“All wives do,” said Joe.
He stood and left one-armed Danny with his two little helpers.
THIRTY-TWO
THE MAP.
Fun City.
The locations of the killings. The Detective sat watching Taylor. He was an extremely nervous man, a hunted man, Joe thought, somebody who was dealing with pain on a complex and untreatable level. They were sitting on either side of a dining table with a map of Fun City spread out between them. Taylor had long hair, he reminded the Detective of a photograph he had seen of Alexander Trochhi, in Paris, in the fifties.
“The upper road, the beach road…The Killer would cross to the Seventh Road.” Joe compared the sketch to the doodles he had made on the map, it was symmetrical.
Just like Jack.
The double event.
“So, he will kill twice tonight, I’m going out there, you want to join?” Joe asked the man opposite him.
“I can’t”
“Why not?”
“I have panic attacks; it’s difficult to go out. I can’t talk about it.”
“The more you talk about it, the easier it is. The more you go outside, the easier it is, Taylor.”
“I know, I work as a psychiatrist.”
“I have these dreams.”
“Most people do.”
“That’s cute, Taylor.”
“I didn’t tell you my name.”
“I’m a detective.”
“Right.”
“You go outside. You put one foot in front of the other and then you repeat. One foot in front of the other. You keep doing it until you have walked around the block. Then you do that again.”
“Sure. I know how it works. ”
“I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll drag you around the block.”
“I deplore violence.”
“Well, you seem to like reading about it.”
“This is research.”
“Research for what?”
“To find the killer, I’m helping you, Joe.”
“And I’m helping you. Until tomorrow.” The Detective stood and let himself out of the apartment. He thought about loneliness and solitude as he rode the elevator down to the ground floor. What was the difference between loneliness and solitude?
One was voluntary.
Everybody has a past and not many of them were rosy. The important thing was to glance in the rearview mirror, but never to stare. Writers, Joe considered, were probably more likely to suffer from mental illness than those in other professions. Hours spent sitting alone in front of a screen, no human interaction, no life. He had read somewhere that writers spent their youths living life and their adult lives sitting in a chair writing about it. He guessed there was some truth in that analogy. Only the very lucky and the very talented were able to spend time away from the desk.
Joe was one of them.
He stopped in a bar and threw three Tiger Sweats down his throat. He threw some cash on the bar to settle it and walked across beach road. He took a motorcycle taxi along the second road and then at the mouth of the road, he saw the police motorcycle. He saw the pick-up truck that masqueraded as an ambulance. His first thoughts were for Kelly.
He dismounted the bike and ran over to the truck; he caught a glimpse of the face of the dead body in the back of the pick-up truck. She had been horribly mutilated, dismembered, but the face was clear, the head separate to the body, it was not a face that he had seen before. Not a body that he had seen before, but that didn’t make it all right. She was number three.
She wasn’t Kelly.
The double event.
The third and fourth victim.
The same night.
He looked at the map. He would skip across the road. The Detective flagged down another motorcycle and asked the rider to cruise the seventh road.
The Blue Rose
THIRTY-THREE
THE KILLER moved through the inter-connecting road with his head down. He passed a group of Russian tourists, semi-naked, drinking from bottles of beer and singing in their drunken tongues. He passed groups of Indians and Chinese tourists, local women worked the streets. Past sickly looking palm trees and over-spilling garbage cans, past the debris of human waste, the smell of raw human sewage wafting from the open drains beneath the sidewalk. It was now dark above him, the moon hidden behind a clump of clouds. Cats, rats, and stray dogs cast long shadows as they patrolled the streets. At his bolthole, he walked through the apartment entrance. Upstairs, he showered, changed into a different set of clothes, washed the knife and within twelve minutes, was back out on the street a new man. The fourth target was a long-legged, tall woman who he had bar-fined the year before, he saw her sitting on a motorbike smoking a cigarette, a foreigner was standing near her trying to negotiate a deal of some kind. She was angry and swore at the man, an Indian, who backed away into the night. He remembered that her name was Joy, she liked chocolate, and had once dreamed of working as an air hostess.
The Killer walked over.
“Why are you so sad?”
“Not sad, only angry,” she said looking at him with a faint whisper of recognition in her eye.
“Why?”
“Because he wants me to go back and sleep with him and his ten friends. Why Indian man like to do like that?”
“Some people are sick in the brain,” the Killer said.
“Not like you?” Joy said.
“Not like me, come, let me show you.”
“Show me what?”
“Show you I am safe, I just want somebody to sleep near me.”
“No sex?”
“No, I get lonely, and I have money.”
“How much?”
“I will pay you five hundred dollars, to sleep next to me, and I won’t touch you.”
Joy turned on the ignition and revved the motorbike. Her frown had turned into a smile with the promise of an easy gig. She thought fast. In her line of work, she had to. “Let’s go,” she said.
“No,” the killer put up a hand. “I would prefer to walk, the traffic scares me, and it’s not far.”
“How far,” she killed the engine.
“Come, follow me,” he said.
Joy was wearing the shortest pair of shorts he had ever seen. The killer watched those never-ending legs unwrap themselves from around the motorbike and she stood before him, she was, he thought, devilishly beautiful. Her skin was light coffee-colour and her hair was cut short and held back with a band. Her nose was pierced with a tiny stud. The shape of her breasts were clearly defined underneath the tight T-shirt that bore the logo – Fun City.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE KILLER took her in the alley that led from the tenth to the eighth road. Above them, the flashing lights from a short-time hotel, the sound of rock music from a bar on the Beach Road.
“Stop here, for a moment,” he said.
“Why?” she said nervously fumbling in her handbag.
“Because it is time.”
“Time for what?”
The knife responded to the question with a series of commas, question marks, exclamations and semi-colons. Her body slumped against the wall as he tore and slashed at her with his blade.
Tore out the liver, the satchel swallowed it, still quivering.
Who ever said the pen was mightier?
He was finished, she was a mess on the concrete, the pool of blood, black under the night sky. He didn’t look back, kept moving until he was away and into a crowd of Japanese tourists, drunk and singing in the street, he moved past, and walked with haste back to his bolt hole.
The fourth, the bloody fourth.
He took the book from the shelf and took out the map.
Marked it accordingly.
THIRTY-FIVE
JOE FIGURED the alley between the eight and tenth road, he was right about the place but wrong about the time. A woman, collapsed on the concrete. Her legs were long. He bent down, took out his mobile, and switched it to the torch mode.
What he saw would make an ambulance driver puke. Joe did likewise. He retched onto the street, the vomit merging with the blood.
Lights,
Cops,
A voice shouted, footsteps…He ran.
He ran through the alley and headed back to his hotel, the image etched in his mind.
THIRTY-SIX
GRAFFITI SPRAYED outside the short-time hotel:
The afflicted must not be the ones blamed.
Who were the afflicted? The women of the night or those that used and abused them. Taylor had read about a similar piece of graffiti, during the Whitechapel affair. The graffiti had been removed in an attempt not to cause a scene of unrest.
THIRTY-SEVEN
JOE DYLAN opened the door to his apartment. The paint hung from the walls in flakes as a reminder of the city’s humidity. The bed had sunken from past traffic and the television worked only when it felt like something was worth being broadcast to its lonely occupant. His belongings, such as they were, were all contained in the walk-in closet. His Sony netbook sat on top of a rosewood writing desk where he wrote some notes and then, exhausted, collapsed on the bed, the pillow an old friend beneath his shattered mind. Withdrawal spurred him to activity after an hour and twenty minutes of near sleep. He cooked up a shot and hit it in a new vein, an ankle shot that had eluded him for weeks. The room took a sudden purple glow, like a Near Eastern whorehouse. The visions were surrealistic at first, like a Van Gogh painting before taking solid shape and form, he wasn’t sure if it were a dream within a dream, or the dream itself that fell before him.
He saw Tammy, in front of him; she sat on the bed and touched his arm. Her breath was as cold as ice. An ice pick lobotomy. She spoke. “Kelly will be last. You do know that Kelly will be last?”
He let the vision slide. She wasn’t the first ghost that had visited him, she wouldn’t be the last. A transsexual appeared from the closet, opening the door, twirling once, and then sitting on the bed next to Tammy. “She’s right, you know. The beast has a plan. It is not his plan. It is hers. She told him to do it. She’s a real bitch.” Lucky sat on the bed sucking on a lollipop. She offered the lollipop to Tammy, who licked it and smiled at The Detective.
The Detective looked up to the ceiling. Kim danced up on the ceiling and looked down at him through her legs. “What we worth?”
“Nothing,” said Tammy.
“Fucking nothing,” said Lucky.
“He wants us for what?” said Kim.
“We were already dying.”
“All of us.”
“I have to give it up,” said Joe.
“Give up what?” said Tammy.
“The junk, god darn it. This is not real.”
“Oh, it’s real alright,” said Lucky, moving closer. “You want a B.J.”
“She sucks real good, watch…”
Lucky went to work on the lollipop again. Tammy joined her. “It’s what you guys like, huh?”
The Detective closed his eyes. “This is a dream, a fucking dream.”
“It’s a fucking nightmare,” said Kim reading his mind. “You think I made merit in my lifetime. You think I’m going anywhere special. Bullshit. I’m stuck here. In this room, with you, until…”
“Until what?”
“Until you stop the monster...”
Kim hovered down from the ceiling and begun to dance in front of him. Her translucent body, moving to a silent song, as she smiled and teased him with her eyes. Across her stomach, a scar thirty centimetres in length. The stiches were fresh. One by one, the stiches fell to the ground where they withered around like small blind snakes. The abdominal wall opened and she pulled out her intestines, wind-milling them in front of her as part of her erotic performance.
Joe leaned over and puked in the waste paper basket.
A new long-legged figure walked through the far wall and began to dance, bending over with her rear facing him, she bent down and looked at Joe through the gap between her legs. “My name’s Joy,” she said silently, the Detective hearing it on a psychic level. “You want long time?”
He didn’t.
“We will haunt you every night, lover boy,” said Tammy.
“Until you stop him.”
“But who is he?”
“Think about it…”
“…Think about it real good.”
“The answer will come…”
“The answer will come to those who…”
“…Just think about it.”
“Ah, fuck,” The Detective threw the blankets over himself. The laughter and gossip of the dead women, still audible as he shook and sweated, his body temperature dropped to freezing and then rose to boiling. His heart hammered inside his chest, fear, if such a thing was possible, coursed through his body as the ghosts of the murdered women chattered and laughed around him. He was livid with the adrenalin pumping through his veins; he remembered the picture of Christ in his bedroom, the table tapping and the summoning of ghosts that haunted his past. His mother, being taken away. They were real now before him, shaking, living, breathing foul rotten breath into his hovel of a hotel room.
His heart thundered in his chest, drenched with sweat, he recalled he had a secret stash of the H in a packet under the mattress. Like all good addicts, he hid stashes when he was drunk in the hope that he would forget where he had hid them until moments, well, moments, like this. The luck of the gods. He grabbed at the stash, took his works from the bedside cabinet and began to cook. The process took away the fear of the visions surrounding him, he focussed on the bubbling chemicals, in the spoon, he drew it into the syringe and tapped the end of the plunger. A small droplet of the solution fell onto the bed.
“Oho, you like play drug, huh?” Tammy said.
“Crazy man,” said Kim.
“Shut the fuck up.” The Detective tied up using a belt, and found a point of entry where the forearm met the bicep. He sent it home.
Eyes closed, the shot silenced a million thoughts, each battling each other with equally significant points, the shot silenced them all like a sudden handclap in a rowdy classroom.
Until…
“Maybe he like share needle,” said Lucky.
“Maybe he got the HIV,” added Tammy.
“Dirty little junky,” chimed Joy.
And then, shit, it had to happen.
Vern walked through the door and sat on the floor. “It’s a mug’s game son, a mug’s game. The bottle is better than the brown sugar. I’ve done both, see?”
“Bullshit,” said the Detective. “Look at you. Look at ALL OF YOU!”
“Keep a cool heart, darling,” said Lucky stroking his thigh. “We are all in this together.”
“The fuck we are,” Joe fell back onto the bed, his eyes closing now.
Lucky, offended, threw her lollipop across the room. It hit Joe on the chest. The other ghosts grouped around and consoled her by stroking her hair and making calming, cooing sounds. A cavern of victims, each with a more torturous past than the next, consoled each other in group therapy.
Who said what for the next five hours, The Detective couldn’t be sure. The ghosts hovered around the room, as he took shot after shot. He thrashed around on the bed, hiding beneath the bed covers, sweat drenching from his body. When he arose from the sheets, he saw them. The dead whores, mocking him, laughing, dancing, and swearing. The morning took forever to arrive. The sound of birdsong outside his window erased the ghosts; the glimmer of dawn through the curtains drove them away.
One thing was certain.
He had to kick the junk.
THIRTY-EIGHT
HIS FEET led him to Taylor’s office.
“The girls that work the bars in this town are better at it than me, you know. The first two questions they ask you. What your name? Where you come from? These are the two most important questions in your line of work, in their line of work, and in mine,” Taylor said.
“I daresay in plenty of others.”
“Once we
can identify the place of a person’s birth, we can attach all kinds of labels and associations to him. The bible says love thy enemy.”
“I say we should know our enemies, but more importantly, we should know how to hurt them. The more I know people, the less I love them,” The Detective said.
“It’s a sickness,” the psychiatrist said.
“What is?”
“Love.”
Joe leaned forward on the desk. “Look, I had a mother in the nut house when I grew up. I used to wander the corridors and halls of an insane asylum as a kid. I feel at ease around the mentally ill. This town suits me. My father said I’d join my mother in the loony bin and I still have time to make it. Last night, I shared a room with ghosts. Ghosts.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your mother. Have you ever spoken to anybody about it?” The shrink’s eyes gazed directly into the detective’s eyes. He reminded Joe of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Those in positions of care were often those who abused that position. There were more dangerous nurses and social workers than there were dangerous plumbers, electricians, and florists. “Spoken to anyone other than ghosts?”
“I spoke to the bottle for ten years and then got on the program. Spoke in the rooms. The rooms spooked me and I went back to the bottle, and then, the needle,” The Detective said.
“You are using heroin?”
“It’s using me.”
“You want to kick it?”
“Not right now. The case...” Joe trailed off.
“You think the drug helps you solve crimes?”
“I see things on it that I don’t see clean.”
“And these things, these things you see, are they pleasant?”
“No. But neither are dead bodies.”
“I see. When you are ready. Ready to stop, would you come back and see me?’”
“Probably not.”
“Why?”
“Fear.”
“I see.”
The White Flamingo Page 10
