Page 39 of Shadow Ticket
The Milwaukee PD bomb squad, given the history here, is possibly not the unit to be expecting much help from, even with boilerplated trucks these days, plenty of mattresses and so forth. Sometimes they don’t even return phone calls. “And heaven help you if it’s a false alarm, then they send you a bill, then bill collectors packing service .38s, everybody meantime pissing and moaning about taxpayer money.”
“Here, now put it up alongside your head, get your ear right down next to it, and—”
“Aghh!” DeQuincy recoiling in terror. “Not just ticking, now it’s playing…tunes, some…horrible Christmas medley. Just get it out of here once, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“Traditionally,” Edgeworth can’t help pointing out, “time bombs get set to some exact hour, right now it’s about a quarter to, gives you enough time if you care to to go deep-six this down in the Lake, which you recall is only a block or two out the door and to your right.”
“If you hear anything really loud out here…”
DeQuincy smiles briefly, narrowing his eyes, “Sure thing, Zoomer. Next of kin still at the same phone number?”
Dum dee um dum, tickticktick…Threading through the midday traffic, pedestrians in the classic Milwaukee stupor, Hicks, trying not to show too much of a problem with his nonchalance, makes it down to the Lake and not a minute too soon.
Not to blame the Depression or anything, but there seem to be a considerable number of fish-happy unemployed to be found today out here on the frozen expanse, with sleds, tip-ups, bikes pedal- and motor-driven, shelters more and less elaborate. Small fires going, coffee percolating, kerosene lamps cutting some of the gloom, portable radios at low volume, possibly on some theory that music will hypnotize fish up through the ice. Pinochle and Sheepshead games in progress as well as a curling tournament, what curlers call a bonspiel.
As luck would have it, an ice fisherman happens to’ve just augered a hole. “Mind if I—” Hicks sliding the festive holiday parcel in, stomping it under the ice as far as he can, “thanks, you’re a real sport,” turning and heading for shore, motioning everybody to keep clear, whereupon—
KA-BOOM. And then some. Addressing every bone in Hicks’s body, including the one just under his hat. A colorful and earsplitting fountain of ice, blood, silt, factory waste, and pieces of perch, pike, whitefish, and two or three varieties of trout meanwhile hurtling skyward, the echo racketing away to cover most of Milwaukee, then returning in a downpour of Friday-night supper ingredients which a sudden crowd have showed up with buckets, bags, and hats to collect.
The guy with the auger isn’t too happy. “Dammit, you dynamite hounds,” he screams, “this is sinful, don’t you know the Angler’s Creed forbids this kind of thing?”
“Missouri Synod Lutheran, myself,” Hicks in a shaky voice he almost doesn’t recognize.
About now a beat cop and old friend of Uncle Lefty’s shows up, “Have to ticket you for crossing against the light back there, Hicks, sorry but it’s a dollar fine.”
“Price is right considering it just bought me my life.”
“You must be getting up in the bucks, this side of town the going rate’s closer to 39¢.”
After a while, The crowd drifts away leaving soiled and shattered ice, a patch of water already begun to ice over again, and, not too many hours away, frozen Milwaukee sunset, and the night ahead.
—
“Aren’t we the night owl.”April blinking, truculent, not fully awake. Of course it’s her door Hicks would be showing up at.
“Thought you might still be awake.”
“If you want to call it that.”
“Tell him to use the bedroom window, nice snowdrift back there, only a short drop.”
“Maybe you didn’t notice, but it’s half past ungodly.”
Stares at the back of his empty wrist for a while. “Huh. Somebody must’ve lifted my watch.”
“You look a li’l more dilapidated than usual, Cupcake, if I may say.”
“Speaks are all closed by now, force of habit, wasn’t thinking, sorry…”
“No, wait, Hicks, come back, only talking in my sleep…Hicks?”
“I must be getting, what is it, sensitive? No, wait, sentimental?”
“Sure…and remind me, what are you doing here again?”
“Thanks, maybe I will just for a minute,” Hicks beating the evening snowfall from his hat, stepping cautiously in over the doorsill, as if something might be waiting in the room tonight to jump him, as beat up in spirit as April has seen him, even from the worst nights of mob warfare in Chicago not all that long ago.
Somewhere off in the house, upstairs or maybe down, Christmas carols over somebody’s radio, somebody else picking a blues line on a guitar. From outside now and then come sounds of late river traffic. The new foghorn down on the breakwater.
