The Dark Path

by Luke Romyn

  Martin and his partner Steve Jones were making their usual Thursday rounds. They’d been working together for almost a year and had fast become good friends. Jones and his wife Samantha often came around to Martin and Catherine’s home for weekend barbeques, and their children were enrolled in the same school. Things couldn’t have been more perfect for the two officers in their stereotypical suburbanite lives, and they loved every minute of them.

  But this Thursday had a different feel to it. Martin couldn’t put his finger on it, but there seemed to be an ominous shadow hanging over the two of them while they made their way down Park Street and into Columbine Boulevard. He didn’t mention this to Steve, simply shaking off the feeling. Full moon jitters.

  He was actually gazing up at the enormous moon when the call came through their radios of a possible code 19: domestic disturbance, just two blocks down–an apartment on Chelsea Avenue. Both police officers broke into a run and arrived before any other units.

  “Hold on Steve,” Martin cautioned, seeing Jones move to enter the complex. “Something’s not right; maybe we should wait for back up.”

  Suddenly, the pair heard gunshots from inside the building. Without a word Steve sprinted up the stairs, knowing Martin would follow him. The call had been to apartment 207, and both men approached the landing, guns drawn.

  Arriving at the second floor, Martin heard the voices of at least two men moving down the corridor towards where he and Steve stood. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their accents sounded Russian. He had seen enough Cold War movies to recognize the harsh tones of the language.

  The men drew closer; Steve stepped from the stairwell into the corridor with his gun drawn.

  “DOWN! Get down on the floor. Now!” Steve shouted at the surprised Russians. Taken aback by his partner’s rashness, Martin took a moment to react. That moment decided his destiny.

  The Russians ignored Steve’s order and instead produced handguns of their own from beneath their jackets. They leapt apart, making it impossible for him to cover them both by himself. Steve instinctively fired a shot at the closest of his opponents and caught him high in the chest, shattering his collarbone and exiting in a bloody spew. The man slumped to the ground, and Steve turned towards his second target.

  In the fraction of a second it took Martin Roberts to react and move into the corridor, he knew it was already too late. The bullet from the second Russian’s gun took Steve right in the cheek, exiting from the back of his head in a grizzly spray.

  Martin instinctively dropped to his knee, but not fast enough. A second bullet from the Russian’s gun smashed into his left shoulder and flung him to the ground. Initially feeling no pain, just an incredible numbness down his left side, gradually a slow burning turned into a flood of agony.

  “Ah, little policeman. You’re not dead yet?” a thick Russian accent mocked. “Well that will soon be problem easily solved.”

  Everything seemed to slow down. The Russian raised his gun, pointing it directly at Martin’s face, while at the same time Martin lifted his own weapon through a frustrating fog, managing to squeeze off a single shot before sliding into nothingness.

  * * * *

  Martin awoke to pain. Pain and the sound of sirens blaring in the distance.

  His entire left side erupted in flames and briefly he wished to return to the absolution of unconsciousness. His head slumping to the left, Martin saw what remained of his friend and partner. Half of Steve’s skull had been sheered away and he now lay crumpled on the floor, a look of terror still glinting in his eyes.

  A low cough turned Martin’s attention towards the gunman Steve had wounded. Remarkably, the man was still alive and crawling towards the staircase. The body of the second gunman lay dead on the carpet, blood dribbling from the wound in his chest: the shot Martin had somehow managed to discharge before passing out.

  What happened next would have appeared comical were it under different circumstances. Martin commenced probably the slowest pursuit in his police department’s history. Crawling excruciatingly after the Russian, finally managing the strength to stand and stumble across the hallway, he caught his prey at the top of the stairs.

  The Russian resisted, but Martin managed to overpower him and awkwardly cuffed his hands behind his back. Kneeling beside the gunman, he took a moment to catch his breath. The sirens were almost at the apartment complex, and Martin knew he had to work fast to get the information he needed.

  “Who do you work for, you Ruski bastard?” he growled at the bleeding Russian.

  “I don’t talk to dead men,” rasped the man on the floor. Blood gurgled from his mouth, and Martin knew he had little time before the man died. He glanced back at the body of his dead friend and took the first step on a path that would eventually dominate his entire life.

  Martin grabbed the hair of the dying man and pushed two fingers from his other hand into the hole in his chest. The man howled in torment. For a moment Martin thought he’d gone too far, and the man would pass out or die from the pain, but the Russian held strong. He slumped back to the carpet when Martin removed his fingers, disbelief flashing across his features.

  “You police cannot do such things,” he gasped incredulously.

  “I just did asshole. Now tell me what I need to know.”

  The Russian paused, seeming to consider the request, but when Martin moved his hand back to the man’s wound his eyes widened in fear.

  “Romolov! I work for Romolov!” he rasped through the blood now steadily flowing from his mouth. “It does not matter. You are dead man.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Martin snarled. The Russian’s lungs filled with fluid and he finally expired.

  * * * *

  Several weeks passed before Martin finally left the hospital. He’d managed to attend Steve’s funeral where little Angelique placed a single red rose on the coffin. A tender sign of farewell. Steve’s wife Samantha had been an inconsolable mess. At the wake she drank herself into a stupor and had to be carried to the bed she would no longer share with her husband.

  The investigation into the killing was taken over by the FBI once the name Romolov appeared in Martin’s report. Apparently they’d been building a case against the syndicate for several months, and Martin’s testimony would hammer the final nail into the coffin.

  So they said.

  After the murder of his friend, Martin felt only too willing to be the one to put the offenders behind bars for good.

  His wife Catherine wasn’t so sure. Since Martin’s release from hospital, the family had begun to receive strange phone calls. The receiver would echo eerily, or reverberate with a singular hiss:

  “Silence!”

  Martin had no doubt as to the origin of the calls, and told the FBI of Catherine’s fears of retribution should he take the stand against the syndicate. The family were quickly packed up and moved into protective custody: a small two-bedroom house just outside of New York. A veritable disaster greeted their arrival. Cobwebs coated every corner of the ceiling. It had taken almost two days of cleaning before the house looked anything like a home.

  Catherine had been surprisingly reluctant about clearing the spiders’ webs. Martin had always assumed women were deathly afraid of spiders, and other creepy-crawly things. When he’d questioned her reluctance, she had simply said, “They’ll bring good luck. Clearing them away brings misfortune into a new home.” Martin’s laughter had almost shaken the webs from the walls, and Catherine hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the day.

  Angelique, still too young to understand, simply found herself torn from all of her friends and the home she’d grown up in. Shunted to a dust-filled and cramped shoebox of a house, with armed FBI agents getting in the way every time she wanted to play, her tears had rent Martin’s heart. For safety’s sake neither she nor Catherine were allowed outside unless they were under guard, with Martin only supposed to leave when he needed to appear in court.

  The days dragged into weeks, and
Catherine and Martin began to argue. Initially over simple things: the hassle they had to go through simply to take the garbage out for collection. First, they had to use the two-way radio to contact the FBI agents waiting either in a car out front or a similar house across the road. Next the FBI had to check the area to ensure no one suspicious lingered. Finally, they would come to collect the garbage for disposal. Simple things added up and soon Catherine decided she’d had enough of the entire situation.

  “For God’s sake Martin, I’m starting to feel like I have to ask the FBI if it’s all right for me to go to the bathroom,” she yelled.

  “Now honey, they’re only doing their job,” he said, trying to sooth her fears. “Once this is all over, things can go back to the way they were.”

  “They’ll never go back to that again. We’ll always be looking over our shoulders if you testify.”

  “So that’s what this is about: you don’t want me to testify.”

  Catherine paused and looked away, no doubt recalling their continued arguments. Her pleas that if they didn’t get back to their old way of life soon, she feared it would tear the family apart long before the Romolovs ever saw them in court.

  “No,” she said quietly, “I don’t think you should.”

  “You think they should just go free for what they did to Steve, huh?” Martin grew tense, his voice rising. Catherine knew she’d gone too far this time. “You think if I don’t testify I’ll ever be able to live with myself? For Christ’s sake woman! It’s bad enough I failed when Steve needed me; now you want me to turn my back when I can get the bastards who killed him! What do you think I am?”

  “You’re the man I love,” she said, her voice small. “I’m afraid if we don’t get out of this soon, no matter what the outcome of the trial is, we’ll never be the same. For God’s sake Martin! Stop letting your pride affect your thinking. Sometimes you can just be so....” She paused, searching for the word. “You can be so fucking vain!” she screamed finally.

  Martin glared at her briefly before turning and stalking to the front door. He stood silently in the open doorway before speaking quietly over his shoulder. “Vain or not, my friend’s killers will pay.”

  * * * *

  The FBI agents parked across the street didn’t see him go, and he cursed them silently for it. How could these men protect his family if they didn’t even notice him walking through the front door? He made a mental note to berate them when he returned.

  Martin had no real destination in mind leaving the safehouse. He simply answered a need to walk in the open air to clear his mind. Catherine’s words had cut him deeply and he wanted to calm down before he spoke to her again.

  How dare she call him vain? He wanted justice for his friend’s death. It had nothing to do with his ego or his pride.

  The longer he walked, however, the more clearly he began to see the truth behind her words. His pride had been injured with the death of his partner. Every night he pictured the scene again and again, trying to think of what he could have done differently that would have ended things for the better. The answer never changed: he’d been too slow; he should have made them wait for backup.

  He was trying to make amends for failing his friend by putting the lives of his family in danger.

  Catherine was right: he was vain.

  Martin slowly meandered back to the safehouse. The streets seemed somehow darker now and he began to feel nervous. Something didn’t seem right; he could sense it. There were no sounds in the night air as he approached the car where the FBI agents were supposedly watching the house. Again Martin felt a twinge of anger at their inattention. If he could sneak up on the car, what would stop heavily armed assassins from doing the same?

  Approaching the driver’s door, Martin’s stomach lurched in dread. The men in the car had to see him now unless something was terribly wrong. Looking through the passenger side window his heart stopped.

  Both agents were dead. Twin bullet holes in the windscreen mirrored almost identical holes in the men's chests.

  Martin raced across the street and flew up the steps of the safehouse. Throwing open the door he called out wildly for Catherine, praying that she and Angelique were still safe. He heard a muffled sob from the lounge, but rushing towards the door a flash of movement surprised him. A swift crack to his head and everything went black.

  * * * *

  Martin awoke to laughter and pain. The dull ache in his skull told him he’d been too late to warn his family of the danger, while the ropes binding his hands and legs mocked the stupidity of his attempted rescue. All of his police training had been forgotten in his panic and he’d broken the one cardinal rule: never rush into any situation.

  Gazing around the room, he found he’d been moved to the cellar. His wife and daughter were nowhere to be seen, and briefly Martin thought he’d been left alone and started to struggle at his bonds.

  “Don’t do that, little policeman,” growled a heavily accented voice from the shadows. “If you do that I will be extinguishing you too soon, and you miss out on all our fun.” A darkly clad man moved into Martin’s view.

  “Not so tough now, eh? You pretty tough when talking to FBI, why not so tough now?”

  “Where’s my family?” demanded Martin.

  “Don’t worry, little policeman. Pretty girls join us soon.”

  The words echoed with a quiet menace. Martin’s stomach tightened in fear. He still pondered their meaning, when the man leaning over him hit him square in the mouth.

  “That one is for poor Vladimir. You killed him dead you stupid pig.”

  “Enough Viktor,” a second voice called from the doorway. “You don’t want to kill him too quickly.”

  A second Russian entered the room dragging a naked woman behind him. It took a moment before Martin recognized the wounded face beneath the mop of blood soaked hair. Catherine. Thrown roughly to the cement floor, her captor began to undo his pants.

  “DON’T YOU TOUCH HER!!” screamed Martin. “If you touch her I’ll–”

  His words were cut off mid sentence by another blow to the face.

  “Look policeman, I do touch her,” the Russian said, roughly grabbing Catherine’s breast and squeezing. She let out a feeble moan and weakly tried to fight off her assailant. He simply grinned maliciously and slapped her hands

  away as if she were a misbehaving child. “Now what you going to do about it, eh?”

  Martin lunged forward in the chair, but succeeded in nothing more than knocking himself to the ground. The Russian named Viktor laughed loudly, and kicked him in the chest before setting the chair upright again.

  “Yes, I thought so. You do nothing to help your wife, just like you do nothing to help your partner. That is why he is dead I think,” grunted the Russian, who had now succeeded in removing his pants and positioning himself between Catherine’s legs.

  “Now watch policeman, while I show your wife what a real man, a Russian, is like.” Catherine’s screams echoed through the empty house and into the street. Various windows closed around the neighborhood and television volumes steadily increased until the blaring sound smothered anything that might impinge on their closeted lives.

  Viktor gripped Martin’s jaw and forced him to watch. Eventually Martin’s roars of anger turned to sobs for her pain with both Russians laughing malevolently in the background. He begged the men to stop, to kill him and let Catherine go, but that only made them howl more.

  Finally the second Russian, the one he now knew as Piotre, finished with his wife. Something inside her seemed to have broken. She lay limp on the cold cement, staring blankly up at the bound figure of her husband while the two Russians swapped positions.

  Viktor’s treatment of Catherine was much more violent. Her lack of reaction seemed to spur the Russian to even greater effort. This brought enough response to excite him further and he began to hit her viciously as he continued to violate her. By the time he finished, there remained no doubt that she was dead.

/>   “You... bastards..., I’ll... kill... you... all…,” Martin gasped between his heart-torn sobs.

  “Not today, little policeman,” whispered Viktor.

  “Just kill me then.”

  “Oh no, not yet,” giggled Piotre. “We are only half the way through.”

  Fear unlike anything he’d ever felt before gripped Martin. He prayed they were talking about him and not whom he thought.

  Viktor answered this unspoken question by leaving the room and returning with a bound and gagged Angelique. Untying the gag, Viktor pointed Angelique towards the dead body of her mother and laughed louder than ever at the child’s screams.

  “Now, little policeman’s daughter, Viktor is going to do the same to you as he did to mommy there,” Viktor whispered into her ear.

  With superhuman strength, Martin broke free from Piotre’s hold, and fell towards his daughter.

  “DADDY!” screamed Angelique. “Daddy, don’t let them hurt me!! Daddy, stop them!”

  Piotre grabbed Martin and hauled him upright. Pinning his arm more securely in place around Martin’s neck he murmured, “I will not do her. I do not like children. But Viktor enjoys it very much!”

  The Russian’s mirth mingled with Angelique’s screams when Viktor threw her to the ground amidst the hysteria of both father and daughter. What happened next unfolded unlike anything Martin had ever envisioned even in his worst nightmares. Each cry from his daughter tore strips from his sanity until he seemed to hear the sound of breaking glass somewhere off in the distance. A sense of unreality enveloped him and he felt blood and saliva dripping from his torn lips whilst he was forced to watch.

  Martin stopped screaming. It did no good. Nothing did any good.

  You can be so vain!

  Blood flowed everywhere. Someone crying. Such an annoying sound.

  Vain.

  More blood flowing. A black handled knife. The glint of a wickedly sharp blade.