Disciple of the Dog

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Some,” Molly said, “apparently more than others.”

  “Manners,” Nill grated. “Manners, Missy! The Good Lord has a way of teaching them!” He glanced at the hulking shadow of Johnny Dinkfingers, who almost instantly stepped forward, his hand drawn back for a bitch-slap ...

  And my reflexes took over.

  Johnny Dinkfingers was no pussy. He was big, surprisingly fit and fast, and, perhaps more importantly, he was hard.. Prison teaches you that a straight line runs through every violent encounter. If you fail to find and to follow it, you will be maimed or dead. Ex-cons tend not to fuck around.

  Mr. Dinkfingers was all these things and mean besides. But the sad truth was that he simply did not stand a chance.

  Those of you with any long-standing involvement in sports know exactly what I’m talking about, even if you still fool yourself into thinking otherwise. I have heard no fewer than 3,687 fuckers claim, in this way or that, they were “ass-kickers.” Of those, only 16 or so were credible: real ass-kickers tend not to talk about kicking ass all that much (though with all this MMA crap I seem to hear it more and more).

  See, if you play a sport, you have an inkling of just how vast the difference in skill and strength can be between players. Now take that inkling and apply it to combat, and you have a sense of just how unlike the movies real fights are. Trust me: you do not ever—ever—want to find yourself in the ring with someone like me.

  There was simply no way I could ever gain the trust of these fuckers the way things stood, even if I had five years and wept at the mere mention of Herr Hitler. I was too clever, too arrogant, and just too damn good-looking to ever really be trusted by men like these. So I had to reach for the next best tool in my tool box: fear. Not that these guys were going to go all wobbly in the knees when they saw me in the street—not by a long shot. But they had done time, which meant that criminal paranoia was stamped as deep as a sex change into them. Cops, you see, have procedures, all kinds of rules that make them fluffy and cute so long as you don’t stumble into their sights—in which case they can bring the hammer down hard. But me? I was an unknown. And in a few moments I was about to become an unknown who could not be intimidated or otherwise bargained with—and who could kick some serious ass.

  Atrained unknown.

  I was about to become the big Who-the-fuck? in the marrow of their little world. The harbinger, baby.

  And I had come bearing a gift—a simple feeling, one that said, I dunno but we gotta do something...

  Something!

  And something always leaves tracks.

  I caught the arm swinging toward Molly—before she had even registered it, I think. I stepped into its lumbering arc, twisted and turned, drawing the big man around and down. He didn’t really have much choice, given that he was simply following his own momentum—coaxed along arcs of my design, of course.

  Afterward, I simply stood as relaxed as before, doing my best to appear as though I hadn’t even moved. A little Jet Li drama never hurts, I’ve found, when the violence is secondary to the message.

  “Now where I come from,” I said in a toke-sharing voice, “you never— never—hit a white woman ...”

  Tim gaped in abject horror. The other sheeple just stood blinking—a critical incident processing lag of some kind. Stupid Nazi fuckers. Even stunned, Johnny Dinkfingers rolled forward on his rump, reaching for

  his boot—a knife of some kind, I imagine. The world becomes a Yard when you’re an ex-con. You always come armed.

  Some woman screamed—a latecomer to the party.

  Only Reverend Nill seemed unaffected. He held out a hand to stop Johnny mid-motion then turned to me with a mild expression of disappointment, placid while his Angry Bitch wife cackled in drunken laughter. It was pretty fucking hilarious, if you thought about it.

  “I thank you for coming,” the Good Reverend Nill said.

  “Sure thing,” I replied, drawing a shell-shocked Molly away from the crowd. “What time were Sunday services?”

  He blinked those wild, freaky eyes.

  “Ten,” he replied. “In the A.M.”

  Molly started crying on the drive back to the motel. I apologized—for real for a change. Told her some nonsense about provocation, the perfect balance of aggression and intelligence.

  I sometimes forget what it’s like ...

  Being normal.

  She should have been furious with me for putting her in a situation like that. Instead, she was embarrassed. She was young, eager to hammer pitons into the sheer cliffs of print fame and fortune. Her head was stuffed with almost as many ideals as romantic notions. Everyone knows that investigative journalists are fearless hard-asses, capable of staring down civil wars in illiterate nations, and here she was, getting all weepy about a little jiu-jitsu at a church picnic. She kept her face averted, pretended to stare at the setting sun through the passenger window. From time to time she wiped her eyes with fluttering fingers.

  I could even hear her curse herself as she marched to her room.

  “They were Nazis.!” I cried out in encouragement.

  That was something, wasn’t it?

  Once in my room, I called Albert, left a message on his machine or wherever the hell it is you leave messages nowadays—the nowhere of the Web probably. I needed to find out as much as I could about the Church of the Third Resurrection as soon as possible. There was piss all about them on the Web.

  Say you were in a bind, a really, really tight bind, like the mob was out to hit you or something. Now, most men pretend they’ve stepped out of a movie, make believe they’re ready, willing, even eager to do what it takes, no matter what that involves. Most men pretend to be capable of calculated murder. But press them, and when the time comes I guarantee you they’ll find some bullshit way of backing out. Everyone postures in a vacuum, but when circumstances take hold, the sorting happens real quick.

  Now, you can call this cowardice if you want. But let’s face it, murder is stupid, particularly if you have any personal connection to the dude you intend to murder. So I’m more inclined to call this intelligence rather than cowardice—the brave ones are the ones who shatter lives and go to prison.

  Reverend Nill understood this all too well. He knew what it took to get people to kill for him.

  The key is to get them young, when peer group pressures are well- nigh irresistible. Then you start small: graffiti, other kinds of petty vandalism. Then you do something for them, something low-risk but illegal all the same. Like so many things human, trust is the foundation of co-operative crime, and few things inspire trust like someone breaking the law for you—actually risking his neck. Then you ask them to commit some crime in return—to reciprocate. Once their cherry is popped, once they get away with something bad, it becomes oh so easy, even addictive for some types.

  You don’t need to be a chromosomal mutant to enjoy hurting people. You just need to believe that your victims deserve their pain. And we’re wired to think that already.

  No. Reverend Nill was no fool.

  This was the realization I kept in mind as I lay on my bed, boots and all: that I was dealing with a sociopath in the full manipulative sense of the term. If Reverend Nill was behind Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance, then he was “behind the scenes” in every sense of the word. Not only would he have a herd of complimentary character witnesses, he would have an ironclad alibi.

  Which meant the place to start would be his tools.

  The moment came to me as it always does, the one most pertinent to my questions and concerns. Johnny Dinkfingers and his two junkie cohorts, sitting at the crooked picnic table. They were both as skinny as marathon runners, but the one was older, sporting a grey mullet, while the other, the younger, had short-cropped hair dyed an artificial black. They were having a long conversation without jokes, eyes fixed then wandering. Looking down and bored, then matching gazes.

  A single nod from Johnny, eyes closing as the mouth said, “Okay. I see.”

  Th
e older junkie sucked in his lips. “Sheesh. Too much. “

  Fists clenched to mime blows given and received.

  A face raised to offer bruised evidence. The younger one had a shiner.

  Laughter, but reserved, as if they talked on the corner of a major thoroughfare.

  Johnny shot them a look over his shades. His eyes darted up and out, then down again. A knuckle glanced his nose. Weight shifted from foot to foot. A string of inaudible, unreadable words. From beneath his sunglasses his lips said, “Give me a fucking break.”

  An impassive look from the younger one. “So? “

  A sour stretch of Johnny’s lips.

  And the sentence I swear that I saw. “She’s dead.. “

  Johnny shrugged and spat. The old junkie turned to me and grinned.

  A hard knock at the door startled me from my reverie. It was a wet-haired Molly, her freckled face scrubbed of makeup, staring up at me with wide and hungry eyes. Suddenly I understood what it was she wanted from me. She wanted my cynicism, my numbness ... She wanted my disease.

  Because she thought they would make her strong. Stupid twit.

  “I know ...” she began, breaking eye contact and hesitating. “I know you said you wanted to ... work ... or whatever the hell it is you do.”

  “Recollect. Remember. I kick back, sort and sift and interpret.”

  “If you say so.”

  I say so.

  I breathed deep. Gawd, how I love the smell of a woman fresh out of the shower.

  “Well, I just wanted to thank you, you know, for what happened back there.”

  “No thanks necessary. Getting hot young stringers into life-threatening situations is just what I do.”

  She laughed, looked at the finger she had raised to pick at her hair. “Yeah? What were you thinking?” she asked, cross-eyed.

  “Just doing what I do best, Molls.”

  “Which is?”

  A strange pang accompanied the question. Hard to explain, actually, like doing a somersault without moving, a kind of figure-field inversion of the soul. I could tell from her eyes that she could see it on my face, all that past crashing in. I reached for her hand, retreated with her into the orange of my room’s tacky light.

  “Screwing with people.”

  Oh, I got laid that night.

  Ladies, you can deny it all you want, talk about how violence makes you ill—whatever. Weird as it is, a good number of you like it, not as a spectator sport—more like an Olympic demonstration. For whatever reason, a man’s hands tingle all that much more when they’re scabbed with another man’s blood.

  You see, we’re savages together, you and I.

  Children of Reverend Nill.

  Track Ten

  FORTY THINGS WE SHARE

  Saturday night ...

  One man’s dog is another woman’s pig. I get that. But I like to think that I’m a dog in a deeper sense.

  Did you know that the word cynic comes from the ancient Greek for dog?

  Apparently the Roman Cynics were actually evangelical—some to the point of burning themselves alive to make their point. They went around preaching virtue and screaming hypocrite everywhere they went—kind of like Jesus. Fuck that. No, give me the ancient Greek version. Give me good old Diogenes, living in a stone tub, tossing the odd load in the agora, and searching, endlessly searching, for a single honest man. The dude that Alexander the Great said he wanted to be were he not Alexander. The guy that Plato called Socrates gone mad.

  Even better, give me Diogenes as he should have been. Doglike in every sense of the word. Gnawing on his leash. Chewing up his master’s shoes. Crapping on the neighbour’s putting-green lawn.

  And, of course, humping everything that moved.

  Rules, brother. That’s the real difference between you and me. Every-fucking-where you turn: admonishments, tickets, citations, not to mention out-and-out convictions. Judgments, endless condemnations, raised on the clay brick of half-baked belief. You can’t see them because you can’t remember, because the million ways you repeat continually topple into the bottomless abyss of five minutes ago. Over and over, the same way, the same time. Even your flaws and foibles—even your sins—follow ironclad commandments. Again and again.

  Rules.This is how you remember. Rules are what binds you to your past. The content of your life shrivels into a wicker cage of imperatives, where mine is trucked to the landfill.

  It’s a paradox, really. Your inability to remember dooms you to repeat things—and here’s the kicker—for the first time. You are imprisoned and utterly convinced you are free. While here I stand, soaked in an awareness of everything I’ve done, totally able to step sideways, to walk perpendicularly to you and your pantomime world—able at any instant to do something radical, something genuinely new ...

  And knowing, because you’re so fucking predictable, that I would simply run afoul of your rules. That first you would tag me, lest you lose track of me in the absent-minded scrum, call me “crazy” or “troubled” or “pathologically self-centred.” And then you would bag me, dump me into some Secure Housing Unit, or give me one of those jackets with armholes but no cuffs.

  So, I try to be a “good boy,” even if I shit on the carpet from time to time. Begging for treats, barking at strangers, not so much feeling shame as cocking my head and watching it.

  Whatever it takes to keep the feed bowl full.

  Take the Holocaust, for instance. I mean, seriously. How, after the greatest, most thoroughly chronicled tragedy in the history of the human race, could a cadre of Nazis take root and blossom in a town like Ruddick, PA?

  Fawk. Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

  This is generally what I do when I can’t sleep—rant to the congregation of me. I usually try to take advantage of my insomnia, use the time to relive the particulars of whatever case I happen to be working on. But for some reason I found myself batted back and forth between Reverend Nill and his surreal God Plays Favourites rap session, and Baars saying, “What if cynicism and self-righteousness were one and the same thing.?”I understood the comment this time around: the self-righteous prick was calling me a self-righteous prick—an irony I could appreciate. Condemning others becomes a trifle when you stand condemned in your own eyes. I got it.

  Even still. Fuck. Him.

  I stared at Molly in the gloom. She lay on her side facing me, her hand out as though braced against the possibility of the mattress tipping. Her hair had been swept back in some accident of restless sleep so that her face lay bared in the dim illumination. Feminine yet strong in an impish, Julia Roberts kind of way. Full lips that I could still taste on my own. I slowly drew the sheet from her freckled shoulder down the line of her arm and along the curve of her waist. Her brow furrowed in dream perplexity. Her top leg was drawn forward, concealing her pussy like a Renaissance nude. Lines of white etched her horizons, from the arc of her shoulders to the long curve of her buttock.

  I could see her breathe.

  Sasha Lang, that old philosopher girlfriend I told you about, once claimed I was the kind of guy who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. That was January 20, 2001, another bad day, as it so happened. The description struck me as apt enough. Sasha loved to theorize, and I loved to tease—not a great combination given that teasing is so much easier. She had figured it out—Christ, she had an IQ that would make most physicists blush. She understood that a cynic is just someone who believes nothing to better judge everything.

  So was that what I was? Just one more pious prick?

  Take Molly, nude and unconscious, her skin pimpling in the air- conditioned cool. I understood what made my gaze so ancient, so lecherous. I understood what made her so ideal, so desirable that whole industries had been raised around her. There was promise in her youth, strength in her morals, glory in her naivete ...

  I understood all that—even as the hour hand crawled along my belly toward the high noon of my navel.

  I could see, even appreciate, th
e value of things apart from all our tacky self-aggrandizing.

  And that’s the point, now, isn’t it, Doctor? Here I was, poised on the threshold of something breathless and profound, peering into the mists, straining to make lucid my epiphany ...

  And all I really wanted to do was fuck.

  That was about when my cellphone spanked out its riff and Molly’s eyes popped open. She blinked, curled into a shivering ball. Her gaze faltered then focused, first on me, then on my sheet-tenting boner.

  “Disciple? What the fuck?”

  I leaned back to grab my cell.

  She flopped like a fish to her side of the bed, snapped on the bedside light.

  I held my hand out against the glare, concentrated on the voice murmuring through the receiver. “Disciple. This is Nolen here. I just wanted to give you a heads-up before I arrived.. “

  Arrived?

  “You ... You ...” she said, sitting up with the sheets clutched tight to her neck, squinting and scowling beneath a dishevelled pile of hair. “Ugh! You’re such a fucking creep!”

  “Yeah,” I said to the Chief in a rough voice. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Sorry,”Nolen said in an entirely genuine tone. “But I’m kindofin over my head with this one. “

  “What?” Molly continued ranting. “Were you ... like ... beating off or something?”

  I clubbed her in the head with a pillow.

  “You found something?” I asked.

  “Another one. We found another one. “

  Molly was talking to herself now, her hands raised in Why-me-God? exasperation, her expression one of abject, mystified disgust. “While I was sleeping ? Ah! Ah!”

  “What?” I said into the receiver. “Another finger?”

  That shut her up.

  “No,” Nolen said. “A toe. This time we found a baby toe. “

  We were scarcely dressed when Nolen’s headlights panned across the room’s curtained windows. Molly had spared me a couple of scowls but otherwise pulled on her clothes—a white button-up and blue jeans— with her eyes unfocused in that unfinished-business way.