And having lost his partner on top of it, sympathy had been in abundant supply. Hell, he’d been downright pampered. In fact, on the day of his release, a mariachi band, hired by some of his buddies, played “Hail to the Chief” just outside the doors as they wheeled him out.
Everyone thought he was a hero. He’d almost believed it was true.
But he was sure his partner, Tyler Everton, would disagree. If he were alive.
The day of Tyler’s funeral was the most sobering of Duncan’s life. Though he had still been in intensive care and couldn’t attend, he couldn’t shake the sense that he was a murderer. That feeling had less to do with the funeral and more to do with his decision to stick to Lieutenant Mo White’s somewhat fictionalized version of events.
“No sense in the department losing two good cops” had been Mo’s justification.
Jesus, he was so gigantically screwed up then.
Then? Oh yeah, right, he thought. Now I’m the epicenter of sanity.
The poster child for Prozac.
And a murderer!
If he could do it again, he knew exactly what he would change.
Everything.
Tyler Everton was a good cop. Good meaning beguiled. Tyler had operated under the inveigled impression that people were basically good and well-intentioned. Duncan, on the other hand, had joined the force knowing full well that human beings were very flawed animals. And it wasn’t until he had a few years under his Safari Land basket-weave belt that he understood just how miserably fucked they really were.
Police officers were by no means the exception. On the contrary...
Theirs had not been the partnership upon which cop movies were made, but he and Tyler had nonetheless developed a relationship as trusting as any he had ever had, despite some rather poignant differences of opinion.
You watch my back, I’ll watch yours: an aphorism Duncan had written on the front of his locker when he was a rookie. It was a reminder to himself, not his fellow officers, that no matter how insignificant or trivial or inconsequential the job, or life, might seem, he would never surrender a colleague’s safety.
He’d known that the cop fraternity was riddled with nothing but cynical, alienated, disenchanted people, sworn to protect and to serve, and to uphold the law through the bloodshot eyes of hypocrisy. When he’d joined the force, his intentions were not to save the world, or even his little corner of it, but to hopefully experience the thrill and excitement that law enforcement promised. Unfortunately, even that illusion was eventually shattered, especially when he was in uniform and cruising the districts. To steal a phrase his captain was fond of: “It’s weeks and weeks of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror.”
That just about summed it up. And, despite the presumed odds, a large percentage of police officers retired from the force without ever having drawn their weapons. Of course, there were always those very few who could never seem to keep them holstered.
Society was briskly going to hell down a dark vertical shaft, but not so much greased by violence as it was apathy, regardless of what TV and its glut of real-cops-in-action programming would have one think. Those shows didn’t often privy the viewing audience to malnourished toddlers living in their own excrement because their mother was too busy whoring to support her drug habit, or the middle-class, upstanding parents who swapped prurient photographs of their six-year-old son with other pedophiles over the Internet.
No, that shit was depressing. People wanted to see fists and cuffs. Hear squealing tires and bleeped-out dialogue. But to the disappointment of all, the vast majority of calls were easy on the knuckles. And the treads.
Hard as hell on the soul.
The list was endless. At least it was for a cop. Because that’s what cops did. They lived in decadence day in and day out.
Shit magnets.
They lived reality.
The badge didn’t differentiate the good people from the bad, he knew. The “Thin Blue Line” that allegedly separated order from anarchy was just an urban legend. Cops didn’t prevent chaos…they controlled it.
It was all just a game; a game where the winners went home in one piece (at least physically), and the losers were left staring down at the shattered remains of what they had for so long thought was truth.
What was truth?
Rachel, after finishing a Joseph Wambaugh novel—they were both avid fans—once said, “There’s no way cops are really like that.”
Duncan had smiled back. “You’re right, babe…they’re worse.”
Cops. What a funny, pathetic, enduring, decadent, heroic breed they were.
Duncan thought that Baxter Slate, a character from Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choir Boys, summed it perfectly: “The very best, most optimistic hope we can cling to is that we’re tick birds who ride the rhino’s back and eat the parasites out of the flesh and keep the beast from disease and hope we’re not parasites too. In the end we suspect it’s all vanity and delusion. Parasites, all of us.”
And the night he was shot, Duncan realized just what kind of parasite he’d become. Or worse, what kind of parasite he’d always been. Ironically, while lying there, bleeding to death, it had finally gelled with him that any contrasts existing between the good guys and bad were, truly, only the dense bricks upon which wallflowers grew.
That night, as Lieutenant Mo White was plugging Duncan’s wounds with his fingers, he’d assured him that he would personally take care of everything, that they’d all come out heroes, smelling like roses.
Oh, he’d acquired a smell all right, but it wasn’t anything like a bouquet of Betty Boops.
As it turned out, Mo himself was a parasite; one of the biggest and most respected bugs to ever create an itch on Boston’s crotch.
Duncan had taken his second bullet for Mo; probably had, in fact, saved Mo’s life.
And the favor was returned in spades.
Mo White: The baddest, blackest cop on the force. Everybody loved Mo. Everybody.
Duncan had suffered a collapsed lung, and lost nearly four pints of blood and a kidney. Why he hadn’t ended up in the morgue was the most asked question by his attending surgeons. They called it a miracle.
Privately, Duncan called it a travesty. He should have died.
Deserved to die.
Like Mo, Duncan had also been well received by his peers and superiors. He’d made a lot of friends in high places over the years, although he never considered it politicking. Not then. It wasn’t until later when he realized just what he’d been doing, and how clandestinely he’d been doing it.
Ergo his decision to remain a detective rather than advance in rank, which he could have done effortlessly.
Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea: it is Latin, meaning, “an act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is guilty.” Mens rea: Mental culpability. Duncan had not believed himself culpable of trying to gain favors. But after careful review, that had been exactly his intent. And the funniest thing of all, he eventually learned, was that he was not just doing the priming, but that it was he who was also being groomed. Not for anything in particular, just the back-burner variety.
Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
Just look the other way.
And he had. Hell, he’d turned his head so many times he developed a cough.
Law-enforcement was definitely a close-knit family, and ratting on a fellow officer was the civilian equivalent of screwing your best friend’s wife, sending him the pictures, and charging the hotel room to his VISA. It was not tolerated, and met with its own brand of justice.
And because of his loyal adherence to this policy, Duncan had been cared for by his family.
It was all of this and more that eventually led him to radically renounce conventional justice, and to create his own, the crusade reaching its zenith the moment he’d decided to help Patricia Bently in her desperate moment of need. The death of Charles Bently, her husband, had left her in financial ruin, and he’d found a remedy for th
at.
For so many years, guilt stalked him like a determined beast. Somewhere along the way, though, he’d stopped running, and the monster gained on him.
And now, according to his daughter (and whoever else was in there with her), he was somehow going to help save mankind like some bearded relic from the Old Testament.
Not the rain forests. Not the whales.
The fucking world!
Check, please!
16.
Summoned by the call of banging glass, Eli made it down the stairs just as the courier came though.
“Impatient bastard,” he grumbled.
The creature hopped down from the window, grinned its black, double saw-blade dentition at him, then jerked its wings back from its body like some dwarf exhibitionist, as if to say, Take a look at this puppy!
Eli scowled. Its puppy wasn’t anything to be showing off, but there was even less of Katherine Bently. And that was even more perverted. Blushingly so.
“Son. Of. A. Bitch!” he barked. “Now what?”
On a scoured leg, the creature hobbled to the remnants of what had once been a child’s mattress, now beached upon the basement’s concrete shores, wads of ticking clustering around the carcass like tide foam.
Given its overall tousled appearance, and the blood trail from the window to the mattress, it was more than obvious that the courier had been involved in some kind of fracas.
It squatted on the cotton remains and began preening. This the couriers did constantly, injuries or not, and at a level that made cats look lazy and squalid in comparison. Eli wondered if it had anything to do with their befouled origins; a stink they kept trying to lick away.
If they’d devote as much time and effort to finding the Bently girl, he thought, I’d have nine of her by now.
Glaring at the courier, Eli folded his arms across his chest and said, “My, my, did we fall off our tricycle?”
The creature kept on grooming, but Eli could tell it didn’t much like the innuendo. If it could have effectively raised a middle finger, he was certain it would have thrust one out, wiggling it a few times for emphasis.
“So now what?” Eli said. “Do I send you out again, or replace you with something a bit more competent, say…a blind titmouse?”
The courier hissed at him.
Eli hissed right back. “Kiss my ass! If you don’t bring me Katherine Bently before tomorrow morning, I’ll have your ass on a skewer.” Then something struck him. “Or, is finding her the easy part?”
He studied the creature some more, then said, “She’s the one who did this to you, isn’t she? Got your ass kicked by a little girl.”
The courier sheepishly looked away.
“Pussy.”
Then more banging erupted. From behind one of the other windows.
Eli turned, and for a moment stood confused. There was something not quite right with the wall, or perhaps the basement itself.
And then it struck him as nothing else ever had.
The seventh window! It’s here!
He blinked a few times, stared some more, then—very slowly—turned back to the courier.
In a guarded whisper, he said, “Am I hallucinating, or do you see that, too?”
The creature, engrossed with the ceiling as it worked a large knot up and down its slender throat, ignored Eli altogether. Then it hacked up a hairball.
Too shocked to be disgusted, Eli took a deep breath as he turned back around.
The seventh window was still there, another courier behind it, banging again; louder this time. Although he’d been expecting it, deliriously so, he hadn’t realized until just now how emotionally unprepared he was for its arrival.
He finally exhaled, purging his lungs and lingering doubt, surveying the seventh window rather than just ogling it. It appeared to share the same dimensions as the other six—No, Eli thought, that wasn’t exactly true. There was one dimension where it digressed from all the others: Depth. And it’s design of colored glasses was wonderfully grandiose: the image of a man—it was him–stepping into a black, rectangular portal, his right lower leg disappearing into the abyss. And he was especially taken with the way the artist delineated the victory—the triumph!—in his smile.
Actually, it reminded him a little too much of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” album cover where the bespectacled entertainer was stepping into a picture and onto the road Dorothy and Toto allegedly traveled.
But most of all he was enraptured with those enormous feathered wings, jutting majestically from his back. Elton’s glittered pumps paled in comparison, he thought wryly.
He couldn’t move. It felt as if some kind of refrigerant had been injected into his neck, as the circulation there had grown cold, the iciness now exuding down his spine, tickling every follicle, erecting every hair as it coursed beneath the dermis.
He supposed he’d expected this one to arrive differently than the others; with some fanfare, maybe…noise makers, balloons, streamers, champagne on ice.
The courier continued to rap behind the glass, obviously eager to be rid of the weight of the little girl.
The seventh angel.
Tears welled in Eli’s eyes, and the next eight steps were the longest and most memorable he had ever taken.
17.
Melanie Sands opened her eyes. She was naked, stretched out on her left side. The cement beneath her was numbing in its coldness. Her shoulders ached, and she was incredibly thirsty.
As she pushed herself to her knees, she saw that she’d peed the floor. There was blood, too—
Something behind her retched like a cat.
She turned and, at the sight of the creature, instantly remembered her abduction from Mr. Altman’s front yard. The animal, apparently having roused itself awake by its own vulgar noises, regarded her with a part-startled, part-groggy expression.
Then it licked itself down there.
Gross.
It was obviously a boy creature because it had a pee-pee just like Jake, her beagle.
Then, just as Jake would have probably done, the creature leaned forward and sniffed the wet spot on the cement, then proceeded to her crotch.
“Shoo,” she said, her tone only a glimmer of what she’d intended.
The creature tipped its head, considered her for what seemed like forever, then looked down at its privates. And stared. Immodestly, perversely, carnally...
Just. Stared.
But what horrified Melanie was its smile, a thin, calculating, curling-at-the-edges Grinch-grin.
As she backed away, expecting the attack to come at any moment, the creature slowly lifted its head. Still grinning, it followed her with lustful eyes as she scooted along the cement floor.
She eventually backed herself against a joist, cleaving her bare back with its splintered edges. White sparkles of pain danced before her as her heels kept scuffing a retreat. She had no intentions of ever stopping, of ever taking her eyes off the monster. But as her heart settled with the slow realization that she was going to be left alone, at least for now, she relaxed a bit and began inspecting her surroundings more closely, always keeping the creature well within her peripheral range of vision.
The room was about the same size as her bedroom back home, except this one didn’t have any walls, just boards. And through these wood beams she could see the simple floor plan of the basement. Most of it, anyway. To her right was an adjoining room, unfinished as well, and in it was another animal, same kind as the one with her, squatting on a torn-up old mattress. She thought it looked hurt, had maybe been in a fight with a big dog or something. Surprisingly, she found herself feeling a bit sorry for it.
In front of her was another room, this one much larger. And way across on the opposite wall she could see what looked like church windows. She counted three, and got the impression there were more, but her view was blocked by the half-finished section of wall that ran lengthwise down the center of the basement. And on the far end wall, near the windows, she
could see an open doorway accessing a wooden flight of stairs.
Stark and shadowy, the overall layout was largely incomplete. There did appear to be an enclosed room this side of, and closest to, the stairs. Maybe half the size of the room she was in. She thought she could see a thread of red light running along its upper edge where the facing wall and ceiling weren’t quite flush.
She then looked down at herself and began inspecting her shoulders, arms, chest…She had puncture wounds everywhere. One hole in her left chest was still bleeding badly. They should be hurting like the dickens, she thought. But they weren’t; just kinda throbbed.
She stared accusingly at her captor’s sharp talons, then glanced at the other creature in the next room, not feeling a bit sorry for it anymore.
Then she heard footsteps. Someone coming down the stairs.
Reflexively, she straightened against the joist, then began pushing against it, struggling again, hoping and praying she could burst through and fall back down the dream hole that was surely hovering above her nice, warm bed back home.
“My, my,” the man said as he entered the room. “Up from our nap?”
She pulled her knees to her chin. She’d seen those kinds of clothes before, the kind the man was wearing. He was a minister or something. But that didn’t make her feel any better. Maybe even worse.
There was a camera in his right hand.
The man stepped aside, then motioned for the creature to leave.
It snorted its disapproval, then hobbled indignantly through the doorway. It made its way over to one of the church windows, then— magically—jumped inside. And was gone.
She froze as the man knelt before her.
He stroked her hair. “The ones before you were exceptionally pretty. But I just might have to concede that you’re the prettiest of them all.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “I guess they saved the best for last.”
She buried her face between her knees.
“Legs down, chin up,” he ordered. “I want all of that beautiful face.”
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