I wasn’t someone you could describe as a big fan of heights. Standing here at this particular moment, looking down through the railing from the top level of the old Peerless-Cross department store parking garage, smack in the middle of downtown Saint Louis, I was reminded of that fact in no uncertain terms.
The honest truth is that for the majority of my life heights had never been much of an issue. I hadn’t spared as much as a moment’s consideration to the idea of fearing them; at least not any that I remembered. But, of course, that was all before the night when a deranged serial killer had tossed me over the side of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge somewhere near the middle of its span across the Mississippi river. Now to that, I had given more than just a passing thought. I had dwelled on it. And, to say the least, it was definitely something I wasn’t going to forget. Not in this lifetime and probably not even the next.
Fortunately for me, the rope he had been trying to hang me with had held fast. The other bonus was that it had been wrapped around my arm instead of my neck. It was only due to this stroke of blind luck that I had the luxury of being able to recall that night in all of its Technicolor detail.
But that’s another story, sort of.
Now, to clarify, I have to point out that I’m not one to panic or go into an immobile stupor due to a fear of heights- not at all. Whenever confronted by the vertical demon, I simply feel an involuntary catch in my throat and then experience that sinking flutter in the pit of my stomach that always precedes the ‘fight or flight’ adrenalin dump of fear. Of course, it is just about then that said adrenalin does exactly that- dump.
With a sudden flood into my circulatory system, the hormone embarks on an emotionally driven attempt to rescue me from the perceived danger. A few seconds later I, mutter some form of exclamation, the cleanliness of which is directly proportional to the height multiplied by the amount of adrenalin then divided by my heart rate. That accomplished, I remove myself from the situation.
For the most part, all it ever really does is make me tense muscles I don’t even remember having and then battle a lingering headache for an hour or two.
“Sudden stop.” My friend’s deep voice uttered the two simple words from behind and above my left shoulder.
I glanced back without fully turning and questioned him. “Do what?”
“The sudden stop at the bottom,” Detective Benjamin Storm returned with an almost jovial undertone. “Ya’know… It ain’t the fall that kills ya’, it’s the sudden stop at the bottom.”
It was comments like this one that had long ago convinced me that my best friend, a homicide detective with the Saint Louis City Police, would make the perfect wisecracking cop for a weekly television crime drama. He was loyal, honest, and good at his job. And, as evidenced by his most recent verbal observation, he was inextricably tied to cliches. There were even times when they would season his speech the same way some people salt their French fries- too much. Still, while not always an especially endearing quality, it was a part of his makeup, and I accepted it for the personality trait it was. Of course, accepting it didn’t keep me from retaliating against it at times.
Like right now for instance.
“Not actually,” I said as I turned, unsure as to whether or not he would take the bait I was about to toss before him.
I put my hand up to shield my eyes against the late morning sun. The sky was clear and the yellow-white globe had already driven the air temperature past ninety, with the relative humidity making it feel as if we were in a Jacuzzi. Worse yet, the hottest part of the day was still to come. Of course, that was just ‘Mother Nature’s Tourism Bureau’s’ way of saying welcome to June in Saint Louis, Missouri.
The only thing that made it bearable standing up here on the open concrete deck of the parking structure was the slight breeze rising and falling around us, and more importantly, the fact that a table in an air-conditioned restaurant was waiting for us down at street level.
I tilted my head up to look at my friend’s face. While I wasn’t the tallest person around, I was still of average height. Ben, on the other hand, took average and built upon it with reckless abandon. He stood a full six-foot-six and carried himself on an enviable broad-shouldered, muscular frame.
The sun silhouetted him so I had to squint in order to make out his angular face. Framing his countenance was coal black hair, worn as long as departmental regulations allowed. His dark eyes gazed out over high cheekbones, revealing little and missing nothing. It was impossible to look at him and not immediately know that he was full-blooded Native American.
“Whaddaya mean, ‘not actually’?” he huffed.
And with that, we officially had the ‘hook.’
On the fly, I dredged up an old childhood myth and applied my own twist to it. “What I mean is that you’re dead before you ever hit the ground.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Seriously. The fear of falling is so intense that your system overdoses itself on adrenalin. It pretty much shorts out your nervous system and causes you to suffer a heart attack as you fall, end of story. You’re a corpse before you ever hit the ground.”
I watched his rugged features as his right eyebrow furrowed. I could literally see him rolling what I had said over and over inside his head, trying to get a handle on it.
“Bullshit,” he retorted.
The one word comment wasn’t exactly what you would call swallowing the ‘line,’ but I’d known he would be a hard sell.
“Oh yeah.” I nodded vigorously as I spoke and offered up a bogus factoid to lend credence to my lie. “It’s a known fact. Now, of course, the fall has to be greater than twenty feet for the fear to reach that level and cause your system to dump that much adrenalin.”
He cocked his head to the side and gave me an unsure look.
I pressed on. “You know how when you fall you get that bizarre feeling in your gut like you just lost your stomach?”
“Like when ya’ top a hill on a roller coaster, you mean?”
“Exactly. Well it’s like that, but since you don’t fall far enough you don’t have the heart attack.”
“No way. Hills on roller coasters are way higher than twenty feet.” He shook his head as he argued.
“Sure, but that’s different. Your subconscious knows you are in a roller coaster.”
“You’re just yankin’ my chain.”
“Why would I do that?”
“So what about skydivers?”
“Parachute. Again, the subconscious knows.”
The look on Ben’s face told me that he was struggling with this sudden contradiction of perceptions. He wasn’t stupid by any stretch of the imagination, so I was actually surprised I’d managed to take it this far.
My friend slipped his hand up to smooth his hair and then allowed it to slide down and began to massage the back of his neck. He always performed this gesture when he was thinking hard on a subject.
“Really?” he eventually asked, giving his head a slight nod as he squinted at me.
Now, there was the ‘line.’ I thought about going for the ‘sinker’ as well, but I wasn’t feeling particularly ornery today, and I doubted my luck would hold out. Besides, it had only been one cliche, not to mention that he was bigger than me and he had a gun.
I gave it a long moment before finally answering him with a simple, “No.”
He shook his head and screwed his face into a frown. “Jeezus, Rowan, don’t fuck with me like that.”
“Hey,” I splayed my hands out in a ‘don’t blame me’ gesture. “You’re the cop here. Aren’t you supposed to be able to tell when someone is lying? Besides, I’ve never known you to be gullible. How was I supposed to know you’d fall for a line of BS like that?”
“Because it came outta your mouth,” he replied with a grunt as he stabbed a finger in the air toward me. “I EXPECT everyone else to be lying but not you. And, you got so damn much trivia runnin’ around in your head, I just figured maybe you knew somethin’ I didn’t.”
“Well…” I shrugged. “Maybe I do on some stuff. Sudden stops at the bottom, though, not really my area of expertise.”
“Yeah, mine either, but I’ve seen a couple of meat sacks sprawled out on sidewalks. The friggin’ stop at the bottom’s what did ‘em in. Trust me.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I replied, consciously chasing away the visual his words had conjured, and then I paused for a moment before changing the subject. “So, I may be wrong, but I didn’t think we came here to discuss the physics of falling from tall buildings. Or did we?”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “But you were the one starin’ off into space over here.”
“I wasn’t staring off into space.”
“Yeah, Kemosabe.” He nodded. “Yeah, you were.”
I didn’t issue another rebuttal. It occurred to me that perhaps my earlier self-assessment was in error. Maybe these days heights did make me seize up after all.
“So, speaking of lying, are we at least here to go to lunch like you said when you showed up at my door?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Why would I lie about that?”
“You tell me? It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve used a free meal as a carrot to get me somewhere.”
“C’mon, man, I told ya’ already. This is my day off.”
“I seem to recall you once telling me that you are never really off duty,” I reminded him.
“Jeez, what are you, a freakin’ tape recorder?”
I merely chuckled in reply.
“Yeah,” he continued. “Maybe so, but even when I’ve done that to ya’, I didn’t screw ya’ over on the deal.”
“You sure about that?”
“Hell yes.” He waved his index finger in the air to punctuate his comment. “I know for a fact that I still bought chow.”
“I wasn’t talking about the meal,” I said as we began walking along the inclined parking lot toward the glassed-in elevator enclosure.
He ignored the comment. “Well, to be honest, I do have somethin’ else I wanna do while we’re here, now that ya’ mention it. I need to hit The Third Place after we eat.” He offered the name of the tobacco shop we both frequented with what could have easily passed for reverence. “You good with that?”
“Yeah.” I gave him a nod. “I need to have Patrick order me some more CAO MX Two’s anyway. It’ll save me a call.”
“You and those damn double maduros,” my friend muttered.
“What’s wrong with MX Two’s?”
“Too strong, white man,” he told me.
“Hey, I like what I like.”
“Yeah,” he said as he tugged open the door to the glass enclosure and motioned for me to go through. “I just wish you’d like somethin’ else.”
I shook my head as I entered the somewhat air-conditioned waiting area. “What does it matter?”
His matter-of-fact reply came as he followed me through the door. “‘Cause I don’t like ‘em.”
“So?” I queried, stabbing the call button for the elevator then looking at him with a puzzled expression. “You aren’t the one smoking them.”
“Exactly,” he replied. “So if you don’t smoke the ones that I like, then it makes it kinda hard for me to bum them off ya’ now doesn’t it?”
“Ohhh, now I get it.” I nodded slowly. “You want me to smoke something you like so you don’t have to buy any.”
“Damn straight,” he chuckled. “Cigars are expensive.”
“So quit.”
My friend looked back at me like I had suddenly grown an extra head. “Yeah, right. I already told ya’ once today ta’ quit yankin’ my chain.”
A sickly electromechanical ding announced the arrival of the elevator car. The signal was followed by the scrape and groan of the doors parting down the center with a moment’s hesitation then sliding laboriously open. Looking through the widening gap, we could see the car still in motion as it rose the last few inches and then halted with a clunk and a shudder.
“Oh yeah,” Ben announced. “This looks real safe.”
“You want to take the stairs?” I queried.
“I’m thinkin’ maybe yeah,” he replied.
“The stairs are outside.”
“Yeah, so?”
I held my arms out and glance around. “Hot out there, cool in here. Well, cooler anyway.”
“Lemme see… Hot or splattered? Hot or splattered?” He motioned with his hands as if he were physically weighing the two options. “Considering the conversation we just had, I’m not all about splattered if ya’ know what I mean. Elevator or not.”
“I’m with you on that one.”
He stepped back toward the glass door of the waiting area and tugged it open. At that moment, as if cued by some unseen director, our ears were met with what had to be the single most panicked scream I had ever heard in my life to date.