Page 42 - Demo

Surrounded by the hustling bustle of the Iowa 80 truck stop dining room in Walcott, Iowa, field Detective Gerdulon sat across the table from his licked-clean breakfast plate. His current assign- ment involved tracking down a teenaged runaway whose whereabouts had been narrowed down
to this particular section of Iowa. He was in the middle of an hour or so of cold calling to dig out any possible leads. A green trimmed printout rolled out before him listed hospitals; check; walk in clin- ics; check; mortuaries; check; county jails; check— and, under each category heading, were roughly between seventeen and seventy-nine ninety-five individual place names and numbers to be called, one at a time, tediously. Palming bravely his freshly charged postmodernistic handy-phone, he called down the line, initiating, conducting, and terminat- ing politely the next probably fruitless query-call ‘bout his lost boy Fedddy-eeko ‘fter t’other. As: fingering ‘ext-line, locating the number, and punch up down overing undering check no wrong number back out this struggle for the length of the digitized Bell System devised North American Numbering Plan-style ten-digit telephone number, push call, the silent, the ring, the once, the twice, the on aver- age ‘tween two, and thirteen rings, which, it doesn’t need to be mentioned, but will be anyway, so what these rings aren’t the backside of the frontface
of the rings intruding in, at, or under whatever deskset, wallphone, pocketed portable, or dinner- ing spatter-ringer, interrupting a possibly myriad number of possible other activities the called
are engaged in, which, now that they have been
so rudely interrupted by the Gerdulon, who they absolutely don’t know of, care about, or will even remember at all after the call, might in the seconds ‘tween ringing and answering, feel annoyance at having been interrupted at some pleasure—in which case, its fifty-fifty that they’ll pick up, or ignore—or, might feel happiness at having been interrupted in the middle of some unpleasantness, certain types of which cannot be interrupted, and other types of which can, but, in these cases, it may still be the luck of Gerdulon’s draw that they’ll be answered or ignored, which decision by the called may be influenced by even more factors, such as, would the pausing of the unpleasant situation
which must be returned to afterward be made even more unpleasant due to some effect of the slight pause on the overall chemistry of the unpleasant- ness, for example—if the caller is fighting for their life against one or more knife-wielding assailants, will their lack of focus on defense during the call provide a window for a flurry of fatal stabs and slashes, and, if this is the case, will the stabbing and slashing have occurred fast enough for Mr. Gerdu- lon to hear the actual fatal cut-down of the answer- er, and, if this is in fact so, will Mr. Gerdulon, at the other end, hear the clatter and grunt and slishy- slashy muttersounds, or any type of gasps oofs
yells ughs or ahhhs on the part of the falling victim, or any triumphantly savage yells of satisfaction on the part of the killer or killers, and then, depending on if the killer or killers hang up the phone neatly, yank the call from the wall sharply, or slice the cord deftly with the murder weapon, will any or all of this add up to the fact of the matter in the face of the Gerdulon, that he should hang up, and pick up, and punch in 9-1-1, as every good decent citizen must, or not, as it may be dismissed it as an unusu- ally complicated noisily raucous electronically siz- zling bad connection. And, if it clearly demanded an immediate 9-1-1 call, can Mr. Gerdulon risk, given the sensitive nature of his job assignment, et ce- tera, getting involved with an incident which would attract the attention of local law enforcement to him; they will grill him hotly on who he is, what
his relationship to the victim, whom he called, may be, and so forth and so on and possible involving lawyers, higher level police detectives, politicians and newspaper reporters and, eh eh eh, shit, no, and then, last, but certainly not least, what does the Boole Detective Agency Employee Indoctrination and Orientation Manual, which, though this would not be a factor for most any other Boole employee, the masters back home in their big Jersey office already have him tagged for a sitdown regarding the scads of previous violations he has committed since beginning this, his very first field assignment, because he failed to obey the inviolable rule that once hired every Boole employee must strive twen- ty-four-seven to defeat the reams-thick orientation document, which is so very dense that not a single line, word, or letter is the meaningless boilerplate
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Cold Calling
Jim meirose