[Darkthorn 01.0] Pond Scum

by Michael Lilly

  Seven blocks east and nine blocks south from my apartment, the cold has begun nipping at my ears, despite me having my hood up. I keep my hands in my pockets against my thighs, to keep them warm, in case I need to use my firearm.

  One block to go.

  I persist onward, through a constant mist of my own breath, which impedes my sight only slightly, but still more than I like. I stop a house away from Beth’s, watching, listening. Not even a breeze disturbs the silence that befalls this night. She lives in a good neighborhood: not uppity, like the new developments at the northeast corner of town, and not run down, like the ancient buildings to the south. It’s older, but well-kept, and in a community made of good people.

  Beth’s house is dark. It’s early in the evening, though, so she may be out. But her car is in the driveway. Maybe she’s on a date, and he picked her up? No, if there was a guy she trusted enough to pick her up at her house, I’d know about him. She seldom does sentimental, but she does anecdotes with an almost reliable frequency, and she hasn’t had a date in the past year that I haven’t heard all about.

  I duck into the deep, embracing dark of a neatly trimmed hedge, and with a few taps, have her number ringing. I hold the phone to my ear inside of the hood, better to conceal the light emitted by the screen. Three rings in, I sense no disturbance, visually or otherwise, within her house.

  Four more rings, and it goes to voicemail. Double- and triple-checking my surroundings, I draw my gun and, in a crouch, scurry toward her car in the driveway. She has an attached garage, but it’s full of stuff that she won’t talk about. Her car looks ostensibly innocent, like a witness playing dumb.

  From the car to the front door, nothing looks amiss, but at this time of year, it would take a lot of commotion to leave evidence there. Not like in the springtime where a slight scuffle could leave blooming flowers broken and trampled.

  I walk up the steps, still taking care to maintain my stealth. Listening at the door, I detect more nothing, and call her phone one more time, crouching in the corner of the porch that’s cradled by the adjacent sitting room.

  This time, I hear a ringtone sound from inside. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, muffled but identifiable, sounds from the interior. She uses that ringtone as an ironic, playful nod to the reputation she has as a hardass.

  I use my elbow to ring the doorbell, and holster my gun while I fish out yet another pair of gloves. After forty seconds, I holster the gun once more, in need of my key. I insert it and turn it quietly, enter, and cross the entry hallway to disable her security system. After entering the passcode, the blinking red light turns back to solid green.

  Apart from the kitchen, Beth’s house is always an uncannily neat mess, like the domestic version of Ellen DeGeneres’s hair. Things are always scattered and strewn about but in a way that still makes you want to take a photograph of them. The kitchen area is always immaculately clean, however, so as to minimize risk of contamination.

  As far as decorations go, it almost looks like she raids a thrift shop on the weekly and buys the most obscure, random-looking trinkets she can find, then throws them up onto her mantle just to be done with decorating.

  That’s what it looks like on the surface, but to one with a thematically sensitive eye, there’s a trend. A figurine mouse wielding an exaggeratedly disproportionate sword, a cat riding a dog, a painting of a boy in tattered clothing wearing a gleaming crown.

  It’s all about the little guy. Beth is a protector of the innocent, a fighter for the weak, a voice for the voiceless. Ten out of ten times, she will root for the underdog.

  I call her phone one more time, and, now that I’m inside, locate it without trouble. I follow the sound into the kitchen, which is absolutely trashed. A bar stool lies on the floor, and one of its support beams is splintered in the center. A plate has been shattered on the ground, its contents forgotten and cold and smeared in front of the fridge. There’s no room left for doubt in my mind: Keroth took Beth.

  Up until now, the game has been played by both of us with the simultaneous goal of self-preservation in mind. While we’ve been hunting each other, we’ve also been hesitant to make moves that would risk our own exposure. After all, a dead hunter is the least effective kind of hunter.

  Now, however, it’s personal. Instead of taking my queen, he upended the board and flipped me off, and now expects to laugh and walk away, leaving me stunned.

  Keroth has made two very big mistakes: First, he underestimated me. Second, he pissed me off.

  I don’t pretend that my anger and fury will make this hunt any easier, but historically, they’re tools that keep me focused. Formerly a camera lens fading in and out of focus on a scene with a complicated foreground and obstructed background, now I’m razor sharp, and will remain so for as long as it takes to rip this guy’s life apart, literally or otherwise.

  In near overwhelming clarity, the story of the intrusion plays out in my mind.

  Keroth uses his contacts to call the security company to have Beth’s alarms temporarily disabled. He lies in wait in her pantry or somewhere. He waits for her to be eating dinner—or about to, as there’s not a fork in sight. He must not have anticipated that she was packing. She’s always packing. He bursts out of the pantry or wherever he was hiding. Instinctively, she draws her weapon. She keeps it on her right hip, and as she reaches for it, her arm swipes the plate from the counter to the floor.

  Hmm. This doesn’t work. Beth is a great shot, and he would have to have been closer to her in order to restrain or disarm her. The pantry is an easy target. There’s no way he’d have made it from there to her without her getting a solid shot off.

  As I think it, I find a shell on the floor, then one in the sink opposite the bar; she definitely held her gun over the bar, indicating that he was indeed hiding in the pantry to wait for her. From where she must have sat, I scan the wall in the direction of her fire. No holes; she didn’t miss. But also no blood on the floor.

  I inspect the sink and bar to look for streaks; maybe he cleaned up as quickly as he could before taking off. But he most likely wouldn’t want to spend any time cleaning up unless he was confident that she’d be unconscious for some time, and based on the rest of the mess, he wasn’t interested in cleaning up anyway. I’m still not entirely sure that she was unconscious on her way out, either.

  My mind picks through scene after scene, eliminating them one by one, given what I know about Beth and her habits as well as present evidence. As far as I can see, the circumstances leave one option: Kevlar. A bulletproof vest. Even if he didn’t know that she’s always packing, he prepared for the possibility, and the precaution paid off. Her house is far enough removed from the other houses, and insulated well enough, that gunshots may be audible to the other houses, but they wouldn’t be alarming. It would sound more like a small desk falling over onto a hardwood floor.

  My eyes and mind zip all over the kitchen, looking for the beginning of a trail to follow, like a bloodhound picking up the scent of her lost human. Within seconds, maybe minutes—I’m not sure; time does weird things when I’m concentrating this hard—I find what I need: a small dent in the doorframe of the pantry.

  The height of the dent is roughly consistent with where Keroth’s head would have hit it. He must have recoiled quite forcefully when Beth shot him. Kevlar is good, but it’s not magic. There is no trace of blood on the dent. Blood would have been useful, but I must be able to work without it.

  I search the floor at the door of the pantry, hoping that the shock and the impact may have shaken loose a hair or two, but such luck eludes me. I return to the other mess—the bar stool and the plate—and search more closely there, too. Chicken parmesan, bits of ceramic plate, and the bar stool. As with me, vegetables are an afterthought for Beth; carbs and meats take priority. I kneel down, careful not to step in any of the sauce, and inspect more carefully.

  Thank god for Beth’s anal cleanliness of the kitchen, for without it, I don’t know that the dark, curly hair wou
ld have been visible otherwise. It’s longer than most men’s hair would be, but not nearly as long as Beth’s, and has a wispiness to it that definitely doesn’t belong to her. What intrigues me is that it looks nothing like Keroth’s hair, either. Glad that I brought a spare bag, I pluck the hair from the floor and put it inside.

  Heart pounding, I scan the room one more time for anything of use, but come up short. Hopefully I don’t need much more than this. I set Beth’s home alarm and exit through the front door, suddenly sure that I’m being watched. That’s okay, though; the darkness has never let me down before, and I don’t anticipate that it will start now. I walk confidently to the street and slip into the shadows, my ears wailing in silent protest of the cold.

  The gloom swallows me again for my return trip, and I walk with an urgency that I didn’t have before. Along with the illumination of the street lights, I shed the feeling of being watched. That doesn’t make me feel any better, though, for I feel that if they didn’t pursue me, I’m being played. I’m doing exactly what they anticipated; exactly what they wanted. Still, though, that may be the correct move at this point in the game.

  In considerably less time than I took for the journey to Beth’s house, I’m on my street. I find it deserted, but I’m also aware that darkness isn’t in my service exclusively; there could be any number of people watching from the shadows, and I need to remain calm and focused either way. I can’t let fear run away with my imagination with so much at stake.

  Entering my bedroom, I find the bathroom door closed again. Odin is inside, again, sedated, again. I would think it was déjà vu, except that the old index card has been replaced with a new one, with a message: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. With a winking face.

  My name is Jeremy Thorn, and I’m in check.

  Seven

  At last, morning swings in, relieving me of a relentlessly troubled night. In lieu of sleep, I opt to map out my course of action from here. But, as it turns out, the options most likely to yield favorable results are those that take place during the day, a condition that took me most of the night to accept and the remainder of the night to execute. I take a photograph of the hair with my phone and run it to the station. Ron Sanders heads the forensics squad, and he likes me. Likes that I don’t pester him, ask him stupid questions, what have you. For whatever reason, he likes me, and for the first time, I need to take advantage of that.

  “Hey, can you run this for me? Just something I found on the big case.” ‘Big case’ instead of ‘Thorn case’ might help him forget that it’s my dad and I’m not supposed to be on that case.

  “Yeah, sure,” Ron says. Absently, he accepts the bag from my hand without looking up from his own work. “I’ll have the boys do it as soon as possible. You know DNA, though; it’ll take a few days.”

  “Not a problem,” I say. In reality, it’s potentially a big problem, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

  As I’m walking away, he says, “Hey, do you know where Connors is? I’ve been trying to get ahold of her and she’s not answering. It’s pretty urgent.”

  “I don’t know, man, sorry,” I say. “If I run into her, I’ll have her give you a ring.”

  “Thanks.”

  If I sic the force of the force on Keroth, he loses everything. Depending on the depth of any investigation, he could be brought in for a huge number of charges for the child pornography business, and now kidnapping, harassment, breaking and entering. If he ends up with the police on his ass, he loses everything.

  It’s for that reason that if I sic the police on him, he kills Beth. Period. No question about it. If I involve another player in this game, I forfeit. He knows that, so in one swipe, he took not only my best friend, but the best tool I had for turning the investigation on him. I can’t take the risk of turning him in. Not until I have her safe.

  I sit at my desk, which looks barren, almost desolate. My desk has been cleared of the paperwork that I was set to do over the weekend, and instead it has been distributed to the floaters. I boot my computer and log into the database to look through a case that I remember, from Domestic Violence. I remember it because, when it was fresh, I was hoping it would sweep my dad into jail with the rest of these bastards, but only one guy ended up serving time. The case gave me hope.

  The guy who got pinned for that one is still in jail, but I need to look through his known associates; this is the circle of royal sonsabitches that runs the kiddie porn ring.

  Each of the known associates has a mugshot, and I find my quarry before long.

  Martin Jackson has thin, curly hair that extends to his shoulders, an expression that looks like an abandoned puppy taking a shit, and drowsy eyes that threaten to roll up into his skull without notice. He’s balding on top, which means that today, he may be left with just a curtain around the edges, or maybe even nothing at all.

  I don’t anticipate that this is the case; this hair easily matches that which I pulled from Beth’s house. This is my guy. It looks like he lives on the southeast outskirts of town, likely alone. I get the sudden mental image of a dwelling, more of a nest than a house, reminiscent of the blob man’s apartment in Stephen King’s “Gray Matter”: A dank, dark mélange of rotting odors swimming through the air like a bowl of drunk goldfish.

  I must make any future moves under the pretense that I’m under constant surveillance; Keroth’s resources are less limited than mine, and he carries himself with a charisma that gets him into people’s good books in thirty seconds flat. His winning smile is an instant trump card, one that he employs daily, and he listens attentively, ostensibly because he’s just such a good listener, but more likely because he’s prying for tools that he may need against you in the future. He can woo all but the most rigid and frigid, man, woman, gay, straight, what have you. And he knows it.

  He can’t woo animals, though. Animals, with whatever sense they have that separates them from humans, can detect his bullshit a mile away, more effectively than a human who’s stepped in it. They sniff through your past, present, and future, and judge you for your intentions. This, partially, is why I have a dog. To a mind in perpetual turmoil about what constitutes good or evil, the reassurance of a loving, loyal canine is an effective antidepressant and a convincing argument for the ‘not guilty’ viewpoint. Because of this, I’m reasonably certain that Keroth, or possibly Jackson (or really any number of people; now that I think of it, I have no idea how far wide his army may stretch), injected Odin with a tranquilizer on each of his visits, before depositing him into the bathroom and closing the door.

  I memorize the address and ask one of the floaters whether he’d seen Keroth recently. The floater told me that he was usually in around eight o’clock in the morning, then in and out of the office throughout the remainder of the day, usually not going home until around six.

  I have suspicions that ‘home’ may not be quite accurate.

  I look across the bullpen at the area that they cleared out in which for Keroth to do his work (turning water to wine, walking on water, healing the sick, etc.), and it is virtually untouched, and kept uncannily neat in his absence. I don’t bother looking through it, with or without a good cover story; if there’s anything useful or incriminating, he won’t leave it in a place where I have even remotely easy access to it.

  I memorize Jackson’s address and, glad that I restocked on gloves when I was at home, leave the station, my vindication bright with the fervor of a freshly stoked flame.

  Martin Jackson’s house is almost offensively normal. Its Victorian architecture faces south, has slightly faded paint with a crack here and there, is set in the middle of a yard made of scraggly grass, yellowing and settling in for the coming winter. While it doesn’t look great, it’s also evident that the yard is well kept during the spring and summer. The porch offers two outdoor chairs as well as a swinging bench suspended from the overhang, and a wind chime in the corner, presently silent in the stillness. An ashtray between the two chairs looks like it sees a lot of use,
even in the nippy chill of November.

  I station myself at the end of the block where Jackson lives, sitting in the provident shade of a cluster of trees on the corner on the opposite side of the street. I watch for any visible movement inside or outside the house, but, for half an hour, find none at all. The gentle krrrrrr of cars passing on neighboring streets echoes through the otherwise calm air, and I need to adjust to a different position in order to avoid limbs falling asleep.

  Finally, at around noon, a car (a maroon Ford sedan) pulls out from the detached garage at Jackson’s house. As it poises itself to come in my direction, I do my best to get low, below the bushes, playing for an advantageous point of view while remaining sufficiently concealed.

  While I’m usually good at being invisible, I also usually have the advantage of people not recognizing me. At least, not right away. But in a situation where my target will likely be on the lookout for me, hiding in plain sight is out of the question, and to the typical bystander’s eye, there is nothing more conspicuous than someone attempting to be inconspicuous. So, I bury myself as deeply and snugly as I can in the shadows afforded me by Mother Nature, and try to trust in a combination of skill, luck, and human error on Jackson’s part to keep me undiscovered.

  The small car picks up speed rapidly, in blatant disregard to the twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in residential areas, and roars past me. As it does so, a very small void in the bush behind which I’m hiding allows me a brief, mildly obscured look at the driver. However, due to the darkness of the interior of the car and the brightness without, I only got a silhouetted profile. For all intents and purposes, that could certainly have been Jackson, but based on what I was able to see, and allowing room for mental bias, it could also, conceivably, be a girlfriend or very well-trained poodle roaring up the road.

  I can see through a window on the west side of the house, providing me with a gratuitous view of the kitchen, in addition to a smaller office window to the right. Neither betrays any movement, human or otherwise, for the duration of the five minutes that I spend watching, hardly daring to breathe. Beth may be in there. Whether alive or dead I’m still unsure, but I am sure that if I’m detected before I’m able to get to her, she will be killed.