The Embossed Name

Karl reached the car on legs that had stopped properly belonging to him somewhere on the long walk down the hill. He dropped the keys twice before he managed to get the door open, and when he fell into the driver's seat at last the familiar smell of leather and Jargus's fur rose up around him with the unwelcome hospitality of a place that did not yet know what he had brought back into it.

He sat there in the dark of the cabin and could not move. His ribs hurt where they had met the stairs. His ankle hurt where it had rolled beneath him on the back fence. His knuckles hurt where they had met carpet and plaster and the body of the man he had been certain was Luke Smith and had not been Luke Smith at all. He closed his eyes and the inside of his eyelids was the snap of vertebrae against a doorframe and the wrong nose and the wrong jaw of a face he had never seen before in his life.

His hands had begun to do something that was not quite shaking. Karl made himself breathe in the careful four-count rhythm he had been taught a long time ago for situations that had never quite looked like this one. He did it four times. It did not help. Nothing about the inside of his own head was going to be helped tonight by counting.

The small piece of blank plastic was still in his pocket. He had pocketed it without looking at it in the dark of the downstairs of a house he should never have been inside, beside the body of a man he had killed by accident in the middle of a fight he should never have started. He took it out now and turned it over between his fingers. It was smooth and unremarkable and the same colour on both sides. The edges were slightly worn, the way an object becomes worn when it has been used often by hands that knew exactly what to do with it.

Karl reached up and switched on the dome light.

The cabin filled with a soft glow that felt obscene after so much darkness, and he had to squint against it. He held the card up under the light and turned it back and forth in his fingers, and at first the surface gave him nothing back. Then, at a particular angle, the embossing rose just enough to catch the light, and the words came up out of the plastic the way ghosts come up out of fog.

Killerton Enterprises.

Karl read the words once. Then he read them again, because the part of his mind that had been trying very hard for the last hour to convince him that the night had been a discrete and survivable kind of catastrophe was now trying very hard to convince him that the words were a different kind of plastic, a different kind of light, a different kind of card. The words did not change. The words sat there in their small embossed certainty and waited for him to understand what they meant, which was that the man he had killed in the dark of Luke Smith's downstairs had not been a stray. The man he had killed had been carrying the name of a thing that had a name. A thing that had business cards. A thing that had a reason to send people into houses in the middle of the night with no wallet and no phone and no identification and only a single small piece of blank plastic in an inner pocket where a man might keep something he did not want a stranger to find on him.

Karl turned the card over in his fingers one more time.

He sat in the dome-lit cabin with the card in his lap and the keys in the ignition and his hands no longer shaking, exactly, but doing something quieter and worse. The night had not ended when he had climbed back out through the broken window. The night had only just opened a door he did not know how to close.