Walk Hand IN Hand Into Extinction
Stories Inspired By True Detective
Christoph Paul
Contents
Copyright
Index
1. BAD MEN by D. J. Tyrer
2. MIDNIGHT ABYSS By Jayme Karales
3. PREACHER BY J.C. Drake
4. THE YELLER KING by David W. Barbee
5. A BRIEF HISTORY OF BAD MEN by Tom Leins
6. A MYTH WE CALL EMPTINESS by Jeremy Thompson
7. MEDITATIONS by McKenzie Cassidy
8. GRIEVING IN REVERSE by Drew Chial
9. JACOB COUNTY By Mark T. Conrad
10. THE MAN WHO COLLECTED CHAMBERS by William Tea
11. INTERROGATOR by Anthony Trevino
12. JUST FRIENDS by Michael W. Clark
13. A BLUED ARMADA COMETH by Graham Wooding
14. THE LORD PROVIDES by Christopher Brosnahan
15. ECCE HOMO by Joel Amat Güell
16. DEFILEMENT by George P. Farrell
17. FROM THE DUSTY MESA by David Busboom
18. THE DARK SIDE by Andrew Shaffer
Copyright © 2016 by CLASH Books. All rights reserved.
Published by CLASH Books, Boston and New York Visit our website at www.yesclash.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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First Edition ISBN-13: 978-1-944866-00-6
Edited by Christoph Paul and Leza Cantoral Cover Art by Mallory Rock Interior Design by Joel Amat Güell
Created with Vellum
Index
Bad Men / D. J. Tyrer
Midnight Abyss / Jayme Karales
Preacher / JC Drake
The Yeller King / David W. Barbee
A Brief History of Bad Men / Tom Leins
A Myth We Call Emptiness / Jeremy Thompson
Meditation / Mckenzie Cassidy
Grieving In Reverse / Drew Chial
Jacob County / Mark T. Conard
The Man Who Collected Chambers / William Tea
Interrogator / Anthony Trevino
Just Friends / Michael W. Clark
A Blued Armada Cometh / Graham Wooding
The Lord Provides / Christopher Brosnahan
Ecce Homo / Joel Amat Güell
Defilement / George P. Farrell
From The Dusty Mesa / David Busboom
The Dark Side / Andrew Shaffer.
1
BAD MEN by D. J. Tyrer
A wise man once said the world needs bad men. You’d say I was a bad man, and you’d be right. I’d never claim otherwise, because I know we’re necessary: we keep the other bad men from the door.
Bad men like Willis Wilkes. Bastard carried a shield, but had a liking for little kids, and I don’t mean in an “Aw, shucks, ain’t they so cute,” sense. He took kids he knew wouldn’t be missed and he used them up, before burying what’s left like garbage.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, what the hell does it matter? One more pervert? A few less kids? The world keeps turning and the Universe doesn’t notice, doesn’t care. Only we do. That’s the supreme irony of life: people care about things that don’t really matter. Whatever they do, however much they struggle, things still end just the same.
Another wise man said that the world is indeed comic, but the joke is upon mankind. He was, I think, speaking about consciousness and its bastard daughters, conscience and guilt. Do you think a cockroach worries about the morality of eating your cereal? Do you imagine germs are even aware they make you ill? Only humans worry about meaning and morals or agonise about the ethics of taking antibiotics and the consequences of too many. If we were cockroaches, people like Willis Wilkes could do whatever they wanted and it wouldn’t matter. We’d all be free, if freedom without knowing you’re free is worth a damn. If anything is.
But, we aren’t free and it does matter in some pathetic, finite way as we struggle to avoid the truth that it doesn’t. Which was the reason why I had him pinned to the floor of his hallway as I stabbed at his face with a corkscrew.
A corkscrew is the perfect murder weapon: nobody ever got arrested for carrying one with intent to open a bottle, but they can puncture flesh with enough force and pop eyes as easily as they pop corks. Easier.
Wilkes was screaming as I stabbed him, begging for mercy, but all I could think was how his blood seemed to run in spirals before it merged to cover his face in dark gore. The ragged-edged pin pricks where the corkscrew had gone in reminded me of stars in the night sky, only dark. Black stars. Sometimes, I look up at the sky and watch the stars. It’s like a war’s being waged in Heaven between light and darkness. Often, I wonder which is winning. Sometimes, I worry that, one day, I’ll look up and see that all those stars have been snuffed out, leaving only dark stars burning cold and black. Like the holes I was putting in his face
At last, my arm was beginning to weaken, aching from the repetitive blows. I drove the corkscrew into his neck – I knew the spot – and blood began to pour out.
He shuddered and died. The light went out of his eyes. Extinguished, just like the dark stars…
He was dead. I stood up. It was over. Willis Wilkes would never hurt anyone again. I would, but only bad men; only people who deserved it.
I looked around. We were in his house. A dump. A hovel just outside the city limits. Quiet. Lonely. Hardly any furniture. The only signs of modernity were the home cinema and the laptop. A means for him to relive his obsession again and again. Yet, the images were never enough. Never.
On the walls, crude sketches of children, each, I was certain, identifiable as a child he had killed. He had arranged them in a pattern swirling out from a taller, central figure. Wilkes? Possibly. Where the children were drawn using red and black felt tips, the central figure was drawn mostly in yellow.
Of course, now I know the truth.
I set the house on fire. Cleansing flame. For once, light won out over the darkness. The good people of the city could go on living out their delusion that the world is anything but a meaningless wasteland full of horror.
My cell bleeped as I drove back into the city. It was a message from Jardin. My former partner. Now, Internal Affairs. A slimy bastard. I was glad to be rid of him and didn’t relish meeting up with him. Putting him in IA had to be somebody’s idea of a joke, or the purest evidence of the perverse meaningless of existence.
Jardin wanted to meet me in Castaigne’s.
I considered ignoring him. Or, maybe messaging him back to tell him where he could go. But, instead, I let him know I’d be there. I don’t know why. Does it really matter?
I drove over to the ba
r. Part of the glass frontage was boarded up, the rest was grimed over. The name flickered in yellow neon above the door.
Castaigne’s is in the old part of town, where the gentry long ago gave way to the poor, the underclass, the scum of humanity. The bar would once have been more upmarket, but it had followed the district’s slide into oblivion. Now, the only rich folk you’d find in it were slumming it, looking to score drugs or hookers. It didn’t surprise me that half the dirty cops in the city, Wilkes included, frequented it.
Was Jardin’s choice of venue a reflection of his own crookedness or habit from looking into its PD habitués? And, if the latter, did that say something about how he perceived me? Maybe I should’ve thought more about that.
I went inside. Jardin wasn’t there.
I headed over to the bar. Asked for a whisky. That’s all they seemed to serve, apart from bottles of something green and French.
I sat down in a corner booth. It was the perfect place to observe the rest of the bar without easily being overheard once Jardin arrived.
The bar was almost empty. A handful of customers, each of them as rundown and dirty-seeming as the bar itself. None of them seemed to be cops. The interior decoration of Castaigne’s was a sort of beige and washed-out yellow with the occasional blackish or greenish stain of mould and damp; it’s a wonder the health officer hadn’t closed it down.
I turned my attention from my depressing surroundings to the tabletop. Somebody had dragged a cloth across the sticky surface in a desultory attempt at cleaning it, producing swirls, which I studied, fascinated. The random shapes seemed almost to contain some indiscernible meaning. Then, it struck me: the swirl reminded me of the figures Wilkes had drawn on the walls of his house.
I found myself considering that image: I’d assumed it was analogous to a trophy, a record of every child he’d killed, or perhaps to the videos he kept as a reminder, a means to relive every murder. But, it seemed to be more than that; ritualistic. Like the swirls on the tabletop, it seemed to promise more meaning than I could discern. Somehow, I just knew that the meaning I sought revolved, like the children, around the central figure. If there was any meaning and I wasn’t just imputing something to nothing.
I’d assumed the yellow-drawn figure was Wilkes, standing at the centre of his victims, receiving their terrified adulation. But, what if it wasn’t? To whom was he offering the children’s lives?
No matter how I chased the thoughts about, I could never quite pin them down. Like the swirls, I seemed to be going around in circles, fixed upon the figure.
Then: “You came.” The voice startled me out of my reverie. It was Jardin. I should have smelt him coming. Jardin’s one of those officers who craft the image of the fat, sweaty detective who’s eaten far too many donuts and spent more time at his desk than doing his job.
He shuffled his enormous backside onto the bench opposite me and his belly rocked the table. Having settled himself, Jardin pulled out one of those awful, huge red handkerchiefs with white spots and used it to wipe his face. The weather was warm, but not hot enough to justify the sweat that ran down his jowls from his bald pate. He was practically a cartoon.
“I said I’d be here,” I told him. “What’d you want?”
He played nervously with his glass of whisky, then downed it in one go, before gesturing for the barman to bring him another.
“Well, what is it?” I asked him. “If you’re planning to come out and declare your love for me, I have to tell you now, I don’t go for fat, balding men with BO who work for Internal Affairs.”
Jardin sputtered. He’d always been touchy about his sexuality. He liked to project the image of an avuncular ladies’ man, but I’d seen the magazines he kept in his desk drawer, back in the day.
“I find your sense of humour distasteful,” he said.
“I haven’t changed.”
“No, you haven’t.”
The conversation went on much like that for a while, with us catching up in a manner that did little to conceal out mutual dislike.
“Look,” Jardin said at last, “some of the guys are beginning to lose patience with you. You’re a loose cannon.”
“Boom,” I said, making him glare.
“You tread on toes; you poke your nose in where it’s not wanted –”
“I even looked the gift-horse in the mouth, once,” I said. “Come on, do you have to talk in clichés?”
“You’ve ruffled feathers.”
“Oh, apparently, you do. Look, I get it, some of the guys are unhappy with me. Why? ‘Cos I get results?”
“No, because you rock the boat.”
It was then I told him that if he didn’t stop talking like that, I’d break his jaw.
The barman brought over his whisky and Jardin downed it in one and asked for another. I was still nursing my first.
“Look, just say whatever it is you have to say,” I said.
“There’s a natural order to this city and you’re destabilising it. You’re arresting the wrong people. Protected people. You’re upsetting folk. Creating problems.” He paused and took out his handkerchief and wiped his face again. I had to fight the urge to grab it and ram it down his throat. “They want me to bring you in on it, seeing as we’re old pals.”
“Bring me in on it?”
“Make you part of the brotherhood, the elite. They want you in the tent...” He trailed off when he realised I was glaring at him. “Well, you know the saying.”
“There’s another one about being able to see the stars because the tent’s gone missing.”
That just confused him. He frowned, then blinked as if dismissing my words and just went on: “They think you could fit right in. They know about your tastes.”
“My tastes?” I asked. I had no idea what he was on about. “Are you fried chicken aficionados?”
“I’m talking about Crystal.”
What can I say? Crystal was a stripper. I like strippers. A guy’s got to blow off steam, right? Well, we got friendly. Then, somebody – the odds were he was sitting opposite me right then – dropped me in it and a posse of vice cops bundled into my apartment, expecting to find her there. Turned out she was only fifteen, dancing on a fake ID. They’d planned to get me on statutory rape. But, they could never prove I’d done more than watch her and it quickly blew over and Jardin moved on to new positions.
“What about Crystal?” I asked him.
Jardin laughed nervously. Then, his cell rang. He answered it and said “Uh-huh” several times before hanging up.
“Detective Wilkes is dead,” he said.
I told him I knew.
Jardin grabbed his handkerchief again, dabbed his brow, then held it over his mouth as if nauseous.
“You killed him,” he said through the cloth.
I didn’t admit as much, but I guess he knew me well enough to tell I had.
“Dammit, you’ve gone too far,” he said, mouth still covered. “You can’t kill cops and expect to get away with it.”
People always say that when you’ve proved you can.
“Look,” he continued, “it comes down to this, man: either you knuckle under and do as you’re told – and, believe me when I say, it can be a sweet deal; you could have all the young pussy you want – or, they’ll deal with you. Drop you into prison with inmates who’d just love to say ‘hi’ to one of us; maybe worse.”
I chewed my lip, as if I were thinking it over. I called over to the barman to bring over the bottle and I topped our glasses up. That’s when it all came together.
Jardin gulped his down in one go and I did likewise, before refilling our glasses again.
Jardin gulped that down too – the man had to be sweating whisky. He hadn’t even put the glass down before I brought the bottle down on the florid dome of his head. It didn’t break the glass, but the blow did cause his face to slam down into the table. His nose burst and blood seemed to run in swirls across the tabletop.
Jardin raised his head and looked a
t me with unfocused eyes.
I smacked the bottle into him again and, this time, it shattered. He slumped back. I rammed the broken bottle into his face, again and again. If anything, it was better than the corkscrew.
I admit I did it in a rage, but I’d expected to get away with it; Castaigne’s was one of those places where there are no cameras and folk are surprisingly unobservant. What I hadn’t bargained with was that one of those “Uh-huhs” Jardin had mumbled into his cell must have been confirmation that I was there. Half-a-dozen IA cops had entered the bar while I was whaling on the bastard with the bottle and were standing there like slack-jawed idiots, watching. They probably wouldn’t have been able to pin Wilkes on me or anything else, but I’d just butchered Jardin right in front of them.
Why didn’t I go for my gun? They had theirs out, ready. I wouldn’t have lasted a second, and I knew killing me was just what they wanted. Jardin had threatened me with hell in jail, but, knowing I’d killed Wilkes, they had to wonder how much I knew, and how much Jardin had told me. Dead, I’d be no problem.
Alive, I can bring them down. And, as much as I’d appreciate an end to the farce that is life, I’d rather give them grief.
Of course, how long I’ll live is another matter.
That’s why I’m in here. In jail, I’m plausible. In here, I’m a lunatic and nothing I say has any more value than the guy next door who swears he’s Jesus and the President is a lizard in a man-suit.
But, even in here, I can still talk.
They’re all in it together, all those dirty cops, and they have Internal Affairs tied deep into their nasty little conspiracy. They think they can do what they want.
But, they never reckoned with me.
Especially now I’ve worked out who the figure was at the centre of Wilkes’ wall art. It was on the whisky bottle, you see. There was a figure on the label, sort of like a monk in yellow robes. It looked quite like the figure he had drawn. It was a Yellow King Whisky, or something like that, I realised.
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