R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning

by R. S. Guthrie

  So I told them. I was so tired of holding it all in I told them everything. Except the part about Greer. That one stayed within my circle of trusted friends and family. No one else need hear of the worst night of my life. It bore nothing on the case at hand.

  When I was through there were no immediate questions. I believed it was the shock. My own included. As I spoke, it hadn’t sounded like me, or rather, it was as if I were listening to myself right along with the rest of the room.

  “I think we’ve had enough for the morning,” Jenkins said, popping the silence as if it were a balloon of nothing at all. It was almost noon and we’d begun at seven. “I think it’s fair enough to say that we should be working on the premise we have less than a month before Melissa Grant is likely to be killed. Until something else alters that theory, I thank Detective Macaulay for his candor—that couldn’t have been easy, particularly considering the audience—and beliefs aside, this is what we’re going on.”

  “I disagree,” said Janet Del Rio. “I’m sorry, this is just asking too much. No disrespect, Detective Macaulay. We each respect your reputation.”

  “None taken,” I said. “I’ve wondered more than twice myself.”

  “What about the dimes,” asked Kent Reams, a young star Special Victims detective. “We never released the fact that we found the dimes on all the victims.”

  “Who are we going to get to admit that?” Del Rio said.

  The speakerphone lying in the middle of the conference room table rang just as Del Rio finished her question. We all looked around as if someone had farted. I was standing nearest so I pushed the button.

  “Hello?” I said

  “Bobeeeeee.”

  I frowned.

  “And everyone else, hello. It is ‘who’, Ms. Del Rio, to answer your question. Spence Grant. I am the one who’s going to know about the dimes. Do you have any idea how hard it’s been finding so many dimes minted before 1965? I should get some sort of award for that alone. Well, never overstay your welcome I always say. Oh, and don’t worry Ms. Del Rio—I won’t say a word to the team about the other Ms. Del Rio.”

  The phone and Janet Del Rio’s complexion went dead.

  Officer Rico came up to Homicide the day after I dropped my nuke on the task force. I really wasn’t in the mood for an apology. Good thing. He didn’t come toting one; he came to take me up on my offer of three rounds in the ring.

  “Detective Macaulay,” he said, him out of uniform, off duty, sweat-stained grays from wherever he worked out.

  I looked up, my brain a million light-years away. “Uh, Rico. Yeah. What’s up?”

  “Figured you weren’t going to call so since my Pilates place is just up the block decided I’d stop in so we could get that fight scheduled. The one where you’re supposed to clean my clock or somethin’ like that.”

  I leaned over my desk and motioned him in close so I could speak and not be heard by anyone but him. “Some friendly advice. No matter what your brain tells you to say, don’t always say it. I am a Senior Detective and you are one year off boot status, so I say this not because I personally give a shit but because as you move along, your career’s gonna care a lot. Step the fuck away from my desk now. You stink.”

  Rico stepped back. Said nothing, at least not with his mouth. His eyes wanted me in that ring right then.

  “Guy down at the Third Precinct is a buddy of mine. Best ring in the city. I’ll call and get us a couple hours, what, next Tuesday? You working nights still?” I said calmly.

  “Yeah. I am still workin’ nights. Sir.”

  “Today’s Tuesday, right? What say you skip Pilates next week and we do this thing instead?” I looked up at the clock; I had no fucking idea what time it was. “Two to four PM?”

  “See you there,” Rico said, and spun to leave.

  “Officer Rico,” I said, loudly.

  He stopped but didn’t turn around.

  “Bring plenty of ice.”

  I showed up at the Third Precinct gymnasium an hour early to get my sweat going. I was hoping no one had yet told the kid I was Golden Gloves five years running in my youth, half-Irish, and could have beaten most anyone in the DPD in their annual boxing championship tournament except I never entered for one reason: there was an undercover guy in Narcotics—grew up in Boston’s Southie neighborhood—that just before joining the force was one bout from getting a shot at the World Welterweight Division Champion when he busted his hand on some brawler’s thick skull in a charity fight. This guy fought every year—one of those ego guys—and he always won the trophy.

  I had also never cozied up to the feeling of a fist hitting my face (gloves, head gear, or no). Not even when I was winning.

  But this kid, Rico. I didn’t want to fight him because of my ego or my anger or because of anything other than the brutal reality that being a cop was a dangerous gig and he had, hopefully, eighteen plus years ahead of him, and if he didn’t take a beating now, he was going to die later.

  At least that was what I told myself.

  But I wasn’t stupid. That Pilates shit; I knew the kid had the conditioning on me in a big way. I’d checked up on him and he’d done some boxing, half wins, half losses, dropped his gloves way too often, always looking for the big punches—I figured I had one round of beating on him, bruise him up good and sore, and then I just needed to wait for him to drop those gloves and knock him down and out near the beginning of the second round. If the fight went much longer than that, my gas tank would be running on fumes.

  Rico didn’t show up to the gym until fifteen minutes before, like he was suited up for a pick-up basketball game, no warm-up required for the old guy with one good leg. I was wearing what I referred to as my Pistorius—prosthetic strictly for athletics. It was actually even better for fighting than running, helping my bounce and weave.

  By the time the bell rang for Round One, there were probably thirty other cops, mostly from Patrol, wanting to see their young stud champion stick it to the old man in Homicide. Score one for the grunts.

  Rico danced around the ring like an idiot, kissing his gloves, throwing them to his buddies, acting like the ring rooster he was.

  When he finally decided to stop showboating and fight, he came at me hard, just like I’d heard, young, dumb, and always looking for the knockout punch. He was five feet from our first contact when I changed my mind.

  He dropped his gloves to cock that big right hook and I uppercut him so hard that his entire frame lifted a foot off the mat and when his legs came back down they may as well have been made of mashed potatoes.

  Officer Rico crumpled like a shitty suit, right into the fetal position, and the ref didn’t even bother counting. I walked back over to my corner, packed up my bag, and returned to make sure the kid wasn’t dead.

  He was just waking back up.

  “You ever say anything to me about Burke, show any attitude to senior police, or I hear you’re playing hot-shot quarterback out on the mean streets, we’re coming back here and I am going to beat every square inch of pretty off that sexy face before lights out. You’ll be so bruised and deformed the next shift they’ll think you’re the Elephant Man. Learn a lesson here. Be a good cop. I’m going to be checking up on you. You’re my new favorite project.”

  I gave him the two fingers in the eyes “I’m watching you” sign. I guessed he was still seeing about eighteen fingers and I don’t know how many sets of eyeballs. I looked at his partner—Gibbs, the guy who had his shit squared away—who was trying to get Rico to come around to his senses.

  “You tell him,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He’d be all right. That was why I changed my plan, last second. Kid like that wasn’t going to be humiliated taking a beating. His squad would probably start calling him Rocky or Balboa and he’d be hitting the streets every day thinking he could take on the whole wide world. What stung a guy like that—what taught Mr. Ego to wake up and smell the coffee beans—was being one hundred percent knock
ed the fuck out.

  It doesn’t get any more humbling in boxing than the one-punch down and out.

  I wasn’t even sweating anymore.

  Somehow I knew Burke was looking down, laughing, and it made me want to sit down in the middle of the ring and cry.

  Three nights earlier the humanoid had appeared for no reason—okay, Spence admitted to himself, no reason of which he himself was aware. It was changing, morphing, and if Spence wasn’t bat-shit crazy, becoming even more human.

  Yet it still held its control over him. That first night milling around the apartment, just to prove a point, the humanoid forced Spence into a twenty minute Irish jig. It sat in a chair in complete silence—expressionless—the entire time. There was no music, no happiness, no comedy—just Spence jigging around the open spaces in the apartment like a complete moron and the humanoid demon watching him.

  When the thing relinquished control, it told him not to ever think for a moment that he was free of his bond with the creature, but that they’d entered a new stage of the grand plan—a plan to which Spence was most definitely not privy—and that the possessive occupation of Spence was no longer required.

  Now, three nights later and a busload of children murdered, Spence wanted more than anything to garner a pat on the back or a “good work” or “well done.”

  “I did good, right?” Spence said to the creature.

  The demon, of course, had no name, though as it changed, Spence knew exactly who the humanoid was. He’d not say it of course. Such a declaration would likely have him as dead as that fat bus driver and her gaggle of damaged children. Spence didn’t care one way or the other who or what the humanoid would become nor what the master plan entailed, but the creature had been wandering around the warehouse, looking in on Melissa while she slept, which not only made Spencer sick to his stomach but also angry as hell—but what was he going to say?

  “You did fine.”

  The creature spoke as if just recovering from a cold, phlegm and mucus still clinging to the insides of the throat. The eyes were striking. So blue they glinted like the sharpened edge of a surgeon’s blade—and it was in those eyes Spence saw who it was. The thing’s skin was beginning to form and it looked reptilian: cracked and broken. Like a kitchen tile smashed into a hundred pieces.

  “Soon he’ll know,” the thing said.

  “Macaulay?”

  “The number. Judas, of course, as if a school child could not have figured that brainless clue. All of it. He knows it already, his subconscious simply won’t let it loose inside his brain. The truth is too traumatic.”

  “Are you going to tell me what this all means?”

  “Never.”

  “Won’t I find out when your—when Macaulay figures it out?”

  “If you’re still alive to witness it.”

  Spence didn’t say anything after that. He simply sat in the darkness and listened to the thing wheeze and gurgle and hate.

  9

  I FINALLY got a callback from Father Meyer West, my cousin, where he was volunteering in Cambodia alongside a congregation of Asian monks building homes made of the earth and bringing in fresh drinking water to the horde of homeless whose entire village had been decimated by a mudslide. I had sent multiple emails but heard nothing. There was no cell service in the remote area but he was able to call from a satellite phone that was slated for “emergency use only”. According to him, the priests, nuns, and other volunteers used it when they became lonely and needed to hear a loved one’s voice.

  “Meyer?”

  “Bobby. I can’t believe it’s you.”

  “We’re in a bad way here in Denver,” I said. “Serial killings, little girls. It’s Spencer Grant.”

  “If Grant’s involved, so is Father Rule,” he said. “You realize this.”

  “I do realize it, although I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction,” I said.

  “I don’t know what I can do from here.”

  “When we were in Idaho you did a lot of research. You talked once of the real reason Rule could do what he does; why we’d not seen him before.”

  “You’re breaking up,” Meyer said. “Rule did what?”

  “No, you said there was a reason he was here now.”

  “Not a reason,” Meyer said. “A time. There’s always been evil in the world, just as there’s always been good. But that’s the metaphysical; the intangible. Not devils walking the earth.”

  “But you thought you knew why it was real now. Physical demons and Rule and all of this other nonsensical shit. In the waking world with us.”

  “I said I had some thoughts on the subject.”

  “Well let’s hear them. I am at the end of the killer’s rope out here, Meyer.”

  “In the Book of Ossian there was foretold a betrayer in the Clan MacAulay. One who would not stand for Good but for the forces of Evil.”

  “And you were going to share this with me when?”

  “Things have been so hard on you. I-I just didn’t want to add more gloom where there was nothing to be gained. Even if it’s accurate, it doesn’t change much. I think we know enough to piece that part together.”

  “It still changes a lot, Meyer.”

  “Okay. Yes, I know. But that was my rationalization. The text was difficult to decipher at best, Bobby. You know that. The rest was more my supposition and intuition than printed in ink.”

  “I want to hear it anyway,” I said. Meyer’s lack of self-confidence could be trying at best.

  “If a weak link in a chain weakens enough—”

  “Broken chain,” I said.

  “The book also implied that somewhere around the fourteenth century the Clan was at its most powerful in both numbers and will and physical Evil was banished or put back somehow; back to whence it came.”

  “Hell?”

  “Maybe, by one group’s definition. A different place to someone else. We’re way past the boundaries of any one or two religions, Bobby.”

  “So how can we find this rogue Macaulay?”

  “I have no idea,” Meyer said. “I told you, this is barely a pet theory.”

  “You’re the smartest man I know,” I said.

  “No, Bobby. You’re the smartest person you know.”

  “You know how much I hate that, Meyer.”

  “But sometimes you have to stop putting up the fight, cousin.”

  “If I’m so fucking smart, why can’t I figure out a way to end this?”

  “I’m betting the idea has already sprouted inside that thick skull of yours,” Meyer said.

  The ironic thing was, it had.

  “I really feel in my being that you need to be here. Something beyond important is going down. That much I wouldn’t hesitate to say, and I don’t. We’ve won before but we’ve won together. There’s significance in that, Meyer. Strength in numbers, power in blood.”

  “What I’m doing here, Mac. It fulfills me. Frankly, our previous encounters scared the shite right out of me. I’m not you, cousin. I’m an academic. A weakling. And a bit of a coward, I’m afraid.”

  “You are one of the bravest men I know, Meyer, and it’s you alone who’ve taught me time and again that the mind is the strongest organ in the body. By far. I’m asking you to come.”

  “Then I will put aside my terror and find a way to be there for you, my cousin and friend,” Father Meyer West said.

  I had grown up despising my intellect. Could there be anything more egotistical than to think such a thing? It wasn’t my label; I’d been labeled long before I had any memory of it. Two, three years old maybe. There were the tests and the examinations and, later, the special classes (those I did remember).

  I wasn’t exactly the nerd or the brain—I was tough and strong and an athlete, too, but Jax got to be the star and the ladies’ man and the normal kid who got reprimanded by the teacher and, later, pummeled by our father for skipping class or pulling a “D” on a paper.

  The dumb jock, he used to called hi
mself, which was his way of joking to defend who he was against whatever jealousy or shortcomings or underachievement his ego claimed defined him. It was ridiculous. Jax was my best friend—not just a brother.

  My best friend.

  God how I missed him. I didn’t know how or why or even when any longer that we’d allowed our differences to define and divide us, but we had. Our personalities were vastly different but much of that came from my own inability to put up with Jax’s hatred of himself, his inability in his own eyes to live up to me, and the reality that there was no way for me to tell him that thoughts like that were bullshit or prove to him that I didn’t feel that way or believe any of that at all.

  I’d promised myself that when the shit was done in Idaho that we would talk—brother-to-brother, friend-to-friend, and figure everything out. Get back to where we used to be.

  And then he was gone.

  You spend a lifetime ignoring someone while they are but a phone call or an email away and then when they die you miss them every minute of every day. We couldn’t connect to the afterlife, assuming there even was one.

  It made no sense for me to disbelieve something after all I’d seen evidence of it, but I still had too much baggage to really accept all I’d been through. I wished my sharing of what I’d been told—what I’d witnessed—with the task force would have unburdened me somehow, but when I saw that look in their eyes, it was the same as back in the days of elementary school when the other kids realized I could read Tom Sawyer or Ulysses in the second grade.

  The oddball.

  The one who was different from the rest of them.

  The child reading the classics, textbooks on Physics and Chemistry when he was ten.

  Hell I couldn’t just read them, I could recite them verbatim.

  How was my brother ever supposed to compete with that?

  My own father despised it. My abilities made my father feel like there was a superiority that came from my mother’s side of the family, since all his kin had been laborers and blue-collar folk. So whom did he punish?