The Innocents

by Nathan Senthil

  Ryatt drove across the city center, through the streets he had known as a kid and was hit with a dreary nostalgia. The porno mag and VHS shop had been replaced by a fancy Apple Store. Fitting since it was technology that killed them.

  Killed. Everyone and everything Ryatt knew ceased to exist. Thomas, Leo, Young Boys Inc., Bugsy, Roman, and the Detroit Alliance. Everything had died.

  Everything except Ryatt and Iris. Only they survived the old Detroit.

  When Ryatt had called his home phone earlier, his mom was unavailable. Seeing that the Chase boy had discovered Ryatt’s noxious secret, the cops and the FBI couldn’t be far behind. But Iris not answering the phone made little sense. They should have tapped the line and forced his mom to pick the call, so that they could track or trap him.

  But they didn’t.

  Meaning Ryatt might have a bit of time left, until Gabriel gained consciousness. He must quickly take Iris and leave the state before that.

  Five minutes later, he turned onto the cul-de-sac leading to the back of Goodwill. Chances of pigs watching this side were slim. No one knew about this route.

  The rundown plot of vacant space that once festered with vermin was now a basketball court, and kids were shooting hoops.

  Ryatt left the keys in the ignition, hoping some desperate boy would steal the car. He skirted the ground and crossed the path that snaked to the rear door. No hobo piss in the backyard anymore, but a small garden with daisies in it.

  Ryatt unlocked the door with his key and stepped in.

  Iris had renovated the shop in the early 2000s, tearing down the walls, making it a single space. What used to be their “kitchen” and “bedrooms” were now aisles and aisles of candies. However, she had a separate room for goods, where she also ate her lunch. It housed a portable stove and some utensils.

  “Hello?” his mom called out from the billing counter in the front.

  “It’s me, Ma.” Ryatt ambled inside.

  Her demeanor suddenly changed. She stiffened for a moment and then galloped around the table, walking purposefully in his direction.

  As she marched towards Ryatt, he spotted purple bruises on her wrists. Enraged, he wished to revive Bugsy, only to kill him again. Maybe when they met in hell, Ryatt would torture the son of a bitch for eternity.

  Iris halted two feet from him and stared, her mouth tautened into a thin line.

  It unnerved Ryatt, his stomach churning. He hadn’t seen his mom so spiteful.

  Her dry lips parted, her voice a whisper. “Are you Lolly?”

  Ryatt did a double take, and that one moment of hesitation was all she needed.

  Iris’s face curled in disgust like she had just touched a hairy spider.

  “Ma—”

  She slapped him with all her energy. Her hand didn’t miss his cheek even by a millimeter, rattling him to the core. His mom had never raised her voice to him let alone her arm.

  Torrents of tears lined her wizened cheeks, and her voice broke. “All this time without sight, I’ve never felt blind. Not until now.”

  “I… I’m not—”

  “Floridan Crocs never heard of any Ryatt,” she said. “Then I called every team you’ve said you worked for during all these years. None of them knows you.”

  Ryatt had no clue how she did it, but her eyes were deadlocked on his. They pierced through his façade and glowered at his true self, which uselessly tried to scurry into some dark recess of his grotesque mind. While a cold chill shot through his spine, warm sweat droplets appeared on his forehead and above his upper lip. He sensed his Adam’s apple bobbing, vainly attempting to dampen his parched throat by drily swallowing. He wanted to scram, to bolt from that stifling place, or to just cower at a corner, but he couldn’t move his trembling legs.

  “Wikipedia told me that your gang has killed fifty-two people and Lolly…” She sniffled. “You personally took thirty-four lives.” Iris clenched her teeth and spoke in a grim tone. “Is. That. True?”

  Ryatt nodded, unable to open his mouth. Another slap landed on the same cheek. This time, her righteous hand also caught his ear, making it ring.

  “You know how many boys I saved from the streets?” Iris asked. “Thirty-fucking-four.”

  Ryatt closed his ears, wishing it was a nightmare. There was no universe or reality where he could imagine his purer-than-angel mom say that word.

  “Thirty-four…” A guttural noise escaped from his mom but she instantly covered her mouth with a hand and inhaled slowly, her body shaking as she did.

  Iris’s shoulders, that had never shown weakness, finally slumped. She suddenly appeared so small, so fragile. So old.

  What had he done?

  Then he accepted the mind-shattering truth: he had destroyed what made Iris Iris.

  “All my life’s work is now meaningless.” She looked around the shop. “While I was healing the world on one side, you were wounding it in the other.”

  Ryatt said, “Our life was unfair—”

  Iris turned her head sideways, as if she did not even want to hear his voice. “Just… just don’t.” She stood there, pondering over something. After a while, she took a breath; her chest inflated once again, and shoulders settled back in their usual position of strength. She looked like she had come to a decision, and Ryatt braced himself for whatever she was gonna say.

  She wet her lips. “Let’s eat lunch. I’m hungry.”

  Not waiting for an answer, she walked past him and headed towards the storeroom.

  Though he was confused by the anticlimax, he followed his mom like a subservient puppy.

  As there was only one chair in this room, he sat on the floor.

  She began cooking, and he resigned to look down at the carpet, again wishing it all to be a nightmare. He was never more scared in his life than that moment.

  Each minute stretched into hours, and an eternity later, she placed two bowls in front of him. One yellow and one white, both brimming with ramen, the food he hadn’t eaten in decades.

  After she sat herself down, she picked the yellow bowl. Then she took a fork and began eating.

  While she angrily munched the food, she asked, “You’re too good for ramen? I’m sorry, this is all I could afford from my meager but honest income from this candy store. I’m never touching anything that came out of your cardinal sins. Not your house, not your car, and definitely not your steaks.”

  Ryatt’s arms stretched automatically and picked the white bowl.

  He coiled the ramen onto his fork and brought it to his face. The mere smell of it made him regurgitate. Nonetheless, he shoved a forkful into his mouth.

  “Um… this tastes funny,” Ryatt said as he munched. “It leaves a weird aftertaste. All sweet like.”

  “Stop complaining. Eat your meal!” she ordered. And he reluctantly obeyed.

  After forcefully swallowing half of the food, his vision became watery and slow, like he was falling underwater.

  The fork slipped from his numb fingers, worrying him. “Ma…” Ryatt tried to construct words but they slurred.

  “Don’t you dare call me that!” she spat, her lips quivering. “I wish I had never borne you in my womb.”

  Though Ryatt couldn’t feel his tongue, his ears worked fine and her words hurt him like pins poked into the heart of a voodoo doll of him.

  But more than the hurt, he was petrified. He felt like he was intoxicated, his head dizzy, and his mouth began drooling. As his heartbeat rose, he started hyperventilating.

  And then everything darkened. The blackness brought along a horrible childhood memory, terrifying him.

  “Ma!” he cried. “I can’t see no more, Ma!”

  “As much as I hate him, Bugsy was right,” Iris said calmly. “I should have let you stay blind, when you said those exact words forty-two years ago.”

  Ryatt did not gracefully descend into water any longer. Everything moved irrationally, chaotically, robbing Ryatt of his balance, and he limply fell sideways.

  He w
rapped his hands around his throat and squeezed them because something clogged the airway. But to no avail. He could not draw a drop of air.

  As he choked and kicked about on the floor, he tried to make peace with the fact. He was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

  Still convulsing, he brought a hand to his good eye and rubbed it frantically. He begged God to answer this one prayer. Just let him see his mom’s angelic face one last time.

  And God answered by giving him sight, albeit it lasted only for a second.

  However, what Ryatt saw in that one second broke him into a million pieces. The last image burning into his soon-to-be-dilated pupils induced a pain so severe that it hurt his very soul.

  His strong, superhero mom was holding the white bowl, taking a mouthful.

  Chapter 51

  May 18, 2019. 09:49 P.M.

  Gabriel unlocked his room and shouldered the door open, holding a plastic bag that contained the things he had on him when they’d wheeled him into the ICU. He dropped it on the table and collapsed on the bed. The sudden motion made his abdomen throb.

  “Goddamn it.” He cupped the part of his belly where the suture was and pulled out a pill holder from his jacket. With his thumb, he flicked open the cap and shook a blue pill into his mouth.

  The SNOM procedure benefited Gabriel in many ways. Hospital stay reduced to only six days, shorter bill, and most importantly, lesser scar tissue as they skipped laparoscopy.

  When they discharged him, the attending physician had said, “You’ll heal in weeks. But until then, stomach the pain, pun fully intended.”

  Gabriel did not lose an organ or have enough time to develop peritonitis because he was quickly taken to Level 1 trauma center. Thanks to Ryatt, Gabriel got off relatively and improbably scot-free. He had later learned that Ryatt had left his dead friend behind in Bugsy’s mansion, to get Gabriel to hospital on time. Maybe, just maybe, there was a fraction of good in that heartless murderer after all.

  Too bad he couldn’t salvage that good in Ryatt and help him in some way. He was dead. The SWAT team that burst through Iris’s candy store found both her and Ryatt lying dead on the floor, side by side. The pathologist wrote it down as ‘homicidal poisoning with ethylene glycol’, a common ingredient in antifreeze.

  The SWAT team also found a letter beside Iris. It read: Please donate the reward money to Detroit Public School.

  Since she was blind, it was written in a slanting line but the text couldn’t be more intelligible.

  Iris, even in death, cared about community service. Not only had she killed her son and made the world safer but also used the $500,000 bounty on his head for children’s education.

  Gabriel felt his eyes prickle. Why the emotion gushed out, he did not know. Could be the drugs kicking in. Or could have been Iris.

  As the painkiller benumbed him and turned his head as light as a balloon, he made a rash decision.

  He reached for his rucksack under the bed. Rummaging through it, he fished out the burner, which was still alive. A miracle as it hadn’t been charged for six days.

  When he entered the Swizz bank website, the browser remembered his credentials; so logging in was no problem.

  He opened another tab and searched for the libraries in Detroit that were shutting down due to lack of funding. Once he notated them all, he switched back to the bank website. Without a moment’s thought, he transferred the necessary amount to each one of them. And he still had almost a million dollars left, which he donated to the same public school Iris had.

  When he finally crushed the burner into pieces, Gabriel had not a penny left of Bugsy’s blood money.

  Feeling good, he lay back and rested his eyes.

  Just as he slipped out of reality, his cell phone rang, its ringtone muffled inside the hospital bag.

  He grabbed the bag and took the cell phone out. To his surprise, it was not crusted with blood or grime. In fact, he observed that all his belongings were cleaned and smelled good.

  Gabriel answered the call.

  “You safely reached the hotel?” Conor asked.

  “Yes, Mom,” Gabriel said.

  Conor chuckled. “Alright. Guess what? The DPD got the Camaro. It was abandoned at the back of Goodwill. A bunch of kids called 911 and reported that the key was still in the car.”

  “Hm,” Gabriel said.

  “I would’ve thought that the car might have gone missing.”

  “Not only you. Ryatt would’ve counted on it too when he left it there. Seems like you’re both wrong about the world. At least about Detroit.”

  “Are you seriously lumping me with that sociopathic bank robber?” Conor asked.

  “Sometimes you seriously talk like a sociopath.” Gabriel yawned.

  “Whatever,” Conor said. “Anyway, the Camaro isn’t the reason why I’ve called you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Conor’s tone became grim. “I’ve gone through your psych eval.” He cleared his throat. “Y-you have a genius level IQ but… um…”

  “Don’t mince words. What’s up?” Gabriel asked innocently. But he thought he knew what was up, and it jittered him.

  “You have trouble communicating?” Conor asked.

  “I used to stutter, yes,” Gabriel answered. “But I’ve worked through it. I haven’t stuttered since high school.”

  “Come on, Gabe. You know we do backgrounds.” Conor paused. “We talked to Victor.”

  Victor was Gabriel’s captain from the 122nd precinct.

  “What did he say?” he asked.

  “That you had a breakdown during the Mr. Bunny investigation. You lashed out and… uh… you’ve had a hard time communicating.”

  “Mr. Bunny videotaped shooting my friend in the face and sent it to me. Try not stuttering after seeing something as traumatic as that,” Gabriel said. “However, that was the only time I stuttered in my whole career as a homicide detective, because I lost so many people close to me to that animal.”

  “Yes, I agree. But you had some psychological problems as well. Substance abuse to be specific, and during that period, you were negligent of your health.”

  “I recovered and haven’t drunk in a really long time,” Gabriel lied. He mourned his dad’s murder with cheap vodka.

  “It’s not just that,” Conor said. “You know, our department has ways to put things together.”

  “What did they put together?” Gabriel asked, hoping they knew nothing about his little setback.

  “Your problem with speech, your self-destructive behavior that borders on suicidal, and according to our research, you had late motor skill development. And you have poor sociability. I’m not saying this because you weren’t able to maintain your marriage and stayed single after the divorce, but you punched me in the face when you came to talk to me about that cannibal you caught last month. Combine it with your extraordinary IQ and almost otherworldly persistence, it doesn’t take an FBI psychologist to know what’s up with you.”

  Oh boy.

  No point in hiding the truth anymore. Gabriel sighed. “Fine. I’m aspergic.”

  “That explains a lot.”

  “W-what?”

  “You went to special ed in elementary, where you met Casey, your late best friend, you know, who had autism?”

  Gabriel frowned. “So what? Us tards in the spectrum stick together, uh?”

  “Oh my… no. I didn’t mean—”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “Shouldn’t have said that. What I mean is you’re incredibly focused and determined. We all know how obsessed you are with justice.”

  “But my condition is still somehow a problem?” Gabriel asked. “Look, you wanna fire me, go ahead.”

  “No, why would I— I’ve seen you hunt down three ultraviolent criminals in the period of two months. You’re a highly functional, crime-solving guru. A gem in the FBI’s arsenal.”

  “What’s the problem then?”

  “You should have told me about
your condition before. Or in your application.”

  “I’m not comfortable talking about it,” Gabriel said. “You’re right. I suffered from alcoholism, and still suffer nightmares. I don’t know if those psychological problems are related to Asperger’s. But my battles with liquor and nightmares are connected to scary things, sad things, that I’d rather forget.”

  “So you avoid thinking about them?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think about anything much. I don’t care about sex, don’t care if I have friends or money or respect. Frankly, there’s not much I care about.”

  “Except solving crimes.”

  “Except solving crimes, yes,” Gabriel said. “That’s my routine, and that’s what I’m gonna do until I die.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence on the line, making Gabriel hold his breath. Maybe the FBI did not take kindly to people like him.

  “Good thing we got just the gig for you,” Conor said. “Welcome aboard, Agent Chase.”

  Gabriel released his breath. “Thank y—”

  “Excited about our very first case in BISKIT?” The pitch of Conor’s voice increased, bordering on squealing.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said truthfully. Nothing was as satisfying as catching serial killers, especially internationally. Because serial killers were the personification of evil and fighting them was the reason he existed.

  “Awesome. We’ve received a request from the CID in London.”

  “The UK?” Gabriel asked dumbly, feeling the excitement growing.

  “Uh-huh,” Conor affirmed. “Looks like a crazy guy up there mutilates his victims and puts them up for public display, taunting the authorities.”

  “Can you ask them to send us the case file?”

  “They already did, and I’ve forwarded them to you, along with the flight ticket.”

  “Flight ticket?” Gabriel frowned. “I hope it’s from JFK.”

  “I’m sorry. I-I didn’t think you’d want to go back to New York. Didn’t take you for the good-bye type.”

  “I’m not, but I need to drop Bill back, asshole,” Gabriel said.

  “Totally forgot about him.”

  “See. Sociopath,” Gabriel said.