Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  “You are of free blood. I ask your pardon, sir. Such prodigies are rare.” He withdrew a card from his breast pocket. “This is not the place for our discussion, and I have withheld you too long. Please come to me. Childe must be found.”

  He held out the card, and I took it. There was no name on it, only an embossed address, and a single phone number. As I read the card, Gabriel said, “Perhaps then I might answer some of your questions and redeem myself for this unfortunate business.”

  “Wait, I have some questions now. The first of which—”

  I raised my head and Gabriel was gone.

  “—why the sudden change of heart ... ?” I whispered to the snow.

  The only sign of Gabriel’s presence was the card he had handed me, and a pair of footprints that were already filling with snow. I wiped the snow off my watch and checked the time.

  It was 2:30.

  I wondered what had happened with Bowie and Leia. I also wondered what their doctor would have found if I’d gone to his office. With all of the reference to blood, insane as the idea was, I was beginning to suspect that the doctor would have found something very unusual.

  I pocketed the business card and walked back to Tony’s Plymouth. The keys were still dangling from the trunk. Also sitting on the trunk was my Desert Eagle.

  Tony’s Plymouth had seen better days. Its left rear fender occupied the back seat. Fortunately, it started. I was nervous as I pulled the Plymouth out onto Coventry. I was the only vehicle on the road. I felt as if I were driving under a follow-spot. All I needed was a bumper sticker, “Body in Trunk.”

  What now? I asked myself as I drove away from the apartment.

  Everything was different now. I’d killed a man. I had little memory of my life before this, but I could feel, in my gut, that I was not a killer. I had carried a badge, carried a gun, but I wasn’t a killer....

  The first real memory of Kate hit me—

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks, massaging the back of my neck. She’s using the tone of voice that asks, “You’re not just doing this because I want you to, are you?”

  I shake my head, massaging the scar on my chest. “I’m getting disability leave now. I think it’s time for me to get out. ”

  A guilty silence fills our bedroom. Kate thinks she’s driving me to this decision, and I can’t do much to dissuade her. Still, I try. I take her hand and turn to face her.

  “Look, I know it’s what I’ve done for fifteen years. But I still see that kid’s face before I shot him—”

  “He tried to kill you,” Kate objects. Her mouth is downturned and I know that she could never accept me as a cop again, not after what we’ve been through. She says that she’ll support my decision, but I know if I put my life on the line like that again, she couldn’t handle it.

  I hug her. “I don’t want to face those decisions any more, I don’t want to see any more kids’ faces when I sleep.”

  I gripped the steering wheel hard enough that the whole assembly was shaking. I could remember shooting the kid who put a thirty-two slug through my left lung. I could remember his head snapping back.

  Worse, I could picture the funeral. I could picture his mother as clearly as if she were sitting next to me. She hadn’t cried, or cursed me. That would have been easy. That must have been what I had been looking for, attending the funeral within days of my own hospitalization. All she had done was sit still, staring straight ahead, blind to everything but her son in that coffin.

  Tony’s family wouldn’t have even that.

  My thoughts were jarred when the Plymouth jumped the curb. I had to brake in the middle of a snowdrift. I looked madly around for cops. But any cops were lost far behind the blowing snow. I looked at my watch, and I felt another wave of memory—

  “Happy Birthday, Dad.” Gail smiles at me. In that moment I see so much of her mother in her, in the long red hair, in the freckles, in the smile. The wrapping falls away from the little crystal box that holds the watch.

  “Hey,” I said, “are you trying to say something here?”

  “Try not to keep so many late nights,” Kate says from behind my right shoulder.

  “We miss you, Dad,” Gail says and hugs me.

  —I’d already been driving over an hour.

  I cursed my memory. I cursed it for showing me fragments of a life that I could now no longer go back to. The man named Kane Tyler had died in that apartment as surely as Tony had. The man driving Tony’s Plymouth was a cipher that I knew nothing about, other than that this man was capable of tearing out the throat of a stranger.

  I rocked the Plymouth back and forth, freeing it from the mess I’d put it in. When I got it free, I drove the car west, toward the city.

  9

  By four in the morning, I’d driven out of the snow and out under a clear sky. The layout of the city was coming back to me, and that gave me some hope—good or ill—for the rest of my memory.

  The city slid by me on skids of gray ice. I was surrounded by the deadest part of the night. Tony’s Plymouth was the only vehicle on the road other than the occasional snowplow.

  The city was an eerie landscape painted in cold colors. White streetlights, bluish snow, purple sky, and buildings made of gray and black shadows. The only warm color I passed came from the traffic lights.

  Cold, still, and empty. Even the snow had stopped moving for the night. It gave me a weird sense of superiority to be out at this time of night, as if the city were mine, as if I owned the broad expanse of Euclid unrolling before the Plymouth. It was a spooky feeling, and one that felt as if it came from the same part of my mind that had made me go into apartment 401. That made me nervous, and I turned on the radio.

  Some college station was playing an album side from Blue Oyster Cult, Fire of Unknown Origin. It fit my mood perfectly. I drove through an empty Downtown accompanied by “Joan Crawford.”

  I’d spent too much time in this car. I needed to dispose of it and the body. I think I’d only delayed the inevitable for this long because the destruction of the evidence of my crime was as irrevocable as killing Tony in the first place.

  At this point there was still some dim possibility that I could argue that Tony’s murder was justified, that I was protecting the woman. I did not believe it, but if I turned to the police with that argument, I was still part of human society.

  Destroying Tony’s body would be an admission that I believed that I’d left that society.

  Instead of crossing the Cuyahoga River, I drove Tony’s Plymouth down into the Flats. I didn’t drive toward the darkened restaurants and bars lining the mouth of the river. I drove away from the development, toward the remains of industry.

  I took a turn that carried me under a bridge. Under the snow the tires of the Plymouth left the pavement. I paralleled a rusted chain-link fence that separated what used to be a road from a field dotted with piles of broken asphalt and old tires. I pulled to a stop in a lot dominated by one of the massive pillars supporting the bridge above me. Despite the storm earlier, there was little snow here.

  I wiped off the wheel and stepped out of the Plymouth.

  Behind the field of debris, a broken hillside rose toward the city. Everywhere down here were piles of concrete, fallen from the bridge above as if it were some gigantic creature shedding old skin.

  Further up, where the road finally ended, sat a broken gate in the fence. Just inside was a small brick shack, no more than a shell. The windows were glassless, and it was roofed only by a single girder as ocher as the bricks that supported it.

  I stood in a world as dead as a graveyard.

  I opened the trunk and searched my pockets for Tony’s possessions. I tossed his watch, wallet, and his jewelry into the trunk with Tony, after wiping them for prints. His lighter, a gold Zippo with an eagle engraved upon it, I kept—wrapped in a wad of tissue paper.

  “‘Yet if Hope has flown away ...’”

  I left the trunk open, and backed away from the right
rear fender of the Plymouth. I gave it a decent clearance, twenty or thirty feet. Then I looked around for anyone observing me. The only witness I saw was a lone crow perched on a metal post by the fence. It seemed to be watching me.

  I looked away from the bird and out over the black waters of a river that had once burned. Across the river, a few lone smokestacks released white smoke; one black chimney breathed fire. The sky was black and starless, the only lights red ones—ruby diadems crowning the smokestacks. I stood upon the night’s plutonian shore, if I stood anywhere.

  The night was quiet, the air still, cold and sharp as a blade. I drew the Desert Eagle out of its holster. I drew the slide, checked the action, and leveled it at a spot behind the right rear tire.

  I braced my wrist and fired.

  The shot echoed, its flash illuminating the underside of the bridge. I saw there, in an instant, that the girders under the overpass were massed with crows. Hundreds, maybe a thousand, of the birds took wing in response to the gunshot. They exploded out above me, a black cloud cawing a demonic avian chorus.

  For a moment I was deafened amid their roar, and by the sound of their wings tormenting the wind. Then, like a dream, the birds were gone, slipping through the girders of the bridge, into the sky, like a handful of sand slipping into the ocean.

  When they were gone, I could hear the sound of liquid spilling to the ground. I lowered my gaze. My bullet had torn a hole through the gas tank of the Plymouth. The smell of gasoline sliced though the air toward me. Under the rear fender, a stream of liquid melted the snow. Gas dripped from the bottom of the fender and from the bumper.

  The ground sloped in my direction, and a snake of melted snow was weaving its way toward me.

  I holstered the Eagle and took out Tony’s lighter.

  The Zippo’s flame was small and blue. It danced weakly in the little wind the night had left. The flame ignited the tissue wrapping the lighter, and I tossed it all into the gasoline. The tissue flew off toward the sky, but the lighter landed in the puddle. The little blue flame escaped and raced to embrace Tony and the Plymouth. When they met, the gas tank unrolled itself toward the sky with a burst of ruddy light and hellish wind.

  When the smoke reached the bridge, I was already walking away.

  It was after four-thirty when I walked out of the Flats. I was cold, alone, and empty. I had walked all the way to Public Square before I heard the sirens responding to my conflagration. I couldn’t feel much of anything other than fatigue and a sense of loss.

  Where did I have to go? What was it that I could do?

  Everything seemed to be falling apart, slipping away from me. Things had spun out of control. I needed things to stop, to slow down, if only for a while. I wanted to go home, to rest.

  I wanted to go home, but I had no idea where home was, or if I still had one.

  I needed to find a phone book. The night was leaking away, and I was afraid of the coming dawn. However, I had some little time left. When I reached the intersection central to Public Square, I saw the lights in the lobby of the Terminal Tower. The transit station down there was open, and somewhere inside would be a phone.

  By five, I had an address and I had a cab.

  The West Side was more familiar to me than the Heights area. I knew the streets the cab rolled down. I knew when the cab was just around the comer from the house where I had lived the past ten years of my life.

  The last five, alone.

  I told the cabby to drop me off a fair distance back from the intersection of two one-way streets. I paid him and stepped out into a virgin expanse of snow. The cab continued down the street, its taillights the last thing to vanish as it turned away, looking for a main road.

  I stood alone on the street for a long time. The cross street ahead of me was Allan Drive, a three-block-long street that was barely a lane wide. Just looking at it caused tiny flares of memory—

  Under the snow, the street is brick and hell on the suspension.

  The green house on the comer is home to an old woman with way too many cats.

  Kate doesn’t like the neighborhood, but she wanted her own house since Gail was born, and she bears it with the same grace that she bears my profession.

  Gail caught the bus to the high school on Detroit, three blocks away.

  Until Kate left me, that is.

  Fragments, disjointed facts. They hit like tiny sparks from an abused piece of machinery. I stared at the wedding band on my finger. Why did I keep it? Did I have some hope of one day coming home and finding Kate there ... ?

  Something is wrong—

  I stared at the ring. Kate had left me five years ago. Five long years. I had kept the hope that she’d return. Just like I had kept this ring....

  I come home, and I see the house. I know something is wrong—

  A memory wanted to come, a memory that filled me with a sick dread. I wanted to call back the taxi. Call it back and have it take me to someplace else, anywhere else.

  But the taxi was gone, and I was committed.

  I looked up and down Allen Drive. I couldn’t see my house from here, and every other building was darkened and closed. There was a dim threat I felt, unfocused, trapped within my frozen memory. The feelings made me cautious, made me worry that my house might be watched.

  There was no reason to stake out my house, but I worried. If there were police here, they had yet to see me. I approached from the back. Somewhere a dog barked at me.

  The way the backyards and driveways interconnected on these narrow blocks, it was easy for me to approach my house from the other side of the block. The neighborhood became increasingly familiar as I walked up my neighbor’s driveway toward the back of my house. When I reached my backyard, I froze for a minute. No footprints marred the snow, no tire tracks marred the driveway. Everything was still, silent. The wind had ceased.

  Recognition struck like a blow. From the gutter sagging beneath the ice to the too-loose storm windows, I knew this place. I knew the kitchen window that was painted shut, and the half-assed addition someone had tacked to the back porch in the fifties. I knew that the second-floor window facing me was for the rear stairs, and if the light were on, I would see the top of the bathroom’s door frame. I knew Gail’s room overlooked the driveway, Kate’s and mine overlooked the front of the house and my office was opposite Gail’s room. I knew the glass block on the basement windows was expensive as hell, but necessary since the darkroom equipment in the basement was even more so.

  I knew the attic was reached by a trapdoor that stuck in summer and shouldn’t be opened unless you really liked the feel of fiberglass insulation on your skin.

  Even as I remembered, I had to revise the memory, correct for the history of the past five years. Nothing was Kate’s and mine anymore, except maybe Gail—and she was more Kate’s. Gail’s room was storage now....

  I had walked up on the porch, feeling something wrong. I was on the porch before I realized that all the shades were drawn. I like the light, I almost always leave the shades open. The door—

  The memory left me again.

  “God,” I whispered.

  I approached the rear of the house. When I reached the back door, I stopped. Covering the door and the jamb a few inches above the doorknob was a yellow sticker—“Sealed by Order of Cleveland Police Department.”

  The door was locked, and I didn’t like the implications of that sticker. Something was wrong here, and not just within my errant memory.

  I was about to try breaking in, but I remembered something about the back of the house. I walked away from the door, about ten feet to my left, stopping in front of a mound of snow that sloped against the rear of the house. I started kicking the snow away to reveal a pair of storm-cellar doors. These didn’t need a key. The sloping doors were shut with a combination lock.

  There was no police seal here, but I had to kick ice away from the lock before I could open it.

  While I crouched, I had a few nasty minutes when I couldn’t reme
mber the combination. I squatted, fingers numbing on the metal lock, for close to five minutes before I began turning the dial. The numbers finally came, one at a time. With the ice, the lock needed to be forced, but the numbers were right, and I managed to tug it open.

  I slipped it off and dropped it into the snow.

  The door came open with the grinding sound of breaking ice. The opening revealed concrete steps descending into a darkness the moon didn’t reach. At this point, familiarity should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t.

  The front door is ajar. With the shades drawn, none of the morning light reaches inside the house. I had run here, driven madly, expecting something. I draw my thirty-eight—

  I had been driven to come here, driven by fatigue and an aching hole of a memory. But now, as more memories came leaking to the surface, the idea of entering the house filled me with nauseating dread. I felt an urge to run.

  I stepped down into the storm cellar.

  My eyes quickly adjusted to the feeble light down here. At the bottom of the stair was a flimsy door, unlocked. I stepped through into my basement.

  The feeling of familiarity was overwhelming. The past fogged this place, like a choking perfume—a perfume hiding an uglier scent.

  I looked around without benefit of the light; the bluish moonlight streaming through the glass block was enough to see by. I found the darkroom I expected, in a walled-off corner of the basement. I stepped in and finally had to turn on a light to see.

  I groped in the dark and finally hit a switch that flooded the room with red light, as if the room had been sunk in blood. In addition to the trays, the chemicals, and everything else, there should have been pictures in here. Negatives and prints should have been here. Someone had taken them.

  Sebastian’s men? The police?

  The police, I thought as I found traces of fingerprint powder on one of the trays.

  What was on those pictures? Why were the police dusting here for prints? The ugly feeling grew in my stomach. Something bad was going on here.