The Unlucky Man

by H T G Hedges

  To my surprise, his indifference irritated me. "There was a guy," I said. It piqued his interest for definite, even warranted a faint raise of a dark eyebrow, but on the whole didn’t get the reaction I felt it deserved.

  "A guy?"

  "Sure," I said again, annoyed at how I sounded, about how little I had to offer. "A guy. On the fire escape. Guessing put a bullet through your friend on our car."

  "Can you describe him?" Cotter asked, clearly without much hope that I could. He flipped open the pack and slid clear a smoke. He had his eyes on me in the mirror though.

  "No," I said with guilty pang. "He had odd eyes. I saw that but, you know, too much rain, too little time."

  Cotter nodded. "Odd eyes," he echoed. It was getting to be a habit of his, easier than thinking of his own sentences I guess.

  "Yes."

  "Great." He nodded again but didn’t seem surprised or disappointed or even particularly interested. His every word, every action seemed to say, "I’m just a guy doing a job; we’re going through the motions that is all."

  "You two work at…?"

  "Last Rights Funeral Services," I answered.

  "To respect and inter," Corg added before resuming his stony silence. I shot him a glance, but he was staring out the window once more, eyes locked moodily on the deteriorating weather. If Cotter noticed, or thought this outburst odd, he didn’t give it away.

  The questions carried on for some time, each less helpful than the last, and pretty soon any use we could offer was clearly exhausted. By then there didn’t seem much else to say. Cotter’s money said the shooter was a professional hitter and had made himself good and lost in the maze of back streets and alleys and cellars that were the labyrinthine backbone of our fair city.

  "Right," the detective said at last, bouncing the unlit cigarette off his knuckles, seemingly oblivious to Corg’s blank hostility, my increasing dispirited exasperation. "Well the car’s going to be taken as evidence for now, but we’ll get it back to you in due course, I guess." And that, it seemed, was that.

  "That’s it?" I said.

  "That’s it," Cotter agreed.

  "We can go?"

  "You can go, sure," he said, "Get the hell out of here." He got out and opened the door for us, waiting impassively in the falling downpour as we clambered out of the back of the squad car.

  "We’ll be in touch," he said, though it sounded like a formality somehow and I doubted the truth of the empty words.

  I looked back as we made our way though the pouring rain. Cotter was still outside the car and had finally put light to the cigarette. He smoked it like a starving man might attack a steak, cooked rare and still oozing a little juice. As I watched, he set spark to the tip, sucked back a long deep crinkling drag of smoke and let it out into the sodden air. He took another hit, then another until there was nothing left but one final gritty black breath.

  Later.

  "Did any of that make any sense to you?" I asked Corg as we entered the pleasant, familiar dark of Down Quiets, our regular drinker. Split into two rooms divided by a couple of shallow steps leading from the bar area to the quieter, more secluded lower lounge, Quiets was a dark wood, old fashioned saloon, watched over by the sober presence of Francis Low - known to most as Quiet - the serious cool eyed barman and owner.

  "No," Corg said, heading to the long dark-wood bar overhung with rusted farm equipment and tin drinking cups, and nodding to Quiet. "Nothing about that was normal."

  "What’ll it be?" Quiet whispered deeply. Corg ordered beers and two shots of bourbon apiece that he carried on a steel tray to our usual, shadow swathed corner table and faded red leather bench.

  "No," he said again as we sat down at the scarred round table and breathed in the familiar air, thick with old smoke and stale beer, "Nothing at all for my money." He took an appreciative sip of his drink.

  "Then again, I’ve never had a corpse fall on my car before, so what do I know?"

  I followed suit with the beer. "Just me though, or did Cotter not really seem like he cared all that much at all?"

  Corg shrugged. "Like I said, whole city’s going to hell. Look at what’s happening over the bridge."

  Legends about the far side of the bridge were legion. Old Links Bridge joined the two halves of the city, old and new. There was a time when plenty of people used to cross the old monument and head into the Old Quarter looking for a good time - the law extended over the bridge, of course, but there weren’t enough law enforcers to keep it. The old, crumbling stones of the quarter had seen more street parties and excess than any other part of the city. But it had seen more murders too, more drug peddling, theft, prostitution.

  As time went by, only the more hardened crossed the bridge. No longer just kids looking for a good time and cheap booze and weed, the official stance of turning a blind eye pushed professional criminal activity over into the other side of the city. Those who lived there already left if they could. Those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, drew together forming gangs and families, their numbers gradually swelled by runaways or people who crossed over because there was no place for them on the regular side, in the real world.

  And of course, they viewed their neighbours, their rivals as they now were, with suspicion and dislike. If you weren’t part of the family, you must be against the family.

  And so, over time, the Old Quarter descended into what was essentially total anarchy, ruled over by a series of gangs locked in bloody feuds with one another. Gradually, these units found that they were strong and took over the guns and the hooch and the drugs. If you wanted to disappear, as they said, you crossed the bridge: if you wanted someone else to disappear, well, you still crossed the bridge and found someone with the skill-set to make it happen.

  "I heard the police have stopped even crossing the river," I said.

  "So they say," Corg assented. I knew for a fact that from time to time Corg’s other work took him over to that side of town and that he had affiliations with one of the families in some way or another. Sometimes, in his cups, he would talk about it but it didn’t seem I was going to get anything out of him today.

  "One of us better give Danvers a ring," I said at last. "I guess the police already talked to him, best give him our side of it, right, let him know about the car if he doesn’t already. You want to do it?"

  Corg shook his head and knocked back a whiskey. "Nah," he said, "You do it. I do it he’ll just chew me out, probably think I’m trying to steal the fucking thing."

  That sounded about right. I nodded, threw back my own drink, and stepped out into the drab grey evening and the torrential rain.

  When I came back in, shaking droplets from my hair, Corg was smoking a cigarette and had been back to the bar and returned with a whole bottle of Mash and two tumblers. "What’d he say?" Corg asked as I sat down, pouring me a generous tipple and passing it over.

  "He wasn’t too pleased. Said the police had already been on to him." I slugged back a mouthful, swirling the smoky liquid around my mouth, savoring the amber burn as it slipped down my throat.

  "Well then, bottoms up," Corg said, raising his glass in a toast and we both drank.

  It was some time later that he asked the question that I guess had been on his mind the whole time.

  "So," he said, by now slurring very slightly and with a feigned nonchalance, "What did he give you?"

  It took me a moment to pull myself out of the heavy whiskey stupor that had wrapped itself around my head to find my tongue and answer. When I did it felt too big for my mouth.

  "What?" I said, blankly. "Who?"

  "Who?" Corg chuckled incredulously, a long throaty, dirty laugh. "Who? Fuckin’ Cadaverous Joe ornamenting the company car man, that’s who."

  It took me another moment, but at last I cottoned on. "Shit," I said, rummaging in the pocket of my suit. "I’d forgotten!" After some fumbling I produced the thing that the stranger had used his final moments to hand on to me. Or two things as it turned out, one wrapped around t
he other.

  The first was a slip of stained note paper – though stained with what I tried not to think - torn from a spined legal pad, on which was a hastily scrawled number - a phone number at a guess but all jumbled up together without any spaces. Below this, in the same hurried hand was a single word: "Whimsy."

  The other item was more disturbing - a small clear capsule, the sort that some medicines come in, inside which was a tiny amount of something black and glistening that didn’t seem able to decide what form to take. From one angle it seemed liquid but with a twitch of the wrist, melted into slime then coalesced into gas. Whatever it was, there was no more than a smear of it, shining darkly with an unhealthy vivid pallor. Just looking at it sent a needle of pain dancing through my temples.

  We were both quiet for a time, staring at the thing I’d laid on the dark wood of the table.

  "This is very bad shit," Corg said at last. I was forced to agree.

  "Why didn’t you tell the cop about this?" he asked after a while, somewhat hypocritically I felt.

  "I’d forgotten about it," I said. "Honestly," I added, seeing the disbelieving look on his face, "Heat of the moment I guess?" Though I wasn’t sure that this was the truth, not really. Then, "Why didn’t you?"

  "I was following your lead," he said, with something like a twinkle in his eye.

  "Right."

  "Believe me brother," he said, face suddenly leering into a devilish grin, "Last thing you wanna do with mystery shit like this is hand it over to the man." He spoke like one who knew and I could kind of see his point.

  I secured the pill back in my inner pocket and looked at the number again. Tempting, I thought: there was no option really.

  "Time to go," I said, killing the dregs of my drink.

  "You gonna call that?" Corg asked, fixing his bleary eye on me.

  "I guess so."

  "Could mean a whole heap of trouble," he said darkly.

  "I guess so." I was thinking once more of the shape of a figure, silhouetted against the grey sky, eyes shining brightly in the gloom.

  I left Corg with the bottle of mash, nodded goodbye to Quiet, and made my way slowly out into the night.

  When I got home I headed straight into the narrow galley kitchen that backed onto the lounge, flicked on a small mood lamp and poured another few fingers of bourbon onto ice and added it to that which I’d already consumed. Steadied - sort of - I took out the note and the pill and flicked them down onto the marble effect surface, watching the contents coalesce oddly under the soft light.

  I picked up the phone then paused, Corg’s parting words coming back to me once again - was I about to invite a storm of trouble into my life? Or our lives even. I stared at the numbers and they seemed to crawl on the page in the dim light. Isn’t that what you want, whispered one of those little voices that lurk in the long-grass of the mind waiting until you’re unmanned to pounce, until there’s no one else around. Isn’t that what you want?

  No, I thought. And yet.

  I could feel the storm building, at some point it had to break.

  Shaking my head to try and clear it, my attention switched to the pill again, to the brackish rolling ink beneath the clear plastic, feeling my skin crawl, feeling the air get thin. Something rustled in the darkness of the building and, just for a moment, as I glanced up, the shadows seemed longer than they should have been, deeper, deep enough to hide dark shapes, intangible somethings that the reasoning mind could not, should not, pinpoint or understand.

  For a moment, the shadows in the lounge, in the bedroom beyond, were not the soft familiar curves and angles of my battered, mismatched furniture. These shadowy forms shifted sinuously, prowled the room, swallowing the light, spreading and lengthening and reaching.

  And, just for a moment, I felt that if I left the dim bubble of safe lamplight, I would step out into a place built not from the comfortable familiarity of my own four walls and well-worn furniture but rather into somewhere else entirely, somewhere much older, a dark abyss in which to be lost. For a heartbeat that seemed to last forever I stared into the deepening dark that didn’t feel like my lounge anymore and had the uncomfortable sense that something was looking back.

  The light flickered. Don’t stray from the path, whispered the sing-song voice in my mind, echoing some half forgotten rhyme from childhood: the way through the woods is tricksy, the things in the wood are bad.

  Then the moment passed and I was back in my flat, where, of course, I’d always been, staring at the sun-faded brown leather of the couch, and the only noise was the beat of my heart and the steady rhythm of the rain against the windows.

  But I knew that - whether I wanted it or not - trouble had already found me.

  Taking a deep breath I punched the numbers into the phone and waited.

  Someone picked up after fourteen rings. I have no idea how many I would have left go unanswered before I gave up.

  "What?" A voice suddenly barked down the line, then, "Who is this?" It was a male voice, fast, angry with a think burr. He sounded all at once jumpy and pissed off.

  "Whimsy?" I said, my mind still reeling from the drink and whatever - if anything - had happened a few moments ago.

  "No, fucknuts, that’s my name," Whimsy shot back. "Try again. Who are you?"

  "My name’s Hesker," I said, "Jon Hesker."

  "Never heard of you," it sounded like herd-a-you in his thick accent. "I’m going to hang up now."

  "No wait, listen," I said, "Look, you’re right, you don’t know me and I don’t know you, but some really odd shit happened to me today and your name sort of fell out of it."

  The only response from the other end was a slow, considered intake of breath, and then, grudgingly, reluctantly, he said, "Mine is not a name I want falling anywhere. Speak."

  "Right," I said, "Well, I guess I might have some bad news for you," and I told him everything that had happened that day, about the backed-up traffic and about the guy who fell from heaven and ended his days leaking fluid over the front of Corg’s car. I told him about the shadowy figure glimpsed on the fire escape, about his strange eyes and the thrill of fear he sent down my back as I felt his gaze falling on me. Eventually, I told him about the scrap of paper with his hastily scribbled number. Whimsy listened in silence, but I heard him suck in another breath when I told him about the poor guy’s final moments of trauma on this earth.

  When I was done, I asked simply, "You knew him?"

  "Yeah," came the distant reply from the receiver after a pause in which I’m certain decisions were being made.

  "Yeah, I knew him. His name was Charlie Dwight, we were in business together, back when I was still an investigator, for a while… and he gave you old Carver Whimsy’s name, eh?"

  "Um," I said, momentarily blindsided by the full unveiling of that unusual name, "I guess so." I in turn hesitated for a moment. Did I really want to tell him the rest? I hadn’t even told the detective. But then, maybe, he could shed some light on things, I reasoned. For all I knew, I told myself, it was nothing anyway. Nothing enough to murder someone over.

  "He also gave me something else."

  "Something else?" He sounded tense again, like he’d been expecting something more.

  "What?"

  "A Pill," I said.

  "A Pill?"

  "Yeah," I said, then, "No, more, you know, like a capsule, with-," I struggled to find the right word to express the thing I was looking at, to communicate the empty feeling it left in the pit of my stomach. But Whimsy cut me off before I ever found it.

  "Fuck," he breathed, more to himself than to me. "He got it."

  "Got it?" I echoed blankly, "But what is it?" Putting voice to the question I really wanted answered.

  "It doesn’t matter," Whimsy said. "Not right now anyway. We’ve talked too much on this line already. Listen," and now he sounded truly edgy, his voice low and urgent, "We need to meet. I need to see that pill, make sure. You’re in the city right?"

  "What?" I said,
surprised by the sudden development. "Yeah, but -" he cut me off again - talking to Whimsy was proving to be a challenge, like trying to catch a rabbit as it veers and bounces ahead of you.

  "Tomorrow," he said. "Ten o’clock, Central Station. I’ll find you."

  "OK," I said feeling that we were drawing to a close but that I was no closer to any sort of understanding.

  "But wait, isn’t there anything else you can tell me?" I was looking back again at the shadows crowding out my apartment, trying to dispel what I’d felt earlier and the hollow feeling it had left in the air, listening to the rain fall like nails on the glass…

  "Yeah," he said. Hope burned and died as I recognised the smirk in his voice. "Don’t eat the pill."

  He hung up.

  No worries there.

  Outside Hesker’s apartment, in the cold, dark shadows across the street beneath a tangle of spouting gutters, colourless eyes watched the light flick off, their owner waiting impassive as a statue as the water cascaded and fell.

  ***

  The morning dawned cold and grey, heavy with the promise of more rain. I had slept badly once more, plagued by strange and troubling dreams, snatches and chunks of which returned to me as I nursed a coffee with creamer and watched from my window as the ashen world below began to come alive.

  I had been running across a broken, twisted landscape beneath a moon that was bright and massive above me, a bulbous monstrosity that swallowed most of the sky yet gave little light for all its incredible size. The ground beneath my bare feet was hard and smooth like volcanic rock, and shone black in the weak light of the celestial body.

  And something was chasing me. I think it may have been a wolf, though bigger than any natural wolf that I’ve ever heard of in waking life.

  That was my feeling, but I couldn’t say for sure, I never saw it. I did hear it though, and I remembered the visceral sound of long claws scraping against the stone as I sipped my coffee and felt the breeze whispering through the open window and across my face, reviving me slightly, but reminding me also of the feeling of breath on the back of my neck as the stalking creature closed in on me.