Dominion

by Bentley Little

  Penelope never wanted to see any of her mothers when they were really drunk.

  Finished with her food, she pushed her plate away and swallowed the last of her grape juice. She stood, bowed, and addressed her mothers. “May I

  be excused? I have a lot of homework tonight.”

  “You may not,” Mother Margeaux said.

  Penelope sat back down. In addition to its formality, dinner in their house was also uncomfortably ritualistic, and though she had lived with that every night of her life, it was still something that made her feel slightly uneasy. They dined at precisely seven-thirty every evening, and no matter what any of them were doing, they had to stop at seven, wash up, and change into a green dress. Her mother’s dresses were all identical—simply designed full-length gowns—while hers was slightly different, not quiet as expensive. They began each dinner with a song, any song, which they took turns initiating. To leave the table after eating, each of them had to ask the permission of the others; if the decision was not unanimous, the person had to wait. Until she’d been in fifth grade and stayed overnight for the first time at a friends’ house, she had thought all people ate this way. She had even begun to panic when she’d discovered that she’d forgotten to bring her green dinner dress to her friend’s house. But after embarrassing herself by asking detailed questions of her friend’s mother, she’d learned that not everyone ate dinner in such a ritualized manner, that in fact hardly anyone did. The knowledge had made her extremely uncomfortable.

  She picked up her empty glass, poured the last few drops of grape juice onto her tongue. She fiddled with her fork.

  It was Mother Felice who brought up the subject of Dion.

  “So how’s your boyfriend?” she asked casually.

  “Dion?”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  Her mother’s next question died in her throat. She looked quickly around the table. There was silence.

  “Penelope.” Mother Margeaux’s voice was quiet, but it was strong.

  Penelope looked toward the head of the table. Mother Margeaux dabbed at her lips with a napkin and replaced the napkin in her lap. In the warm low light of the dining room, her lips looked almost as dark as her hair. The whites of her eyes seemed large as she focused her intense gaze on Penelope.

  “I thought you and Dion were dating,” Mother Margeaux said.

  Penelope squirmed in her seat. “Not exactly. Not yet.”

  “Well, what exactly is your relationship?”

  “Why do you want to know?’* Penelope felt herself reddening.

  Mother Margeaux smiled. “We do not disapprove of Dion. Nor do we disapprove of you going out on dates. We would simply like to know the status of your relationship. After all, we are your mothers.”

  “I don’t know,” Penelope admitted. “I don’t know what our relationship is.”

  “Are you planning to go out sometime?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “But you do like him?” Mother Felice asked.

  “Yes!” She stood, exasperated, embarrassed. “May I be excused? I really do have a lot of homework.”

  “Yes, you may be excused.” Mother Margeaux looked around the table.

  There were no objections.

  Penelope strode quickly from the room, running upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. She had avoided the Big Discussion she’d been anticipating, but her mothers’ quiet probing had been even worse. There seemed something secretive about it, something that made her uneasy. The questions themselves had been innocent enough, but they had been asked in a manner that was anything but innocent, and as Penelope flopped down on her bed, she could not get out of her mind the satisfied way in which Mother Margeaux had smiled.

  TOHTV Lieutenant Horton stood in front of the printer and read the report as it ran out. He held up the long roll of perforated paper and frowned as he read the DUI statistics. Up two hundred percent from last month? Up a hundred and ninety-six percent from the same period last year? That wasn’t possible. Someone must have made a mistake. He dropped the paper.

  The printer continued to noisily click out its dot matrix, one line at a time.

  Now he would have to spend an hour double-checking the input.

  He was going to have a lot of comp time accumulated by the time this was all over. In addition to working full-time on the murder investigations, he still had to perform his regular duties, which meant that he was putting in twelve-hour days as well as working weekends.

  He took a drink of his lukewarm coffee, put the paper cup down on one of the shelves housing the tech manuals, and bent down to peer through the printer’s smoked plastic window at the latest lines of the report.

  Drunk and disorderly arrests up a hundred and fifteen percent.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  When he had transferred here from San Francisco over a decade ago, Horton had been surprised by the relatively few alcohol-related arrests made in Napa and the surrounding communities. Incidents of public drunkenness, reckless endangerment, DUI, etc., were surprisingly low, particularly for a region so heavily devoted to the production of alcohol. It was as if people, overly conscious of the area’s economic dependence on liquor, made a special effort to behave responsibly when it came to imbibing. It was something that had remained constant during his tenure on the force and which he and everyone else took for granted.

  Horton sat down on the low, empty table next to the door and waited for the report to finish printing. He pulled a bottle of Tylenol from his coat pocket, shook out two caplets, and washed them down with the last of the coffee. He didn’t have a headache, but he could feel the blood thumping in his temples and his thoughts were heavy, muffled, coming to him as if through a thick fog.

  He stared across the room at a faded poster someone had tacked up on the wall years ago: a stylized cancan girl kicking up her leg in a dance.

  The poster reminded him for some reason of Laura, and he found himself wondering what had happened to her. It was not a thought that occurred to him often these days, but even after all these years it was one tinged with more than a hint of sadness. The alimony payments had stopped when she’d remarried, and though he’d thought at the time that he should still keep in contact with her, still keep tabs on her whereabouts, he had not made the effort. He had moved three times since then. There was no telling how many times she had moved. Periodically, he got the urge to run her name through the computer and find out where she lived now, but he didn’t know her current last name, was not even sure if she was still married to the same man.

  It was strange to think that two people who had once been so close could now not even know if the other was still alive. There’d been a time when he had honestly believed that he could not live without her, when he had selfishly hoped that they would both live well into their nineties and that he would die first so he would not have to go on alone. He’d been alone for over fifteen years now, and the woman with whom he’d shared his most intimate secrets, his worst fears, was now a stranger, sharing the hopes and dreams of another man he did not even know.

  Horton slid off the table, stood. What the hell was he doing thinking about this? Why was he wasting his time on this nostalgia crap? There were enough problems for him to be concentrating on in the here and now. More than enough.

  The murders for one.

  The murder investigations were not going at all as planned. The police were doing everything they could— interviewing friends, family, and business acquaintances, combing the nearby neighborhoods for possible witnesses, quizzing the appropriate file suspects—but there was no real evidence to go on, and despite the sophistication of their techniques, none seemed to be forthcoming. With the obvious cult angle, he would have thought Fowler’s murder would be a little easier to work up a lead on, but both investigations were stalled at the starting point. They were simply going through the motions, following procedure, hoping something new would
turn up. If these two killings were connected—and everyone from the chief on down believed they were—the murderer knew his stuff. He was obviously crazy, but he was just as obviously not stupid.

  And that was a terrifying combination.

  Jack Hammond thought it was something else entirely. He wouldn’t say exactly what he thought was happening —apparently he belonged to some cult or fringe group that required a vow of secrecy—but he’d hinted around about resurrection and prophecy and all sorts of wacky religious crap. Which was why he’d been taken off the case.

  Horton walked into the hallway, glanced up and down the corridor. At the far end he saw the captain still in his office, his silhouette outlined clearly against the lit window (hat faced the hall. As Horton watched, he saw the older man discreetly pour a shot of whisky into his Mcdonald’s coffee cup. Horton frowned. Captain Furm’er drinking on the job? He could not believe what he was seeing. The captain was the most by-the-book officer he had ever met, a man who went into rages if staff meetings were not conducted according to proper procedure. This was definitely not like him.

  Hammond. Furnier.

  There were a lot of weird things going on.

  The captain looked up, out of the window, saw him.

  Horton immediately ducked back into the computer room. He stood in front of the printer and began folding the long roll of reports.

  A moment later, he heard the captain’s heavy footsteps pass in the hallway, but he did not look up and the captain did not stop by.

  Officer Dennis Mccomber pulled out of the Winchelps parking lot, cinnamon roll in hand, a Styrofoam cup of coffee between his legs. He cruised down Main toward the periphery of town, eyes open for drinkers, tokers, partiers, parkers, the usual Friday night offenders. He was glad to be on the street again, happy to be driving. It was routine duty, but it sure beat working with Horton on homicide. It sure as hell beat that.

  That glamour shit might look good on TV, might impress the women in conversation, but it was a creepy damn business and he didn’t like it one bit.

  He drove across the Spring Street intersection and slowed down as he passed the park. He was tempted to shine his light in the dark section of the parking lot, underneath the trees, but he was still eating the cinnamon roll and his fingers were sticky. He finished the pastry and drove with his knees while he pulled out a Wet One and cleaned his hand.

  He took a sip of coffee. Working homicide was different than he’d thought it would be. A lot different. The academy training had taught him what to do and how to act, but it had not prepared him emotionally for the experience. All the films and reenactments in the world could not adequately simulate the intense pressure and heightened reality of an actual murder scene.

  And no dummy or playacting test subject, no matter how good the makeup, could ever fill in for a real corpse.

  Particularly not a corpse that had been mutilated.

  Mccomber shivered, turning down the air conditioning though he knew the coldness came from within. He’d had nightmares about Fowler the watchman ever since that day at the winery. Nightmares in which Fowler, bloody and faceless, had stood in the fermenting cave and screamed endlessly with the raw, open hole that had been his mouth. Nightmares in which Fowler had chased him through a tortured, shadowed landscape of living grapevines to a monstrous vat of black wine. Nightmares in which he had gone to work and everyone in the station had been horribly, bloodily disfigured.

  Last night he’d gotten drunk, really drunk, blackout drunk, for the first time since he’d met Julie. She hadn’t understood, had been frightened of him, and though part of him had wanted to seek her sympathy, another part had wanted to hit her, hurt her, make her pay for the way he was feeling, and he’d had to force himself not to punch her in the face.

  He turned onto Grapevine Road. He took another sip of coffee, but it tasted like shit, and he rolled down die window, dumped out the rest of the cup’s contents, and tossed the cup itself onto the floor of the cruiser. He was coming up on one of the valley’s busier lovers’ lanes, and he slowed down, hoping for some action.

  He was rewarded with a red Mazda parked underneath a tree by the side of the road.

  Mccomber slowed, cut his lights, and pulled in back of the vehicle. He grabbed his flashlight, got out of the police car and, putting his right hand on fee butt of his pistol, walked forward. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a teenage boy in the passenger seat of the car, leaning back, his eyes closed, a look of relaxed joy on his face. A

  moment later, a girl lifted her head from his lap, pushed the hair out of her eyes and back around her neck, and lowered her head once again.

  Mccomber grinned. This was more like it. This was going to be fun.

  He put on his most serious expression, strode up to the car, and rapped loudly on the driver’s side window, shining the flashlight and peering in.

  The chief’s daughter sat up and stared back at him dumbly, fingers still grasping the boy’s hard, wet penis.

  Mccomber gazed at the pair, shocked. They were both hopelessly drunk. He could see it in their glassy-eyed stares, in the dumb slackness of their mouths. His light reflected off sweaty skin. The fun had gone out of this scare, but he decided to pretend he didn’t know who the girl was, and he motioned for the boy to roll down the window.

  He waited until the window was down before speaking. He tried not to look at the still stiff organ peeking out from between the folds of hastily pulled up pants. “What are you two doing, exercising in there?”

  His voice was threatening, official, but though the boy seemed frightened, the chief’s daughter was not intimidated.

  She picked up a wine bottle from the floor and took a swig, not looking at him. “Fuck you.”

  Chief’s daughter or no chief’s daughter, it was time to play hardball.

  “May I see your driver’s license?” Me Comber said.

  The boy licked his lips nervously. “Look, we’re sorry. Please don’t—”

  “Your license,” Mccomber repeated.

  The boy dug through his pants and pulled out his wallet. His hands were shaking as he withdrew his driver’s license.

  “Mr. Holman?” Mccomber, said, reading the name next to the poorly shot photo. “Will you and the young lady please step out of the car?”

  “We didn’t—”

  “Please step out of the car.”

  He hadn’t intended to do anything but scare them, put them through a few sobriety tests, then let them off with a warning, but as he stood mere, the wine bottle few over the roof of the Mazda toward his head.

  “Fuck off, pig!” the chief’s daughter yelled.

  The glass shattered on the asphalt.

  He knew he was acting out of anger and not reason, that he was making what could be a career decision, but he strode around the car, yanked the staggering girl to her feet, and twisted her arm around her back.

  “Police brutality!” she yelled.

  “If you do not cooperate, young lady, you will be spending the rest of the night in a jail cell.”

  “She didn’t mean it,” the boy said, apologizing for her.

  “Fuck you!” The girl was sobbing, but there was no sadness in her tears, only anger and frustration. She glared at Mccomber defiantly. “It’s almost here, and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it!”

  “What’s almost here?”

  “Him!”

  “Who?”

  Her expression clouded; her gaze seemed to lose some of its intensity.

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was confused but still defiant.

  “Look, I’ll take her home. She’s sorry—”

  “Shut up,” Mccomber snapped.

  It’s almost here.

  He’d nearly understood that, it had almost meant something to him, and that was why he now held her without moving, why he wanted the two of them to shut up so he could have time to think. Even outside the car, he could smell the wine they had been drinking. It hun
g heavy in the air, recharged every few seconds by the girl’s exhalation of breath, and it made him feel slightly nauseous, gave him a minor headache.

  It’s almost here.

  He felt that too, had felt it ever since he’d seen the watchman’s body at the winery, though he never would have thought to express it that way. There was a palpable feeling in the air, a building tension, like the accumulation of energy or the gathering of power or … He wasn’t sure. But something was coming to a head. Something he did not understand and probably would not believe in if he did. Something the chief’s daughter had obviously tapped into.

  He suddenly wanted a drink himself.

  He looked toward the boy, now buckling his pants. “Mr. Holman?” he said.

  The boy looked at him, frightened. “Yes?”

  “I could run you in for being a minor and being under the influence, for having an open container of alcohol in your vehicle, for indecent exposure and, if I wanted to get nasty, for statutory rape.” He stared at the boy, waited for a response, was glad to see that there was none.

  “But I’m going to let you off with a warning this time on the condition that you lock your car and walk—I said, walk—the little lady home. If I come by later and find that this car had been moved, that will mean that you were also driving under the influence, and I am afraid that is an offense I will not be able to overlook. Do I make myself clear?”