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It’s actually a feat, how incredibly stuck Harry has gotten the motor vehicle now creaking in the ice, a giant metal beast, its ribs bulging out unnaturally, spiked and twisted. Harry approaches it gracelessly in that god-awful outfit and pulls the gas canister out from where it lies against a half-sunken floe.
The thing barely looks like a vehicle anymore. The model is a Coupris 40 in saxe blue. The sort of vehicle government and police workers drive all over Revachol. It’s no surprise, either. It’s a real work horse, fitted with an KR18GU engine and distinct, skinny tires that had looked familiar to Kim when he had first seen those muddy tracks tracing their path from the splintered fence near the Whirling-in-Rags to their final destination here.
Debris lay scattered across the frosted ice-- a wet cigarette pack, a blind spot mirror, some reál, indistinguishable scraps of plastic slowly melding into the hopeless, dreary landscape that is the Martinaise coast. Harry tries to pull a bottle from the ice but it’s already frozen over and empty. All the better, then. This way he can’t take a final sip from it.
Kim thinks himself just a little bit of an idiot as he follows Harry to the edge of the solid ground, uncaring waves sloshing against cracking ice and sparkling with burgeoning rays of shrouded sunlight. Mud and any number of thing taint the water closest to them in a bright bister that eats at the cratered car like a slow-acting acid.
Harry pretends as long as he can that the mistake isn’t there, but he must acknowledge it eventually. Kim’s shoe scrapes along an uneven chunk of ice as Harry pulls him nearer the wreckage.
They don’t speak for a moment; either something clever or incredibly stupid or both are turning in the gears of Harry’s mind before he opens his mouth to speak.
“So, this is where all the tracks were leading to!”
It’s hard, sometimes, to extrapolate what, exactly, the detective at his shoulder is thinking when words part from his lips. The exclamation seems to be a mix of genuine pride at realizing the connection and wonder that this is the conclusion. Harry wears the face of a man impressed at what humanity is capable of while being simultaneously incapable of understanding that *he* is also human.
“It appears to be so,” Kim says noncommittally, hands clasped behind his back, looking through a pane of unbroken glass into where a human would have folded up into meat origami if they hadn’t escaped in time.
“Let’s investigate.”
“I agree,” Kim replies. “We should definitely investigate.”
Harry begins with some surface-level observations. When must it have crashed? What model is it? He makes a mocking joke; Kim doesn’t dignify it with a response as he runs through his own calculations in his mind. The empty bottle of liquor, the fuel canister, the chipped paint and scrapes on the motor carriage. If he looks closely, he sees two bullet holes above the driver’s side tail light.
There’s no mistaking it; it’s certainly *his* motor vehicle.
“Enough gloating. This is serious.”
The man speaks to himself as much as he does Kim.
Kim’s taken aback by the curt severity in his tone. The fact that he’s down to business suggests that maybe he’s beginning to figure it out.
Kim studies Harry surreptitiously.
“Yes. Quite.” Kim gives an even response, waiting to see how the words land. Harry remains nonplussed, disconnected. He really *hasn’t* realized that this is his vehicle.
“What should we do?”
“Let’s wait for the low tide and see what’s inside.”
“How long will it take for the tide to come in?”
Why does he look excited by the prospect? Like a child ready to go spelunking, not peeling apart a destroyed cop car with blistered hands and stale breath still stinking of that emptied bottle a few feet away?
“I don’t know. An hour or two tops.”
Harry moves to an old children’s playground and drops onto the swing set. Two wooden planks suspended by rusty chains creak under the new weight. Kim perches on his more than sits. The angle gives him a good look of Harry’s face. The man is overactive, always fiddling with something, always making a comment. It’s the times when he becomes deathly quiet that Kim feels the strangest around him. Somehow, the energy is comforting even if it’s useless banter and carbon dioxide that only feeds the flora.
It could probably use it. The earth looks like one giant oil slick, a mix of white and brown. Spring hasn’t come here yet, the grasses behind them trembling from a too-cold breeze.
Maybe spring will never come.
Kim involuntarily shudders as thoughts of death briefly cloud his mind. The motor vehicle is practically flattened in the water with the force of the impact. And yet, here is the driver beside him, disco lights buzzing behind his eyes, a brilliant mind trapped inside a poisoned body with that incredibly *eerie* expression.
When he had arrived on the scene three days ago, Kim had seen the path the Coupris 40 had carved through Martinaise, the oil slick and tire marks that scarred the waterfront. He had imagined, every time Harry mentioned the “traffic hooligan,” what state Harry must have been in when he’d done *what* he’d done. Plastered, high on life, his mind the clearest it had ever been, screaming, tearing at him, begging for the sweet release of the Insulindian tide. At least, that seemed the sort of stunt he’d pull. Maybe he wasn’t high at all but in that low place, the sort where even an anchor wouldn’t be large enough or reach deep enough to pull a man back out in one piece.
“Hold on, it looks very blue.” Harry points to the vehicle.
Yes, yes. Maybe he’s beginning to get it.
“Yes, yes it does.”
Kim hangs onto words that never come. Another line dropped, another thought abandoned. He releases his anticipation as a light drizzle patters against his orange nylon jacket, the only orange thing around aside from those glimmering tail lights.
Harry begins to whistle.
It’s an odd noise, as most things associated with him are, although it’s undeniably beautiful amidst the surrounding bleakness. At least it’s less melancholic than the sound of rain pinging off rusted metal and the retracted sun roof.
Kim casts him a glance.
He’s still deep in whistling.
So, Kim joins him.
It’s a spur-of-the-moment thing. Harry’s so good at those.
He wants to achieve some sort of harmony between them, two sounds that, when joined together, feel like they belong that way.
A higher pitch is the best that Kim manages, with a trill at the end that pairs with the lower hum of the other detective’s tune.
Nothing else happens for a long time. If Kim weren’t already used to it, the puncturing cold of the rain would bother him. It’s easier when they’re constantly moving from place to place. But this has its own serenity, too.
When Harry doesn’t say anything else for another thirty minutes, he can only assume he’s slowly figuring it out the only way his complex mind knows how by pulling information from everywhere, everything, and making the details sing on his tongue.
As time passes, the 40 begins to emerge.
Harry seems occupied with other things, his mind far away as he challenges Kim on whether he’d rather suffer through ants or leeches. His mind reaches for the obvious conclusion: Leeches. He can think of a few instances where they’ve been used in health care.
So contrarian, so inclined to bickering just for the sake of it, or maybe because he’s actually convinced (Kim can never really tell), Harry argues for ants. His argument, though, is surprisingly sound. He cites ancient cultures and traditions, talking in depth (or out of his ass?) as though he’s actually experienced the things firsthand. When the silence creeps in again, Kim’s impressed. He almost made the option sound *appealing.*
More time passes.
“Can you make out the marque now?” Harry asks.
“It’s a Coupris, model 40,” Kim says.
He stares at Harry, hoping that whatever creature running the cogs in his head has enough fuel to push through the haze and connect the pieces together.
Harry needs a little help. Just a jump start and soon he’ll understand. Kim explains the significance of the make and model. He asks Harry what he thinks the number means. Why it might be important.
It makes him feel sick, watching the way a shadow of realization passes over Harry’s face. He looks pained-- anguished, even. It’s easier, Kim thinks, to break the news gently, but even so, the outcome is still the truth, which is terrible.
“Oh, god, no…” he mumbles beneath the curtain of rain that makes his hair damp and glimmering in the morning sun.
“I’m sorry, Harry. I’m so sorry.”
There’s the obvious half of his apology-- for the Coupris 40 with his precinct stamped in a large marquee along the side. That’s one half, but the other half is something much sadder, much more delicate. From the moment Kim met him, he knew Harry was different. He carried a deep pain within him, one shaped by trauma and smelling of vomit. Something that had once been glorious then lost and lost again. The shadow of the man Harry once was had drowned somewhere in the Coupris 40 and would never be revived.
Many times now he’s watched Harry’s body betray him-- shouting, puking, stumbling, wearing that awful expression-- and as Harry sways on the swing, Kim prepares to catch him. Fortunately, though, Harry composes himself before that happens.
“I don’t remember *this,*” Harry says.
He sounds defeated. His legs aren’t sturdy enough to stand just yet as he clutches onto the swing like it’s his life support.
“You were probably too drunk to remember it,” Kim says. “You started at the Whirling, jumped over the canal, and ended here.”
“I’m a crazy fuck.”
“At least you survived.” In a sense, anyway.
“First my badge and now THIS.”
It’s indeed a lot to lose. His motor carriage, his badge, his gun, his memories…
Collecting his wits about him, Harry pushes off the swing and approaches the motor vehicle. Kim follows.
He mumbles to himself as he kneels and pulls his badge out from the wreckage. Kim watches carefully as he peels seaweed off the back. Numbers and a handsome face glint Kim’s direction as Harry turns it over. The green eyes and handsome wink linger in Kim’s mind like a long exposure over his eyelids.
“At least something came from all this,” Kim attempts optimistically.
Harry asks about his name. Serial number. Kim’s only a little surprised at the rank. Double-yefreitor, huh? Well, he certainly wouldn’t have gotten into this mess if his rank was any higher on account of doing field work. And even with the memory loss, there are shadows in there that suggest the way he used to operate. Harry knows things and wants to know things. He’s good at police work, a skill Kim is sure he’s mastered over many years.
Working in the 41st… covering all of Jamrock. Kim’s no longer as surprised why there’s a crashed car in front of them now. Pressure can do a lot of terrible things to a person.
The rain’s coming down heavier now. Black specks mark the places where raindrops have dissolved in unmelted snow. The badge still in his hand, Harry lifts his arm and massages the creases in his wrinkled forehead. He mumbles a fuck, looks around.
“Look on the bright side-- at least that’s one mystery solved,” Kim says.
“Yeah,” Harry says.
Have his shoulders always been hunched? Has he always looked so simultaneously defeated and invigorated? He slinks away from the scene as he shakes the frozen water off the commander’s jacket and Kim dutifully follows, hoping his words of encouragement were enough to stave off another attempt at… whatever the crashed Courpis 40 signified.