by L T Vargus
The eyes in the mirror disappeared into the hand-blinders.
He stood there for a long time, fingers cupping at his brow, looking at the lines in his palms, the color of his flesh, the veins beneath the surface. It felt better. To not have to see. To just block himself out for as long as he could.
When he peeled his fingers away at last, the flesh of his face came with them, slopping into his palms in a gooey mess. Stringy musculature stared back at him from the mirror. Wet, red meat surrounding his eyes and mouth. Cheekbones and teeth laid bare and gleaming white.
Chapter 32
When Loshak and Spinks made it to the station, the regular staff was down to bare bones for the overnight shift. Very few hands on deck. Most would be out on patrol or responding to calls sent through by Dispatch. Officer Lennie was gone, of course. Hopefully fast asleep in an oxygen tent.
Millhouse wasn’t there, either, though Loshak had left her a message on their way out of the hotel. It felt a little underhanded to come here in the middle of the night and talk to the task force without her, but if Loshak was honest, he was relieved the Deputy Chief wouldn’t be there to undercut his idea as soon as he proposed it.
While Spinks went to find “the little reporter’s room,” Loshak headed through the desk pool and down the hall to the AV room, where a pair of low-grade detectives were sifting through footage from the parking garage. One was the detective who had challenged everything he said at the profile meeting, then backed him up on not jumping after Ray Winston as their guy. The other was a heavy guy with a ruddy, chapped-looking face and linty sport coat.
Loshak rapped on the open door.
“I come bearing gifts,” he said, stepping in and depositing an offering of Humble Donut Co.’s last batch of the day on the table between them, along with one of those cardboard cartons of fresh coffee. He’d had to tuck the container into his coat when they left the store so it wouldn’t suffer the same lukewarm fate as his coffee this morning.
“Then you are our new favorite FBI guy,” said the red-faced detective.
He rubbed his eyes and stretched, leaning his chair back so far that Loshak was surprised it didn’t tip over.
“Oh man, HDC’s got the best coffee,” the chip-on-her-shoulder detective said, pouring herself a refill from the steaming carton. “You are a godsend.”
“Can I get a hallelujah?” Now satisfactorily stretched, the other detective reached over and dug through the donut box.
She dusted sprinkles off her wrinkled slacks. “If you stop dropping stuff on me, you can.”
“So, you guys drew the overnight shift?” Loshak asked.
“Volunteered.” The heavy guy gestured with his cake donut. “My kid’s got a dance program tomorrow, so Deluca agreed to take the late shift with me.”
“Nice of you,” Loshak said.
Deluca shrugged, the move bunching up the sleeve of her sport coat. “We’ll be on call tomorrow either way.”
“Eh, don’t let her fool you, she’s a good partner,” the guy said. He took a sizeable bite of his donut. “If you don’t mind her shedding all over your car.”
“Better than crumbs.” She smiled at Loshak and stuck out her hand. “I don’t think we were ever properly introduced. Deluca, obviously.”
Loshak shook her hand, but before he could say anything, the other detective spoke up again.
“Tell the nice agent your whole name, Deluca. It’s the polite thing to do.”
She rolled her eyes. “Peaches. Peaches Deluca. Before you ask, yes, my mom is from Georgia. And this delightful sack of crap dropping sprinkles everywhere is my partner, Jared Brunhauser.”
“Brune-hauser,” he emphasized. He grabbed Loshak’s hand and gave it a couple hearty pumps. “It’s German. She’s got too much Georgia in her to say it right.”
“Literally never been to the state in my life,” Deluca said.
Brunhauser ignored her. “So, what brings you in at this hour, agent? Not just stopping by to see our pretty faces, I assume.”
“I was coming by to see if we couldn’t try to narrow our search down a bit,” Loshak said, pulling over a chair from another reviewing station.
He’d been up since the 5 AM call that morning, but it had been the standing out in the cold in that parking garage for so long that had really taken it out of him. He felt stiff all over.
“I’d like to put together a list of all the known pharmacists in the city. The DEA keeps pretty close tabs on them, and they’re required to update their information regularly, so we should be able to get a pretty current list. Then we can take those names and run them against the license plates in and near the parking garage.”
“Why pharmacists?” Deluca asked. “I thought we were going for doctors and lawyers.”
“And such,” Brunhauser added.
Loshak smiled to show that he’d gotten the country music reference, though he was a little surprised either of them was old enough to remember the song. Once you reached a certain age, you just assumed everything you remembered was before younger people’s time. But maybe that was the wonder of the digital age — all the old stuff was accessible to the kids now.
“Well, it’s sort of a long shot,” he admitted. “But it’ll at least give us a smaller pool of data to investigate. A fresh starting point. If something jumps out at us, good. If not, we back off and reopen the search to the original candidates. Hopefully, though, this’ll shake something loose, really give us something solid to go on.”
“Welp, I’m game,” Brunhauser said, reaching over his partner for the coffee carton. Loshak cringed at the slack way the guy grabbed it. He felt like he should be telling Brunhauser to use both hands.
“Watch what you’re doing!” Deluca flinched out of the way just as the careless detective spilled a trio of hot, brown droplets where her legs had been. “Christ, Brunhauser. This is a two-hundred-dollar suit.”
Brunhauser snorted. “That’s why you’ve never got any money, Deluca. Wasting it all on work clothes.”
“And dry cleaning,” she said, scooting her chair back up to the station. She craned her neck to look at Loshak over her shoulder. “Are you sticking around or heading out?”
Loshak stood up.
“No, I’ll hang out and lend a hand, if you two don’t mind,” Loshak said.
He was exhausted, but the sooner they got this shooter off the streets, the better. The way their unsub was escalating things, it would only get worse the longer he was running free.
“I’m just going to go find—” He still didn’t quite feel right referring to Spinks as his partner, not with the possibility Darger would come back, but he wasn’t sure what else to call the reporter. “—my partner, Spinks, and let him know I’m staying.”
Deluca rolled her chair over to another station. “Then I’ll log you in here before I get on the phone with the DEA’s Chicago office.”
“I appreciate it.”
“And I’ll get started on the four hundred special task force forms we need to file,” Brunhauser said.
Next to him, Deluca gave a long agreeing exhale of frustration. “I forgot.”
“Be nice,” Brunhauser said, grinning. “The Deputy Chief’s just trying to get things organized. You remember the crap-show we were dealing with before they started trying to organize the place.”
Loshak cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“The Bureau of Detectives was a mess until about last year,” he explained, taking a slug of coffee and smacking his lips in appreciation. “They finally started reading all those studies they were doing, and realized we only had about a third as many staff as we needed and exactly zero standard operating procedures. And, hell—” He chuckled. “—Area South didn’t even have any detectives.”
“They had detectives, just none on the night shift,” Deluca corrected him.
“Still, they need them more than anybody, and they only had like a handful,” Brunhauser said. “Anyway, the Chief of Detectives broug
ht Millhouse in to clean things up and get it all organized, whip the B-of-D into fighting shape. Which I guess requires a shit-ton of paperwork. Oops. Excuse my potty mouth. A crap-ton.”
Deluca shook her head teasingly. “Carmen’s going to have your ass if she hears you talking like that around Mari.”
“A buttload, then.”
Deluca snorted, and even Loshak huffed a laugh. He wasn’t sure what the cool parents were going for in terms of their kids cursing these days, but he doubted a mom who had a problem with “crap-ton” was going to like “buttload” a whole lot more.
This was an interesting revelation about Millhouse, though. It’d be one hell of a job getting a few hundred detectives across dozens of jurisdictions to march in lockstep when they were all used to doing things their way. Maybe he’d misjudged her a little. Or at least not given her a fair shake.
Rolling back to her own computer, Deluca made a grand gesture toward the computer she’d set up for Loshak.
“It’s all ready for you.”
“Thanks,” Loshak said. “I’ll be right back.”
Just as he reached the doorway, Spinks bustled in, finally returning from his sojourn to the bathroom.
“I was about to send out the search party,” Loshak said. “Thought you might have gotten lost.”
Spinks scoffed.
“Never. I have an excellent sense of direction.” Spinks held up a finger. “Like a sea turtle.”
“A sea turtle?”
“Yeah. There’s this one type of turtle that hatches in Japan, then swims 8,000 miles to the Baja peninsula in Mexico. Once they’ve matured, and it’s time for them to breed, they find their way back to Japan, returning to the very same beach where they were born.”
Loshak wondered at the reporter’s encyclopedic knowledge of random facts, but he had more pressing matters on his mind. He filled two cups with the caffeinated brew he’d brought and handed one to Spinks.
“Here,” he said. “I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”
Chapter 33
He screamed and the skeletal, meaty face in the mirror screamed back at him, dripping red into the sink below. Heart racing, he stumbled back into the mushy cantaloupe wall, while his hands groped mindlessly for a weapon. Anything he could use to defend himself.
His left hand landed on something solid, plastic, heavy. Instinctively, he flung it at the mirror.
The shampoo hit lid-first, the hard plastic caving in the center of the mirror with a crunch that made the skin down the back of his neck crawl. Cracks spiderwebbed around the point of impact, making hundreds, thousands of tiny mirrors out of what had been just one. So many eyes staring back at him. So many faces.
But they were normal.
His shoulders, which had been hunched up by his ears with fear, relaxed a little. The faces were normal.
No glaring white cheekbones. No stringy red muscle tissue. No dripping blood. Wide-eyed, yes. Maniacal, yes. Mouth-breathing so hard his whole chest and shoulders went up and down with every inhale and exhale like some kind of cartoon freak, yes. But not skeletal. Not anymore.
He slumped onto the toilet, happy. Content. It felt good. He’d expelled his aggression, broke the mirror, and that had solved the problem. That made sense. That was the way the world was supposed to work. Actions got results. Aggression was rewarded. The powerful pushed forward no matter what. They attacked, attacked, attacked. That was how shit got done.
That was what he needed. More of that. He wasn’t going to run and cower behind the snack counter like those pigs at the theater. He stood up. He wasn’t the prey, he was the predator.
He grabbed at the fleshy, doorless wall. Feeling around. Searching. Getting rough with it. A wall wasn’t going to tell him no. When he said yes, yes was the answer. Just ask the people at the food court in Woodfield.
His hands sunk into the mush, squishing around. Releasing even more of that fish tank stink. But he kept grabbing and digging. Working.
Something hard brushed against his knuckles. He clutched at it. It felt like the doorknob, although he couldn’t see it to be sure. There was still too much flesh between him and it.
He cranked the thing to the right, then pulled it toward him.
There was a wet, sucking sound, almost a slurp. Then a slab of goopy wall slid out of his way.
He walked through the little portal into the hallway. It was all lined with muscle tissue, too. A red, breathing archway to the living room.
Nothing weird at the end of the hall, though. Just his usual living room. Mundane. Everyday.
Part of him could remember laughing in this place, eons ago, back when he first took the cocktail of pills.
Now laughing seemed possible again. Not right away. It was still a somewhat distant notion, like growing old or retirement. But something he could do, and would do, in the future.
He’d forgotten it, laughter, whilst trapped in the flesh-walled bathroom. His brain had narrowed all of reality down to just those memories playing on the flesh wall. Introspection. Self-reflection. Trapped in a nightmare loop of the past, trapped as the person he’d been before he changed himself. It was a kind of psychosis, he thought, obsessing over your past, getting stuck on the old stories of yourself, letting them come to life and hurt you anew.
But he was back now, rooted once more in the present, in the man he’d become. He could see down the corridors of time in both directions.
No more of this moping, reflecting, getting trapped in the past.
Forward. A person should look forward. Move forward.
So he’d press on. Forward to the next violent spectacle.
Forward to death.
Chapter 34
“I hope it’s a trap. Profiler dude’s plan, I mean,” Vince said. “Lure the sick fuck in with like some kinda bait, then—bam!”
“What do you use as bait for a mass shooter?” Frank asked without looking away from the front doors of the station in case their Agent Loshak came out. God knew Vince wasn’t watching. He was playing on his phone.
“Probably slow movers. Stuff he can hit easy.” Vince shrugged. “Grandmas with walkers, amputees, hobos, three-legged dogs. That’s what I go after in GTA.”
Frank chuckled. “Maybe I ought to be concerned about you, Vince. Shooting up old ladies. Those violent video games warp the mind. Everybody knows that. Maybe someday you’ll take out your video game violence on the street. Act out, if you will. Maybe you want to be just like this shooter when you grow up.”
That got Vince to look up from his phone, disgust on his face. “What? No, I don’t!”
“I don’t know.” Frank made a show of shrugging and tapped his cigarette on the half-empty Styrofoam coffee cup he’d been using as an ashtray. “You kids today, you’re so impressionable. Maybe someday you’ll run into a bank or a post office with an AR-15 and start blowing people away. And I could’ve stopped it, if I’d just taken your Xbox away.”
Vince’s brows crammed together over his big, many-times broken nose. He took a big slurp out of his Pepto bottle before he answered.
“Frankie, I would never,” he insisted. “I’m not some sick fuck. That’s just games. You don’t take it from the game to the street unless you’re already sick in the head. If GTA caused shit like that, there’d be mass shootings like every day.”
Frank snorted. “Guess you’re too busy shooting old ladies to watch the news.” He took a long drag, then slowly breathed the smoke out, staring off into space like somebody recalling an old war story. “Oh yeah, we suspected Vince was wrong in the head right from the start. He liked to kill old ladies on the GTAs—”
“It’s not that I like it. See, you get points for—”
“—and sniff their panties. Oh my God, was he a panty-sniffer. Just couldn’t leave ’em alone.”
“Ah, shut up.” Vince shook his head. “You just don’t get it.”
“Granny panty sniffing? I get it, buddy. It’s not for me, but I’m open-minded, Vince. Ev
erybody’s got their thing.”
“No! Games. Like, you’re old, so you just assume it’s the games and phones and the internet and shit fucking up my generation. All the new stuff, ’cause you’re scared of it.”
“Hey, just how fucking old do you think I am?”
Vince sized him up, kind of squinting and cocking his head at different angles.
With a snort of disgust, Frank threw up his hands.
“It takes you this long to think about it? I’m fifty-one, moron.”
Vince’s eyebrows popped up. “Seriously, Frankie? I was gonna guess forty-something. You look pretty good for an AARP guy.”
The sudden turn-around caught Frank off-guard. He hadn’t been expecting a compliment from the big mook. But he didn’t want to get all mushy about it. He rolled his eyes.
“First of all, forty-something is old to you? What are you, ten? Second, you think people my age are old fogies scared of technology?” He tapped his chest and a couple flakes of ash dropped off his cigarette. “We used to do a whole computer programming class in my elementary school, numbnuts. Us old fogies are the ones who made all your Xboxes and phones and shit. If not for us, you dummies wouldn’t even have GTA to shoot old ladies on. So, you’re welcome for all the granny panties.”
But Vince was already back on his phone. “Ah, are you kidding me with this shit?”
“What?” Frank craned his neck to see what Vince was pointing at on the little glowing screen.
“Look at this.” He had an email open, but Frank couldn’t read it from that far away with Vince waving it around all crazy. “The damn cable company is trying to fuck me over. They’re saying I didn’t return my modem for my fucking internet. Bullshit! I returned it. You better fucking believe I returned it. Even kept the receipt, just the way the gal at the UPS store specifically told me to do, in case they asked.”
“There was a girl working at your UPS store?” For some reason this struck Frank as odd. He’d only ever seen men in those places.
