9th Circle

by Carolyn McCray; Ben Hopkin

  It was time. Time to move toward his destination. The destination where he would find his destiny. He never would have seen that connection before. His mind was opening. It was all because of the Plan.

  And now, to set the next part of it in motion.

  He set off down the buried street, the ruins of an old city swallowing him up as surely as the whale had swallowed Jonah.

  CHAPTER 14

  This ain’t gonna work, Trey thought as he hurried down the hospital corridor. Trey had seen the look on Mala’s face when she took Janey off that last time. Granted, he had been woozy from the venom—venom scare, whatever—but that was not the look of someone who was about to give them any help.

  As they came around the corner, Trey spotted Janey in her bed. The little girl tossed fitfully, her hair plastered with sweat. Mala and Father John hovered over her bed, doing what they could to comfort her. The large black guard held up a beefy hand to stop them before they could even think about going through the door.

  “Darc. C’mon, man,” Trey begged his partner. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Looking up from her patient, Mala moved toward the door, waving the guard off to the side. Not too far to the side, Trey noticed. The burly guard was still close enough to run interference if Darc decided to get any funny ideas in his head.

  Trey could see that Mala had her armor up high once more. In fact, this wasn’t Mala he was seeing. This was Dr. Charan. She spoke to Darc, her tone cool and professional.

  “Detective, I respect what you are trying to do. Sincerely.” Darc began to speak, but the doctor spoke over him. “And I understand the constraints that your disability places you under, but you cannot, I mean cannot, put the burden of your investigation on that little girl’s shoulders.”

  Trey winced, ready for another Darc-style confrontation. But instead, the detective simply stated, “I don’t need to see her. I just wanted to give these to her.”

  Glancing over at his partner’s hands, Trey saw the paper towels that Darc had been working on so frenetically. Oh. Okay. Maybe they weren’t here for what he thought they were here for.

  Darc held the papers out for the doctor, but Mala’s hands remained at her sides. “Janey has seen enough violent images for an entire lifetime.”

  But instead of arguing the point, Darc simply leafed through the pictures. There was one of Janey’s teddy bear. Another of a cute mongoose. And the last was an exact replica of Darc’s detective badge. Mala took the drawings from Darc’s hands, her expression softening a tiny bit.

  “Darc…”

  “She needs to feel safe.” His tone was inflectionless, as always.

  Mala blinked rapidly multiple times, still standing in the doorway, holding the pictures. “I think these will be very comforting to her.” She looked back up from the drawings to peer into Darc’s face. The beginnings of a smile hovered around her lips. “Thank you, Detective. Thank you for understanding.”

  And then his partner turned…and walked away. Down the hallway just a few yards. Hold on. Was Darc actually waiting for him? Trey stood there, stunned. What had he just witnessed? Had all of that really just happened? The nonconfrontation, the pictures, the waiting?

  “Wow. That went…just wow.”

  Mala gazed at him, her look amused. “What did you say to me that time? ‘Don’t get that look’?”

  “Yeah, but…” Darc was waiting for him, and not because the car was locked. “I can’t help but…Wow.”

  He waved goodbye to the doctor and the pastor, then jogged over to Darc. As he got closer, he called out, “Hey. That was one solid day of work.” Darc didn’t respond. Not even a twitch. Okay, they’d been on a roll, but responding to Trey might be a bit much to ask. Baby steps. “So, what I’m trying to say is, are we cool to punch out?”

  Without turning to Trey, Darc spoke to the air in front of him. “I think we have done all that we can for tonight.”

  “Excellent!” Trey rubbed his hands together. It was time for him to get back home to Maggie. And her stew, if you knew what he meant.

  Darc swiveled around to peer at Janey. Mala had just given her the drawings, and, after glancing over them, she lifted her little head to seek out the tall detective. The two held a long look. Darc nodded his head once. Janey returned the nod, her face grave. She then reached to her side to pick up a crayon. The red one.

  Yeah, that was a little weird, but Trey really didn’t have the time to overanalyze it. He had a hot meal waiting for him.

  And, if he was really lucky, a hot girlfriend.

  *

  Darc moved through the night, observing in passing that it was not raining this time. Not that the rain hindered him much, but the lack of moisture would make scaling the fire ladder less challenging.

  The light trails swirled around his head, doubling back on themselves, changing colors, shrinking, expanding. There was no rhyme or reason to the glimmering lines that should be nothing but reason. His logic was failing him. He had no idea what to do next.

  Darc knew that he had promised to not haunt this fire escape, but in a sea of grey, this place was the only one tinged with light. He would stay hidden. If Maggie did not know he was there, then his promise would be intact—at least in spirit.

  He clambered up to Maggie’s stoop, only to step over the ledge to find his partner there. Trey had set out two chairs, a pot of coffee and two mugs, a table, and a whiteboard. Everything they would need for a late-night brainstorming session.

  Trey snorted. “Yeah, right. ‘We’ve done all we can.’” His partner shook his head. “It took me, like, two blocks to realize that you’ve never said anything like that to me. Ever.”

  Sighing, Darc sat down on the chair nearest him. Trey waited until Darc was settled in before continuing, “Sooooo. You going to tell me what’s really going on?”

  Darc did not even look at his partner. What would the purpose be?

  “Come on, dude. Like you really drew pretty little pictures for a pretty little girl. Again, yeah, right. I should have picked up your plan right there.”

  Interesting. His partner perhaps comprehended his intentions better than Darc had anticipated. Darc observed Trey continue his rant.

  “In the entire time I’ve ever known you, six long years, you’ve never done anything remotely kind.” Trey peered at his partner across the dim light cast by the lamp inside the apartment. “You’ve kept right on taking up a seat on a packed-to-the-rafters bus when a little old lady boarded, with a walker.” He paused once more, this time apparently just to catch his breath. “You would steal candy from a—no, you have, literally, stolen candy from a baby when your blood sugar dropped that one time.” Trey waited, apparently looking for a response from him. Darc did not have one. His partner was accurate in his assessments. Trey finally blew out a huff of air and finished with, “So don’t tell me you just wanted Janey to feel safe.”

  The night was still, but for the soft fluttering and cooing of a nearby pigeon. They sat in silence for several moments, the silence stretching out between them. At length, Trey coughed, bringing an end to their oneness with the night.

  “So,” Trey asked, propping his feet up onto the fire escape, “what’s up with the pictures you drew?”

  “We’ll see in the morning.” The morning. The ending of the dark.

  *

  She looked down at the pictures that weren’t pictures. The tall man had given them to her and showed her with his eyes that he needed her help. It was good to help; she knew that.

  It felt safe here in the room with the pretty lady. She was nice. Her eyes were kind, and she said soft things. But the lady wasn’t happy with the tall man. The tall man made her cranky. Very cranky. Like, a wake-Mommy-up-from-a-nap kind of cranky.

  She pulled Popeye in closer to her with one arm and held a crayon in her other fist. Popeye was helping, too. He was making sure the lady and the man in the black shirt didn’t see what she was doing. He wasn’t doing a very good job, though,
so she had to keep an eye out herself.

  Looking at the drawing of the mongoose, she traced the symbol that was there in the curve of its back and tail. It was pretty, even though it made her tummy twist up. The tall man had made it, so it was almost like it was warm and shining.

  She knew what she had to do. She had to draw pretty, pretty pictures with her crayons. The pretty, pretty pictures were so the lady wouldn’t be mad at her. The letters inside the pictures were for him.

  Drawing a symbol with the crayon, she looked up to see the man in the black shirt staring at her. She quickly filled in the rest of the drawing. It was a dog. A tiny, fluffy one. She liked fluffy things, even though it made Popeye jealous. Maybe that was why he wasn’t doing such a good job right now. Naughty, naughty Popeye. She’d make the next picture less fluffy. The man leaned toward the lady and whispered, but she could still hear him. Grown-ups did funny things sometimes.

  “Art truly can be a salve to the soul,” he said.

  The lady whispered back, “Yes. Children’s resiliency will never cease to amaze me.” The lady moved over to the side of the bed and bent down. The lady rested a hand on her shoulder and patted a couple of times. “That’s a beautiful dog, Janey. I’m so proud of you.”

  She looked up at the pretty lady and smiled at her. Then she turned back to her drawing, filling in the symbol some more.

  The tall man was really going to like it.

  *

  Okay. So Trey had figured out that Darc wasn’t in a sharing mood, but since he never was, that hadn’t been much of a shock. Darc didn’t want to share? Fine. Trey had some sharing of his own to do. Maybe he could prime the pump and at least not get sandbagged every single freaking time by what was lying in wait for them in this bugger of a case.

  He slapped the first of the photos he had gotten of Blake’s paintings up on the whiteboard. Trey could still see the look on the art dealer’s face when he had shown up outside her office at seven o’clock in the evening. Somehow he had just known Ms. Steinway would still be at work.

  She hadn’t been thrilled about it, but she’d allowed him to photograph the whole series. Amazing what a badge and the statement “official police business” could do, at least with the law-abiding portion of the population. And Ms. Steinway was nothing if not law-abiding.

  So now Trey had the whole collection. Yippee. Lucky him. He waved his hand at the whole grouping.

  “All right. I figure it was time for some show and tell.” Trey glanced at his partner. No response. Okay, maybe a little more priming of the pump was in order. “Like, I show you these pictures and you tell me what the freak is going on.” Trey lined up the first six pictures. “I’m seriously tired of being behind the curve here.” He scrubbed at his face, trying to wipe away the tiredness that was throbbing right behind his eyes. “Strangely, I kind of got used to the whole ‘oh, there’s another piece of brain’ thingy. But those freaking snakes?”

  Okay, Trey was starting to hyperventilate. Time to calm the eff down. When it came to Darc, it had to be “just the facts, ma’am.” Otherwise, it was a no-go. Trey counted to ten, then made it twenty for good measure.

  “Seriously, dude, I never want to be surprised like that again.” Trey had gotten his stride back. “So if there’s some effing hyenas or killer clowns coming up, I want to know about it.”

  He waved across the group of photos once more, feeling like Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune. Darc rose out of his seat and moved over to the whiteboard. Sweet. Progress.

  His partner pointed at the first of the photos, the one set against the totally white background. Trey nodded. He knew this one.

  “Yeah, limbo. Unbaptized babies. Got it.”

  Darc moved on to the second. Trey got a brief flash of the scene at the indoor skydiving place. Ah. Good times. Good times.

  “Lustful storm. Been there, done that.”

  The third. The pool of nastiness. More stuff that he would never, ever be able to get out of his head.

  “Sludge of deceit. Experienced it personally.”

  And then the fourth. This one Trey just didn’t get. At all.

  “Rocks of overspenders. Not sure how blowing your discretionary income equates to getting squished by boulders, but whatever.” Dante—no, make that Aristotle—was a messed-up guy.

  On to the fifth circle. Flesh raining from the sky, skinned corpses, etc., etc.

  “Yep. Den of losers. Would rather not remember that one, thank you very not.”

  Darc tapped on the sixth one. Okay, Trey hadn’t even been sure he had them in the right order. Where were the…?

  “Oh, there’s the effing snakes. Way down at the bottom. You know, you’d think they’d make those suckers a little bigger. More prominent.”

  Darc scooped up the remaining three photos and finally spoke. “That’s the difficulty with these next works. Each has multiple levels that our killer may or may not reproduce.”

  See, this was exactly why Trey was here. Nothing like getting a heads-up from a certified smarty-pants. “Yeah, well, hit me with them all. No surprises, remember?”

  As Darc placed the seventh photo up on the whiteboard, the window to the apartment opened up and Maggie stuck her head out.

  “It’s going to start raining.”

  Whoa. That was uncharacteristically nice of her. “So, you’re letting us in?”

  “Keep dreaming,” she said, just before she closed the window.

  Trey turned to Darc and smirked. “I can see why you married her.”

  He glanced at the photo his partner had posted. It was a riot of violence and brutality. The only spot that looked even remotely peaceful was a graveyard off in the corner. Well, except for the flames.

  It said something about this bloody case that an exploding graveyard was looking pretty good right about now.

  *

  Officer Earnest Daniels was tired. He was tired of complaints. He was tired of teenagers. He was tired, period. It was three o’clock in the morning, for hell’s sake. Shouldn’t everyone be asleep?

  “Stupid kids. Can’t they just vandalize their own stuff?”

  His partner, Nalik, snorted in agreement. “Yeah, or at least tag shit in another precinct.”

  And it didn’t help anything that they had been called out to a cemetery. The biggest one in Seattle. Evergreen Washelli Memorial Park was creepy enough in the daytime. Early in the morning, with nothing but the moon occasionally peeking through the clouds and the light from their flashlights? Might as well be a set for a horror flick.

  Daniels hated horror flicks.

  And this one was tailor-made for that kinda shit. Trees everywhere. Yeah, yeah, Emerald City and all that, but there were times where trees were not a good thing. This was one of them. Way too many shadows. Way too many blind corners. Way too many obstacles if you had to run screaming away from a guy in a hockey mask.

  And it was huge. The thing stretched over more than a hundred acres and was one of the oldest in Seattle. “Old” to most people meant “charming” or “full of character,” but in this case, it just added to the freak-out factor.

  Jesus H. Christ, what was wrong with him? After the massacre on the south side of town, though, everyone was jumpy. Getting the heebie-jeebies from shadows.

  They passed by a huge mausoleum that the plaque proclaimed to be the Judge Thomas Burke Monument. Whatever. Daniels was just waiting for a zombie to come shambling out of it.

  As they moved closer to the gravesites for the general public, Nalik’s flashlight landed on what looked like fresh dirt. This didn’t look like the orderly digging of a new grave. This was something else entirely.

  Daniels added the light of his flashlight to that of his partner, turning the light on the stone that marked the grave. The tombstone was old. The date proclaimed it to have been placed back in 1892. They were in one of the older parts of the park. But the gravesite had obviously been disturbed, and just recently.

  “What the…?” Daniels muttered,
a chill running down his spine.

  “Grave robbers?” Nalik guessed. “Really? Seriously, how low do you have to sink before digging up a dead guy’s gold tooth sounds like the most viable option to get your life back on track?” He moved over closer to the side of the grave, prodding the newly turned earth with his toe.

  “Hell if I—” Daniels began, right before the night exploded all around him. The casket underneath the ground where his partner stood shot straight into the air, dirt and flame spewing up from the gaping hole in the ground where seconds before there had been only a residence for the dearly departed.

  “Nalik!” the officer screamed, seeing his partner flung straight up into the air, only to collapse right at Daniels’s feet a couple of moments later. Nalik’s singed hand grabbed hold of Daniels’s ankle, but there was no life in the mangled mass of flesh that lay in front of him.

  The officer shook off the hand and turned to run, trapped in the middle of his own worst nightmare and worse. He bolted pell-mell, stepping onto other freshly dug-up sites that exploded right behind him, propelling him faster, more headlong. The clods of dirt raining down from overhead set off even more graves around Daniels, turning the night into a veritable holocaust.

  After what seemed like hours of this, Daniels stumbled out onto Aurora Avenue, charred and emotionally scarred for life, but alive. As he flipped open his cell phone to call it in, he looked back over his shoulder at the once-peaceful park.

  Flames reached up to the sky from grave after grave, like orange and red fingers grasping at the heavens. It looked like the graves had opened up into the pits of hell.

  Daniels was pretty sure that was exactly right.

  *

  Darc surveyed the next photo. Trey had shown unusual dedication and foresight in obtaining these photos. Although Darc could call up the familiar images with little to no effort, the physical presence of these duplicates in front of him allowed for even greater clarity and depth. Not necessary, certainly, but useful.

  Even more important, having Trey understand what might await them could potentially lessen his shock in the moment. If his partner had anticipated the snakes, he might have been of more use back in the slaughterhouse than as a simple pincushion.