by Mike Knowles
The elevator scared the shit out him when it took off. Woody felt like he was Lois Lane being yanked into the air by Superman. He quizzed himself by trying to remember the name of the ugly chick who played the character onscreen. Woody pulled Margot Kidder from his brain faster than he had gotten Julie’s last name. Progress.
When the panel above the doors showed the elevator was racing past the seventh floor, Woody reached out for the wooden handrail that wrapped around three of the four sides of the elevator car. The rail had been lacquered in a shiny varnish numerous times, and it was slippery to the touch with the oils from years of greasy hands. The elevator suddenly stopped moving up, and Woody’s knees buckled despite bracing himself on the railing. Woody stepped out of the car and wiped his hand on his jacket before finding Julie’s apartment. He knocked on the door and waited for his partner.
When Os opened the door, Woody was immediately glad that there was no smell assaulting his nose. No smell meant the body was fresh. A fresh body meant more to work with. Leads dry up faster than water in the desert; Woody just hoped there was still enough to get his feet wet.
“Hey, Os.”
“Wood.”
Woody stepped in and looked around. The apartment was small. From where Woody stood, he could see through the kitchen to the dining room. To his right was another hall branching off to what was probably a living room. The hall continued on to what had to be the bedroom.
Os stood watching Woody. Os was quieter than usual, and that was saying something. He kept most things brief. They didn’t banter or joke around much. They were like a good marriage; a lot went unspoken, but nothing much went misunderstood.
“What happened to your hand?” Woody said.
Os looked down at his swollen knuckles.
“It wasn’t like that a couple of hours ago.”
Os shook his head and turned around. “She’s this way.”
It wasn’t the first time Os’s knuckles had ballooned. Woody had seen the man tear up his hands getting into it with people on a regular basis. Usually, Os just explained what happened like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Woody pushed a familiar thought out of his head: if he wasn’t with us, he’d be one of them.
“He’d be the scariest one,” Woody said.
Os looked over his shoulder, and Woody waved him off. The big man was used to Woody’s one-sided conversations. The two men were used to each other. They accepted the other’s faults and didn’t let them get in the way of a good partnership.
Woody noticed that Os slowed down as he got closer to the bedroom door. He stopped with his hand on the knob, and his shoulders rose slowly as he took a deep breath. Woody ignored the pause and used the time to look around the apartment. He looked back at the room he couldn’t see from the door. The living room was behind the kitchen wall. Diagonally to the right was the other half of the dining room. There was a sliding door leading from the dining room to a concrete patio. To his left, Woody saw a small bathroom and a bi-folding closet door.
When Woody turned around again, Os opened the bedroom door and stepped inside. Woody followed, and what he saw rocked him like a cheap shot to the stomach. Julie’s core was open, and Woody could see an exposed pit at her centre. He didn’t see her organs—just a dark empty space. He was trying to process the scene, to understand what he was looking at, when his eyes found the umbilical cord laying against her naked thigh.
The blood, the cord, her exposed nakedness—it all sent Woody’s mind racing, and he couldn’t deal with it in the bedroom. He turned around and staggered out of the room. His shoulder connected with the wall and he used it to support him on his way to the bathroom. He shoved the door closed behind him and planted his hands on either side of the sink. The room was dark, and Woody couldn’t see anything at first. But the blackness of the room soon gave way to a bright, vivid memory. Woody saw his wife dead. Her thighs black with crusted blood. Wrapped in a towel was his baby girl. The towel covered the baby’s face, and Woody wanted it to stay that way, but his hallucination chose otherwise. The towel was pulled back, and Woody was unable to look away—unable even to close his eyes. He saw an innocent face robbed of life. Her skin was pale, and she almost looked like she was sleeping. Almost. Her face was too still and her muscles too slack to be asleep. The birth had been too much for both of them, and Woody was left alone holding a tiny corpse in a towel.
Woody had seen the visions before, but they had been coming less and less over the past few months. That might have been because he was sleeping fewer hours each night. He was just so tired. He was getting sick and he needed to sleep. That was all it was—exhaustion. He was regressing, but he could get a handle on it again—he just needed a break. Woody reached out for the door and followed its surface to the wall and the light switch. The bright bulbs over the mirror immediately exploded into harsh 100-watt light. Woody saw his reflection—the three-day old stubble, the pink eyes, the sunken cheeks. He looked like the hostages he saw on television who were rescued after a month in captivity with ISIS terrorists. “Not so bad,” he said. A month in the desert was nothing; he had been living in hell for over a year.
He turned on the faucet and splashed water on his face. The cold liquid felt good, and when Woody gave himself another once over in the mirror, his reflection looked a bit more human. He turned off the tap and surveyed the room. There was water around the sink. Woody put his finger in the water and noticed that it was warmer than the freezing water that had just hit his face. Someone else had splashed a lot of water on themselves. Os? Woody shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like him.” Os was solid about bodies. Some of the sickest jokes about corpses came out of Os’s mouth. Most of the homicide detectives loved Os’s jokes because they always came at the most inopportune times. People didn’t always laugh right away, but the next day when people were talking about the scene, they would always bring up whatever Os had said. The jokes were like birthday cake—always better the second day.
Woody looked closer at the water. There were no soap bubbles in it.
“No sign of drying,” he said.
Woody then saw his face in profile and noticed the medicine cabinet over the toilet tank. Woody took four steps and used a pen from his pocket to open the cabinet. The three shelves inside were stocked with over-the-counter medicine and a number of small orange-tinted plastic prescription bottles. The bottles all had white labels from several different pharmacies. There were a few antibiotics, some other bottles that mentioned prenatal on the label, and a whole shelf full devoted to pills with long, long names. Woody recognized the drugs listed on several of the bottles. Julie had a lot of medication for depression. He browsed the bottles, passing by the Prozac in search of something better. When he saw Adderall, Woody pulled the bottle off the shelf and popped off the cap. The drug was an upper, and it would do better against the heroin than the caffeine. Woody dry-swallowed three pills and put the lid back on the bottle. He was about to pocket the container when the bathroom door opened. Woody turned and saw Os standing in the doorway.
“You okay?” Os asked.
Woody held up the pills in his hand. “Julie was on some serious meds. She has a lot of pills for depression here from a few different pharmacies.”
“I just use one,” Os said.
“Most do. You use more when you have a few doctors prescribing things and you don’t want the pharmacist asking questions.”
“You coming back in?” Os asked.
Woody nodded. He had wanted a few more minutes to let the Adderall kick in. He’d be no good if he started seeing things again, but there was no good reason to stay in the bathroom.
“This where the party is?”
Fucking Dennis.
6
“What are you doing back there, Woody?” Dennis asked the question from his tiptoes. He had tried to find a spot in the doorway that wasn’t taken up by Os’s bulk and found tha
t the only real estate with a view was accessible if he was on the balls of his feet. Dennis was struggling to look over Os’s shoulder without actually coming into contact with Os’s shoulder. Dennis Hamlet was maybe five-foot-six and on the fat side of chubby. He wasn’t Jerry fat, but he was on his way. It looked as though he was wearing an extra layer of clothes underneath his suit. If someone were to take Dennis apart Russian-doll style, they would have to go through shell after shell of fat until they uncovered the inner asshole that was his core. His favourite subject was himself, and he could brag for days about the cases he had closed, the things he had seen on the job, and the endless number of women he had supposedly fucked. Listening to him, you’d think no one else had ever caught a bad guy before. His stories were indulged, meaning no one ever told him to shut the fuck up. Woody never bought into any of the stories. It wasn’t that he disputed the fact that Dennis closed cases, he was just sure that it never really happened the way he said it did. Every story Dennis told was big on self-promotion and vague on detail. Cops get off on details. They love nothing better than a suspect who has their life in enough order to tell you where they were at a given day and time. The second a person skips a detail, a good cop knows it and it pisses them off. It pisses them off because it’s insulting. Trying to get away with leaving something out is calling a cop stupid. The smart cops know enough to get pissed off; the dumb ones who never get riled up wind up rolling around in a patrol car until their pension is fat enough to pay the bills. Dennis’s stories set off an alarm in Woody’s head; every one was like a fuck you that took way too long to say.
Woody watched Os roll his eyes and step forward so that Dennis wasn’t on top of him anymore. Woody knew how Os felt about the chubby cop.
“Hey, Dennis, what do you say?”
“I say that little blond piece of trim outside is mine. Unless someone else has already staked a claim?”
Os and Woody let the comment hang in the air. Woody had nothing to say; the body twenty feet away was still there every time he blinked.
Dennis mistook the silence for encouragement. “Then I plan on planting my flag later on to—”
Os turned around. Dennis stepped back as quickly as he could and barely avoided getting shoved as Os walked past him.
Dennis looked at Woody and said, “What gives?”
Woody shrugged, gave up waiting for the Adderall to start doing its job, and followed Os down the hall. “The action’s in the bedroom, Dennis. Let’s go.”
Dennis trailed Woody close enough for him to hear the fat cop’s rapid breathing.
“So what happened? Robbery? Domestic? What?”
Woody didn’t say anything. He watched Os step into the bedroom with his head down. He was still moving slow like he was wading towards the deep end of a pool. Woody took a deep breath and crossed into the bedroom. He looked at the bed and saw Natasha lying there. His wife was still in the hospital smock; her right arm off the side of the bed. The hospital bracelet almost falling off her thin wrist.
Woody shook his head and walked to the corner of the room. He blinked hard twice and rubbed his eyes. The image vanished and Julie was back, dead and exposed. Woody looked to the doorway and saw Dennis standing frozen—another victim of the murdered Medusa on the bed.
“What . . . what the fuck happened in here?”
No one answered.
“Seriously. Woody, Os—what the fuck happened?”
Dennis took a step towards the body. Woody watched him, glad he had something other than the body to pay attention to for a while. While he eyed Dennis’s reaction, he noticed that his foot was tapping on its own—the Adderall was saying hello.
7
It was hard to fathom that the mutilated remains in front of them had ever been a person, let alone another cop. Dennis had seen some things in his twenty-plus years on the job. Last week, he found a dead woman in a meth lab. Nothing special there, except her eight-month-old was screaming bloody murder in a crib in the kitchen. No one could get the kid to stop crying. Dennis found out the mother of the year had been cooking stove-top meth for so long that the baby had gotten hooked on the fumes. The kid was screaming for a fix. His little mind had no way of knowing what it wanted, just that he wanted it worse than anything. The noise that kid made was in Dennis’s head for days. He heard it whenever there wasn’t some other sound drowning out his thoughts. He didn’t sleep for two days until he figured out leaving the TV on really loud kept his mind from remembering the wails. Dennis would have taken the kid’s screams as the soundtrack for the rest of his life to not have had to look at the woman on the bed.
Dennis thought he had it under control. Jerry had called him in on this because he understood that nobody was better at catching bad guys than him. He had pulled to the curb ready to hunt down some bottom-feeder who didn’t understand that cops were at the top of the food chain—not to be hunted—but the whole thing was starting to go to shit. There was the body on the bed, and he was on the case with a couple of major league tenth-degree-black-belt assholes. Os, the big fuck, never said more than two words around Dennis if he could help it, and Woody was worse. Dennis always caught Woody staring at him like he was some rapist sweating it out on the wrong side of a two-way mirror. The pair of them were dicks, but they were stone-cold police. Everyone knew about Os. He was some kind of maniac that put suspects in traction but always seemed to walk away without so much as a slap on the wrist. To Dennis’s knowledge, there had never once been any accusations of police brutality. That was one of the scariest things about him—the big cop was squeaky clean. Even the by-the-books guys had shithead cons try to pin some bullshit charge on them at some point, and they didn’t even do anything. It was part of the job. No one got around it—except Os. Dennis had wondered more than once about the kind of scare Os must have dealt out to keep himself out of trouble. Woody was the opposite kind of cop. He didn’t get violent, and he wasn’t silent. He’d talk to himself if no one was around. Woody was like Columbo; he noticed things other people missed. Everybody loved Woody—almost everybody.
Dennis couldn’t miss how the two cops felt about him; he was a detective for Christ’s sake. Who could hide anything from him? He showed up and tried to let everyone know he could hang. He made a joke to show everybody that he was on the same page as everyone else, but neither man laughed. Os just shoved him out of the way and walked into the bedroom. Woody was no better, he just followed his partner like a fucking puppy.
The body was unreal. Dennis was unable to look away from the vacant womb. He thought that was the right word, but who knew. He kept getting closer and closer to the body, looking at the open torso. It was like a red sinkhole made of flesh and blood. Woody cleared his throat, and the sound broke Dennis’s trance. He took a step back and looked at the ceiling. When he brought his eyes down, he made eye contact with the vic. Up until now, she was just a name and a job. Julie Owen from the GANG unit. Dennis didn’t know the name, or anyone else working gangs for that matter. It wasn’t until he was able to look away from her belly that he realized he had met Julie Owen before. She looked so sad. Her eyes were soft, and Dennis wanted to think it was because in her final moments she had one last second where there was no pain. But he had been to too many murder scenes to believe it for long—the muscles in her face just went slack when she died. No matter the reason, Julie was giving Dennis the same look she did when she’d caught him.
It was at least ten years ago. Dennis had just finished a stakeout that lasted thirty-six hours. It was a marathon of napping, eating shitty food, and pissing in bottles while the other guy snored. Nothing turned up; the suspect never came home and the detective sergeant had no overtime left to authorize. After thirty-six wasted hours, Dennis’s partner wanted a beer and a soak in a Jacuzzi. Dennis wanted something better. A blowjob was more relaxing than a hot tub, and it cost less. Dennis dropped his partner back at the station and cruised the late night crowd for his
nightcap.
The pay-for-play crowd was thin on the streets in Hamilton, and Dennis was used to using the numbers he found in the back pages of free newspapers. It was too late to be calling around, and Dennis wasn’t in the mood to spend a fortune. A blowjob doesn’t require a lot of finesse or effort to be halfway decent, and the difference between a fine BJ and a great BJ wasn’t worth a couple hundred extra bucks.
Dennis found a working girl on a corner and pulled over with the window already down. “This is your ride. Get in.”
The hooker eased away from the brick wall she was leaning on and walked across the sidewalk to the car. She put her forearms on the window ledge and leaned inside.
“You gonna give me a ride?” Her voice was a weird in-between; it didn’t sound masculine and it didn’t really sound feminine. The voice wasn’t important to Dennis; he was good so long as the hooker didn’t sound like a truck driver.
Dennis could see stubble on the hooker’s chin. Her Adam’s apple was large and there were bumps around it from razor burn. The wig she was wearing was red and the curls were rolled out in some places.
“What’s your name?”
“Ellen.”
“Nice name. What’s it short for?”
The hooker gave him a look. “You really want to know.”
“You want this?” Dennis said holding up two twenties.
“Martin,” she said.
“Hop in, Martin.”
She opened the door and sat on the seat before pulling her legs into the car. Dennis saw she was wearing a pair of leopard-print wedge heels. The calves above them looked smooth, and Dennis ran a hand up one leg all the way to the hem of a short black skirt.
