself in, knees halfway up to his nose and his back bent at a peculiar angle. It was then something of an operation to reach out and close the door.
Danny fired up the little two-stroke engine, and the car jumped away from the curb, rattling and roaring as it went, little bouncing-head dinosaur doing a sympathetic shimmy from its suction-cupped location on the dash. Inside, it smelled of tobacco and cinnamon, a strangely sweet aroma after having lived on the other side of the Line.
Mike thought about asking questions regarding the crime scene, but between the noise and his currently squished diaphragm, he decided it would be prudent to wait. Instead he watched the town go by, remembering the sights, looking at billboards advertising new toys or imported G-rated flicks, viewing with wonder the tiny buildings that had once seemed a normal part of his life.
He turned and looked at Danny out of the corner of his eye. His former partner still looked thirteen, something that seemed a bit weirder now that he’d gone to the other side of the Line and seen kids that age who still acted like kids. Danny had been this age for most of his life, grown into it and then just hit a holding pattern, some parts of his mind and emotional makeup maturing, but still remaining basically a kid. He took his job with the Templeton Police Department seriously enough, although Mike remembered so many of the days where it had all seemed a game to them. And it had been, really just playing at cops and robbers, no domestics or rapes or murders ever happening, ever needing to be dealt with.
And now there was Derek Hayes, lying dead near the clocktower. No game this.
There weren’t many cars on the streets, but that was normal for Templeton. Instead, Mike watched as they roared past bicycles and skateboards and scooters and pedestrians, even some smaller kids riding metal or plastic trikes. It was close to the end of the day, so he imagined most of them were coming home from work or school right now.
A billboard on the side of one of the buildings advertised two old Shirley Temple and Jackie Coogan movies playing at the art house theatre, a retrospective from when they had first quit acting and moved into directing, sharing that bill with adult directors on the other side of the Line—a procedure no longer in vogue. Coogan was dead now, had crossed over and aged a couple of decades ago. But Temple, Mike knew, lived still, hiding in her suite uptown, tucked away like a miniature version of Garbo, unwilling to face or deal with anyone in the town that carried her name.
He watched several heads turn sharply as they went by, and he knew he was seeing looks of shock on some of the faces as they realized what the passenger in the cop car was. He’d never seen such a sight himself, all the years he’d lived in Templeton, so he could imagine just how bizarre he looked.
Danny cut the motor and let the little car roll to a halt in the middle of the road. Mike managed to pry open the door with a moderately paralysed hand and then practically fell out of the car and to his knees, thinking this was a great way to start as he stood and brushed dirt and gravel