Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  She shrugged, turned back to the west, and continued jogging towards City Center. Her hotel was only a few blocks away, and with any luck she might get some sleep this time. She might open the curtains a bit when she got back to the room, before turning off the light. She wasn’t really in the mood for total darkness again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Patrick’s call woke her, Izzie had only been asleep a little over an hour, but she still felt immeasurably better than she had a few hours before. She’d fallen asleep in the borrowed workout clothes, and found the smell of them far more noisome now that she was fully awake. She stripped out of them, wrinkling her nose, and left them in a pile on the bed. Then she grabbed a quick shower, brushed her teeth vigorously, and dressed in yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt. She caught sight of herself in the mirror as she pulled on her jacket, and knew that she would have to address her ratty braids before too much longer, but they would have to wait for the moment.

  She went through her personal sign of the cross before opening the door, patting her pockets in sequence. Phone? Check. Credentials? Check. Firearm? Ammunition? Handcuffs? Check, check, and check.

  She pulled the Do Not Disturb sign off the outside handle, tossed it into the room, and the door sighed shut behind her. As she headed down the hall, she wondered whether a gris-gris bag might not be more fitting for the day, after all. In for a penny with superstitious nonsense, in for a pound.

  Patrick was right about one thing, at least. The donuts were delicious.

  “Oh my god, these are amazing,” Izzie said around a giant mouthful. They were flaky and tender, and sweeter than their plain golden color would suggest, even without any added icing. And huge. One of them alone practically filled the plate, and Izzie had already had three.

  “These are island-style donuts,” Patrick explained, taking a sip of his steaming hot coffee. He gestured towards the counter and the kitchen beyond. “The owners were neighbors of mine growing up. They graduated from high school with my cousin Susan. We go way back.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “They set aside the best ones for me.”

  Izzie rolled her eyes. “Patrick, do you honestly think you’re the only cop who gets preferential treatment in a donut place?”

  Patrick sat back, feigning mock offense. “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

  She chuckled and held up the plate holding the last of the enormous pastries. “Your winnings, sir.”

  When he reached for the last donut, she quickly snatched it up and took a huge bite, chewing with exaggerated bliss. “Mmmm.”

  Patrick gulped the last of his coffee and slammed the cup down on the table. “Everybody out at once!”

  Izzie pushed back from the table, patting her stomach. “Okay, I clearly needed that. Thanks.” She stood up, checking to make sure her holster was still in the correct position behind her hip.

  Patrick grinned. “So when’s lunch?”

  “Come on.” Izzie headed towards the door. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Where would you like to start?” Patrick said as he followed her outside.

  “I want to revisit the physical evidence from the Fuller investigation.” Izzie headed towards the curb where Patrick’s car was parked. “In particular, the stuff we seized from his apartment. It’s possible that we missed something important the first time around.”

  “For example?” Patrick jingled the keys in his hand as he approached the driver’s side door.

  “Like what he thought he was accomplishing by killing all of those people.”

  During the course of the Reaper investigation five years before, the materials that the task force collected had been kept in the Property Room at the 12th Precinct Station House on Odessa Avenue. After the investigation concluded with the death of Nicholas Fuller, everything had been moved to a warehouse that the Property and Evidence division of the Recondito police department maintained in the South Bay’s industrial park for long-term storage.

  As Patrick navigated his car through the morning traffic heading south along the bay’s eastern shore, Izzie mentioned her run-in with the staggering pair the night before.

  “Oh, yeah,” Patrick said, wincing. “They must have been pretty far gone.”

  “Far gone on what?”

  “Ink. I’ve only seen a few cases that had gotten that bad, but I guess we’ll be seeing more and more of it unless we’re able to figure out where the supply is coming from.” He signaled to change lanes as they approached South Bay. “I’m sure you’ve seen photos of people who use crystal meth regularly, right?”

  “Sure. ‘Faces of meth.’ That kind of thing.” Izzie cringed, remembering images of sunken cheeks and rotting teeth, slack skin covered in acne and sores, people seeming to age years in a matter of months, decades in a matter of years. “Gruesome.”

  “Well, Ink is just as bad, maybe even worse. At first it just affects the user’s behavior—mood swings, personality changes, memory loss. It’s the loss of memory that’s the draw for some people that use Ink. Maybe they’ve had some trauma they’d rather not remember, or a bad breakup they’d rather forget. With enough doses of Ink, all that is washed away. But with continued use it starts to affect them physically, too. There’s usually dramatic weight loss, probably due to a loss of appetite. I’ve even heard of some kids who start using because they’ve got body image issues and think it’ll help them lose weight. But nobody tells them that they might drop a few pounds, but they’ll pick up lesions in the bargain.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yeah, they’re nasty. I don’t know what causes it, exactly. Bruising, maybe? Or maybe Ink jacks up the body’s immune system somehow? But however it happens, they start forming these dark patches on their skin, just a few at first, and the longer they keep on using the more they get, bigger and darker. Like nasty black welts all over the place.”

  “Sounds horrible.” Izzie glanced out the window at the hike and bike trails that threaded between the road and the eastern shores of the bay. Couples strolling along, people out running or jogging, young parents pushing strollers. “I guess that means the problem could be worse though, right? I mean, you don’t see too many people walking around covered in big black bruises.”

  Patrick shook his head, and scowled. “Oh, they’re out there. But they tend to keep out of sight. Prolonged use of the stuff seems to make them … what’s the technical term for being sensitive to light?”

  Izzie thought for a moment. “Photophobic?”

  “Right. Photophobic. They stay holed up indoors during the day, and at night avoid the parts of town that are brightest lit. But if you go looking in the shadows, you’ll always find a few blots skulking around.”

  “Blots?” Izzie echoed.

  “That’s what some of the vice cops have started calling them.” He gestured vaguely at his face and neck. “Because of the lesions.”

  Patrick shot a look over at Izzie, a somewhat guilty expression on his face.

  “I don’t care for the term much, myself,” he explained. “These kids don’t know what they’re getting into when they start taking this stuff, and it seems a little heartless to reduce what’s happening with them to a dismissive slur.”

  “You almost sound more like a social worker than a cop.”

  Patrick shrugged. “I just don’t want anyone to get hurt. Even if it’s somebody hurting themselves. Protect and serve, right?”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  “You guys are lucky,” the sergeant behind the desk said, as I he flipped through their requisition form. “This material is slated to be purged at the end of the quarter. We keep evidence related to homicide cases longer than most felonies, of course, but we’ve got to free up that space eventually. Most of it was digitized, though, so you’ll always be able to find it in the system. But this stuff … ?”

  He glanced over at the small collection of file boxes that a clerk was transferring from a handcart to
the counter next to him.

  “These are headed for the incinerator.”

  Patrick nodded. “Well, glad we got to them in time.”

  While the clerk scanned bar codes on the file boxes with a handheld scanner, the sergeant consulted the requisition form again, and then checked the inventory display on his computer’s monitor.

  “Actually, it looks like the crime scene photos you’ve requested have already been digitized and purged, but you can refer to the case file number to find them on the departmental database. And …” he tapped at his computer’s keyboard, checked the form, and then looked back over the counter at Patrick and Izzie. “There’s just two more items in the inventory associated with that case number that you didn’t include in your list. Do you want those, too?”

  Patrick glanced over at Izzie, who raised an eyebrow. “What are they?” he asked, turning back to the sergeant.

  The sergeant pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose and leaned in closer to the monitor screen. “They were listed as ‘One face mask—metal’ and ‘One sword with twenty-inch blade.’ They’re boxed up separately and packed in plastic, but they were stored along with the rest of the material.”

  “I’m not sure that we need—” Patrick began, but then Izzie laid a hand on his arm, silencing him.

  “Can you add those to the requisition?” Izzie said, addressing the sergeant. “The authorization that Lieutenant Tevake got from his captain should cover that, right?”

  “Sure.” The sergeant consulted the forms. “This authorizes the lieutenant to requisition any and all physical material associated with that case number. You want ’em, you got ’em.” He tapped a few keys on the keyboard, then nodded to the clerk.

  A page clattered out of a printer behind the sergeant. He turned to retrieve it, stapled it to the requisition forms, and then slid it to Patrick.

  “You’ll have to sign an additional statement for the narcotics. New regulation.”

  Izzie was momentarily confused as Patrick signed the form, then remembered the vials of crystallized powder that had been found among Fuller’s effects.

  The clerk returned with two additional boxes, one under either arm. The first was half the size of the file boxes on the counter, and the other was three feet long and six inches square.

  “I think that does it,” the sergeant said, accepting the signed forms from Patrick. “You two need a hand with those?”

  Patrick was already hefting a small tower of file boxes, straining only slightly under their weight, while Izzie picked up another. “No, I think we’ve got it.”

  The sergeant offered a mirthless smile. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  Patrick’s vice squad worked out of the 10th Precinct station house, at the corner of Howard and Albion in the northwestern part of the Oceanview. He’d reserved the precinct’s community room for their use, and when he and Izzie arrived from the warehouse they began moving the boxes up from Patrick’s car in the underground garage beneath the station.

  The room was usually used for departmental training or general meetings with community members, but Patrick had moved most of the upholstered chairs to one side of the room, the casters clattering across the well-worn carpet. The room smelled of coffee and age to Izzie, and the humming fluorescents in the fixtures overhead that flickered slightly cast a wan light that made her think of hospital waiting rooms and long lines at the DMV.

  It had taken a couple of trips to shift the boxes from the station house’s garage up the elevator to the community room on the second floor. Now that all of the boxes were in, they began sorting and unloading them on the long wooden table that dominated the room.

  It had been fairly late in the Reaper investigation that the task force had managed to identity the most likely subject who fit the profile Izzie and her partner Thomas Henderson had worked up: Nicholas Fuller. Captain Travers of the Recondito PD had gotten a warrant expedited, but by the time they arrived at Fuller’s last known address, he had already vacated the premises. But he had evidently left in a hurry, given the number of personal possessions that remained in his ramshackle apartment. Perhaps he intended to return when his “work” was complete, or maybe he suspected that the authorities were on his scent and had gone into hiding. It was only when they traced his connection with the deceased owner of the inoperative lighthouse on Ivory Point that they knew where to search next, and after that fatal confrontation in the lantern room Fuller was in no condition to account for his movements.

  Nor was he around to explain the significance of the things that the crime scene investigators had recovered from his apartment, which left Izzie and Patrick attempting to make sense of the confusing mess that lay before them, five years on.

  Spread out on the table was an entire landscape: mountain ranges of piled books and magazines; foothills of stacked memo pads and journals and spiral-bound notebooks; forests of folders stuffed with newspaper clippings and Xeroxes and photographs; vast plains of street maps and topographical surveys marked with pencil and pen; and a sea of technical schematics and architectural blueprints, beyond which an assortment of scientific apparatus and occult amulets had been scattered like calving icebergs.

  “Where to even start with all of this?” Izzie picked up a book from the top of one of the piles. Hidden City: Recondito from 1849–1900. Many pages had been dog-eared, and Post-it page markers bristled like a porcupine’s quills. She opened to one of the marked pages, and saw a grainy reproduction of a daguerreotype, showing miners digging in the hills. Someone, Fuller presumably, had circled and marked the faces of each of the miners, with names scrawled near each in a crabbed hand. Marston. Aldrich. Swan. O’Malley. Chang. “This all has to mean something, right?”

  She dropped the book onto the table and picked up another. The Guildhall: The Rise and Fall of the Recondito Robber Barons, from which entire pages had been torn out. Beneath it was a paperback reprint of a pulp novel from the 1930s featuring a grinning skull face on the cover, and flipping through it Izzie found that huge blocks of text had been underlined or highlighted or furiously crossed out, sometimes with remarks like “Lies!” or “Possible?” scribbled in the margins in that same crabbed hand.

  Izzie noticed that Fuller’s handwriting seemed to grow more crabbed and erratic as he went along, with the oldest examples being so neat and orderly that they looked like they were written by a different person than the most recent ones. Izzie thought of studies she’d seen on the effects of drugs and psychosis on an individual’s ability to draw accurate representations of what they saw or to correctly form letters and symbols, and wondered if narcotics were to blame for Fuller’s apparent degeneration.

  The next book in the stack was In Search of Emanant Truth, a self-help mass-market paperback from the 1960s written by Jeremiah Standfast Parrish, the founder of the Eschaton Center. The book had an author photo printed on the back cover, which was defaced with the eyes gouged out and the mouth covered with a tight row of Xs in black ink. Beneath that book were translations of the Mayan Popol Vuh and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, collections of Babylonian myths and Native American folktales, an introduction to the Kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah, Aleister Crowley and MacGregor Mathers’s edition of the Ars Goetia, superhero comics, horror novels, and trashy conspiracy theory paperbacks. At the bottom of the pile were scientific journals featuring articles like “Observable Effects of Extra Dimensions” and “Dark Matter in Multidimensional Cosmological Models” and “Brane-World Gravity,” but beyond the titles Izzie couldn’t make heads or tails of the contents, or of the commentary that Fuller had neatly written in the margins.

  The only other thing of note that Izzie gleaned from her quick perusal was that Fuller had scribbled strange symbols on the flyleaves, title pages, and margins of most of the books, but whether these were scientific formulae or mathematical notation or some kind of cyphered writing, she had no way of knowing. And even if she knew which the symbols were, she’d be no closer to u
nderstanding their significance.

  “Ungh!” Izzie sent a science journal flapping back down to the table like a wounded bird. “This is hopeless.”

  Patrick looked up from the maps that he was studying on the far side of the table. “I don’t know, I think you were right the first time. This meant something to Fuller. Here, look.” He lifted the map, which showed Recondito and the surrounding areas in topographical relief. It was covered with bits of writing and symbols, circles and lines, that at first glance seemed to Izzie to be completely haphazard. “See that?” He pointed at the mouth of the Hidden Bay, where a neat spiral had been carefully drawn in red permanent marker.

  “Ivory Point,” Izzie said thoughtfully.

  “Exactly. The lighthouse. And see this?” Above and to one side of the spiral that covered the lighthouse were grouped a collection of larger, more loosely-drawn curves that spiraled and looped through the southwestern corner of the Oceanview.

  “That’s my old neighborhood,” Patrick said. “Little Kovoko.” He pulled out his phone, and swiped until it displayed the map of the city that he had shown Izzie the night before. “Fuller drew these symbols at least five years before Ink first appeared on the streets. But look!” The spiraling loops on Fuller’s map corresponded exactly to the area where Ink traffic and use had never been reported.

  Izzie remained skeptical. “Could be a coincidence …” she said without much conviction.

  “And this?” Patrick indicated a point a few miles northeast of the city on Fuller’s map, where a complex geometric figure of angles and jagged lines was inscribed in black ink. “That’s the old mine shaft where the researchers from Ross University did the Undersight experiment.”