Death Spiral by James W. Nichol

sympathetically.
    “Not that I didn’t want to be.”
    Wilf nodded again. And sat there and waited.
    Andy took a deep pull on his cigarette. “There’s someone I know. He works in the lab but he lives in Brantford. I don’t know what shift he works.”
    “Right,” Wilf said.
    “I guess, maybe, I could find out.”
    Wilf kept his expression neutral.
    “He was just a guy I knew at police college. He ended up going with the OPP.”
    “I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”
    Andy grinned. It was the first time he’d felt the least bit adventurous in years.
    “Yes, you do,” he said. “Welcome home, asshole.”
    * * *
    Wilf pulled his father’s car into a service station that was closed for the night, circled around the gas pumps and came to a stop. Across the road the butcher shop and the two-storey brick house it was part of looked isolated and lonely sitting on its corner. A street light, leaning over a little, cast a faint light on the walls. Someone had built a wooden extension on at the back with an open staircase leading to a door on the second floor. A large window by this door was lit up. All the other windows were dark.
    Wilf sat in the car and stared up at the window. A shadow moved behind the blind and disappeared. After a while two shadows appeared and disappeared. Wilf smiled to himself and thought of Carole. Everything felt just right. Everyone was where they were supposed to be. Andy in his office trying to make a connection with his friend in the lab. Cruikshank lying in the dark in the basement of the hospital feeling like the world’s biggest fool, no doubt. And Adrienne and her boyfriend pacing the floor at two in the morning haunted by desperate remembered images and by dark premonitions of disaster.
    Wilf opened the car door and pushed himself out into the frigid air. The sensible thing would have been to go straight home after talking to Andy. Try to get some sleep. He needed sleep. But he was too wound up. High on something.
    He limped along the snowy road past the butcher shop, turned at the corner and followed this street toward a series of wooden planks that crossed a double set of railway tracks. He walked up onto the crossing and looked toward Old Man Cruikshank’s house. He could almost see Adrienne walking along the path beside the tracks. All it would take was a turn to the left, a short climb up out of the ravine, slip past the fruit trees and in through the side door. For half a year. Or a year. And who in all the sleeping town would have been the wiser?
    The road Wilf was standing on continued down a steep hill into a river valley. A line of street lights far below were blinking back at him. Carole was asleep down there somewhere according to the telephone operator. And now he could almost see her body stretched out long and skinny under a fluffy pink quilt, a frown creasing her brow, her mouth a bit skeptical as it always seemed to be.
    Wilf had to smile to himself. Despite her small-town conservatism and at some cost to her peace of mind she was trying to help.
    She was helping him.
    Wilf looked over the town and suddenly he felt like an alien standing there in the dark. A refugee from far lands and foreign disasters. The air felt ten degrees colder. A sharp pain rippled down his left side, lingered for a second.
    He turned back to the car and as he trudged along he could see that the light in the window was off. Retreated to their bed, exhausted from discussing all possibilities, rehearsing every response, Wilf thought to himself. Adrienne with all the answers, the sailor following along. And now two pairs of eyes staring into the dark. Sleep impossible.
    Wilf opened the car door, eased himself in and was about to turn the ignition on when he caught sight of a shadow passing quickly in front of him. The passenger door opened and Adrienne slid in.
    She closed the door. The interior light went off again. They sat there together staring ahead for a moment as if they were