Malevolent

by Searls, David

  “Who were you talking to?”

  Tim jumped. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.” He sat shirtless at a kitchen chair, in the dark.

  Patty switched on a lamp at the counter and Tim blinked. “Who were you talking to?” she asked again.

  Tim assessed the situation quickly. She sounded fully awake, her voice clear and alert. He couldn’t snow her with the wrong-number routine, so he was left with a bare-bones version of the truth. “The police.”

  She said nothing.

  “It was a Detective Dillon,” he said.

  “A Detective Dillon,” she said. “Like neither of us has ever heard the name before.”

  Tim shoved out a kitchen chair with his foot and nodded at her to take it. She remained standing.

  “I want to know what’s going on and why you’re calling her, your cute little Detective Dillon, in the middle of the night.”

  Tim let out a rush of breath and hoped it contained all the righteous anger he had a right to. “What now, Patty? You think I raped some neighborhood woman so I could score with a cop?”

  She wheeled to lean the palms of both hands against the sink and stare at the black night outside the window. She was wearing one of his T-shirts and it had hiked up into her panties in back. The sight should have gotten him going, but it just made him vaguely pity her. She drummed her fingers on the countertop.

  He said, “I called her because Griffin had a very odd DVD playing tonight.” Making it sound almost whimsical.

  “You went to that video store after work? That’s how anxious you were to stay away from home as long as possible?”

  He hadn’t seen that particular line of attack until her troops were already over the hill. “I told you I was going to try to get closer to Griffin. Like Detective Dillon asked me to do.”

  She turned to face him. “You also told me you stopped in that church last night.”

  Now he was really crossed up. He rocked his chair back until his shoulder blades met the wall and thoughtfully sipped at what remained of his beer. “I told you that because it’s what I did.”

  “Late at night. With no one else on the premises.”

  He could tell by the way she was locking him in to a response that whatever he said was going to be the wrong thing, so he said nothing.

  “So why does that minister tell me that they lock up the church at night? Pretty much like every church in America. You think they’d just happen to leave it open in case Tim Brentwood decided to pay a visit in the wee hours?”

  “You went there?” This surprised him more than he thought it might. It seemed that the little church was looming disproportionately large in their lives, and he couldn’t begin to explain why.

  Maybe Patty saw the cloud passing over his face, or maybe she just got too tired to argue further. “It doesn’t matter, Tim,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

  He didn’t know how long he sat there. He turned off the lamp. Opened another beer. Watched shadows collect and shift and scatter as clouds rolled over the face of the moon. He thought about Patty and the way her nightshirt—his shirt—had rode high to reveal more of her than he remembered seeing, or at least noticing, in quite some time.

  His cell phone rumbled against the tabletop and he dropped it in his haste to answer it before it switched to ring mode.

  “The son of a bitch hid it.”

  He held the phone so close to his face that it seemed welded on. His voice pitched almost obscenely low, he said, “He didn’t hide it, Melinda. I don’t know what’s going on, but I think Griffin’s as much in the dark as we are.”

  There. He said it. Gave voice to the vague thought his mind had been turning over without even his conscious knowledge.

  She said, “He showed us a DVD disk and claimed it was the one you saw. No Country for Old Men. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Problem is, that’s exactly what’s on it.”

  “You viewed it all the way through?”

  “I’ve got a rookie with me whose job right now is to watch a movie, but I forwarded and stopped my way through it and it looks clean.”

  “Uh huh,” Tim said. Not sure what else to say.

  “Naturally we only have his word that it’s even the same disk. There’s no label on it and, if you believe him, it came out of a gray display case with no identifying features. Course, it’s a store full of DVDs. Who knows what he’s handing over.”

  “Sure, he could have switched it,” Tim admitted after a second. “But that’s the easy part. You’ve also got to assume that he not only attacked the woman on a crowded street, but that he videotaped the whole thing while doing it, disappeared in seconds, and no one saw a thing. Did the victim even notice a camera?”

  The phone lime hummed, her silence answering his question.

  “Griffin couldn’t have done it,” he said quietly.

  He got no argument on that point. But after a few more seconds of the line humming in his ear, she said, “You didn’t get a good look at the woman in the tape, right? Maybe it was a different victim, one he did get to shoot. It follows the same MO. He attacks her from behind and pushes her facedown on the sidewalk. What do you want to bet there’s not another case like this, sometime, somewhere.”

  “Pretty vague,” he said.

  “I’m looking into it. If something like this was reported, I’ll find out. It’ll stick out because the victim would have seen a camera.” She paused. “If he let her live, that is.”

  She was breathing heavily now, all of her pent-up anger and frustration whistling through her like a slow leak from a slashed tire. Tim wondered at first why she was telling him all of this, but he knew the answer. She couldn’t go to a DA with this bizarre case. Not at this point, at least, but she had to talk it through with someone. He was her listening post.

  “How’d Griffin explain things when you confronted him?” he asked.

  “Said he’s watching the opening scene of No Country for Old Men, he gets distracted and next thing he knows, it’s what you saw.”

  “He admitted it?”

  “He described the scene pretty much as you did, but what else is he going to do?”

  “Lie.”

  “He knows what you’re going to report.”

  “My word against his,” says Tim. “I mean, assuming he’s going to switch the disk anyway.”

  “Maybe he’s just not too bright.”

  Tim shook his head though there was no one in his dark kitchen to see it. “I just don’t think he’s guilty.”

  “Then why’d you turn him in?”

  He winced at the direct hit. He was still trying to stay on the sidelines, that’s why. Cheer both teams on, pull for everyone’s point of view.

  That strategy, he admitted to himself, just wasn’t working.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On Monday morning, Griffin Solloway came to take his revenge on his traitorous friend.

  Tim’s grip on the doorknob tightened. He’d swung it open without a thought when the knocking came. Now he’d have to shove the other man down a full flight of stairs, slam the door, slap the chain in place, key the dead bolt, call the cops.

  “Hi. Thought I’d stop by and see if we could talk.”

  Tim blinked. Back to reality, where you don’t pitch others down full flights of stairs, no matter what they’re about to do. “Okay.”

  So now he was in Tim’s house. His bristly beard and Oakland Raiders ball cap framing his head in black. Griffin scanned the living room, rubbed his nose and said, “Seen any good movies lately?”

  Tim stood there, speechless.

  “It’s a joke, okay? Sorry. Some weekend, huh? I think we need to get our heads together, maybe figure this thing out between us. What about you?”

  “How can you eat that fiber crap without sugar? Please tell me you got some in the house ’cuz it’s a bowl of horse feed without it.”

  Tim shook his head. “I was getting headaches. Patty told me it was the ref
ined sugar. Or unrefined. Whichever it is.”

  Griffin stared at the bowl between his fists. “That’s what makes the breakfast. Gets you going, you know?”

  Tim had attempted to use his unfinished meal as an excuse to cut short the surprise visit, but the plan had misfired miserably when Griffin invited himself to the table.

  “Those were the days,” the dude mumbled around a mouthful of cereal that he’d seemed to have decided was better than expected. “Remember having your best friend stay for breakfast? He’d sleep over and the two of you would be at the table the next morning, trading lists of favorite cereals and the ones that sucked the most.”

  “You’re not staying over,” Tim muttered.

  “You mind?” Griffin asked, lifting the cereal box and cocking it toward his bowl. “Once you get started…”

  Tim nodded his permission and soon the snap of dry oats meeting skim milk filled the space.

  Griffin said, “If you had real, honest-to-God homogenized milk rather than this gray, healthy shit, we might actually have something here.”

  “Patty says the real stuff blocks arteries.”

  Griffin nodded solemnly. “Sounds like she takes good care of you.”

  They sat and munched in silence, Tim’s jaws finding and subconsciously matching the bovine chewing rhythms of his friend.

  Friend? Maybe. Or a sadistic rapist. Or maybe both. Friend and sadistic rapist. Was that possible? How fucked up was his life becoming?

  And what about Detective Dillon? Melinda. What did he owe her? When he shared breakfast in his kitchen with the man with the milk-stained beard, was he doing it on her behalf? He had, after all, promised to stay in touch with the odd store owner. Could he do so, but in good faith to both of them? How was that possible?

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Griffin said.

  “I’ll bet not.”

  “I’m innocent.”

  It came out flat, totally void of Griffin’s usual awkward attempt at boyish charm. His spoon rattled as he let it loose in the bowl. He set a pair of hairy forearms on the table and leaned into them. “The disk was a regular movie, except for that one god-awful scene you saw. Then back to a regular movie. I never deleted the scene—even if I knew how—and I didn’t switch disks. I think the woman in it is Germaine Marberry, though I didn’t get a good look. Sounds like her, though.”

  There it was.

  Griffin’s eyes jumped. They pierced the air between them, flaming up occasionally with tiny flares of panic.

  “I’m pretty sure I believe you,” Tim said haltingly. Lukewarm, but all he could offer at the moment.

  “I’ll accept that. So the next step’s gotta be figuring out what’s happening.”

  Which didn’t match Tim’s figuring at all. Way he saw it, while there had undoubtedly been some strange goings-on lately, it was both possible and preferable to slip around it, rather than in it. Easy as circumnavigating a pothole, rather than taking the trouble to patch it.

  “Come on, man, it’ll be fun,” said Griffin, obviously seeing through his host’s doubts. “What do you do with your days anyway? Anything more exciting than what I have in mind?”

  The implications stung, but he’d made a good point, Tim thought. While the rest of the world worked—most emphatically including Patty—he rode his bike or hung out at the mall. “Like you’re fifteen,” Patty had told him once while not in the best of moods.

  “The first thing we do,” said Griffin, “is exchange information. I think the church is at the center of it. How ’bout you?”

  Tim said nothing. The last thing he wanted was to have to go up against something darkly religious and unfathomable. Besides, he’d been in the church and had found no place more peaceful or less suspicious.

  “Here’s how I see it,” Griffin continued. “The church is where I met this Marberry broad in the first place. Its members belong to some fundamentalist sect that sets me up to take the fall for a crime I didn’t commit. Why? So they could close me down. Which, to them, is like sealing one of the gateways to hell.”

  It was weak. Truly weak. When Tim found a verbal opening, he said, “I can see how a church of the kind you describe would want to kill your smut room. But how’d they manipulate the DVD? The scene that’s here one moment, gone the next?”

  Griffin’s brows fell heavily over his eyes. “They couldn’t.” He played with the spoon in his empty bowl. “That I can’t explain.” He locked stares with Tim. “But you have to decide if you believe me when I say what happened. And that I didn’t do anything. And I can’t blame you if you don’t.”

  Tim wished he had more time to think about it, but when he spoke he was surprised at his judiciousness. “I don’t know where this thing is going, but I think I’m with you. It seems to me that you’re innocently caught up in something I can’t begin to explain. I’d rather ignore it, to tell the truth, but I’ll help out however I can.”

  Although he’d left himself with some wiggle room, it still felt to Tim like he’d just crawled out onto one wing of a perfectly healthy plane.

  It was obviously what Griffin wanted to hear, judging by the grin plastered on his face. “Thanks, big guy. Oh. While I gotcha in such a trusting mood, I guess I better tell you about the blonde bimbo I’ve got behind my black curtain. Keep an open mind, though, okay?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Quite cheerfully, Vincent said, “Now, Germaine, we can’t have this, can we?”

  She gasped as the tall preacher strode out of her kitchen. She’d been dozing, she supposed. Or daydreaming. Just rocking and waiting. Waiting for what? It was so hard to remember things—and why was that?

  Dolly came stumbling out of the kitchen, hard on Vincent’s heels. Gibbering and pawing the air for the cereal box he held aloft. As she gave a weak little hop for it, Vincent would stretch just a wee bit higher, easily keeping it out of reach. His playful smile never left his lips.

  Germaine’s mouth opened as she thought about this scene, so heavy with deja vu. She’d seen it before, hadn’t she? Had she dreamed it? Her stomach churned with uncomfortable sensations she couldn’t rightly identify. Hunger was, of course, one of them, but she’d grown almost used to the feeling.

  “If I hadn’t decided to check up on my three favorite women, Dolly here would be chowing down on stale Fruit Loops and ruining everything.”

  Germaine’s sister bleated as she launched herself weakly off her feet. Her fingers brushed the cereal box held so high, but she fell back, heavily, without it. Mewling pitifully, the youngest Marberry headed down the back hall. Vincent and Germaine listened to the sound of a door slamming and her whines turning to muffled, hitching sobs.

  “She’s not responsible for her actions,” said Germaine.

  “Oh, I know that,” Vincent said breezily. “God is ever so merciful to her kind. But that’s why He made you responsible. If any of you were to break an ordained fast with hoarded food, well, the punishment must be upon you and your mother.” He offered her a sad smile. “I hate to put it that indelicately, Germaine, but I’m afraid that’s how things stand.”

  Her mother. Germaine panicked momentarily before finding the older woman to be, surprisingly, in the rocking chair next to her. How could she not have been aware of her mother nodding off not five feet from her?

  “Scat, Bandit,” she told the tall yellow cat perched in the rocker beside her mother. It glared, showing red-stained teeth as her mother twitched and groaned in her sleep. Twin trails of blood scurried down her wrinkled arm.

  Germaine cried out, slapped her hands and stomped her feet, finally getting the glowering cat to drop to the floor and slink from sight.

  Wait. It hadn’t been Bandit feeding on her mother. It was Tampa Jack. The two cats looked nothing alike. How could she confuse…?

  She stared dully at the open wound causing her poor mother to mutter in her troubled sleep. She’d have to do something about it. Disinfect it. Patch it. Something. And she would, as soon as she c
ould muster the energy.

  “You’re doing fine,” Vincent reassured her. “Just don’t forget the importance of this fast for all of us at the church. Your sacrifice, it will send the demon right back to hell, where it belongs. Just a few more days and we’ll see a breakthrough. I promise you, Germaine.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. She believed him.

  Her mother groaned louder. Dolly sobbed from behind her closed bedroom door. A cat growled.

  Mustn’t sleep. The cats were all a mite restless, especially Bandit. Or was it Tampa Jack causing the most trouble? Couldn’t remember.

  “Tell me again, Vincent,” she said, her voice thick, “why the cats have to fast alongside us. They’re getting nasty. I’m not complaining, but if I could just put them outside…”

  He wasn’t there.

  She thought about this while catching her breath from her long-winded appeal. She rose with difficulty from her wobbly rocker and hobbled into the kitchen. She yelped when something slithered across her ankles.

  Holly snarled, as startled as Germaine. The cat slashed at her exposed ankle flesh, drawing three thin beads of blood. Germaine drew back her foot and kicked the heavy cat away. For the brief moment her foot made contact with the pregnant calico’s twitching belly, she felt its unborn mass quivering against the blow.

  The cat howled as it backed into a corner where Germaine could keep an eye on it.

  The kitchen, she told herself, looking around. Now why had she come into this room? Supporting herself against the stove, she raised her throbbing foot slightly off the floor and examined a few drops of blood dripping to the dirty linoleum floor. She walked unsteadily along the countertop to the paper towel rack and tore off a couple perforated sheets.

  She dabbed at the claw tracks on her skin while three scrawny cats appeared from nowhere to lick clean the puddle from the floor.

  Ah, yes, now she remembered—Vincent. That’s who’d drawn her here. The kitchen was where Vincent kept making his surprise appearances into their lives. But the room was empty now.

  The kitchen door was locked.