The Hiss Between Stations
I don’t sleep with music. I sleep with the radio on, volume low, dialed to dead air so the hiss blankets the room. It’s a habit I inherited with a badge and tapes. My father, a police radio operator, used to say the city never sleeps; it just changes the channel. Tonight, the channel changes back, right now.
The static sharpens. It isn’t louder, just different, a needle through cloth. It pulls me from a dream into the dark apartment: cold kettle, junk mail, my gun under a stack of tickets. On the nightstand the scanner glows. Beneath the noise, I hear it—the carrier hum my father trained me to catch, a low line hidden under everything else.
I sit up and thumb the volume. Floorboards whisper. The radiator ticks. Outside, river fog clings to the radio towers. The hum deepens. The hiss shivers. For a heartbeat the static is a metronome, precise, deliberate.
Then a voice breaks through, too close, too intimate, as if the room itself is speaking: a woman gasping, metal scraping concrete, the clatter of something dropped. The signal skews, reforms. Words slide in sideways, scraped thin by distortion.
“Forty-two point nine… north dock… hurry.” The rest is devoured by squeal.
I know that hum. My chest tightens the way it did when I found a tape on my father’s desk labeled Misc. Hums, recorded the night he died. I didn’t understand then. I understand now.
I swing out of bed, shoulder the holster, shove my feet into boots. The handheld recorder lives in my jacket pocket like a superstition; I press record without thinking. The hallway smells of burnt toast and varnish. By the time I hit the stairs the scanner slips from static into breathing—wet, terrified—and then a second voice threads through, low and patient, made of dust and electricity.
“Listen,” it whispers. “Find me.”
Sirens flare alive somewhere across the river. I take the alley to my car, windows beaded with cold dew, and slide behind the wheel. The city at three a.m. is a cathedral with broken windows. I key the ignition, clip the scanner to the dash, and let the hiss be my compass.
North Dock is a strip of rotten piers and chain link. The AM band gnashes itself raw as I roll past the grain silos. I kill the lights, let my eyes adjust, and follow a thread of sound toward the furthest pier. Air this close to the water tastes like pennies. My flashlight cuts a road across the boards. At the end of it there’s a shape.
She’s facedown, hair snagged in a splinter, wrists bound with cable ties the way you bundle wires to keep them neat. The cold has set her, slack and final. Not fresh. The broadcast is a loop. Bait.
I key my radio, hold the scene, count my breaths. Squad cars race the last blocks. Their floodlights wash the dock white. With the light comes the smell—oil, salt, copper. A gull laughs like a broken lever.
Agent Cole Danner arrives in a dark suit and a quiet. FBI cyber liaison, on loan to a city that doesn’t want him. He’s older, careful, eyes already making files out of what they see. He takes in the cable ties, the scorch beside the woman’s cheek—an odd Y-shaped gouge burned into the deck—and waits before speaking. That’s rare.
“Mercer,” he says. “You got here fast.”
“I was listening.”
His gaze ticks to the scanner clipped to my belt. He has the look of a man who trusts math and hates ghosts. “To what, exactly?”
“The same voice that’s been hitchhiking our channels.” I stop before I add and longer than you think. “He gave coordinates.”
“He.” No surprise in it. He’s already there. “We’ll need the recording.”
“You’ll get it.” Not yet. Not before I give myself one quiet minute to grieve in peace.
The ME works while the rest of us pretend competence. Mid-thirties, no ID. The ties cinched with pliers that left tiny teeth. The burned Y was pressed through paper first; the ash flakes have printer ink in them. Danner watches the evidence tech collect it and watches me not watching, which is also data.
“The symbol mean anything?” he asks.
“Looks like a fork that forgot a tine.” I stare at the river. “Or a slingshot missing the band.”
“Or a Greek upsilon,” he says. “Printers used it to mark copy changes.”
“Edits,” I say.
“Revisions.” He pins the word to a mental board. “What about the frequency?”
“AM. Dirty. Sideband smeared. He wants the noise as much as the message.”
“Why?”
“Because the hiss hides him.” And because the hum is his signature, I don’t say, the same low purr that sat under my father’s last recording like a shadow under a light.
Back at my car, I let the little recorder speak. Even on an open dock the broadcast owns the room. The woman gasps. Metal scrapes. Coordinates whisper. Beneath it all the carrier hum threads the silence, warm and intimate, like a cat that knows your house.
“You left the apartment after hearing this,” Danner says when it ends.
“I left because I’ve been hearing the bones of it my whole life.” I pocket the recorder. “This city hums. Most people ignore it.”
“You don’t.” He studies me like a misprint. “You’re close to this.”
“That’s why I’m useful.” I step away from the body. “You didn’t come out for a standard hijack. You came because whoever this is walks his fingers up the spine of our radios, and because I grew up on that spine.”
“I read your file,” he says. Of course he did.
Uniforms string tape. Techs swab and bag. The gulls circle like punctuation. Danner takes a call, listens without changing his face, and pockets his phone like a secret. The scanner on my belt hisses, then smooths. The hum rises and falls like a chest beside me in the dark.
The voice arrives without preamble, close as breath. Not the woman. Not Danner. Him. The consonants are rounded, as if he’s smuggling glass in his mouth.
“Good evening, Rae.”
I look up, reflex more than choice, as if the words are painted on the sky. My name never sounds clean to me; it’s a short blade. Tonight it’s honed to wire.
Danner’s head tilts a fraction. He didn’t hear it. None of them did. The voice wasn’t in the shared channel. It was in mine alone.
“Follow the hum,” the radio says softly. “I’ll be waiting where your father stopped.”
Dock lights shiver in a line across the water like bones waking. My heart changes channels. I press record and keep my mouth shut. The whisper fades. The hole it leaves feels like a stairwell with the lights shot out.
Wind worries the tape line. Somewhere, a generator coughs and dies. The sweep of darkness that follows is total, as if the dock has been erased from the map.
In that black, the carrier hum grows warm and close, a hand I can’t see closing over mine, and the scanner clicks once, like a lock being tried.