Crossfire

One of the first things you learn underground is that you don’t ever call the cops, not for anything. For the past fourteen years, the man whose current ID said he was Dan Flint, lived with this fact of life, and now as he surveyed the wreckage of his ransacked apartment, this became more real than ever. Another truth of underground life was also clear: when your place gets broken into and torn apart, there’s probably no way to tell whether it’s the work of thieves or the cops. He took a beer out of the open refrigerator. Judging from the temperature of the nearly warm bottle, the break-in likely happened that morning after he’d gone to work. He drank half the beer and kicked his way through the mess to the bedroom. A dresser was knocked over and he picked it up so he could get through the doorway. This room seemed to have been trashed more thoroughly than the other two. He finished the beer and smiled as he tossed the empty into the clutter where it didn’t make any difference now. Then he began checking the electrical outlets. When he’d moved in a couple of months back, he’d placed dabs of chewing gum on the screws that held the covers in place. He’d heard that the easiest place to bug a room was inside a wall socket. None of the screws were disturbed and he was starting to feel better. There was little in his place to interest a thief and nothing he couldn’t get along without, but cops were a different matter. They could take his freedom. It took him at least an hour to straighten up the mess, an hour in which he had plenty of time for questions to roll through his mind on repeat. He had no one to ask about strangers coming and going; one of the reasons he’d taken this place was the private entrance by way of a back stairway. If it had been the cops, there was nothing for them to find. He had to laugh at the situation, him hoping he’d only been ripped off. The picture of Sonya and her dog had fallen behind the bed but wasn’t damaged. He held it lightly and brought it slowly to his lips. It was well over a year since that election night in ’84 when he’d left her and his heart behind. Time enough for the pain to numb, but time also for the regret to grow. He’d resisted every impulse to make contact, even by mail. It just wouldn’t be fair to either of them. But he could hardly stand not knowing how she was doing. By now she had been District Attorney of Chinook County in Oregon for over a year and was either happy with the work or frustrated with its constraints. He wondered which and had to admit that even though he had loved her more than he thought possible, he really didn’t know her all that well. At least not deeply enough to predict how she would feel about all that and a whole lot of other things.