by Brian Ewing
“Dude.” Sisto could feel the tremble in the voice box as Craig said the words, “I will call the cops right now.”
The dimples hidden in his beard became prominent, as if Carson heard Craig make a joke. Carson reeled in his joy, replacing his evil grin with an even more frightening look of determination and focus. He wheeled the knife around in his hand, like a gunslinger showing off with his revolver, and approached Craig with a forceful strut. The movement shook Craig, and while Sisto could feel Craig’s heart pounding in his chest, he was impressed by Craig’s quick wit. The handle of the ice chest in front of him was upright and, in a split second, Craig kicked the lid open, grabbed two beer bottles, and smashed them against the roof’s brick guardrail, leaving Craig with two weapons for a fighting chance. Sisto noticed Carson Vinnova’s head tilt, possibly realizing he may have underestimated the young man. Sisto thought Carson may have wanted to think twice after seeing Craig wield two broken beer bottles around to defend himself. But, Carson’s smile returned, excited to have his game include a little more risk than he was used to lately. Another flashy wheeling motion of the knife handle circling his hand, Carson clasped under the bridge of the razor-sharp tool and bolted towards Craig.
Sisto felt the leg attached by The Reel’s occupant think quick, kicking the ice chest with beer, and a slosh of icy water in front of the stampeding killer, causing Carson to trip and fall to the floor. Hopes slightly risen, Sisto rooted for his friend as he tried to go around the second chair and the body of Carson Vinnova laying on the ground, to make a run for the roof access door. With adrenaline and a sense of victory, Craig shifted one of his beer bottles to hold both weapons while his right hand felt the cold knob of the roof door. He grabbed and turned, ready to sprint all the way to the lobby and let Super Dave know there was a maniac trapped on the roof. Unfortunately, the short feeling of success was whisked away as the knob turned but the door didn’t budge. Looking down, Craig saw, which meant Sisto saw, Carson had kicked out the door stopper when coming out of the stairwell. The sunset accentuated the atmosphere of despair, finally resting behind the buildings, leaving Craig on a locked rooftop with someone looking to chop him into pieces. He took one beer bottle out of his left hand to give each direction equal opportunity of defense and took a deep breath while still facing the locked door before blasting around and . . .
The burning sensation sent a signal to Craig’s brain, notifying him to look down at the ten-inch gleaming blade almost fully in his left kidney. Blood pulsated out of the wound and as Sisto watched through his friend’s eyes in horror, Craig threw his right arm up in a vigorous attempt to retain life. The bottle handle with multiple chards landed with a direct hit into Carson’s shoulder, causing a slight cry to come from the bulky shadow. The wound in Craig’s gut burned more as the beer bottle only enraged Carson, causing him to twist the blade letting a warm flow of crimson run down Craig’s belly and leg. Sisto felt woozy as Craig felt woozy. Sisto’s vision went in and out, presumably to match the blacking out Craig would have been experiencing hours ago. Sisto felt Craig’s eyelids become increasingly heavy but as a burst of energy and panic rose, Craig shot his eyes open as he felt Carson grab his right arm, causing his hand to release from the forged weapon. Barely visible, Carson released his grip on the knife in Craig’s belly to grab the top of the bottle protruding from his left shoulder. In a fluid motion, Sisto felt a tickle pass Craig’s throat as a viscosity of warmth ran down to his chest. Sisto could feel a fire in his lungs, Craig’s lungs, yearning to get an ounce of air as the vision went fully black.
Tears involuntarily welled up in Sisto’s eyes as he was back in the entry of the vacant apartment.
“Ama,” Sisto called behind him, kneeling down from the phantom pain he felt in his left kidney area.
He heard her footsteps from behind. She looked into Sisto’s glossy eyes, which really caused his irises’ to resemble marbles, as he turned to her.
“You told me you have a camera on the roof,” Sisto attempted to confirm.
Ama simply shook her head in agreement.
“Where else do you have cameras?” he asked.
She stayed silent, thinking to herself. While she was mentally counting the number of cameras and their positioning around the building, Sisto interrupted.
“Do you have a camera outside the building? A view of the street side where someone may park before entering Corden Palisades?”
A thoughtful moment passed, then a glimpse of light beamed in her face. “Yes. I put three outside. One on top of the roof, one above the fourth-floor fire escape, which points down the side alley, and one mounted outside Mrs. Tolleson’s window, directly viewing the traffic on University Drive.”
“I need you to go to your apartment and review your footage from about three hours ago,” Sisto grudgingly said.
“Oh my god,” Ama said, putting her hand over her mouth.
Nodding in agreement at how sour the taste of saying those words felt, he continued, “We need to see if we can get a plate or anything that can help us find him. He needs to pay for what he did. This can’t keep going on.”
She wrapped her hand around his and embraced him in a hug. Sisto was not used to the display of human contact but in that moment, fully embraced it. She kept it brief and broke away as she left for her delegated task. Sisto looked towards the master bedroom as the two detectives exited and convened around him, still kneeling by the doorway.
“There’s no one here,” Bell said, very factual with no snark embedded in it.
“The roof,” Sisto said, just above a whisper. “Craig is on the roof.”
CHAPTER 21
Sisto imagined what it must look like from an aerial view, looking down on the old building he lived in. Maybe a biplane with an experienced pilot is on his way to a coastline vacation and has to pass through Saratoga City, he looks down for a moment to admire the city lights against the night’s backdrop, and sees a barrage of blinking red and blue at the base of the building? On top of the roof and through the side alleys, would it look like a team of Jedis training with their lightsabers as the officers shone their department issued Maglites for any potential clues or evidence? The small distraction gave Sisto a small window to breathe before his reality set back in. He was escorted to his apartment to wait with Officer Hook, while Caden and Bell took the tactical officers to the rooftop. Luckily, he’d sent Ama on her task before Caden and Bell left the master bedroom in Craig’s apartment; she’d been forgotten completely after he’d relayed the newfound information that The Reels decided to drop in after a no-show all day.
Officer Hook was a man that couldn’t have been more than five years older than Sisto, but due to the bloodline and DNA he was born into, was rapidly balding. Sisto vowed that if he ever started to lose his hair to that extent, he would just take a razor to it and keep it clean. From what he could tell, there were no dents in his skull, leaving him confident that he could sport a nice, smooth dome if needed. Hook had dark brown hair, thick as bear’s fur on the side and back of his head, but the cul-de-sac on the top was vacating tenants left and right, producing a sad slick back with a small island patch in the center of the circular emptiness. Hook’s physique reminded Sisto of an American bulldog. The man was below average height and held a gut usually reserved for men closer to middle-age. He did however have arms beyond defined, pressing snuggly against the uniform, similar to the definition a bulldog held in his front legs. Sisto now understood why the short man with the boulder arms was trusted to wield the Enforcer #2 around during intense situations.
Caden asked Hook to simply keep Sisto company. She could have asked him to take a statement on the break-in Sisto had endured earlier but recognized the emotional distress he had been through and opted to just let him recover. The two men sat across from each other at Sisto’s small kitchen table in what would normally be awkward silence, had Sisto been more coherent. The apartment door remained open as Caden instructed an officer who had been called up
from the growing search party below to apply crime scene tape from one wall of the hallway to the other, blocking off both Craig’s apartment as well as Sisto’s. There was nothing to indicate that Carson had entered Craig’s apartment, but Caden played it by the book and wanted to maintain the integrity of Craig’s residence while she went up to the roof, allowing her to follow up if needed in apartment fifty-two.
Sisto kept looking at his phone, which was attached to a charger after his poor judgement of going over a day with no charge and causing him to miss Ama’s initial attempts to reach out to him. Nothing yet. She was sifting through her footage at this point, Sisto assumed. He had been trying to remember what time he sent her off to start her query for any digital footprints Carson may have left for them. Sisto’s tapped his foot in a repetitive motion, like a nervous kid waiting at the DMV to be called for his road test. He realized that his body was trying anything it could to shake off the trauma it had just endured. He stood, walked over to his couch, causing slight alarm in Hook’s face until he realized that Sisto was grabbing the remote off the coffee table, and brought it back to his seat at the table. Clicking on the television, the free TV app from earlier was on by default. Of course, fucking Stir of Echoes with Kevin Bacon was on. Lucky motherfucker, Sisto, spitting hate, thought to himself. At least Bacon was able to walk away after that role, leaving the curse of his mind’s eye on the floor with that character. Sisto grew annoyed at the unwarranted injustice he felt at that moment and changed the channel to a favorite his brother and sister-in-law used to watch religiously, MTV’s The Challenge.
Sisto stared at the competition show another twenty minutes, catching Hook look up from time to time, trying not to seem interested in what was on the screen. Right when Johnny Bananas was being sent in to fight in an elimination match against someone that looked like he could have been a Spartan warrior, Caden and Bell appeared in the hallway of Sisto’s apartment. Bell entered first, nodding to Hook that he could be relieved of his duties and wait outside. Hook grabbed his police cap, normally used to cover his fleeing hairline, along with his notepad and exited Sisto’s domicile, Caden closing the door behind him. Usually, Caden was the liaison between the two butting heads of Bell and Sisto. The fact that Bell sat across from him and Caden lingered back against his front door told Sisto what he had expected about the level of violence from the scene they had just assessed.
The senior detective looked at his hands a moment as if he was actually taking the time to think before he spoke. “It was pretty bad.”
Sisto analyzed the man’s face and replied in a confused tone, “That’s it?”
“It was . . . one of the worst things I have seen with my own two eyes . . . ever.” Bell admitted.
“Tom, he must have been watching you or was waiting somewhere in the shadows for you to leave, so he could accomplish what he had. Based on how long you were gone, he would have needed almost every minute to set up his display,” Caden softly added from back by the door.
Sighing a long breath of mixed emotions he was feeling, Sisto asked, “So it wasn’t like the other kills? You keep saying it’s the worst you have seen, he needed more time. Blah, blah, blah. What was so different?”
Caden emerged from the doorway and made way to the corner of the couch, much closer to the circle of conversation, “It was like the others, but . . .”
“More brutal,” Sisto finished for her.
Bell nodded in confirmation.
“You don’t need the details, Tom,” Caden expressed. “It was definitely our guy and your friend was positioned like the others.”
“How do you know I don’t need the details?” Sisto combatted, anger rising from the entire situation. “How do you know something Carson did differently won’t give us our next clue?”
Tension built in the room like a chief mason laying brick on overdrive to complete a job.
Bell, the most uncouth human being Sisto had ever met, cleared his throat in diplomacy as he took the initiative to answer, “He was cut like the others and positioned like a pyramid of human limbs.”
“Okay.” Sisto digested the thought. “And?”
“The cuts were more like rips, like he tore him apart in anger,” Bell confided.
“There were remnants of a broken beer bottle with blood on it shattered by the side of the door,” Caden finally chimed in. “Our thoughts are that your friend put up a fight and, in the process, hurt Carson Vinnova.”
“Sloppy knife cuts? What the fuck aren’t you two telling me?” Sisto demanded.
Caden softened her tone with empathy for one last plea to a man she’d started to have feelings towards. “Tom, it really isn’t anything that can help us.”
“Aw, cut the shit Camille,” Bell piped up, fed up with the whole situation at hand as well. “The sick sonofabitch cut his head to the spine and then cut down his back, leaving the torso with loose ribs and no spinal cord.”
The imagery made Sisto’s stomach rumble with potential to beeline to the restroom. While he wanted the truth, he had not expected Craig’s suffering to be so primitive and vulgar. Sisto was not a religious man but in that moment, he prayed to the gods of the world that Craig was already fully in his afterlife and at peace before the dissection of his human form had occurred. The messenger of death that Sisto inadvertently brought upon Craig would stain Sisto’s soul until his last breath.
Bell looked at Caden, then back to Sisto as he continued, “There’s one of those Wi-Fi motion cameras on top of the roof. Vinnova, piece of shit, must have seen it and left a show for whoever scans that video feed. We got someone asking that squirrely, pale landlord of yours to get the footage. Vinnova, he . . . he hung the spine between some wires, using your friend’s own shoelaces to keep it in place, with the head in center view of the camera lens. His eyelids were cut off.”
“Fuck me.” Sisto spoke aloud, swallowing back the bubbling bile rising in his throat.
“Nah,” Bell corrected him, “Fuck Vinnova. We will get that shit stain and staple his nuts to a prison wall.”
Confused at how that would work anatomically, Sisto appreciated the consoling, overly-detailed visual.
Sisto pulled his focus to Bell’s previous statement and knew he had to get away to help Ama go through the footage. “Hey, do you guys mind leaving me to rest for a bit?”
The two detectives looked at each other and Bell stood up and made way to exit, while Caden stayed standing at the corner of the couch, arms folded, with concern plastered on her face.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Caden offered.
“No. No, I really don’t,” Sisto said. “I need to sleep this nightmare away for a few hours, get my head together. I will text you later.”
The answer sufficed as Caden stopped leaning on the couch and stood to leave. Sisto, forcing a polite smile, stood up from his kitchen chair to walk her out. He could feel her sympathy smacking him in the face and the last thing he needed was to be treated like a puppy dog. He would have loved to have Camille Caden in his apartment in very different circumstances, but the hand dealt tonight left no room for romance. Sisto grabbed the knob to open the door and let her out, when her arms instinctively wrapped around him tightly. The embrace was in the moment, but the surprise wasn’t the human contact as much as the fact of how right it felt. The hug felt right, but the timing was wrong. He stepped out of the hug before he allowed himself to melt into her warmth, smiling at her with thanks for the attempt to console him. The exchange shook her as well, not expecting in a million years to let her guard down and share a vulnerable moment with the psychic consultant.
“Thank you, Cami,” Sisto said as she stepped through the door, causing a warm grin to appear on her beautiful face.
Sisto waited around ten minutes to make sure that no one would circle back to ask him more questions. He had turned the volume up on the television and unplugged his semi-charged phone to replace in his pocket. He texted Ama once more, to let her know that he was leaving throu
gh the fire escape and would meet her at the local bar a few blocks north, Flashy Jacks. Putting his jacket back on, he felt the buzz of the phone go off in his pocket to see a quick reply from Ama simply texting, “K see you in 20.” The message was a relief to Sisto, assuming the timeframe meant she was able to find enough from her personal surveillance system to leave and meet up with him. The energy started to come back to him. He felt his mind sharpen up at the thought that he was on his way to ending the disturbing game the Vinnovas had decided to implement in the middle of his fucking life. Feeling his pockets, he confirmed his keys, wallet, and phone were all on his person, letting him go to the window Vinnova had broken in through earlier; he opened the latch and proceeded down the metal stairs.
Getting down to the side alley was quick but as he approached University Drive, a uniformed officer walked up, shining a beam of light on him. Barely catching the gleam from the moonlight across her pinned name, the woman called Haskins was a burly thing that could give Sisto a run for his money in the field of arm wrestling. She threw the Maglite right in his eyes as she approached. He could hear her heavy footsteps getting closer, resorting to his hearing since she was intentionally trying to blind him. He knew if she called it over the radio, Caden and Bell would hear and not let him out of their sight the rest of the night. He instinctively called out to her like he was her superior, recalling tons of movies where people with no authority delegated boss-like actions to others. If Officer Haskins didn’t remove that light from his eyes in the next few seconds, he was intent on finding her squad car and putting a banana in the tailpipe like Eddie Murphy did while using his Detroit credentials out of turn in Beverly Hills Cop.
“Haskins, what the hell?” Sisto called out to her like they were drinking buddies. “Sisto, Tom Sisto. I’m consulting on this case. I have my ID in my wallet.”
He turned his ass towards her to avoid receiving a fresh bullet hole in his body, slowly pulling his wallet out with his thumb and index finger. He turned to face her again, every lumen in her tool burning right into his retinas, as he opened the wallet, revealing his laminated SCPD consultant card. Letting the burn in his optics simmer, the light he could see forcing itself on the back of his pressed eyelids swiftly redirected out of his vision. Blinking several times, the gladiator woman came into focus. Carrying a confident swagger at first, her face swiftly turned from Bad Mama to Sad Mama while starting to stutter in apology.
