Barker was raising the dead. The hounds would growl again.
7.
Floor number sixty-two, the floor of the Mayor’s offices. That was where Barker and the Mayor stepped out of the elevator. Unlike Barker's new office, this office area was only split into two sections. Along the walls, were books. It reminded Barker of an imposing library. In the center was a hand-carved oak desk. Today, being a Saturday, there was no secretary behind it. On the lip of the desk was a nameplate: Linda Wetherby.
Barker noticed the floor plan was different as well. Whereas Barker’s office was floored by wooden planks, the Mayor’s was an imposing red carpet. It exhumed power, Barker even had to note it was a nice touch.
The Mayor led him through a wooden door with a large golden nameplate: The Mayor, it read. Come to think of it, Barker wasn’t even quite sure what the Mayor’s real name was. For so long, he had just been the Mayor. He was the Mayor long before Barker was a detective. He was the Mayor long before the Canes was caught and dismantled by that fox from Rescue. He had been the Mayor so long, that may as well have been his real name.
The office door swung open to a massive oak desk of auburn color. The real perk of this office, however, was the view. Behind the Mayor’s desk was a massive three-pane window. Where Barker's office was secluded and closed, the way he liked it, the Mayor’s was open to the world. Well, open to at least the flying world. Being sixty-three stories off the ground and looking out into the city of Urgway was imposing. Match it with the red carpet, and the towers of books, you had a statement of power and respect.
“Sit,” the Mayor motioned to a cushioned chair. He walked over to a corner and popped open a globe; which doubled as a bar it seemed. The Mayor pulled out two small glasses and a decanter of what was probably whiskey. Barker wasn’t a big fan of drinking, but he would imbibe, from time to time, in the right situations. Now ,seemed like it would be one of those situations.
“How long have you been a detective, Barker? Ten, fifteen years?” The Mayor opened his top left drawer. Inside were some of the most expensive cigars Barker had ever witnessed. Barker wasn’t much of a cigar man, but his father had been. At least before the Canes was caught and dogs everywhere were made to suffer.
“Thirteen years,” Barker answered, waving off a cigar.
The Mayor shrugged and leaned back, propping his feet on the desk. His shoes were shiny and very likely out of Barker’s price range. “Do you mind?” The Mayor asked, already lighting the cigar.
“No,” Barker said, even though he hated the idea of smelling like a smokehouse.
The Mayor took a long pull. His lips curled around the base of the cigar and smoke sprouted out either side. Barker realized at that moment the Mayor was a very crude looking man. Very brutish in his features.
“I like the idea of working together Barker. I hope we can become more than two men who share an office. Did you know I knew your father?” The Mayor glanced to Barker, gauging reaction.
Barker didn’t show any outward reaction, however, on the inside, his mind exploded. He had changed his last name at twenty, before enrolling in the detective academy. He had gone out of his way to distance himself from his family name after his father died of a massive heart attack. He had taken the steps, but he supposed the Mayor had steps to uncover, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that he would know. Barker thought about pounding the rest of his small glass of whiskey but instead took a long slow sip, to buy some time.
“He was a good man,” the Mayor continued, saving Barker the trouble of a reply, “Very reliable,” the Mayor blew a cloud of smoke into the air and watched it swirl for a moment. “You know I met him when we were both around twenty-three. He was just a factory worker then. I was a young upstart, straight from graduate school, a fresh face in politics. It’s really embarrassing how we met,” the Mayor stopped and looked at Barker. “Need another glass?”
Barker looked down at his empty glass. That sip had turned into a chug. He held it out and the Mayor leaned forward, pouring it to the rim with a smile, teeth biting the butt of the cigar.
“I wanted to run for city council. I didn’t even know what city council did. Sounded fancy, I didn’t know it was a crapshoot. Anyhow, I was walking around with fresh pressed general store khakis and a button up that could have passed as a flannel.” The Mayor paused, taking a drink of his own whiskey.
“Your father was the first man to laugh in my face. I remember his exact words being something like, you have a face that looks like you just popped out of your diapers yesterday and you want my vote?” The Mayor laughed.
Barker had paced himself on the second glass of whiskey, how much damage could his father have done anyhow?
“Your father sat down with me, called me about one hundred names, not one of them suitable for general conversation then gave me his number. Over the next few weeks, he talked to me, told me some secrets of the city. After those two weeks, he shook my hand, and was the first name on my petition.”
The Mayor pulled the stub of a cigar from between his teeth and stubbed it out in the ashtray Barker hadn’t noticed him pull out.
“To this day, I remember your father with respect and awe. You know how many people signed after seeing your father’s name? Practically, the entire city, I was the Mayor within two years. Your father put me in this chair, well ,not this chair, but one similar.” The Mayor slammed down his whiskey.
Barker took a sip of his that, again, turned into a long drink. This would be the payoff of the story; the butt of the story if you will.
“Barker, I hope to all hell that you are half the man your father was. If you are, then you will be fantastic in this position. If you are half the man, we will get along just fine,” The Mayor opened a drawer on the right side of his desk. “Your father died when you were, what, thirteen?”
Barker thought back to the day his father died. The district he lived in still held his father in some revere, even if his father had fallen on some hard times. Barker’s father lived, well away from home. When he died, Barker got the message at school. He hadn’t seen his father in almost four months. A massive heart attack, they told him. He didn’t cry, he didn’t know the man enough to cry. The district he grew up in cried. His mother cried. She went into such a state that Barker never really knew his mother again either. That was what the world had done to hounds everywhere.
The Mayor pulled out an envelope. He pushed it towards Barker.
“Your father would have wanted you to have this,” he said.
Barker leaned forward and placed his still half full cup on the table. His hands were a bit shaky.
Barker was almost in his mid-thirties and he felt like he was a child reaching for that envelope.
He grabbed it and pulled it off the desk. He slowly opened it. Inside were two sheets of paper and a small envelope. He pulled out the papers. One was the clear marks of the bank of Urgway. An account number, a deposit box, and a name, his name.
“Your father left that with me before he went to the big house. I would have stopped it, if I could you know that, right?” He almost sounded sad.
“Nothing anyone could have done,” Barker said.
“I wanted to pardon him, but it was just too big, even for me,” he said.
Barker knew it was too big. It was the biggest news in over a decade. The Canes Venitici had been household names, and now, the leader had been caught by a fox. Barker pulled the other sheet from the envelope. It was a letter. His father had written him a letter. Barker put it back into the envelope, he wasn’t going to read it here. He dipped into the envelope one more time, pulling the smaller envelope out. He opened it and saw it was filled with index cards, hundreds of them. Each card had a name. Each name had a title and a debt owed.
“Your father was caught, jailed, and sentenced, Barker,” The Mayor leaned forward. “But the Canes didn’t die, it just took a long break, waiting on you.”
8.
The Canes had been something so
large before it died that it wasn’t even a crime syndicate so much as a culture. People lived and died by the name. Families were made and torn apart. Entire cities depended on the Canes. When it fell, the entire ecosystem fell. It went from day to night.
Sure, half of the world celebrated with Noel the fox king. The other half, the canine half, was thrown into the shadows. They were stomped on. Even those that had not met a member of the Canes a day in their lives. Dogs were thrown into the streets. City’s infrastructures were tumbled over.
So many hounds were taken out back and metaphorically put down. Homeless rates went up, but the numbers were pushed down on media sources. Thousands of dogs starved to death, others froze in the winter, and the media only talked about the vindictive ways of hounds everywhere.
They failed to spread the word of how they had eaten large chunks of the proverbial pot. They had downed wine, hip to hip with those they now sentenced to death.
Hounds everywhere in the world were sentenced right along with the Canes. The same group of individuals who had sheltered, raised and provided for an entire generation.
That was what drove Barker. That was the image he promised to never see again.
9.
Barker had drunk another glass of whiskey before excusing himself from the Mayor’s office. He wanted nothing more than to make the trek to the elevator and back into his own office, forty some stories below.
The elevator ride was longer than he remembered coming up. The alcohol was coursing through his body now. Barker didn’t drink much and now that he had, he remembered why. It made the brain foggy. Would he feel like this if it wasn’t for the drink?
The elevator dinged and he stepped back onto the hardwood flooring of his own headquarters. This was his. Under the ever watchful eye of the Mayor of Urgway. The Mayor had given him this information. The Mayor had lined him up a spot in the office. He had promoted him. He had given him the story of his father. However, Barker wasn’t gullible enough to believe the pretenses.
He knew that the Mayor didn’t do this from love. The Mayor may have been scrawny, baby-faced boy once. His father may have elevated him to the power he now enjoyed, but that wasn’t why he had given Barker all of this.
He hadn’t given him the mahogany desk as a gift, he had given it to him as a leash. Telling him to stay in place like a nice little doggy. Don’t overstep your bounds. This is a nice cushioned spot you have here, and now, you can curl up and nap.
Barker walked back towards his own office. It was a nice little office. It provided everything that he would need to be a detective. Sadly, for the Mayor, that wasn’t the final idea of Barker.
He hadn’t promised himself that someday he would be a detective. He hadn’t promised himself that someday he would work under a primate's every watchful gaze.
Barker had promised to eradicate those who had pushed him down. He had promised to see hounds put back into their rightful place in the food chain. The Mayor had thought to appease him by placation. Instead, he had given him another avenue to the throne he sought.
Barker opened his large wooden door. He moved around to the other side of his desk. The cushion of the chair was just as soft as he remembered. He sat there for a moment, in silence. Without letting a thought escape his mind. This was peace. This was the calm before the storm.
Barker pulled the letter from his father from the envelope.
Dear Son,
It started that way with endearment. His father, the most powerful man in the world at one time, showing some unknown affection. Barker crumbled the letter. He wasn’t his father. Barker threw the letter into the trashcan. He opened the envelope with the index cards. The first name on it was Tom Poodles.
Barker picked up the phone on the side of his desk. Time to make some calls.
The Adventures of Vulpecula
Episode Six
The Black Dot
1.
People fear the unknown around them. Most people will toast a cold one to that sentiment. It's become a hackneyed theory that might as well be fact. Vulpecula didn't fear the unknown, however. Or, at least, not the unknown around him. Because, simply put, he knew the unknown.
The unknown was filled with groups like The Shock, groups that would induce the kind of fear to make someone like Comet Fowley amputate his own hand to purge himself from their wrath.
Vulpecula Noel made a toast to that, sipping from the glass bottle that shook around in his hands.
Purging oneself from The Shock only welcomed a reckoning from someone else. Every door closed was a door open to another, meaner monster.
Alcohol had such a delectable taste to it, and one that The Fox Detent had since, invariably, acquired. Not at One Step Back, his pub of choice, however. In-fact, it'd been many weeks since he'd tossed one back with his lizard friend Red.
“To The Gave!” Vulpecula mumbled to himself, though, with no emotion behind it, raising his half-empty glass of alcohol to the heavens, even though it, The Devil, he made a toast with. Or, who he wanted to make a toast against.
V made a proclamation the very night he met Red. The same day of the events that befell him in the Alo Cemetery, he promised not to follow his father's footsteps through the darkness. The very darkness that consumed his father, that led his mother astray, rendering her absentee in her son's life forever after. That night, he vowed to avoid the underbellies of a world propped up and perpetuated by plain badness and cruelty. That night, Vulpecula made a promise to live.
It took seconds of searching amongst the contents of a once cleanly assorted hotel room, now, horrid, to realize his fatal flaw was he didn't know how to live.
Horrid was not an understatement, but a statement of fact.
The room was neat and tidy as he arrived, spotless when he left the hotel key on the hook by the door, and immaculate when he hung his scarf on the rack beside that. Through time and exertion, the former Fox Detective's sloppiness prevailed, however. Strewn about were empty beer cans and used Styrofoam plates, and a vast, surprisingly definitive collection of DVDs he'd bought, blowing through his own inheritance. Happy stories, the silly ones, like animations where humans were given animal characteristics, walking and talking and frolicking about like it was no big deal, those were his favorite. They were simple and ignorant.
In the days after the morbid happenstances in the Alo Cemetery, V made himself accustom to One Step Back, visiting his dearest friend Red daily. The therapeutic gain of his companionship, however, had diminishing returns when the nightmares began to worsen. The dark thoughts were always certain to target the ones he loved. The machete that split through the camel's back was one he had about Apus.
He'd wake up yelling in the night, and, at last, decided it best to exile himself from Lacerta and Apus.
Nay, Vulpecula did not fear the unknown around him. He feared the unknown that was inside of him. For, inside of him, the Gray Fox continues its eternal journey through the pitch-black cave of his psyche, and he did so without the light and with a broken compass.
V's thoughts became mangled and depleted as his mind deteriorated. It was no longer the household of cognitive thought, but, rather, a house after moving day. A house being moved from, that is. Empty, with only the residual ghost of what once inhabited it, the only things left were the appliances the old homeowners left. The instinctual needs, like the need for sustenance and the need for alcohol to keep the monsters at bay.
It was an everyday mission, his only mission, to provide for himself, only the bare minimum. After all, it was what he deserved.
His own man now, apparently, the newly alcoholic fox arose to his feet, dizzily wobbling about the hotel room, stepping over and spilling food and drinks, staining the carpets. He used his walking stick as a cane to keep himself from taking a tumble down into the filth. The aroma of vomit in his fur was not lost on him, but he couldn't bring himself to give a damn about it. Shakily pawing at the doorknob, trying to figure out the contraption in all its splendor, he w
as, at last, able to make his leave.
He might have shut the door behind him, though, the second his back turned from the door, his mind was too far gone to really turn again and make for certain.
The surroundings of the hotel were much more glamorous and enticing than the confines of his room would have suggested. It had a shiny chandelier on the ceiling and dark-red carpeting that was much too blurry for him to articulate for himself. The walls were embroidered with decorative flowers and a brown trim at the floor. Beyond the scent of puke, Vulpecula smelled the scent of an air-freshener that reminded him of the great outdoors, for lack of a better description.
The Fox hiccupped and attempted to fidget with the hairs on his chin, though, every time he made the reach, he found his hand on his ears instead. The stairs had a nifty rail, a safeguard to keep his drunkenness from sending him down the steps and out of consciousness. And, with that, Vulpecula took careful steps, one, two, and three, four, five, then, six. In time, he made it to the end of the staircase, entering the main lobby of the hotel, behind a desk, a finely dressed clerk stood, not far from him.
Vulpecula didn't make eye-contact with him. Looked away from him, in-fact, and while he heard formal greeting on the store clerk's behalf, he ignored it. It was a matter of personal safety.
The crowds of men and women about the exit discouraged him, he had half a mind to try again a later date. He had gone at night-time, assuming less people would be about, and perhaps there was less, but the unease didn't subside. He knew that he needed food, that he was running low, and so, he mustered the courage to continue fourth through the exits.
The store wasn't very far, across the street and a couple of blocks. The highway scared him a lot, the only thing that scared him more was the lady at the counter of the small general store, her name was Marissa, V had a hunch she wanted to murder him. He had tried to schedule himself on the times when she wasn't there, but he found that the other cashier-person, Rob, was probably a pedophile. Rob being a pedophile didn't really pose much danger to The Fox, but he didn't really like the idea of the guy being near his food. Marissa was the flip of the coin choice, really.
The Canes Files Page 23
