CrimeSeen2014.06.09

by Michaelbrent Collings

  The addict wasn’t looking for anything. He wasn’t there for money, he wasn’t seeking sanctuary from police.

  He just wanted to destroy something. First himself. Then the door to their house. Then Listings’ father.

  The junkie broke her dad in pieces, right in front of her. She had pulled herself out of bed in time to see the man grimly twist her dad’s arm right out of its socket.

  Listings never knew her mother, who had fled family life soon after her birth in search of “her center” – whatever the hell that meant. So her father was her hero. Her protector, her savior. He was her world.

  She had never heard him scream like that, the way he did when the crazed addict pulled out his arm. But the sound of her daddy’s scream weren’t nearly as bad as the scraping shriek of the junkie’s laugh as he did it.

  The man was tall and wiry. He wore no shirt, and his torso was covered in scrapes. Some were self-inflicted, but it would later be discovered that this was his fourth visit to a home. That her father was the fifth man the junkie had killed.

  Little Listings – only she was Angela then, and Angie to her daddy – came down the hall in time to slip on a gout of blood. She didn’t scream. She was too shocked to scream, too scared at the sight of the superhero she had worshiped all her life being torn apart like a fly at the hands of a schoolyard bully.

  She didn’t scream.

  The junkie saw her anyway. Probably heard her foot slapping down in the blood, or the intake of her breath as she choked back a sob.

  He looked at her, and she saw that he had scratched his cheeks. One of his eyelids seemed to hang askew.

  He grinned through bloody teeth. Then made a sound like a dog dismissing an unsavory treat, and turned back to her father. He started tickling her daddy. Still laughing.

  Her daddy didn’t laugh at the tickles. He didn’t scream anymore, either. His eyes were staring at nothing, his cheeks covered in his own blood like the makeup of a strange clown.

  Listings saw her first dead man. The one who gave her an eternal hatred of those who would unjustly harm others, who would steal the life and livelihood from those weaker than them.

  She saw her second dead man a moment later. She still didn’t scream. She did cry. Cried so much the tears cast a shimmering veil over her sight and made it that much harder for her to do what she had to. That much harder to get the gun out of her father’s bedside table. That much harder to load it with the bullets he kept in a separate drawer. That much harder to chamber a round. That much harder to walk back down the hall to where the addict was still tickling her father’s corpse.

  Then she walked in her father’s blood, and the tears disappeared and suddenly it was not hard at all.

  She put the gun against the junkie’s head, right over the shredded eyelid, and pulled the trigger.

  And knew she would have to be a police officer. Not because she had a desire to right wrongs, though there was a bit of that. No, she had to grow up to be a police officer because in the instant she blew away the man who killed her daddy she felt delicious. She felt right.

  She would kill the bad guys. That was what she would do.

  Daddy would never come back. Her superhero was gone.

  So she would have to be the superhero.

  But even at seven, Angie knew that superheroes didn’t exist – at least not the way they were shown in movies. She would have to grow up to be something that would let her beat up and kill the men like the one who killed her father.

  She would kill them all.

  It was hard. Hard becoming a cop. Hard reigning herself in sometimes, when she just wanted to let fly and give in to the urge to turn someone’s face into hamburger.

  Hardest of all had been partnering up with people who she knew would never understand, would never forgive her for what she wanted to do.

  Evan had been the first one to break her self-imposed isolation. He had pried back the walls of her obstinacy, had hammered down the barricades of anger and silence that she had so carefully erected over the years.

  She told him everything.

  And he didn’t judge her. He said, “I hope you don’t kill anyone with me.” But that was it. He didn’t ask if she had killed anyone – she hadn’t – or if she would do it in the future. Just asked her not to do it around him. Like he knew he couldn’t change her, but thought she was worthy of her job, worthy of the work she was doing.

  Worthy of him?

  She glanced at him as he followed her into the weird shop. Mystix, it was called, and she thought that was an odd choice. It sounded like a New Age smokehouse, but inside it looked like someone had barfed the religious equivalent of alphabet soup all over the place.

  “Tell me why we’re here again?” she said. She was hoping he’d make a joke, would at least smile. He’d been quiet since his wife was murdered, and that was certainly understandable. But after they kissed that first time, after they held each other and then went to her place and held each other through the night, he had seemed happy. At peace.

  She felt good. Not like she did when she busted a pervert or got the chance to pummel some douchebag. No, she felt like maybe she wasn’t just patching holes in the underpinnings of a crumbling society. She was actually building something. She wasn’t repairing, she was creating. Making something out of nothing but the feelings that existed between them. Out of nothing but his beautiful smile.

  But his smile was fading again, and more so since that call had come, since she had met him at the bar. Just a night ago, and he was falling back into the malaise that had gripped him after Val’s death.

  “We’re looking for the little Vietnamese girl I saw in the alley,” said Evan.

  “This place is freakin’ creepy,” she said, letting him step forward to take the lead.

  “You should see it at night,” he said.

  There were a pair of old women browsing the shelves, picking up bits of herby-looking plants, sniffing them condescendingly, replacing them, then grabbing the next bundle of greenery for olfactory review. Both looked like they were probably about six hundred years old, stubby bodies and round faces that made Listings feel like she was probably looking at the original body doubles for Buddha.

  Evan had already spotted the old broads and was moving toward what Listings guessed passed for the checkout counter: a rickety stool with a cash register sitting on it. Behind the stool was a guy who was just as stubby as the old ladies, only he looked like he weighed twice as much as the two of them combined. Maybe five feet tall, and just as wide. The fact that he was wearing a neon pink shirt that looked like it had exploded through a vibrant wormhole that led direct to the worst parts of eighties fashion served only to exaggerate his bulk.

  He was reading a Bible. And seemed intent on continuing his reading regardless of the presence of potential new customers in the store. Most Asians that Listings ran into were polite and helpful – more courteous than the average white person, that was for sure. But there were exceptions. People stuck in the “old world,” where concepts of racial superiority still held sway. Bigots were bigots, whatever color or stripe.

  Listings suspected this guy might be one of those types who wouldn’t deign to speak to anyone with the wrong pedigree. He didn’t even twitch when Evan walked up to the register and laid a hand on it. The stool creaked, and still the guy didn’t deign to acknowledge them.

  Dozens of necklaces encircled the man’s thick neck. Religious totems. Silver crucifixes, a gold Star of David, what looked like a jade Buddhist Lotus knot, and a few others that she couldn’t identify. They tangled into one another, a strangely beautiful chaos. The Lotus knot in particular was a gorgeous piece, turning into itself, twisting into infinity.

  “Excuse me,” said Evan. “Is the girl from last night available?”

  The chubby dude kept on doing his thing.

  Evan sighed. He dug his wallet out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open. The badge caught the gleam of one of the overhead lights and ref
lected against Fatty’s eyes. Fatty did not seem impressed. Listings would have said he was the definition of “inscrutable,” but she thought that would probably get her a department write-up for inappropriate racial stereotyping. Even if it fit in this situation.

  “It’s important,” said Evan, irritation creeping into the cracks that exhaustion and stress was opening in his voice. “Police business.”

  He looked like he might have said something else, but Listings was done. The dude behind the register might be a bad guy, or he might not. But he was definitely being an asshole, and that qualified him for the Fear-Of-God treatment, at the very least.

  “Hey, Tubby,” she said. “Do you want to help me and my partner in crime here, or do you want to spend the day with your shop closed? Huh?” She clapped her hands together. “Shop-o shut-o?”

  Evan pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger. “He’s Vietnamese. I don’t think imitation Spanish will help.”

  Tubby sighed and closed his Bible.

  Listings grinned at Evan. Then felt her grin crack into several pieces and fall away like porcelain left too long in a kiln as Tubby started speaking. Low, even tones, words burbling by so fast that Listings doubted she could have followed them even if she did speak Vietnamese. Which she definitely did not.

  The guy kept talking, and she wondered if she should flash her own badge. There was a legitimate chance the guy didn’t speak English, but if he had intended to cooperate he would have made some motion of doing so already, so….

  The old ladies who had been shopping for Vietnamese paprika or whatever it was stepped toward the side of the register. Tubby didn’t stop talking, just took their money and made change and never stopped his monotone rant.

  Evan looked at Listings with a dry smile. “Do you want to write this down, or should I?”

  She loved him for making the joke. She also kind of wanted to punch his teeth down his neck.

  Evan turned back to Tubby, who still hadn’t stopped. “We’re gonna go in the back, okay?”

  Tubby continued his screed. Evan shrugged. He looked at Listings. “Think that’s a yes?” he said.

  “Sounds like one to me.”

  Evan led the way to the back of the shop. Tubby never stopped talking, not even as they stepped through a thick black curtain at the rear of the store.

  The front of the store had been religious alphabet soup. All iconography and crystals and the stuff that hopes are made of. The back of the store was different. It was where hopes came, not to die, but to be tortured at the hands of angry demons. The kinds of monsters who knew that sometimes death was a release, a relief, and so would never let the torture end, would never let the suffering abate.

  Hope would wither here. It would shrivel. It would twist and contort and become something ugly and terrible.

  But it wouldn’t die.

  “Cheery,” she said. Sarcasm, always her first defense, the armor she had worn at almost every moment since her father’s death. “What’s this, the voodoo aisle?”

  Evan shook his head as he walked slowly into the dark area. “Hmong,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Beat’s me.” He threw a half-smile over his shoulder. “I’d guess it’s Vietnamese for ‘the voodoo aisle.’” He turned forward again, but continued. “I liked the ‘partners in crime’ thing, by the way. That how you see us?”

  Listings shrugged. A wasted gesture since Evan wasn’t looking at her, but she felt like she had to make everything an exaggeration here. Like she had to remind the world – and herself – that she was still alive. That the sonofabitch who pulled her father apart hadn’t gotten her as well; that she was still kicking ass and taking names. “Well, it had that special something,” she said. Then: “Why are we here?”

  Evan pointed at an open door just ahead. It was dark inside. The doorway looked like the entrance to a cellar, though such were rare in Los Angeles.

  Evan passed through the portal and disappeared.

  She wondered if she would disappear if she followed him.

  But she knew she would follow him regardless. Because he needed her. Because she needed him.

  And because they were partners in crime, after all.

  Guided

  Evan stepped into the back office, moving into the place with the surety and security of a man stepping into his own home. He had only been there once with Tuyen, but he wasn’t worried about hitting anything in the dark. Part of that was simply because there was nothing to hit.

  Mostly, though, was the sense that had gripped him. The feeling that he was being guided. Led. Like he had been stripped of his ability to choose what his next steps would be. And he didn’t even mind: the lack of agency was not confining, but liberating. As though his entire life had been a prison, and now in the moment of surrendering to an inexorable fate he had finally found peace.

  He turned on the light. His hand found the switch easily, flicking it on as he moved into the windowless room.

  The security monitor was still in its cabinet above the computer. It was off, dimly reflecting the contents of the room. He turned it on. It came to life with a low hum, static illuminating its surface.

  Evan flipped on the computer’s power switch.

  “We might want to get actual permission before digging through this guy’s stuff,” said Listings. She sounded oddly restrained.

  “We might,” he said. He waited a moment for the computer to power up, but it did nothing. Dead. Whether it had always been like this, or whether it had recently been sabotaged to preclude anyone looking into its files he could not say.

  “Is it even plugged in?” he said. He was speaking mostly to himself, but Listings responded.

  “Can’t tell. What are we looking for?”

  “The address of the girl I talked to. Or her phone number. Something.”

  The desk on which the computer sat had a pair of drawers. Neither was locked. He opened the top one and pulled out a few papers at random.

  Everything was written in Vietnamese. Or what he assumed was Vietnamese – it could have been ancient Sanskrit for all he knew. “And I took Spanish in high school,” he said.

  Evan heard a metallic click as Listings opened the file cabinet that was jammed into the back of the tiny room. “What a waste, right?” she said. “I managed to avoid taking a foreign language, myself.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “Threats.”

  Evan snorted. Though he wasn’t entirely sure she was joking. Before he could ask, Listings added, “What’s the girl’s name? The one we’re looking for?”

  “Tuyen,” he said.

  “Is that a first or a last name?”

  “That’s what I said.” Listings looked at Evan blankly, so he clarified. “She wasn’t super-chatty.”

  Listings nodded, then returned to the file cabinet. Evan kept peeling through the papers in the computer desk. All of them were incomprehensible. The few that were in English were generic bills. Nothing helpful.

  Listings made a sound. Evan turned to see her pulling something out of the back of the top drawer of the file cabinet. “Huh,” she said.

  “Something?”

  “Looks like.”

  She handed Evan a sheet of paper. He recognized it immediately. He had never seen this particular one, but had definitely seen others like it. It was a “New Hire” sheet, the kind of things businesses put together for employees, with spots for home addresses, home and cell phone numbers, emails, and so on.

  This one was mostly blank. A few Vietnamese characters.

  And the name “Tuyen” across the top in bold letters, along with a phone number and an address.

  “Great!” said Evan. He felt strange holding the paper. One step closer to understanding what had happened in the last few hours to turn his life into such a strange place, perhaps, but shouldn’t that make him feel better? Instead he felt weird, felt like running straight to the address on the paper, or phoning the number a
nd –

  He weaved on his feet. His knees wobbled under his frame, the odd sensation that he was both here with Listings and at the same time absent from his body taking hold of him. He staggered.

  “What?” said Listings. “What is it?”

  Evan looked closer at the paper. Confirmed what he had seen. What he thought he had seen.

  And it was there. It was true.

  He pointed at the paper. At the bottom of the paper someone had written “Alt. Phone,” followed by a number.

  Listings was shaking her head, clearly not understanding.

  Evan knew how she felt. He didn’t understand, either. He tapped the number. “That’s Val’s cell number,” he said.

  Listings’ gaze shot from the page in Evan’s hand to his eyes. “Your wife’s number?” she said. She frowned, looking at the sheet. “Why would some Vietnamese voodoo rave chick have that number listed as her second phone?”

  Evan couldn’t answer. He shook his head. Stunned. He turned away from Listings for a moment, turning back toward the computer desk. He needed to look away from her. She was his partner, his friend, his… whatever they were.

  But he needed to look away. Needed not to be distracted by her presence and the feelings he was having for her.

  He looked at the paper.

  Why is Val’s number on this?

  Why did the killer call me?

  Why didn’t he die when I shot him?

  Something moved in Evan’s peripheral vision. He looked up at the security monitor. It had shifted, the static gone. In its place….

  Bodies writhing. A woman on the bottom. Evan’s wife. Looking at the camera, looking at him. Val smiled. Opened her mouth to speak, but before he could –

  “No!”

  Evan swept the monitor off the shelf. It crashed to the floor with an electric snap, followed by the sharp crack of shearing glass. Tiny bits of the screen smashed across the floor in a white wave, like a strangely sharp invasion of insects.