The Dead Are More Visible by Steven Heighton Page A

was the wooden handle of a mallet or sledge. Still advancing, the leader brought his hands out of his pockets and drew back his hood, slowly, with a sort of wry formality. He was smiling, lips closed. For a moment his face took up all her view. He was shockingly handsome. A twitch of attraction plunged downward with another spasm of fear, down into her womb, twin shocks, fused and unanimous in effect. It was a cruel face, beautiful. Strong brows, high-planed cheekbones, hooded grey eyes, plump lips inside a ring of stubble. The dark hair was brush cut, the skull knobbed as if muscled. She kept waving the hose slowly in front of her. The three stopped at the edge of the wet ice, just short of where the stream of water swept back and forth. Beads of spray sequined their trainers and lower pant legs.
    “You were talking to us?” The voice was deep but nasal, grating, unsuited to that face.
    “I just said leave him alone.”
    “It’s you we want to see anyway.” He looked up at her. After a moment his smooth brow crimped slightly, his eyes welled wider. He’d figured it out. He said nothing. It was the third one who said, “Is this, like, a woman? ” He was short and concave, with a pocked face, and he seemed the drunkest or most stoned of the three.
    “I don’t know,” the leader said. “Ask her yourself. Is there a lady in there?”
    “Never fucking seen a woman doing a rink.”
    “I seen her,” the tall one said. “Told me to get the fuck off the ice, last year.”
    “I was hardly here last year,” she said.
    “In that other park. Down Barrie.”
    “Well, I guess the ice wasn’t ready,” she said. She took a hopeful glance at the crazy man. He wasn’t seeing any of this. She should retreat to the hut, call the police. Something stopped her. She was slow on her feet—hadn’t run a step in years. At least out here there was the hose and the wet ice between her and them.
    “Looks ready now,” the third one said.
    “What, her? ” the tall one said with a stupid leer.
    “The ice.”
    “Check it and see, Zach,” said the leader. Zach, the short one, tried sliding onto the surface beyond the pooling water. His lead foot drove through crusted slush. He started to topple forward, waved his arms, slammed backward onto his elbows and ass. You could hear his bones on impact. He rolled over onto all fours—hands and knees—and stayed like that, head drooped.
    “Okay, you can get up now,” she said. “You’re wrecking my work. You should be moving on.”
    “We’d like to see your office first,” the leader said, ignoring his hurt friend.
    “You’re not going to.”
    “We already dropped in at the hut in that other park. Up in the Heights.”
    “Sure,” she said.
    “You think I’m lying?”
    His face was pale. He seemed ready to pull out a scalp as proof. Walt Unger, a small, shyly talkative chain-smoker, would be flooding the rink in Rideau Heights.
    Zach was back on his feet, rubbing his wet elbows with the opposite hands—a hurt little boy gesture. His wince was angry, yet he glanced timidly at the ice as if it were alive and likely to buck him off his feet if he moved. “ Bitch ,” he said, but it didn’t seem directed at her. That was good—she didn’t have to respond.
    “Let’s go,” the leader said, and for a soaring moment she believed that he was addressing his friends, telling them they were moving on. Then she felt his cold eyes pushing deeper into her.
    “Lead the way,” he said.
    “If I go into that office, it’ll be to call the cops. And there’s nothing there. You think any of us bring money out here for a graveyard shift?”
    He seemed to be giving this some thought. Then he said, “Your friend at the other rink did.”
    “What?”
    “Brought money.”
    “I doubt that very much.”
    He went even whiter. “You know what?” he said, frowning, as if he had just discovered something that surprised him very much. “You’re a goof.”
    “What?”
    “A goof