Anxiety, a thing of the past, as he moved back into the bar and ordered another shot of the dark stuff. He watched the women dance on the stage, careful not to catch their eyes; he focused in on a breast, a brown thigh, a calf, or a trimmed bush. He ached for a cigarette, bought some from an old woman behind the bar and lit up, blowing the smoke at the naked dancers. He paid the bill and walked back out into the Fun City circus. Found a stationary store and bought what he needed to carry on researching and writing. Printer ink and A4. With every step, he gathered new material; he was breaking out of his room, walking and talking with real people. Another bar, a woman came and sat next to him, her hand brushed his crotch, how long had it been since he had? Since he had what? Taken a fall, tipped over the edge, lost himself, how long had it been?
The answer was too long.
So, he had a son?
A grown up son sitting in jail for the murder of a prostitute.
A boy needed a father, a guiding hand.
Taylor needed a drink.
A new bar, this one lively. He overheard a conversation. A football-shirted Brit and a German wearing a white vest.
“Terrible thing these murders,” Football-shirt said sucking on a beer.
“Yes, terrible, all za ladies are uber scared.”
“Still, I think you can tell, when you see a killer, it’s in their eyes, you know. I spent five years in the nick, back in England, and I met a few killers, all of them weren’t quite right you know,” Football-shirt said. “You could see it.”
“Ya, it is in ze eyes,” said the white vest.
It was in the hands and the mind, thought Taylor, but he didn’t say anything, it felt good to be around people again. Real people with thoughts, dreams, and aspirations. He went into the toilets, found the lone cubicle and mapped out another two lines. Now he was flying, paid his bill, and walked back out onto the street. Whores were everywhere under the neon lights, wearing bikinis and holding signs advertising their places of business, tourists stumbled along drunk, falling into doorways and bending over puking in the street. Taylor could see the connection, the London Victorian streets, the teahouses, gin houses, workhouses, whorehouses, the exploitation of the poor, and the gratification of the rich. It was all here in Fun City. He walked past an Irish bar as a football team scored and the crowd cheered. Perhaps it was an International. Who cared? He had little time for football.
Taylor would be working late.
FORTY-NINE
THE ROOM wasn’t much, but it had been the Detective’s home for the past six months. Living in hotel rooms afforded the Detective a certain freedom he had never experienced in his past lives as a nine to five worker back west. Perhaps, the ambivalence was what impressed him about living in hotel rooms. The fact that hardly anybody knew who he was and hardly anybody cared was ideal. The young woman who handed him the key was concerned with nothing more than the money that he paid, punctually, every month. The envelope from The White Flamingo meant he was able to pay two months in advance. If he were to bring a friend to the room, it would not have mattered. Kelly’s ghost did not remain. He knew nothing about the other residents of the hotel, nor did he care.
Kelly had not returned, as far as he could gather, it bothered him in that it was out of character for a bargirl not to return to her client. But was he a client? He hadn’t paid her, he shuddered as the thought fell heavily on his shoulders; she considered him to be the killer. She was afraid.
The lift rose to the third floor and Joe walked over to his door. His heartbeat rose as he noticed the door was ajar, he waited a moment figuring the cleaner was in the room, but there were no sounds coming from inside. He knocked twice and opened the door.
Clothes were thrown across the bed and his Samsonite had been turned upside down. His camera and Notebook were missing. On the vanity unit stood what Joe took to be a human kidney. At least, part of one. It had been placed on a china plate with a knife and fork. A note stood next to the plate, and the body part:
From Hell
Sorry.
I send you half the
Kidney I took from one woman
Preserved it for you. The other piece I
Fried and ate it. It was very nice. I
May send you the bloody knife that
Took it out if you only wait a while
Longer
Signed Catch me when
You can
Mister Lusk.
He shook a couple of codeine tablets from the pillbox and dry swallowed. He felt a presence, like a dark shadow behind his back. The shadow grew larger. He turned. Nothing, just a wardrobe, a bed, and a pile of clothes. He took the note and considered giving it to Kult as evidence, the kidney, no, it would only be used against him. He threw the note and the kidney in the trash along with the plate and walked downstairs, past the receptionist. He threw out the garbage and went back upstairs, took the Samsonite and packed some clothes, his passport, and what was left of his belongings. Walking back downstairs, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. The dark shadow he put down as his addiction, the train, the wreck, and the ghosts.
The City.
He had to get clean, really clean. Not chipping away at the bottle or the pills. His works were under the mattress. German precision. He picked up the works and carried with him as he rode the lift to the lobby. He put the works in the case, sentimental values.
He gave the woman the key, said he would back in a week. Stopped in a pharmacy and bought a supply of barbs, vitamins, and a supply of antihistamines. He bought a copy of the Fun City Express. He took a motorcycle taxi to a temple on the top of the hill, spoke to the head monk and asked for a place to stay and a supply of paper and pens. The monk led him to a small hut overlooking the neon lights of the city. The first night he shook and sweated as sleep alluded him. The ghosts of the murdered women he could hear outside the circumference of the temple, chattering and giggling, their conversation barely audible like leaves in the wind. The second morning he walked the temple grounds and helped sweep the pathways, as he swept the leaves from the pathway, he cleared his mind. His thoughts slowed down to a pace where he was able to deal with them in simple terms, one at a time, with reason. The third afternoon the shaking stopped, and he managed to both eat and write. The monks brought him stewed fruit and green tea. He studied the maps and drew diagrams on the paper in his hut. He watched the crimson sun fall down across the city below him. He watched the boats moving in and out down in the harbor. The neon lights flickering from the bars and the cathouses below, somewhere inside the lights, the killer would be plotting the next event. He thought back to the lessons on the occult that he had listened to from his gypsy mother. She had used many methods to speak with the dead, a gold wedding ring on a chain that moved left or right to answer questions, yes or no, a deck of tarot cards painted by the hand of Alistair Crowley. Table tapings and Ouija boards, once he had contacted a spirit that spelt out his name followed by the letters D.E.A.T – The glass span from the table before the final letter.
H.
Now he understood.
The Detective remembered a period of mirror gazing. His mother, shortly before she was admitted to the insane asylum, would spend hours staring into a mirror until her face transformed into something so sinister that he found it difficult to recall in exact detail. She had walked the neighborhood with that face until a concerned neighbor rang the police, who came around with a social worker and took her away. The Detective was then processed into a series of institutions, a train of professionals who were paid to care, or to look like they cared. Joe realized at that young age, he would never fake sincerity, and those that did were little more than observers in a world where there were very few players, and hardly any stars.
He sat on the hill until he had found out the answer. The answer was in the shape of the bird and the letter A. On the fourth day, he had regained strength. He returned to Fun City.
FIFTY
HALE SAT at the Marina bar s
moking a Cuban cigar.
“I got us something,” he said smiling. “Shit, Joe, what happened to you?”
“I took a trip to the mountain. Erased some demons.”
“You look like a fourteen year old, bro.”
“Kicked the junk, the booze, my body is a temple. Now what you got?”
“Progress,” Hale smiled and took a bite on his beer.
“Good,” Joe sat and ordered a soda water, no ice. “What is it?”
“Well, the mobile text message?”
“Yeah.”
“The text message that Tammy got before she died?”
“Yeah.”
“I found who made that call.”
“And?”
“Well, it was a friend, a girl friend from The Blue Rose.”
“Shit.”
“But there’s something else.”
“Spill.”
“Well, you know I told you we could find all the numbers that had called and sent messages to Tammy’s cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s one number that keeps coming up. It’s a landline; I located it to a small apartment on the sixth road.”
“You know who lives there?”
“I asked the landlady. She says some Western guy uses it as a bolt hole. You know a home away from home. The kind of place a man can use to hide his, uh, nocturnal activities.”
The Detective thought for a moment. “You spoke to the landlady and you got the location?”
“Yes,” Hale smiled.
Joe clapped his hands and smiled. “What have I done? I’ve created a detective. Good work. Lead me to this place.”
“Wait,” said Hale putting a hand on The Detective’s wrist.
“What?”
“First, you have to pay my bar bill. I’ve been here a while.”
“Asshole.”
They took a motorcycle taxi to the PB House on Sixth Road. Joe noticed the main entrance door required a key card. “You know the room number?”
“36A”
“Right. We sit and wait for somebody to exit, and then we go up there.”
“I have a better idea.” Hale walked into a travel agency next to the apartment block and returned with a middle-aged woman who was all smiles and gestures as she opened the entrance door. Hale walked in and waved goodbye to the woman. Joe walked in and they went up the stairs and up to the third floor.
“This is it.”
“Good,” said The Detective. “Hale, do you have one of those mobiles that takes pictures?”
“Sure.”
“Get ready to use it.”
Joe knocked on the door three times. Silence answered him. He pushed the plywood door. “About as reliable as a Fun City travel agent,” he said. “One. Two. Three!”
Both shoulders slammed into the door, and it gave a little. Two more kicks and the door was open. Inside, it was dark. Joe flicked a switch. The room was the normal expat cell. A fridge, a kitchen nook, a table, a bed.
“What’s that stink?” Hale said.
“It’s coming from the kitchen area.”
They approached opening cupboards and drawers until the Detective found the source of the stench. “Holy Mary, mother of God.”
“What is it?”
Joe held the jar containing the prostitute’s livers. Hale leaned over the sink and vomited heavily.
“Keep it together. We don’t want him to know we’ve been here.”
“What the fuck we do now?” Hale said between retches.
“Well, we could go through this mess and try and find some clues or we could simply rest up outside and see who enters.”
“Waiting gets my vote.”
“Hang on,” Joe walked to the bookcase and pulled out the volume on Black Magic.
Just like Jack
“I think I know who his last target will be. We call in the filth and wait for him,” Joe said. “Leave everything as it was, clean up the vomit.”
“What about the door?”
“We fix it.”
“Brilliant. Like the A-Team we invent a new fucking door.”
Joe dipped in his wallet. “Take a motorbike taxi to the Post Office on the eight road. There’s a locksmith. Bring him here and take this old lock with you. He should be able to refit it in under thirty minutes.”
“And you?”
“I’m going to stay here and read through his book collection.”
“And if he shows?”
“I’ll kill the bastard. The last point on the map is this apartment. He has to bring her here.”
“Bring who here?”
“Kelly, the woman with the tattoos.”
FIFTY-ONE
THE KILLER moved with haste. The maze of bars along the second road, were for the killer, a dirty rabbit warren of degradation and vice. He winced as he passed through ladyboys and ladybirds, Russian hookers; trash in heaps littered the avenues and back roads of Fun City. His position had to be exact. The point where Beach Road met the upper Road, the point that straddled the two police districts. The sound of music from an open-air karaoke joint; the sound of a woman’s voice being slowly strangled by the hopelessness of love in the big city. Kids sold chewing gum and plastic roses on the street; they sold other unmentionable services to the pederasts who gathered from all over the rock to exercise their particular cowardly and evil brand of lust. A chancer walked past with an iguana perched on his shoulder and a Polaroid camera hanging around his neck. Another had a slow Loris monkey, large, sad, drugged eyes, blinking slowly under the neon lights; the monkey’s eyes sadder. The Killer walked past caravans of Arabs, groups of Indians, teams of British rugby players. Americans with their intelligent naivety, Germans with their gross mustaches, Scandinavians with their safe welfare state system, renewable energy, open-toed sandals and their hookers on their arms. Smooth copper-bodied hipsters, Spanish and Italian, Turkish, Greek, greasy slick-backed hair negotiating free rides with limited success.
He slipped into a back alley bathed in purple twilight and scented with the stench of sewage. A beggar crawled across his path, blocking his way and holding forth an alms bowl scotch-tapped to one of his hideous stumps. What remained of his legs were twisted boneless scraps of flesh dragged behind his torso, his face ghostly muttering curses as the spit bubbled from his awful toothless mouth. The Killer bent down as if to donate to his bowl, but instead withdrew his knife and slit the beggar across the throat, causing the creature to fall to the ground, gurgling, omitting an awful inhuman stench that filled the alleyway as the Killer stepped over the horrid mess of rags and continued on his way.
Where would she be?
The Blue Rose.
The bar was near empty, apart from a few tables and a gaggle of whores sat on the floor, playing cards. He saw her back, covered with the most ghastly tattoos. He remembered the first time he had taken her, perhaps four years ago, she was barely legal and straight out of the bush. Before the tattoos, the money, and men, the dreams, the nightmares, the diseases, and the neon nightmare they both found themselves within.
“Don’t I remember you?”
“No. It’s my first time here.”
“Your eyes, I remember your eyes.”
“Maybe somebody looks like me. There are billions of people on the planet. You want a drink?”
“Okay. Rum and coke.”
“Then later maybe we can…”
“I’m not going with customer tonight. I have a headache, have period too.”
“But, you don’t understand. I only want to talking with you. I am old, lonely.”
“You have a telephone? Why don’t you call somebody?”
“I need, a, a, human contact. Ever since my wife died, I get so alone at night. I just need somebody. Somebody in the bed next to me.”
“Your wife died?”
“It was an accident.”
“Accident?”
“Yes. It happened here in Fun City ten years ago. Every year I come back to re
member her.”
“And have sex with lady?”
“No, no sex. You don’t understand. I only want to have somebody near me. I rent the room that we stayed in. The same room every year, and I like to feel the warmth of a body next to me, it helps me, it helps me cope with the loss.”
“That room has ghost for sure,” Kelly’s eyes narrowed as she scratched her head.
“No ghosts. Only memories,” he watched her drink her lady drink and then said. “Five hundred dollars.”
“And no sex,” her eyes widened.
“No sex.”
“Only sleeping,” lips pursed.
“Only sleeping, sure,” his hands open palmed above the table.
“Okay, but first you pay bar and buy drinks for my friends,” Kelly waved her hand to a table where six or seven miserable prostitutes drank with straws from a plastic bucket containing what the Killer took to be cheap local rum mixed with Coca-Cola.
“I’ll pay the bar fine, your friends I will come back for.”
Kelly shrugged; the chances of another client that night were zero, unless he came back. They were all monsters in one way or another.
All of them.
FIFTY-TWO
THE DETECTIVE watched them enter the building. The door had been fixed. Hale waited across the street. Kelly walked first, the Killer held the door open for her. He wore a dark hat, bearded. Joe was not close enough to make out his identity. There was something familiar about the man, the way he held himself, drunk yet cordial. The original Ripper had been described as a soaker. A man who could drink from eight in the morning to twelve at night without appearing drunk. A professional drinker, one who took from the glass or the bottle only what he needed to make it through the day, yet never enough to make a careless or telling mistake. Joe walked out of the room, the syringe in his hand. He had loaded it with a cocktail of chemicals designed to put the killer to sleep. He needed him alive, to confess and spring The Flamingo’s kid.
The White Flamingo Page 13
