Darkness of the Soul

by Kaine Andrews

  “Spill it, Vince. Cough it up.”

  Parker continued dragging him, until they were at the far end of the bar. This was the part in the deepest shadow. The bulbs over the tables on this side had gotten smashed, probably the night before, right around the time a bunch of kids had decided to get a little rowdy and before the boys in blue, Perez among them, came to take care of it. He then practically shoved Drakanis onto a stool. His voice was urgent, running far more rapidly than his usual slow rumble, and even he could detect the note of panic, the hint of “talk me out of this, please,” that had crept in without his knowing.

  “Do you believe in the supernatural, Mikey? Like the shit they got on late at night? People burning themselves up, phone calls from the dead, shit like that?”

  Drakanis was about to shake his head—the world was fucked enough, in his opinion, without adding all kinds of boojums into it—but then he stopped and really considered the question. He had never had anything obviously odd happen to him—that he could recall, at least—but like almost all people on the face of this tiny planet, he knew a few people who had claimed to have genuine psychic experiences, people he trusted, people who would have no reason to lie—people like Ed Marco.

  Marco’d been a detective, something of a mentor figure to both Drakanis and Parker, though in truth he hadn’t been out of his training for much longer than they had. He’d come to the calling later in life, and so by the time they’d met him, he’d already been pushing fifty, but Marco could still kick the shit out of any recruit just coming in off his POST. He also could just find whatever he needed, and that was how he had managed to attain near mythic status during his brief time with the Reno Police Department. Before departing his position after only five years, Marco had taken the number of unsolved crimes in the files down from two hundred and eighty to just forty-five. Nobody really understood how he’d done it, least of all Marco himself; though a few of the old-timers who didn’t care to have their records being caught up to by a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, fifty years old or no, used to joke that he’d spent the first forty-five years of his life committing crimes so he could solve them himself. He used to say that if he sat and thought about things real hard, the answer would just come to him or people would just spit out whatever he needed to hear from them.

  It was Marco that Drakanis was thinking of now and how he could just sit and look at a guy and that guy—no matter if he was some sixteen-year-old caught filching a dime pack of gum or a hard-ass lifer still running on appeals and waiting to shiv the first dolt who forgot to search him—would just crumple and spill his guts on any subject he cared to hear about. Drakanis had watched him do it a time or two and still couldn’t tell how the hell he managed it. He was wondering if you could do something like that to a person from a distance—like from a pay phone in a casino, say—and if you could, if you could do it hard enough, if that was the right way to think about it, to kill somebody.

  The rational part of his mind would have dismissed bullshit like that immediately and had been doing so for a couple of days now, but the somewhat drunken and superstitious part wanted to brood on it, turn it over and over in his mind like some precious jewel, and consider it from all angles, and that part of him had ultimately decided that, yes, you could. There was stranger shit out there than that, and some of it spoken of by men he trusted and believed.

  Parker had continued to look at him with those wide eyes, waiting for an answer, while he’d sat there and thought it out. Drakanis shook his head.

  “You don’t look like you wanna hear what I think, but I’ll tell you anyway. Yeah, I think that shit exists. And I’ll even answer your next question, since I know you’ve got one. Yes, I think it could have happened to the captain, and yes, I think it really was our boy that did it. Now can we go back to drinking and fucking forget about it for ten minutes, please? Because I could really give a shit about it at the moment.”

  Drakanis hadn’t realized that the volume control on his voice box had apparently been slowly twisting toward the maximum as he spoke, but the sudden tingling running down his spine and the muting of what was going on in the rest of the room clued him in rather quickly. Parker’s eyes flicked over his shoulder an instant before Drakanis turned to look himself and stared back into a sea of eyes and gaping mouths.

  Perez was breaking through the crowd.

  Jesus, what a bunch, Drakanis thought. Even the fucking janitors are down here partying. Don’t they realize the man’s fucking dead?

  Perez was trying to turn the gawkers’ gazes back to their own affairs and only partially succeeding. Both Drakanis and Parker could see as the whispering started, could see as Brokov turned to Woods and with a secret little smile mouthed, “Crazy. Psychiatric leave,” to the young man, who nodded.

  Drakanis could feel the veins in his forehead pulsing, could tell he was about to do or say something very stupid, that all it would take was one more comment, one more stare that looked even the slightest bit like it was directed at him, and someone else was more than likely going to end up with a broken nose today.

  Parker saw Drakanis turn, saw him go that disturbing shade of purple only those about to do something idiotic or have a heart attack—or both—tended to turn, and reached out with one nimble hand. It tightened like a clamp on Drakanis’s shoulder. He shot his eyes up to Perez with a questioning look; the other officer just nodded, looking apologetic, and jerked his head in the direction of the door with raised brows. Parker nodded back, and before Drakanis could begin to get further than deciding who was going to get punched, his former colleagues were ushering him out.

  Once they’d shuffled out the back door and into the dump that Woody—or his son, depending on how drunk the owner was at the time you talked to him—only half jokingly called Shooter’s Alley, Perez and Parker let go of him. Perez kicked the door shut with his foot while Parker tried to get Drakanis straight again.

  Perez was not by any stretch of the imagination a large man, and when someone like Parker was around for comparison, he looked positively shrimpy; still, the look on his hard-edged face and the gleam in his almost-black eyes told enough of the tale to anyone who really felt like arguing with him. He crossed his arms and stood in front of the door, shaking his head with apparent disappointment and sadness. Perez, in this state, looked like a father expressing unhappiness over a bad report card, but he radiated a palpable aura that enforced the unspoken: they were not getting back in that room, at least not right away.

  Seeing that look on this man—a man he genuinely liked and had always thought well of, a man whose nose he’d broken and yet who still put up with his shit and tried to keep on pleasant terms—caused something in Drakanis to hurt more than almost anything ever had. Seeing that look made him think about how many others he had hurt over the years, how many people he’d just shut out so he could wallow in his own misery. It also made him feel even worse about the captain’s death.

  Christ, you fuckwit. It’s the man’s goddamn wake, and all you can manage to do is shout about how you don’t want to think about it loudly enough that you send his widow crying and get half the damn cops in town thinking you’re a nut again. That was what one part of him was saying. A deeper part, one that usually only spoke to him in the darkness of the night, when he wasn’t aware he was thinking anything at all, added to it, And how responsible am I for Morrigan? If I’d done what I was supposed to back then, would he be dead, now? What about the others this guy’s killed? Is it just two old men and one guy with a bad heart, or is it more? How many? How much blood is on my hands?

  Drakanis shook his head, turned away, and vomited. He found himself grateful for a moment, since it came up like it always had. Even as a child, he could just send it up the chute and let it go without any pain, without any coughing spasms, and it was still like that now, just sick it up, get it out of the system.

  Saved myself a hangover, at
least. Should be grateful for that. Stuck as he was thinking of his lifetime vomiting experiences, he didn’t immediately register what the others were saying to him. He didn’t bother diverting his attention to listen either. He just let it go until it was all out. Then he stumbled back, flopped his ass onto an old crate that had supposedly once contained a great number of oranges, and looked blearily up, catching just the last of what Perez was saying.

  “—going to be okay, Vincent?” Another thing about Perez that Drakanis had always noticed was his attention to detail in everything he did. His nails were always perfectly done, cut probably to the millimeter in precision. His clothes always looked as though they’d been made out of steel; they were kept so straight and even that you almost thought they were a built-in part of him. Everything he said came out that way too; he never used a contraction—at least, not that Drakanis had ever noticed—and he always used a person’s full name. He made sure to always provide clarification when asked. Even the tone of voice itself was almost anal-retentive in his modulation of it, and his enunciation would make English teachers the world around cream their jeans if they heard him speak a few words.

  Parker was shaking his head, glancing over at Drakanis briefly before turning back to Perez. “No, I ain’t gonna be okay, Julio. I’m pretty fucking shitty, as a matter of fact, but physically I’m fine.” He flapped a hand, almost dismissively, and then added, “Sorry about that.”

  Perez shrugged, his shoulders rolling up and back down the barest fraction of an inch to be detectable. Then he lowered his voice. “I know this is a difficult thing for you, Vincent. You as well, Michael.” At that, Drakanis cringed. Very few people even bothered with Mike, let alone Michael, and it made him think of Gina again. “And I would rather that you could stay, but…” He spread his hands, again with the same apologetic but stern facial expression.

  Drakanis was finding something resembling his sense again and just shook his head. “I understand. It’s cool. Look, I’m… sorry.” His voice was trembling, hard to read, and Perez thought he detected a note of anger in it, but Drakanis was holding all of that for himself. He should have known better than to just start shouting, but… A million excuses started to crowd in on him, so he just shook his head again and took a step back, mumbling another, “I’m sorry,” as he did so.

  Perez just nodded, flicked his eyes over Drakanis’s shoulder to Parker for a fraction of an instant, and then disappeared back inside, leaving the giant to try to sort through the rest of the mess. Neither of them said anything for several minutes, until Drakanis offered up another, “I’m sorry,” which pushed Parker over the edge.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Mikey, would you shut the fuck up? Party foul, that’s all. Besides, Brokov’s a bitch sometimes, and Woods is a little weasel, so who gives a shit what they think? The rest of ’em will get over it eventually, so fuck ’em. If I can give you a day pass, they sure as fuck had better.”

  Parker was thinking about Morrigan now, and it was pushing what he really wanted—needed—to talk to Drakanis about right out of his mind. That was bad, but it was hard to stop it from happening. When the man who basically sponsored your whole career on the force, who had been there to listen when your only surviving relative finally kicked the bucket, who had taken you in and let you marry his daughter and then tried to help you through it when she decided another woman was a better choice, when that man dies—especially young and sudden—there’s a lot of shit to wade through, and Parker was still trying to get it into his head that there was that shit to wade through.

  Drakanis looked about ready to let loose with some sharp comment, but the look on the other man’s face gave him pause. He knew better than most how it had been with Parker and how Morrigan had been one of the few people Parker had let into his inner life. You could count those people on one hand, regardless of his apparent cheerfulness and the dozens of “hellos” that seemed to follow him around. Knowing that and seeing the look on Parker’s face, Drakanis found he couldn’t do or say much at all, just stand there with his hands in his pockets and wait, looking uncomfortable and wondering if it had been this way when Gina had died.

  Of course it was, you idiot. They all could see how bad it was, but nobody knew what to say to you; you wouldn’t have let them, even if they had.

  He wanted to argue with that inner voice, say it wasn’t so, say he’d wanted to come out and get on with living, but he couldn’t lie to himself that deeply.

  “All right, look, I overreacted. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about the captain, too. I…” Drakanis paused, unsure if he should say anything or not, but he figured he’d already gotten it half out, so he might as well just do it. “I know how much he meant to you. So are we gonna buck up and kick this motherfucker’s ass or what, Tonto?”

  This managed to elicit at least a small smirk from Parker, who shook his head as he started rummaging in his pocket for the cigarettes. He flipped one toward Drakanis as he parked his own in the corner of his mouth and lit it. Taking his time on the first drag while Drakanis got his own cancer stick going, Parker considered and then nodded.

  “Motherfucker’s goin’ down, my friend.”

  “Right. So spill it. What have you got, and what does it matter?”

  Parker looked slightly reluctant for a moment. Maybe I am just seeing shit where there is none. Maybe that kinda shit’s catching, he thought. Then he shrugged and pulled a thin envelope from inside his jacket. The look of relief that passed over his face was unmistakable. However irrational it might be, the whole time he’d had the thing in there, it had felt like a lead weight that some fool had left in the fireplace for a few hours, burning against his chest and trying to drag him down. Finally being able to whip it out and show it to someone else was like the effect of zero gravity and a bucket of water, getting rid of both of those pains and helping to clear his mind a bit.

  Christ, I probably am going crazy, he thought, and then out loud, he said, “If you’re willing to accept a little bit of shuck and jive and accept some of the weirder shit as being possible, I think our boy’s been one fuck of a lot busier than we really could have expected. Have a peek.”

  He passed the envelope to Drakanis. He tore it open after a half-contemptuous look that wasn’t really serious and then started to skim while Parker smoked.

  * * *

  Damien Woods watched the back door as the nut departed alongside Parker and Perez, the ghost of a smile gracing his lips. The blonde next to him was probably still thinking it was about whatever she’d said last—though Damien didn’t even remember what it had been, nothing important, anyway. She continued to prattle on, so he could stare without fear of repercussions.

  Damien had been with the force for just about three years now. The night Gina Drakanis met her unfortunate end had been one of his first on-duty shifts, as a matter of fact. My how the time flies when you’re having fun! he thought. He had never received a promotion, never been cited or nominated for anything, and rarely even had his name appear on the duty roster, regardless of how many others were out sick. That was the way he liked it, keeping below the radar, just doing his thing. Sure, other cops knew him, but they only rarely remembered him, and while it was a bitch to get a raise in a situation like that, it helped tremendously when you were looking for something and didn’t want anyone else to know you were looking.

  Looks like maybe they’re catching on. There might be hope for those boys, yet. He’d been trying for at least the last year to get Parker to open his damn eyes and see that the world around him wasn’t really what he thought it was, that the impossible was only improbable, but hadn’t had much success. It was ironic, he thought, that all it took was for the killer to do something off-kilter and suddenly, Parker was a raving believer.

  Too bad Drakanis doesn’t look like he wants to buy into the show. Dumbass.

  Damien was broken out of his reverie and the tenuous
mental bond he was trying to tap into with Parker and Drakanis when Brokov tapped him on the shoulder and waved her other hand in front of his face.

  “Hellloooo? Anybody home?”

  Damien started and blinked a few times, trying to get his eyes to focus on her—the farsight always raised hell with his normal vision, even when it wouldn’t work. He smiled at her, reading the expression on her face—part irritation, part boredom—and jabbed a small mental needle in her direction to keep her sedate. Calm.

  No sooner thought than done, and the lines smoothed out in her face and the tapping on his shoulder turned to a caress.

  “Where were you, hmm? Not in your head, obviously,” she said with a mischievous smirk.

  “Sorry. Was woolgathering. Hard to think in here, too goddamn gloomy.”

  Though others had noted the same more than once as the afternoon dragged on and the guests came and went, he doubted anyone else was feeling it the way he did. Drakanis might be, but he was too unfocused to understand it. The rest of them were just plain blind. There was something there, some force, and it was deadening everything, making what was already a morbid affair into something with the atmosphere of a midnight mass. Damien still couldn’t put a finger on where it was coming from.

  Probably exactly why he’s doing it. This was true enough, he was sure. The killer was putting out this dead static over the psychic airwaves, knowing someone or something would be picking it up—another thing that drove Damien up the wall. Cops might not remember him, and the man on the street might not even know he existed, but whoever was doing all this shit knew there was something to be hiding from at least, and that was one step closer to finding him than Damien liked anyone to get.

  “You want to get out of here? It is pretty gloomy, and much as I liked the captain, I think I’ve said good-bye enough times.”

  Damien paused only for a moment; he’d prefer to stay there and see if he could pinpoint where that mental static was coming from, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to tell until it was gone, and then it’d be useless anyway. Outside, at least, he might be able to get a better mark on Parker, and if things turned sour, he’d have a cover story.