by Edward Lee
Dust rose in billows as the parking lot began to empty. Following Eagle tonight would be a dumb move, but he thought it might be a good idea to tail one of the regulars for a while, just to see which direction he was headed. He set his sights on one of the pickups that frequented the lot, waited a moment, then pulled out. The pickup turned north on the Route, away from town. In fact, most of the vehicles pulling out headed north.
And another thing occurred to him. Natter wasn’t at the club tonight. His car wasn’t in the lot…
But before Phil could contemplate that any further, a shadow rose up behind him from the back seat.
««—»»
The dream was a proffering, a blessing…
It was a gift.
In the dream, he was vapor, an unholy ghost. Bodiless. Perfect. Spiralling down perfectly into perfect black.
But it wasn’t really a dream, he knew that. They were never really dreams…
They were summonings.
Ona. Oh, blessed flesh of Ona, he thought. I am so unworthy…
He ascended, somehow, downward.
He soared.
Bereft of the flaws of his curse, he was perfect now, the vessel of his being light as air, his wisdom heavier than all the earth.
He knew where his wisdom had come from.
The darkness smeared, soaring past. He felt terror at first—so quick was his flight. He breezed through massive stone channels pocked and blackened by the age of all of history. He wisped through crevices no more wide than a fraction of an inch.
On and on. Down and down.
Into the blessed black.
Soon the great ebon wall approached. He soared right into it—
—then through it.
Greater blackness bloomed beyond the wall. Blackness that was brighter than the sun. He could smell the sound of screams. He could taste the dense stench of burning human muscle and bone. He could smell pandemonium, a scent sweet as fresh-cut roses.
And with his ethereal eyes, he saw the field.
A field of flesh, of people. Acre upon acre, prone humans lay naked and alive, awaiting the field’s noxious attendants, its pious harvesters. And they squirmed in their wait. Screaming. Shrieking. Convulsing in spastic tremors.
Soon the harvesters arrived: squat, rough-skinned figures plodding forward into the screaming field. Above them, a blistering black moon shined, offering light to their sacred tasks. Dutifully, then, and steadfast, they began to farm the field.
With unholy tools, they plowed and tilled; great blades and hewers, twivels and trowels, rose and methodically fell to turn the hearty human soil. Skulls burst under the blows of mallets. Breasts, buttocks, and faces threshed raw. Bellies riven open by scythes which swept this way and that like clockworks, baring fresh, fertile entrails, ripe organs, and rich, fecund blood. Some of the harvesters worked barehanded, crawling along the squirming horde to punch out eyes with stub fingers, twist genitalia out of shivering groins, crack bones and unseat limbs. Hands and feet were bitten off by glassine teeth, then spat out. Talons raked throats. Palms and heels crushed bodies and heads like grapes in a wine vat.
Hard work. Eternal work.
Tending the fields of the father! he thought in utter, rushing joy.
Acres and acres, miles and miles, he continued to soar above the wondrous spectacle. Oh, how he prayed that on some great day he, too, would join the harvesters in their divine and hallowed labors.
But even eternal farmers needed reprieve. They needed sustenance. They needed recess. So at the granted time, they set aside the tools of their industry—
Such wonders!
—and began to feast.
Some took their meat raw, others preferred it cooked. Plump organs were plucked from opened abdomens as fruit might be plucked from vines. Eyeballs were swallowed whole like grapes, lungs eaten like bread loaves, intestines consumed like so much robust salad. The living dirt screamed forth. Whole heads were cooked to perfection over open flames, then prized apart and picked clean of their delectable meat. Testes were roasted on skewers, severed breasts fried crisp, uteri and placenta, fetuses and kidneys, human bowels and human hearts—all flamebroiled and lustily munched.
It was a hearty meal, and a well-earned one.
And once the reverent harvesters had sated themselves of the belly, they next proceeded to sate themselves of the groin. Demonic erections rose, to plunder every conceivable orifice, and some not so conceivable. Vaginas were routed with gusto, rectums were sodomized raw by perverse organs sunk to their hilts. Unwilling jaws were pried wide till their tendons tore—the only way the pitiful human mouths could accommodate the tumescent girth of such netherworldly members. Trowel punctures and scythe rents, too, provided fine pockets of release, and such release poured forth in copious volume, gouts of lumpen semen flooding bowels and wombs, stomachs and entrails, emptied eye sockets and cracked-open cranial vaults.
A romp indeed.
Slaked now, the field hands took up their tools and finished the dark work they’d started.
The field was tilled red. Rich, fresh blood drenched the chopped soil, the finest of fertilizers. More attendants followed behind, bearing sacks of strange seeds. The seeds were sewn liberally into the verdant, warm soil, and beneath the light of the caliginous moon, they began to spout at once. Soon stalks rose high, heavy with succulent fruit, and the fruit was then expeditiously threshed and taken away to market.
The harvest was over, only to begin again and again and again…
His vapor siphoned back, wisping fast as light through stone cracks and rabbets, back up the charnel earthworks, back from whence he came.
He didn’t want to go back; he could soar here forever, and revel in these holy sights and many more.
But I must go now, he realized.
He had his own fields to farm…
Back, back, he sailed. Back out of the hot meat of the earth, back to the lackluster terrain of his forebears, back to his wretched human vessel.
Back—
Like blood sucked up by a sponge, his flesh reclaimed his glorious vapor.
Ona. Ona. I give thanks to thee for such sights, such heralds, such righteous and holy gifts.
I live to serve thee…to the ends of the earth.
The Reverend opened his eyes.
And sighed.
««—»»
“Jesus Christ!” Phil shouted. “You scared the—”
“The shit out of you, I know. Sorry.”
Phil, in his shock, had weaved across the yellow line, then veered back over to the shoulder. When the shadow had risen from the back seat, he freaked…
But the shadow…was Vicki.
“I just—I just needed someone to talk to,” she explained. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”
Phil put the car in park on the road’s shoulder. “Yeah, fine,” he acknowledged. “But did you have to hide in the back of my friggin’ car?”
She hesitated. “Well, yeah. I guess so.”
“Why?”
She swept shining red hair off her brow. “Let’s just say I had a bad day.”
Phil gave his heart a moment to slow down—actually, several moments. “I didn’t see you in the club tonight. What, day off?”
In the rearview, he saw her glance down. “Something like that. It’s best if you don’t ask.”
All right, Phil instructed himself, Don’t ask. But he had to ask something. “I was hanging out with Eagle Peters. Do you know him?”
“I know who he is,” Vicki said. “When you’re in my line of work, you don’t really know anybody. You’re not allowed to. It also makes things a lot easier.” Then, as if premonitory, she asked, “You made it to the back room yet?”
“Uh, yeah,” he admitted. “That’s some show. Jesus. Kind of feel sorry for the girls.”
“Don’t bother. No one else does.” She got out of the back and then got into the front. The door chunked closed.
Christ, Phil thought.
S
he wore cut-off shorts, sandals, and a tight, bright-pink halter top. Coltish, perfect legs inclined. Her hair shined like some kind of rare metal.
“I didn’t see your husband at the club either,” Phil pointed out.
“He’s busy tonight.”
“Yeah?” he queried, though a hundred other questions occurred to him. Like, Busy? Busy doing what? Dealing with a dust distributor? Killing cowboys moving on his turf? Buying your next rail of cocaine? But none of these questions could he ask. Not without jeopardizing his cover. He’d have to deal with Vicki the same as he was dealing with Eagle. Slowly, discreetly, for snippets of information.
“I just wanted to talk,” she said. “Maybe that sounds pathetic, but you don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve actually had a normal conversation with someone. It’s not easy, you know. Under the circumstances.”
Phil could imagine what she meant. A good-sized chunk of her humanity was erased now, or turned into something fairly useless. She wasn’t a real person anymore as much as she was a pretty painting hanging in a rogue’s gallery. Only these paintings you could rent, if the price was right. As a prostitute, and a stripper, how could she ever really relate to anyone anymore? And being married to someone like Cody Natter? It must be hell…
“Why don’t you just tell me what’s wrong?” he said.
She was looking out the window, into the woods and the night’s profusion, but he knew what she was really looking at was herself. “Sometimes I feel like I’m falling apart,” she said more under her breath than to him. “Sometimes I wake up, and I can’t believe what’s happened to me. I can’t understand how I could ever let this happen to me. It must’ve been a pretty big shock for you.”
“What do you mean?”
She laughed cynically. “Oh, come on, Phil. Stop trying to be such a gentleman all the time. The last time you saw me, I was a police officer. Ten years later, you come back to town to find out that I’m working in a strip joint and turning tricks. Probably not quite what you expected.”
“Well, if there’s one thing I’ve taught myself, it’s that I should never have expectations about people. Especially about myself.”
“Yeah? And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Now it was Phil’s chance to laugh. “You’re not the only one who’s taken a fall since the old days. I didn’t exactly come back to Crick City better off than when I left. I came back because there was no where else to go.”
“What happened?” she asked him. “You never really told me. All I remember is hearing bits and pieces. Something about a shooting. Something about a kid.”
This was Phil’s chance. Here he knew he could mix lies with truth and have it work to his advantage. He could win her confidence, like he did tonight with Eagle, by pretending to have turned into a typical town scumbag. Working undercover, that was his job. Time to let some bullshit fly. “We were taking down a PCP lab one night. It was cut and dry; in fact, the whole thing went off without a hitch. Only problem was there was this prick named Dignazio who had it in for me. He shot a kid, a spotter, with illegal ammo and made it look like I did it. It was a sham, a frame-up. But I got shitcanned all the same.”
She looked at him sympathetically. “Why did this guy have it in for you?”
Here was his cue, the perfect place to start his cover story, his lie. “I was stringing out; Dignazio was the only guy who knew that, and he wanted me out of the picture. Only problem was he couldn’t prove it without turning on his own stools.”
Her stare fixed on him in the dark. Sure, she was a prostitute, but she was also an ex-cop, and she knew the language. “You were strung out? You?”
“That’s right,” Phil lied. “By then, I’d been free-basing crystal for a few years. Then I switched to dust ’cos it was the only way I could get off the ice.”
This fabrication, he knew, would build a new bond between them, however phony. By demonstrating a weakness that she could directly relate to. Vicki knew she was on a road to ruin; if she believed Phil was on the same road, he’d have her. And from there—with some luck—he could get a real line on Natter’s lab and operation.
“Now,” he continued, “I’m trying to get off the dust, but I can’t. It’s a real bitch.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get off coke for two years now. Can’t do it. I try real hard all the time but…”
“I know,” Phil said. “You don’t have to tell me. I guess it’s all the same in a way. Coke, dust, ice, booze—it’s all a kick in the ass, but what can you do? A habit’s a habit.”
A pause drifted between them, but Phil sensed it was a natural one. She was letting some serious things air out here, another good sign that his pitch was working. They lounged back in the darkness, watching the fireflies, listening to the crickets. Phil thought he’d delivered his lines well, and he knew that she believed him when, a moment later, she snapped open a small wrist purse.
Was she testing him? No, if she thought his recital was a fake, she’d never take so open a chance as this.
So, it could only mean one thing:
She trusts me.
If she didn’t trust me, if she even suspected for a minute that I was really still a cop, there’s no way in hell she’d be doing something like this.
In the moonlight, he couldn’t see much, but he could see enough. The purse contained the typical provisions of a prostitute: lipstick, eyeliner, a small pack of tissues, and, of course, condoms. He also noticed a small amount of cash. But from beneath it all, she extracted the tiny glass vial…
No, she’d never be snorting coke in front of me if she thought I was working undercover…
“You want some?” she distractedly offered.
“Naw. That stuff makes me break out in hives. Like I said, dust’s my bag.”
A tiny silver spoon and chain depended from the vial. With expert quickness, she sniffed two shots out of the spoon, and then the stuff was all back in her purse before either of them could so much as blink.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
I guess that says it all, Phil thought. She rested back against the bench seat, her eyes closed. Her chest, arousing in the tight halter, rose and fell. And the look on her face…
He’d seen it a million times. The source of the habit didn’t matter in the least (cocaine, PCP, crystal meth, heroin), the expression was always the same. There was no pleasure in it, but an articulate and very abstract intertwining of relief, disgust, and self-capitulation.
All addicts had it. It was the look of someone who had surrendered to their own slavery.
The night’s stillness enveloped them. The high, two o’clock moon cast shadows about the car. Lightning bugs shifted in legion, and the trill of crickets throbbed hypnotically.
Vicki fidgeted a moment, and sighed.
Hitting her up now with questions about her source—would be the worst thing he could do. As with Eagle, he knew he’d have to walk on eggshells a day at a time. He must prove to her that he was one of her ilk, that his life had turned to garbage just as quickly as hers had.
“Maybe it’s all for the best,” she said with a grim joke in her words. “You’re on dust, I’m on coke… Not what you would call model cops.”
Phil laughed. “You got that right.” Then he shrugged as though it didn’t mean much. “Guess we just weren’t cut out for it. Big deal, you know? I was a shitty cop anyway.”
“I don’t miss the job, either. It got too scary.”
“Scary? What could be scary about driving a beat in Crick City?”
“You don’t know the half of it, Phil.” Lethargically, she lit a menthol cigarette and watched the smoke drift out the open window. “Let’s just say you got out of town at the right time. Remember Adams and North?”
“Yeah. Town boys. I never knew ’em, but I’d seen them around. They worked for Mullins too, didn’t they?”
“Um-hmm. After I got fired, some pretty serious shit started to go down around here
.”
“Like what?”
“Never mind what. Just take my word for it, it was hairy. Mullins had Adams and North working on it, though.”
Phil could guess what she was talking about: Natter’s PCP operation, but of course he couldn’t let on that he knew about that, at least not yet.
“All right,” he said. “But what about Adams and North?”
“They disappeared,” Vicki said.
Disappeared. It took a moment for the word to sink in. Mullins had told him that Adams and North had merely left the department for better-paying jobs elsewhere. Fairfax and Montgomery County, he thought. And as he recalled, they were decent guys and fairly tough customers.
“There were some murders,” Vicki finally admitted. “Drug dealers from out of town, PCP guys mostly. It was really gross; they were mutilated. It looked like…”
Phil’s patience ticked. He didn’t want to push her, but he did want to know what she was talking about. He let a few more seconds pass, then: “It looked like what, Vicki?”
She was clearly distressed, but was it the coke or something else?
“These cowboys they found dead?” Her voice lowered to a dusky croak. “It looked like they’d been…skinned.”
Skinned. His pause burgeoned. Just like that cowboy we found, Rhodes. He was a dust dealer from out of town. And he’d been skinned.
“I heard they found a dozen bodies at least,” she went on. “Same m.o. each time. Mullins had Adams and North investigating. Then one day—four or five months ago, I guess—both of them just disappeared.”
Phil chewed the inside of his cheek. Disappeared, huh? This was the second time she told him something that directly refuted Mullins. And when they’d found Rhodes’ body? Mullins had seemed genuinely shaken, but he’d also seemed…
Well, Phil wasn’t quite sure what. But he didn’t like it. Why would Vicki make something like this up? And if it were true, why wouldn’t Mullins have told him about it.
Whatever it is, he declared to himself, I’m going to find out.
