Eyes Never Lie

by Tyler Porter

  I tipped the bottle and let my head fall back as I swallowed. Even with my eyes shut I could feel them getting ready to water as the smooth burn slowly set into my esophagus. I rested the bottle on my knee and focused on the warmth that was slowly creeping across my body. My sight began to dance slightly and the hurt started to retreat. I pulled the Glock from my side and studied it. It had taken and saved so many lives. I pulled the slide backward and then forward. A slight click of a 9mm round loading in the chamber broke the silence of the night. I kept the gun in my right hand and with my left, I brought the bottle back to my lips again.

  Chapter 17: Hello Detective

  At first, I couldn’t stop wondering how he could be so fucking stupid. When I heard that some geezer in a wife-beater was the person they were looking for. Really? He was just going to let the case end and let everyone go on believe that this Jarmin guy was the most prolific serial killer of modern times. Then, surprise surprise, he came to his senses. I should hope so. I would think that three decades involved in police work would have counted for something. It turns out, they did.

  He didn’t let the case die there. He even went to the top and convinced the police captain to keep the case open. I had him. Honestly, I’d began doubting myself. Everything that I’d done, all the work that I’d put in, every little detail that had been handled so carefully and all of it was almost wasted. For God’s sake, the bastard had actually retired. He had actually walked away from me. Of course, he found out what happens when I’m ignored, but it still left me with a slight doubt.

  Now, though, I was certain that everything I’d done had been right. Everything had not been for nothing, and the stars were aligning. I’d gotten him to climb into the web, now he was stuck and he was going to stay stuck until the very fucking end, whether he liked it or not. It was beyond his control now. He was feeling the remorse and the guilt that I knew he would. It was the exact reason why I’d paid special attention to Shelby. It had to be brutal. It had to be enough to take him over the edge so my craft could be appreciated.

  It was pretty clear that her death had done just that. It was clear to see from my spot outside his new little residence in boulder. As I stood there, just out of view, looking into the living room from the window, I saw a broken man. A man who’d the core years of his life building a reputation as if he were invincible and who now knew it all to be a lie. It was all bull shit, and he’d finally admitted it to himself.

  I knew it all along and so many others did too, whether they said it out loud or not. But this was different. To see it written so inarguably on his face. To see that he had accepted it after all these years. After everything. The great Casey Norris, the man no bullet could stop, and no criminal could escape, now sat, so pathetically, in his living room with a bottle in one hand and a loaded gun in the other.

  When he’d first sat down and loaded a round into the chamber, I’d almost bolted inside. I thought that was going to be it. His final bow to the world. I thought he was going to take himself out right then and there. There was not a snowball’s chance in hell that I was going to let that happen. Not after everything I’d done to put us both in this position. Sure, his death was inevitable, but it was going to come on my terms.

  He was not permitted to die until he understood why I’d done all of this. I enjoyed the kill, sure, but there was more to it than that. It was the very reason why I’d first gotten the urge to take a life. Because I was overlooked. That little whore who I’d almost taken in high school, who everyone drooled and tripped over. She’d overlooked me for years. I’d gone out of my way to be kind to her, to try to be a friend to her, and what did she do? She looked right past me without even noticing me.

  After my failed attempt at slaughtering her in the woods the urges had gone away for a long time. I don’t know the exact reason why, but logic told me that I had actually achieved what I’d wanted to. I’d gotten her attention. I’d gotten her fear. I’d gotten her to see that I existed. Everything might have been fine after that, but then there was this pathetic, small, ignorant detective with the Helena Police Department. He didn’t just overlook me, he overlooked everyone.

  Everyone was beneath him. Everyone had something to learn from him. Everyone was expected to drop to their fucking knees and lick the dirt off of his boots. The day that I met him, I was actually excited. There were few who I looked up to but hearing stories about this man and all the things he’d accomplished had gotten to me. We were all excited to meet him and what happened? He waltzed in, looked us all up and down and scoffed. Like we were nothing to him. Like we couldn’t hack it in his world.

  That was the moment. That couple of seconds. That was the moment that the urges had come back to me. I’d been able to hold them off for a long time after that, but once word got around that he was getting ready to retire, I couldn’t fight it any longer. I was going to lose my opportunity, and that wasn’t something that I could live with. If I just let him walk away, I might never truly feel what it is truly like to kill my main target. The object of my obsessions.

  The problem was, as I stood there outside the window looking in on him, he was disappointing me. I wanted to be the one who Casey Norris couldn’t beat. The one to finally win, when everyone before me had lost. But I wanted to beat the best. I wanted to beat the legend. Not this groveling pile of grief. I mean, he was literally contemplating suicide. Some big hero he turned out to be. I needed him to get past whatever hole he was in. I needed him to get back to his formerly glory, just for a little while. Just enough so that the public could see their beloved detective back on the hunt, only to watch him get slaughtered.

  After a while of watch his motionless body, it seemed to me he’d fallen asleep, and I had to make a decision: stand there and wait to make sure he didn’t wake up and off himself, or start surveillance on my next target. After taking longer than I should have, I decided to leave and start surveillance. It was going to be a thing of beauty. Naturally, his blondie girlfriend would not have been able to be ignored, but it had thrown him into mourning. Now I needed to up the stakes to show him that it was only going to get worse.

  I strode across the street, got into the Camry and took off back toward the city. Although I was starting surveillance, I’d already done more than my fair share of homework on this front. I knew exactly where my unsuspecting victim would be at this time. Asleep in bed. The routine was not as vast as Norris’s. Norris had a certain bar he liked to go to, a store he shopped at, a gas station he preferred, and so forth. This one though, was relatively simple.

  Work, home, sleep, repeat. It made is so unbelievably easy. Almost too easy. It almost took the fun out of it. There were few things in life that I took any kind of pleasure in, and the hunt was one of them. I enjoyed the stalk. To watch those on my list for days, sometimes weeks, before every making a move. It got my blood pumping. Internally it told me that the kill was coming, that wonderful moment of bliss when their fear collided with the undeniable fact that they saw me. They saw who was doing this to them.

  The little, green, two-story Victorian was well within the city limits, but the neighborhood sure didn’t make it seem that way. It sat at the end of a dead-end street on the left-hand side and butted up against the neighboring property tightly. It was an odd mix. The fact that although it had been extremely easy to survey this target, while at the same time it had been somewhat difficult because everyone knew everyone on this street. An odd, unfamiliar car parked with a stranger at the wheel would draw attention. I’d been forced to get creative, but the job got done, nonetheless.

  As I’d done several times before, I drove past the dead-end street by about a block, parked on the curb and went back on foot. Still, I didn’t use the direct sidewalk for the street. Instead, I cut through the backyards toward my destination. I walked tall and easy without any fear that someone might see me. Everyone was asleep by now in this area. They were all good little boys and girls
who went to bed on time so that they could be up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for their monotonous jobs the next day.

  It took no time at all to arrive in the backyard I needed. I approached the window in the back that looked into the kitchen and past it into the living room. I stood on my tiptoes and peered in seeing exactly what I’d expected. Nothing. I saw the lights out, the TV off, and not an ounce of movement anywhere on the ground floor. Luckily, there were no kids in this house, so I wouldn’t have to worry about those little shits causing an issue. There was, however, the spouse to deal with.

  I certainly didn’t doubt my abilities. I was able to take Shelby right out of the bed in which she’d been sleeping right next to a light-sleeping detective without any trouble at all. Surely, I could do the same here. My dilemma was that when I’d taken Shelby, I specifically needed Norris to live. I paid extra card to that abduction as to not wake him, otherwise I would have been forced to kill him then and there. With this abduction, I had no use for the spouse. It would be easier to just do them there in the bed and not have to worry about it.

  I let the thought run through my mind as I carefully let myself into the house through the sliding patio door. Unlocked…fools. They felt so safe in their little cul-de-sac that they didn’t even lock the damn doors at night. I stopped in the kitchen and opened the fridge, nothing that really grabbed my attention. I’d been standing outside Norris’s window for hours—I hadn’t realized the growing hunger in my stomach. There would be time for that later, I reminded myself before moving into the living room and toward the stairs that led up to the bedrooms.

  The old house still had carpeted stairs. The soft pathway upward made it so that there was no moaning or groaning which generally came from wooden stairs. Another factor that made things even easier. It was beginning to annoy me just how easy this was going to be. There was no challenge. No stress. No pressure of any kind. I told myself to save the irritation for later once I was back at the house where I would have the privacy to take out my frustrations on the one casing them.

  I reached the top and, without any stealth in mind, I walked into the bedroom. There they were, sleeping peacefully in their bed without a single care in the world. They knew better than most that bad things happen every day yet somehow, they felt they were excluded from that. They thought those bad things could never come for them. Oh, how incredibly wrong they were.

  It was almost sad.

  Pathetic, really.

  I cocked my head and looked down at them, peering back and forth before letting my full attention rest on my true target. Detective Marty Simmons.

  Chapter 18: Watch Me

  I tried to identify the noise in my ears without opening my eyes. I remembered most of the previous night, and, because of that, I didn’t want to open them. I knew what came with doing that. Light. Bright ass light. My stomach curdled just thinking about it. No. I kept them shut, doing everything to conceal the darkness, but I couldn’t ignore the noise. It was a sort of pulsing, like I was underwater and someone was hammering the surface above me with a paddle. Boom. Boom. Boom. Before long I realized that I couldn’t just hear it, I could feel it. It was my head.

  My head pounded like it hadn’t in years. I focused harder on it, but then stopped when I started to feel dizzy. I knew the routine. Nausea, headache, soreness, and a general shitty feeling, but when the spins set in, that was when I knew it was for real. Everything I drank the night before was coming up one way or another. I tried to control it. Tried to self-sooth myself back into slumber, but no such luck was to be had.

  Just as I was beginning to convince myself that the pain was subsiding, the chiming began. My damn cell phone. Chiming away, nice and loud. I hated the damn thing to begin with, but I was retired. Not to mention the only person in my life was dead now, why did I even need the thing? Why hadn’t I just drilled it out the window on my drive home last night? Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve. It didn’t matter now. Now, it was ringing, and it wasn’t going to stop unless I got up out of my chair and made it stop.

  I slowly let my eyes drift open as if they were centuries-old vaults protecting million-year-old secrets. I brought my hands up and rubbed them with my palms before standing up. As soon as I did, the nausea set in hard. I just stood where I was for a moment trying to keep the contents of my stomach where they were and doing my best to ignore the chiming that just seemed to make everything worse. It wasn’t just that. Every day I seemed to be more and more aware of my aging body.

  Sleeping sitting up in a recliner chair hadn’t helped in the slightest. The good news was, the lower back pain helped to take my mind off of the nausea. I’d spent so much time moaning and groaning, I couldn’t believe the phone was still ringing, but I was all the same. I let myself meander over to it and sighed as I brought the phone up to my ear without checking the caller ID.

  “Norris,” I answered.

  “Boss, its Cooper,” said the voice at the other end of the line.

  “Cooper, three fucking things I wanna communicate to you. One, I’m not the boss anymore. Two, it’s seven thirty in the morning and three you just identified yourself as the reason behind me having to drag my old, retired, broken, hung-over ass outa my chair. This better be real fucking good,” I was only half joking as I spoke. I really wasn’t happy to be getting a call from anyone, but I figured the sooner I could get back to normal the sooner it would feel that way.

  “Sorry to wake you…and it’s not fucking good. It’s really fucking bad,” she said.

  “How bad could it really be? After the last time I was called out of this piss-hole they call retirement, I don’t think there’s much worse I could be called about.”

  “It’s Simmons…”

  “Where?” It was the only word I could come up with as my mind immediately began creating images of what might have happened.

  “His place…he’s at Helena General now,” she said in a tone so quiet it could hardly be classified as a whisper.

  “What?” I said immediately regretting the surprise in my voice. “He’s alive?”

  “For the moment, the doctors don’t now for how long though.”

  “On my way,” I said before hanging up the phone.

  Without so much as brushing my teeth or rinsing off the grime from the day before, I sprinted out to the Jeep and took off toward the city. I hadn’t made very many commutes back and forth between Helena and Boulder. Hell, I’d only been retired a few weeks. Even so, I was beginning to hate the drive with a fiery passion. Not because of the time, but because of the quiet. Because of the opportunity for my thoughts to make themselves known.

  At least if I was day-drinking at Vern’s or finding projects to do around the house my mind was occupied. During the drive though, I could only seem to focus on the thing that I was moving toward. This time, it was Simmons, who was in critical condition and I didn’t even know why. The last time it was Shelby, and I knew before I’d even gotten close what I was going to find. I kept creating situations in my head and each one just seemed to get worse.

  I continued to fight them off and tried to focus on other things. The beauty of the drive, the rumble of the Jeep as it cruised down the asphalt, the smell of clean country air. None of it worked for long. I resorted to blaring the radio at the loudest setting. It was loud enough to create pain all throughout my eardrums, but I would take that over the images that were speeding through my mind any day.

  It seemed like centuries of this struggle before I finally found myself turning into the hospital parking lot. I slammed the shifter into park, turned off the ignition and ran for the front door not even checking to see if the driver side door had clicked shut behind me. I entered the lobby and flashed my old badge at the receptionist who gave me a knowing nod and told me that I needed the third floor, east wing.

  I avoided the elevator when I saw four others waiting for the steel doors to open. I was
n’t in any kind of mentally stable place to be making nice with strangers in a confined space. I took the stairs two at a time and reached the third floor in what for me was likely record time, but there was no sense of accomplishment. Especially once I saw the looks on the faces of my team grouped outside a restricted area.

  Perez, Hall and Hunt were standing in a tight circle whispering among themselves. Captain Connors was off to the side on his cell phone and Cooper was sitting by herself to one side on one of the hallway benches. The expressions on the faces of the team told a story, but the look on hers spoke volumes. The others hadn’t noticed my arrival yet, and I let that linger as best I could as I slowly made my way over and sat next to Detective Cooper. She didn’t look up from the spot she’d been staring at on the floor, but I was certain she noticed me sit down.

  “Hangin in there kid?” I asked her quietly.

  “I can’t believe he’s alive,” she said still not looking at me.

  “That bad?”

  “There was so much blood…and Karen…” She stopped speaking. I hadn’t even considered Simmons’s wife Karen.

  “Is she here too?” I asked. I got only a shaking of the head signaling that she wasn’t and telling me that wherever she was now, it was her final resting place. My heart sank even deeper.

  “Jesus Christ.” It was all I could manage.

  “I found him,” she said after a few moments of lingering silence.

  “You what?”

  “I was the one who found him…found them.”