CrimeSeen2014.06.09

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Neither would happen. And both were far too alluring. So he forced himself to turn away. Turned to his right, toward the end of the small block.

  “Where you going?” said Listings.

  “There was a girl I bumped into in there,” said Evan, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the alley. “She worked at a shop that should front around the corner here. Maybe she saw something.”

  He walked away, not waiting to see if Listings would follow. Listings did what she wanted, she always had. But this time, whether she wanted or not, he had to find out what was going on.

  Had to understand how a man could walk away from three shots in the chest.

  Had to understand how a killer could speak without being seen.

  Had to understand how this connected with Val. With his wife, and with her final smile.

  He walked away, and pretended not to hear the voice that said, “I’ll kill you. All of you. Forever.” It wasn’t in his ear this time, but in his mind. At least, he assumed so, because when he glanced at Listings she seemed as unconcerned as always. She hadn’t heard it.

  What’s going on?

  He had no answers for himself.

  Around the corner, and it was clear where the girl had come from. This street was as dark as the one they had just left, lined with the same hunching rows of stolid, sealed businesses.

  Except one. Light blazed out of one of the storefronts. It was mostly neon, yellows and blues that let the world know this place was open for business, but couldn’t manage to convey any warmth with the announcement. There was a seediness to the light, almost a malaise.

  As they approached he saw the name of the shop in sweeping neon letters: Mystix. The sign itself was leaning against the store front, plugged in with a long green extension cord that went in through the open doorway.

  The other signs on the storefront were a mix of English and what Evan recognized as Vietnamese, though he had no clue what they said. Could be “Grocery Store” or “Crack Den” or “We Kill White Police” for all he knew.

  The signs in English were for a strange mix of items: a tattered ad for Bibles that looked like it had been saved from the 1960s, a computer printout on the healing power of crystals, a large picture offering frogs for sale.

  “What the hell?” said Listings.

  Evan shrugged.

  Listings pulled out her phone. “I’m going to secure the bar.”

  “You didn’t call yet?” Evan was irritated, but not surprised.

  “I’m doing it now. You got this?”

  Evan sighed. Nodded. She smiled at him, and it was a different smile than the one she used with the drunk at the bar. Not a mayhem-smile. A real one. They were rare.

  It made Evan feel warm. It was a treasure, to be valued. He had been her partner for a year before he saw her smile even once. Even now, even with the way things had recently changed between them, the smiles were few and far between.

  “I got this.”

  “You know we’re in deep shit, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  She started talking into the phone, half-running back to the bar. They hadn’t exactly followed normal protocols tonight, but Evan didn’t know if there were regs that really covered a surprise attack by a lunatic that turned into a chase down a street trying to find some guy who could take bullets without blinking and disappear like smoke.

  Writing the report was going to be a bitch.

  Listings was gone in a moment, and Evan turned back to the lit shop. The door was open, some kind of hanging made of woven bamboo strips obscuring the inside of the place. He pushed through it.

  The inside of the shop was as strange and eclectic as the outside. More neon, with beads hanging everywhere. Crystals and quartzes cluttered shelves at concentrations unseen by any but the most able spelunkers.

  A lot of the walls – even the ceiling – had signs as well. Some Vietnamese, some English.

  There were plants in one corner. Leafy green things that each had their own dull pot, and seemed somehow angry to be trapped in the room.

  Another area had bottles – what looked like entrails, chicken feet, sundry other biological materials he could only guess at.

  Bibles, crosses, flasks marked with crucifixion designs sat in another area.

  The air was hazy, with a vaguely herbal scent. Smoking paraphernalia was probably sold here as well, and Evan figured this must be some kind of New Age/religious/sorcery one-stop-shop.

  Two women – both plump, both Vietnamese, both on the far side of seventy years old – passed him, moving toward the doorway as he came in. As they did, a shrill voice caught his attention. He turned and saw Rainbow Hair. She was sitting behind a cash register that sat on a simple stool – which he suspected would be an open entry to rip this place off every night if it weren’t for the weird, almost creepy vibe the shop gave off – waving a nail polish brush in one hand and holding the other up to dry as she shouted.

  The words were in Vietnamese, so he had no idea of the details, but it wasn’t hard to tell from the tone that she was irritated with the two old broads.

  Evan moved to Rainbow Hair and waited for her rant to die down. She kept it going well past the time when the customers had left, though he wasn’t sure if that was because she was that angry or just because she was trying to avoid dealing with him. He suspected the former: he didn’t get a “worried about dealing with people” vibe off her. Most of the people Evan had met from southeast Asian countries were still fairly traditional in dress and grooming. Which meant they were still connected to their past, to their elders. They still had respect, they still knew what manners were.

  That was changing with the young people, just as young people changed things in every culture. But to see one so radically pierced and with hair like this girl’s… he suspected she had a chip on her shoulder, and one she would be only too glad to display.

  “Problems with the customers?” he said.

  She blew on her nails. “They never buy anything from me. Just come in and browse.”

  “People do that.”

  The young woman – and now Evan saw she was even younger than he had first thought, maybe as young as eighteen or nineteen – frowned. “It doesn’t pay the bills.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to respect your elders?”

  She switched to painting the nails of her other hand. Dismissive. “Aren’t you supposed to present a warrant?”

  Evan smiled tightly. So many people – especially in neighborhoods like this – tended to think of police officers as the enemy. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy a lot of the time. She was closing him out, so there wasn’t a lot of friendly chatting they could do. But he still needed to talk to her, so….

  “I’m just asking friendly questions right now. No arrests, no searches.” He sniffed the hazy air loudly. Made a show of sampling it, wrinkling his nose a bit before sniffing again. “I’m sure I could arrange for one, though, if you want.”

  He let that hang there. Not wanting to make an adversary of this girl, but wanting her to understand he wasn’t going to leave and she wasn’t in a position to make him go away.

  She kept painting her nails, which he expected. She wouldn’t acknowledge him right away. She’d keep going for a moment, would show she was brave and that it didn’t really matter what he said. But eventually –

  “I told you already: I didn’t see anyone in the alley.”

  “What were you doing out there?”

  “Taking out some trash.”

  “Could anyone have come in when you went out?”

  The girl’s nose wrinkled. She looked disgusted that he would insult her with such a question. “This look like a neighborhood where you live long letting that happen?”

  Evan nodded, both because she was absolutely right on that count and because he wanted her to know she had scored on him. It might make her feel more confident, might make her a bit more friendly. A lot of folks didn’t realize that the person that is in c
harge – or thinks she is – tends to talk more. So Evan never minded looking weak or silly if it made the people he was interviewing feel a bit stronger, a bit bigger… a bit more chatty.

  “What were you doing in the bar earlier?” he said.

  The girl looked at him again, this time rewarding his question with a gaze that he suspected she reserved for the truly stupid people in her life. “Borrowing a book,” she said.

  “What about the store?”

  “What about it?”

  “Anyone weird come in tonight?”

  She laughed, a short but melodious laugh that made her seem a bit softer. “Everyone who comes in here is weird.”

  Evan sighed. “You don’t like me much, do you?” When all else fails, he thought, try just saying what’s on everyone’s mind.

  The store was lit by low-watt overhead fluorescents. When he said this they flickered, as though in agreement. The girl noticed. She made a sign with her right hand, a movement that he probably would have thought was a gang sign under other circumstances. With this girl, however, he knew it was something else. Nothing so terrestrial as a shout-out to some crew, though perhaps more dangerous. A warding, a spell. Perhaps a curse.

  “I told you,” she said. “You got bad mojo.”

  At that moment Evan was struck by a sense of déjà vu. Not just at her wording, but something about this place seemed familiar. He’d never worked this part of the city before, so he’d never been on this street that he could remember.

  But he felt like –

  “What?” said the girl. He must have zoned out or been staring at her oddly, because the word didn’t mean “What did you say?” but rather “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Evan snapped out of the moment. “Have I seen you before?” he said.

  “The bar. Duh.” She painted her pinky nail. Started waving that hand around and blowing on it. The nails were beautifully done. She’d have a career as a manicurist if that was a good sample of her work.

  “No. I mean….” He sighed, not sure how to end that sentence. “Forget it. What’s your name?”

  “Tuyen,” she said.

  “That’s pretty. Is that a first or a last name?”

  She stared at him, and he could tell now that he’d gone too far. She wasn’t going to be buttered up and she wasn’t going to talk to some strange white cop about anything more than she had to.

  “Do you have security tapes here?”

  “No.” Her voice was even frostier now. She was tired of him, she wanted him gone.

  He chuckled and pointed to the corner of the store behind her. A closed-circuit camera swiveled slowly back and forth above a cluster of Virgin Mary statues. “Why don’t I believe you?”

  Tuyen stared at him blankly, and he could practically hear her calculating whether he would give up and go away if she kept being difficult or if it would be faster just to deal with him.

  She finally got up and walked toward the back wall. Evan followed. The back wall was covered top to bottom by a long black curtain. Tuyen shivered as she stopped at the thick drapery.

  “Someone walk on your grave?” said Evan.

  “I hate it back here.”

  “Not your style?”

  She threw that disgusted look at him again. “I’m not Hmong.”

  She parted the curtain in the middle and stepped through.

  Evan did the same, and realized that the curtain wasn’t covering a back wall, but instead bisected the store neatly in half. He also understood why Tuyen had shivered, and had to resist an urge to do the same.

  The back half of Mystix was dark. Not pitch black, but the lights were lower here. There was shelving, same as in the front, but the shelves seemed older, less stable. As though the owner of the store – whether that was Tuyen or someone else – had never bothered with any upkeep back here.

  And what was on the shelves was the kind of thing Evan didn’t understand. He could conceptualize what he was seeing, but not its uses. Not its reasons.

  He saw chopsticks, lashed together in inverted crosses, each with the dried body of a gutted lizard lashed to it. Beside them was a spot on the floor with no shelves, but piled high with a variety of animal skulls.

  The back wall – the real back wall – of the store drew his attention most of all. There were a trio of animals, what he guessed were creatures indigenous to Vietnam, stuffed and mounted on the otherwise empty space. A five-foot-long python with blood-red scales, a snub-nose monkey with a bluish face, and the shriveled body of something that looked like a baby jackal or maybe a small dog.

  The python’s jaws were unhinged, stretched wide, and it had swallowed half the monkey, which was around three feet long. The monkey had been arranged to look in agony, its arms splayed and its back arched. But at the same time it was busy chewing the baby jackal. And the jackal in turn had the tail of the python lodged deep in its throat.

  The things were devouring each other forever, a horrifically conceived murder-suicide as each beast killed a foe and in so doing also swallowed the world of its own existence.

  Evan had been on the force almost twenty years. He had seen murder, rape, torture, abuse – so much so that it all tended to blend sometimes; it all tended to seem like the same thing over and over again. But this circle of endless death sent chill-spasms up and down his back in a way few things did anymore.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  “He’s not here,” said Tuyen. Her voice was low. Lost in a shadowland between reverence and fear.

  The animals’ eyes were sewn shut. And as soon as he saw that, the interpretation of the circle changed. Now they seemed to be vomiting, to be giving violent birth to one another, to the things that would eventually kill them.

  Either way, death.

  Evan looked at the curtain. It was the thing farthest away from the gruesome death-circle, and he didn’t want to see those animals right now. Or ever again.

  Tuyen saw him staring at the cloth. “Some Hmong believe the spirits can’t pass through doors. They can appear anywhere, but places with no doors invite them.”

  That made it all worse somehow: the idea that there was no place safe, but that this place had been designed to specifically lure things from the other side.

  Evan sensed movement. He turned toward it, and saw a large shape among the shelves at the back. Someone lurking. Perhaps a shopper, perhaps just another chubby old lady – albeit one interested in a darker sort of magic than the jolly-seeming women he had seen earlier.

  Still, his fingers itched. He wanted to grab his gun. Wanted to just start shooting.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Tuyen. “Come on.”

  She pulled Evan’s sleeve, almost yanking him along. Normally he wouldn’t care to have a comparative stranger pulling him around in a dark voodoo shop, but he was grateful for her touch. It grounded him, the warmth of her hand even through his coat seeming to remind him that reality still had at least a toehold in his existence.

  He moved with her to the back of the dark section. There was an open door there, which admitted them to a coffin of a room. No windows, just a desk, a chair, a small filing cabinet, a computer. Above the desk a small cabinet had been built into the wall. And that was it. No pictures, no other ornamentation. The small business office of a person who either made little money or whose main business was not in bookkeeping but in people. Perhaps both.

  A small gooseneck lamp cast a weak cone of light over the desk, cutting the computer keyboard into zones of light and dark. It flickered, an exhausted beam of light that needed tending. Tuyen tapped it impatiently and cursed in Vietnamese.

  She opened the cabinet above the computer. Inside was a small closed-circuit video setup. Not much, basically just a foot-square monitor with an attached video recorder. Evan had seen thousands of them. This looked like a cheap model, the kind designed to record, then automatically rewind and record again so that the owner would have a record of whatever happened in the last two or six hour
s, but nothing else.

  The monitor was dark. Gray-green and strangely unsettling when it was revealed, like the eye of a sleeping demon that had yet to be awakened.

  Tuyen flicked a red switch at the base of the machine and a pin of light appeared in the monitor. An instant later it widened to encompass the entire screen. The image flashed and flared, a gray/green/black/white mélange of motion. The lines were oddly hypnotic, and Evan found himself staring at the monitor, falling into it.

  It was a view of the front of the shop, he finally realized. But a distorted view, as if someone had pulled reality like taffy and then shredded the results before gluing it all together in a lunatic hodge-podge.

  The effect was creepy. Disturbing. And somehow beautiful as well. As if Evan might find all the answers he wanted and needed if he could only find a way to see behind the distortions.

  “What’s this?” he finally managed. His voice sounded like it was coming from someone else.

  Tuyen sounded strangely distant, too. “I told you we don’t have tapes,” she said. “Or at least, none that are worth anything.”

  She whacked the side of the monitor. The sound hit Evan like a gunshot, like –

  (the vision of his dead wife)

  – a bolt of lightning, shocking him at least partially back to reality.

  The blurred image on the screen shimmied under the blow, then returned. Evan looked away before it caught his attention again. Trying to convince himself that the sweat he felt trickling down his neck and armpits was just because he was concentrating, not because he was suddenly terrified.

  “Stupid thing’s been broken forever,” said Tuyen. She sounded enraged, seething. And Evan had been a cop long enough – which meant he had been studying people long enough – to see that she was using rage to mask fear.

  Tuyen was terrified of this monitor.

  “It’s still running tape, though?” he said.

  She shrugged. “Sure. Maybe. Depends on if the day shift guy put one in last time it was working.”

  She pressed a button on the machine. Something deep in the base of the thing grinded resentfully, then a motor hummed with only slightly less attitude. The gray plastic cover under the monitor flicked back and a black video tape spit out.