Dark Specter

by Michael Dibdin

  So while in a similar situation nowadays someone would have dragged Sam off to the hospital, by force if necessary, back then it was out of the question. If I’d attempted to press the issue any further I would have risked being branded a power-tripper, projecting my own insecurities and anxieties onto Sam. Certainly none of the others would have backed me up. Their attitude was pretty well summed up by Larry’s response when Sam assured us grandly that he would be all right.

  “Sure you’ll be all right, man, but what about the rest of us? How are we supposed to get fucked up now you’ve cleaned out the stash?”

  “Don’t heavy me out, man,” replied Sam, closing his eyes.

  Vince suggested dosing him with orange juice to bring him down, but we didn’t have any in the house and Greg wasn’t too crazy about driving after what had just happened. Anyway, Sam said he didn’t want to come down.

  “I’m kind of looking forward to it. I’m tired of low-level tripping. I’ve always wanted to go to the limit, and this is my chance.”

  “Maybe you’ll have an out-of-body experience,” said Greg, a trifle enviously. Everyone had read about out-of-body experiences, but no one we knew had actually had one.

  “Maybe you’ll see God,” added Vince.

  “If I do, I’ll ask him why he let that kid boil.”

  The fact that he could joke about it made us feel more relaxed about the whole thing. Sam was an experienced tripper, and the dealer had probably been lying about the strength of the tablets. We smoked another joint and listened to some music, and then one by one people drifted off to their rooms. Sam lay stretched out on the sofa, his foot tapping in time to the music. I was the last to leave. I asked Sam if he was OK. He didn’t reply.

  “You want someone to stay up with you?” I asked.

  His eyes opened, big and blank, but there was still no reply. I didn’t insist. I had an early class I couldn’t afford to cut, and I knew from experience that even good trips are bad trips when someone else is having them.

  By the time I got up the next morning, Sam had crashed. He didn’t surface again until late that night. I was sitting in an attempted lotus position on a beanbag, making notes for a paper I had to write. The others were out somewhere.

  “Hey, man!” I said. “How did it go?”

  He looked at me in a strange, expressionless way.

  “Phil,” he said flatly, as though recognizing someone from the distant past.

  “What happened?”

  He frowned.

  “Nothing.”

  “Last night, I mean. You dropped all that shit.”

  A ghostly smile appeared and disappeared on his lips.

  “Oh, that. The usual stuff, man.”

  I shrugged and got back to my paper. Everyone’s trips were their own responsibility, but also their own business. If they wanted to share them with you, fine-unless of course they carried on about them at excessive length, as though they were somehow better and more interesting than yours. But if they chose not to talk about them, you had to respect that too. A fundamental tenet of our shared philosophy was that language was a highly suspect medium of communication, clumsy and imprecise, a tool used by the straight world to impose its rigid, normalizing concepts on the infinite, threatening freedom of the human spirit. We weren’t any more consistent about this than about anything else. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one frequently went on and on about at ball-breaking length. But Sam had chosen to exercise his right to remain silent, and anyone who questioned him further would stand revealed as an undercover agent for the thought police.

  Within a few days, the whole episode had turned into the stuff of myth, one of the heroic exploits to be celebrated whenever members of the tribe gathered late at night and the communal joint passed from hand to hand. Its connection with real events became increasingly tenuous. Before long we were telling people how we would have been busted by a crack narcotics squad that night if it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of Greg, or maybe Larry, who’d dropped the whole stash of twelve-count ’em! — twelve tabs of high-grade acid, and how we’d worked all night to keep him together while he went on about the wall-to-wall shag being a heaving mass of maggots.

  Sam never contested this version of events, or talked about what had really happened. In fact he rarely said anything much any more. He had changed, becoming quieter, more serious and withdrawn, less accessible to our noise and nonsense. The reason seemed obvious. A month or so earlier, Sam had received his “Greetings from the President” letter from the draft board. He had been shocked at the time, because he had drawn a pretty high number in the lottery and had thought he was safe.

  Now that the date when he had to report for induction was looming closer, however, he seemed strangely resigned to his fate. Again, we thought we knew why. With his level of education, Sam would almost certainly be able to land a clerical job and put in his year’s tour of duty filing reports and typing letters. Nevertheless, the situation inevitably created tension in our midst. Larry’s turn was also coming up soon, and he had a number in the low teens, making it almost inevitable that he would be drafted. From time to time he talked of taking a bus up to Canada, or maybe applying to join the National Guard, but he never did anything about it, and we all knew he never would.

  The rest of us were safe. Vince had already been turned down because of his bad eyes and generally poor health, while Greg and I were protected for the moment by the student deferment. We never openly discussed the matter, but this manifest inequality slowly drove a wedge into the heart of our intimacy, splintering it apart. One night just before he left, Sam freaked out for the first time in our company, raving on about the world being divided into two kinds of people, the ones with real souls and feelings, and a bunch of phonies who were just pretending to be alive.

  Nothing came of it, however, and a couple of days later Sam packed up his belongings and set off to start his two months’ basic training at Fort Lewis, in Washington State. Our farewells were awkward and subdued. A month later a woman I’d been seeing on and off for the past year invited me to move in with her. I was glad to leave. Larry had also been drafted by then, and Vince and Greg were spending more and more time with people I didn’t know. That stage of my life was over. It was time to move on.

  I never expected to see any of them again.

  3

  Pearce and Robinson were sitting in the parking lot at Taco Time when they got the call.

  “I wouldn’t’ve went if I’da known,” Pearce said through a mouthful of chicken tostada.

  Kimo Robinson sipped his banana shake tentatively. He’d felt like grazing on something, but his stomach couldn’t hack spicy food any more. He felt queasy just watching Pearce feed, lettuce shreds hanging off his bristles, hot sauce dribbling down his chin.

  “But you’re there, what you going to do?” the rookie demanded, spraying a gobbet of refried beans at the windshield. “Can’t walk out on the wife’s best friend’s dinner. Mandatory detail.”

  “It’s my way or the highway.”

  “Pardon me?”

  Pearce was regarding him quizzically. Robinson shrugged.

  “I saw this program on TV. Some guy who’s written a book, you know? He says men are from Mars and women from Venus.”

  “Jean’s from Omaha,” said Pearce, frowning.

  Two weeks ago Robinson showed up for work, sarge tells him, “Congratulations, Kimo, you’re an FTO for the next three months.” No one liked field training assignments, stuck every shift with some guy fresh from the eleven-week course watching your every move, time to time saying, “Gee, that’s not what they taught us at the Academy.” Plus Robinson didn’t want to hear about Pearce’s marital problems. He wanted to tune into KING-FM and relax with Haydn, Handel, those old guys who knew how to kick back and have fun.

  “Not only is Chari a bitch on wheels,” Pearce continued, “she’s cranked up on medication the whole time. Obsesses over every goddamn thing, never shuts her mouth … I
spent the whole evening processing anger. You know?”

  Robinson set his shake down on the dash. He could feel the burn starting up already. Maybe he should see a doctor. “Your core is good,” the guy down at the garage had told him. Guy was talking about the transmission, but somehow the words had stuck. “Your core is good.” Kept coming back to him like the slogan from some cheesy commercial you can’t shake. Maybe because he knew it wasn’t true for him any more than for the goddamn car. Fact was, their cores were both fucked.

  We should never have moved here, he thought for the thousandth time. It had seemed like a great idea at the time. For the price of a studio apartment in Honolulu, they could get a family home with a yard and a garage in Seattle. True, he’d had to start at the bottom of the ladder again, going from sergeant in Hawaii back to plain officer with the King County Police, but that had seemed a price worth paying. Marti was delighted with her new home, the kids were happy at school, he had his RV to go hunting and fishing. Everything was just great, except that his core was fucked. I wasn’t meant to live in this cold, wet, timber-haunted landscape, he thought. I was meant to live and die on the islands, and my gods are punishing me for my desertion.

  The call was the one cops dreaded most: domestic disturbance. Then Robinson heard the address, and eased up a little. Pearce rolled up the remains of his tostada in the 100 percent recycled paper bag and tossed it in back.

  “Don’t break the limit getting over there,” Robinson told him. “We let him work on her a little, maybe this time she’ll press charges.”

  “These guys regulars?” asked Pearce, putting the Chevy in drive and hanging a U across the oncoming traffic. “Kinda strange timing.”

  Robinson grunted. Pearce still wasn’t up to speed on the precinct. In town, most domestic violence occurred in the evening, when folks were tense from a day’s work and a long commute and had had a couple of belts to unwind. But Renfrew Avenue South East was in the slurbs, the swathe of suburban slums in the unincorporated areas of the county stretching inland from the southern tip of Lake Washington. You were talking high unemployment, mothers on shift work, the kids at the childcare center, the men spending all day down at the stuccoed, mirror-windowed licensed restaurant where no one had ordered a meal in twenty years. Domestic tensions could flare up any time of the day or night, particularly at 14218 Renfrew Avenue.

  Robinson had lost count of the times he’d been called to the Sullivan house, maybe because it always seemed like the same call. Guy beats up on his wife, someone calls 911, soon as you show up they both turn on you and tell you it’s none of your fucking business, wife denies he ever laid a hand on her, guy says she hurt herself falling, not a goddamn thing you can do. Robinson had hoped things might improve when they finally split up. Some chance. Wayne still hung around there half the time, the only difference was he had another woman down in Renton he was beating up too.

  They drove up a hill dominated by a huge water tower and a sprinkling of conifers, degenerate offspring of the giants which had preceded them, past a bowling alley and a bingo hall, the Thrift Store and the Splash ‘n’ Dash car wash, the Silk Plant Center and the Hallmark outlet, by signs reading RENT-2-OWN AND NO HASSLE LOANS. It had started to rain again. Overhead, a suffocating mass of clouds miles high pressed down on the landscape. Robinson thought of the candid azure skies of his home state, and shivered.

  Pearce took a left at the lights, passing a strip mall and the Faith in Focus Worship Center, whose reader board said “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” Then they were into the grid of residential streets, GI starter homes originally, small squat boxes with gravel lots surrounded by chain-link fencing, 25 mph limits, lots of all-way stops, no sidewalks. You had to be rich to walk these days, like the yuppies down by the lake. These people were too poor.

  Except for a few decorative details, the house was identical to its neighbors. Woodgrain-effect vinyl siding, skimpy windows, a worn afghan draped over the sofa on the front porch, three pick-ups in various stages of cannibalization in the yard. There was no one around. Pearce parked by a telephone pole, blocking Robinson’s door. A yellow sign peeling off the pitted surface of the pole read Neighborhood Crime Watch: We report all suspicious persons and activity to our local police. Robinson logged in their arrival and squeezed painfully through the half-open door. Pearce was already striding up the path in a take-charge manner.

  By the time Robinson caught up, the rookie had knocked several times at the door. There was no reply. Pearce rapped again, even more insistently.

  “Police!”

  A soft tintinnabulation of wind chimes from a neighboring house, the busy hum of a light aircraft overhead. Looking down at the rain-glistened porch steps, Robinson caught the reflection of a floatplane heading east toward the mountains, Lake Chelan maybe. He thought of the camping trip he and the boys had taken last summer up by Snoqualmie. That week his core had been good.

  “Police!” Pearce yelled again. “Open up!”

  He glanced at his partner.

  “What do we do? Is this an exigent situation? That’d give us the right to go in.”

  Kimo Robinson could have told him it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, this thing was never going to come to court. Instead he tried the handle. It turned. Robinson pushed the door open and stood on the threshold, scanning the room. Nothing seemed to have changed. Plastic leprechaun, three feet high, weighted for use as a doorstop. Doormat reading WELCOME TO THE SULLIVANS. White plastic cross on the back of the door with BLESS OUR HOME in gold. Thing played the “Hallelujah Chorus” in electronic chimes when you walked in, except the batteries were always out. The air was hot and thick and full of smells, food mostly, but also something else, something with an acrid edge. Robinson stiffened, his eyes searching the room.

  An entertainment center dominated the end wall, the big wood-effect TV flanked by dusty gaps where Wayne had moved out his stereo and speakers. His plush velour recliner rocker was still there, though, lined up with the TV, Dad’s throne. A chunky sofa too big for the room, upholstered in bright mustard and tomato soup brocade, faced an octagonal coffee table with a smoked glass top standing on a stained, simulated sheepskin rug. Beneath that lay brown deep-shag carpeting with plastic strips to protect the heavy traffic areas.

  It was Pearce who spotted the bare leg thrust out from behind the sofa. The foot was clad in a pink fluffy slipper. Motioning the rookie to stay put, Robinson walked along the ridged plastic runner until he could see the rest of the body. It was a woman. She was wearing a faded blue bathrobe over a white synthetic nightgown. Her henna-tinted hair was arranged in a tightly interlocking mass of whorls, her face pressed into the carpet.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  Pearce sounded panicky. Robinson knelt down and turned the woman over. It was Dawn Sullivan. There was blood in her hair. She didn’t seem to be breathing, and her skin felt cold and clammy.

  “Go take a look in the other rooms,” he told Pearce, just to get him out of there.

  As the rookie headed off toward the master bedroom, Robinson undipped the portable radio from his belt.

  “Frank Three, Frank Three. Woman down, unresponsive. Get me an aid car.”

  He was responding to a follow-up question from the call receiver when he heard Pearce’s scream. Running to the doorway, he collided heavily with the rookie on his way back out.

  “What the hell?” he demanded.

  Pearce shook his head. He looked as though he was about to cry. Grabbing his mouth with one hand, he plunged past his partner and out of the front door. Robinson started after him, then turned back. He drew his pistol and stepped warily into the room. The bed unmade, female clothing strewn around, no sign of any serious disturbance. The light was dimmed by layers of grimy net curtains and a dust-laden valance of folds and flounces that resembled bad meringue. A flicker of movement caught his attention. A mobile suspended over a crib. Plastic figures of animals and birds in bright primary colors re
volved slowly in the draft from the heating vent.

  Then he heard a noise, somewhere between a groan and a gurgle. It seemed to be coming from the crib. Robinson remembered that the Sullivans had had another child just before they broke up. The “Accident,” Dawn called it. Kimo Robinson thought that was kind of gross, even though the little thing couldn’t understand. The noise was repeated, more urgently. He walked over to the crib, feeling awkward and incompetent. Hopefully the EMTs would know how to calm a baby.

  But this baby did not need calming. Even before he reached the crib, Robinson realized that the noise he had heard was coming from beyond the window, out in the front yard, where Bill Pearce was hurling up a curdled mess of half-digested Tex-Mex. The baby, by contrast, lay quiet and still, its tiny fingers clutching at nothing, its pale blue eyes wide open, a neat, blackened hole punched in the center of its forehead. The mass of blood and brain fragments which had hemorrhaged from its nose and mouth lay congealing on the pillow and quilt.

  By the time Patrol Sergeant Alex Mitchell arrived at the house, the body count had risen to four. The Fire Department’s paramedics had been and gone. Those guys would do CPR on anything with a heart left to pump, but once they looked the scene over they knew they were wasting their time there.

  Mitchell had driven fast-siren and lights, touching a hundred- down Highway 169 from the headquarters of Third Precinct at Maple Ridge. “Get me a sergeant,” Robinson had blurted hoarsely over the radio. Everyone knew what that meant. To make matters worse, the field trainee had flipped completely, and it was only after another patrolman showed up to hold his hand that it had been possible to complete the search of the property. That was when they’d found the other victims downstairs in the basement, two boys about ten years old.