by Mark Lingane
"They're the same thing."
"Your record says your parents are dead. Is there anyone else in your life who can pick you up?"
"No."
"Any friends?"
"No."
"Maid?"
"You've seen my office."
She let out a light, infectious laugh, and then quickly stopped herself. "I guess you could achieve the same outcome if you opened the window on a blustery day. Your records only show from the war onwards. What did you do before?"
I hesitated. The black pit of lousy life decisions fired by an ill-tempered youth opened up before me. The army had been redemption for the mistakes I'd made, but the horrors of war, man against man, sent any recollection of innocence into the wind.
"I don't recall."
"You must remember something." Her face offered an eager inquisition that I couldn't deter.
"I loved and lost."
Watcher appeared at his doorway. "Why is he still here?"
"You said to forget it, that he doesn't matter."
"No, you moron. The charge doesn't matter. Get him into the cells, quickly. Make sure it's thirty-eight. And see me after." He glanced at his watch then slammed his door closed.
She looked like she'd been punched. I felt for her. He'd given bad instructions then blamed her for it.
"Could you follow me please, sir."
Her voice had returned to its original brittleness. She didn't look at me but took out her hammer, long and black, and placed it in the small of my back. I twisted around, grabbed it out of her tight clutches, and handed it back to her.
"No need for that." I made toward the steps to the cells, with her pretty face behind me as she hurried to catch up.
The cells officer slammed down the keys in his hand with herculean contempt. "You. What are you doing here?" His jaw was clenched. He hadn't forgotten, and he hadn't forgiven. But he had healed. Except for the missing tooth. He should've been happy; it gave him character.
"It's okay," L. Mallory said. "For some reason Watcher wants him in the cells."
"We don't need no reason for this sucker, not after last time," the man shouted.
"Why, what happen--"
"It's okay," I interjected.
"He can have cell thirty-eight," the officer said.
"Watcher said the same thing. We have a cell thirty-eight?"
"Yeah, it's a stinking, disgusting small hole we keep for people exactly like him."
The officer led me down to the pit of the tank, where the smell was so bad you could have spread it on bread. He unlocked the cell and tried to push me in. He didn't have much luck. I looked back over my shoulder at him and stepped into the cell. He slammed the gate behind me, sending the ringing tones through the entire floor.
"I'm"--L. Mallory paused as her thought processes drifted off to the moon and back--"sorry."
I gave her half a smile, saving the rest for when I needed to bank it, and she took off for civilization. She had a genuine face that had the grace and manners to reflect her words. Maybe she was sorry. Maybe she was even sorry for me.
I took off my shoes. They were their own kind of civilization. I sat on the cot. It returned a level of comfort unmatched by my stretcher. Food would be coming soon. All in all, it wasn't a bad deal.
3
I watched the night ride in through the diminutive window. This month it was a super moon, fitting perfectly inside the edges of the window. Round peg, square hole. Where had I seen that? Oh yeah.
About eleven they threw some whimpering old hobo into the cell next to me; he was so full of singing juice he couldn't speak straight. Bojangles sang until he collapsed into a cranky pile in the corner, nibbling on his fetid nails. He perked up around midnight and started playing some battered old mouth organ. Odd thing for a hobo to have; he could've traded it in for a week's worth of liquor. But I guess we've all got to find something that gets us through the night.
The bell tolled down at the dock. The port was closed. Midnight.
The lights went out as the building's generators powered down. I felt the hum descend through the octaves until the silence wrapped around me.
Bojangles started up again. The mouth organ followed an ancient sad tune. A tremolo entered the performance. The hobo was visibly being harassed by something; one hand snapped at invisible bugs flapping around his head, causing him to miss the occasional note. He went quiet. Then he jumped up and stared at me through the bars, his filthy hands wrapped around the cold steel. His face freakishly caught the moonlight. His body started to shake. His eyes rolled back into his head, leaving the yellow sclera piercing me. His eyes faded to black.
His mouth opened, exposing gray teeth. He exhaled, and a cloud of insects flew straight at me. I pulled the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around me. I felt the insects bounce off the fabric. They were concentrating on my head. I swept the sheet up, capturing them, then flung it to the floor and stamped on it until the buzzing stopped.
"It's time," Bojangles said. But it wasn't his voice. My head snapped up and I looked at him. "The change is coming."
I wondered if this referred to my shorts.
"You must prepare, Samael."
I looked around. There was no one else he could be talking to. "For what?" I said.
"The change. The old will end. The new will begin. As it is written."
The window at the other end of the corridor exploded and two enormous bird-like creatures flapped their way down to our cells. The lights flickered, powered now by some unseen source.
The birds dived through the bars of Bojangles' cell and started to rip him apart. As well as I could tell in the dim, flashing light, they seemed to be shredding his skin with their claws. He flailed his arms to keep the creatures away, but they were too strong. His face ruptured and he screamed, but there was no sound. One creature slashed his throat, and blood spurted across the floor.
He stopped moving.
The birds crashed against the bars of my cell, but couldn't enter. One flew back down the corridor to the window and was gone. The second paced up and down, testing the bars. Each time it touched the metal it shrieked and fluttered backward. It turned its rat-like face to me and let out a strange whining sound. It sounded sad.
The largest hound I had seen bounded down the corridor, spitting and snarling. It launched at the winged creature, barring its teeth and snapping, opening its jaws wide. The two creatures rolled together on the floor, slashing and clawing at each other. The bird sank its claws into the shoulder of the dog, which yelped, momentarily releasing its captive. The bird took its moment of freedom and crashed out through the window, half ripping itself apart against the jagged glass edges.
The dog turned and stared at me. It let out a low growl, then turned away and ran down the corridor to the window.
In the morning, Bojangles was dead.
They worked hard at it for a few hours, but in the end the slowhands couldn't pin the hobo's death on me, so they had to let me go. Reluctantly, the cell officer recorded "natural causes." You got to laugh. My nerves were still on edge. If L. Mallory had been there it would have helped. But she wasn't.
The afternoon heat rolled up from the gutters. On the way home I stopped at some joints to drink some nerves. But it didn't help. I wandered up the stairs to my office. The keys jangled as I flicked through them. I didn't need them. The door swung open.
The first thing I saw was the chair, over on its side with a broken leg. The trashmen had been and hadn't left one item untouched. It was clear they weren't looking for anything; someone was angry. The damage wasn't bad, but it was going to take a few hours.
I heard hurried footsteps on the staircase behind me, dainty and small. I turned around. L. Mallory smiled at me. She had undone the first two buttons on her uniform, and refreshed her perfume so it set up a perimeter of allure at five feet. Sure made me smell better.
"I thought you might need this," she said. She rotated her wrist and revealed my license fol
ded in her delicate fingers. They were hands that had never seen the dirty end of a desperate altercation.
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Um." The confident girl of yesterday dissolved into a flustered teenager. "Would you like to go for a drink some time? Or we could catch a game if you're into that kind of thing. I like games."
"I ain't a temptation."
"But you're not a cop. I only meet cops and, well, you've seen them. I don't get on with them a whole lot."
"You're with internal audit?"
She looked at her feet and nodded. I felt sorry for her. It was hard enough being a woman in the police force. I could see some Neanderthal jerk taking offense to her because she was smart and pretty, lining her up as an undercover IA informer.
"I'd like a friend. I don't have too many. You look like you could be a friend."
I shrugged. She radiated purity through her brookish stone facade, derived, I was guessing, from an upbringing where life was constant competition with numerous Neanderthal cops.
The sight of the upended contents of the office behind me caught her attention, causing the sad bunnies to come back. "You should report this," she said.
"It's okay."
"It's a crime."
"Only with a theft."
She glanced at her watch, and her squirrel danced behind her. "I've got some time before I have to be back at the tank. I'll help you."
She helped a bit, but in the end she asked too many questions and I said I'd meet her for a drink. After she'd gone and I'd locked the door, I uncovered a large star drawn in blood in the center of the office. On the tips of the star were five burned points, like the pattern you'd find on a dead, skinny blond thing.
4
I was sitting back, flipping decimals into the tumbler on the desk. The place had the pretense of decorum with tidied shelves and a washed floor. A great darkness descended from the heavens, screeching and howling. The rent monster had turned up early. I sighed. There was no escape.
She flung open the door, giving it a hefty kick with her deformed boot. It crashed against the wall and the inset glass shook in a combination of fear and physics. She opened her mouth and the flames of a hellfire spewed out.
I'll translate: "You got till Thursday to pay up or you're out."
I left out the foul language because I've got some standards. She finished up with the usual abuse and stomped away down the stairs, shaking the building to its foundations.
It was going to be hard to find a place cheaper than this with four walls or a roof. I pulled out the pages and started to search for my next abode. In truth I was fine about moving because crimes had increased sharply in the area recently.
A shadow fell across the glass inset in the door. I knew who it was. It's hard to forget curves like that. She stood there, moving slowly, half dancing; performing some kind of seductive shadow-puppet show. Eventually the door opened.
Click.
"Yeah?"
Mina leaned against the doorjamb. My door introduced me: Van H. Avram. She stared at it long before casually deflating into my office. She traced her finger around the embossed gold sticker.
"What's the H stand for?"
"Hell knows."
She wore a white leather outfit that clung to her like a lick of paint, and was about as revealing. From mountains to molehill, it covered nothing. Her hair sat longer tonight.
"You're a hard man to find, Van."
"Hiding in plain sight." I gave her half a smile and gestured toward her like a bad magician. "What do you want?"
"I've placed some faith in my ability to change your mind." She sauntered around the room, checking out all the nooks and crannies. "Where do you sleep?"
"Hanging in the wardrobe."
"Feet up or down?"
I ignored her and poured a drink. I sighed as I fished out the decimals before knocking back the liquid.
She looked over the collection of musical artifacts in the corner. "You've got a sax. I like a man with a big, shiny instrument. Perhaps you'll let me blow it." Her finger stroked upward from the bow to the bell, her reflection stretched and golden in the brass.
She paused at the small wooden box with the army's embossed crest, which was holding down the unpaid bills. "You've got medals, why don't you display them?"
"I don't show off."
Her hand hovered over the box. Her thumbnail flicked the small golden latch but she left it closed. "What did you do in the army?"
"Shot things."
"Is that all?"
"And looked at things."
"You must've looked good to get all these medals. You still look pretty good."
Flattery. It was a pretty lady going soft, so I let it ride. They say I'm a sucker for a pretty face, so when Mina gave me her eyes, three quarts desire and a fist full of desperate hunger, there wasn't much I could do except see where the ride ended up. These things never end up where you want to go, but more often than not they end up where you need to be.
"What happened? How does a war hero descend to the seventh rung of society?"
"Bad choices. Bad luck."
She let out a sigh. For the first time her face radiated an emotion other than determination. "Sooner or later we all succumb to the vices. You want to see some of mine?"
"How about later?"
She poured herself a drink and knocked it back while sitting down on the edge of my desk. She swung her knees to the side, retaining a small degree of grace, and rested the heels of her boots on my knees. She removed her broken-heart hairpin and her hair fell around her face, highlighting her features like a classic portrait.
"I'll try and fit you in, honey, but there's a queue of good intentions trying to back up outta the way."
She leaned forward and ran her finger down the side of my face. It scraped against the two-day growth. She placed one boot against my chest and gently pushed me back into the beat-up old leather recliner. She reached for my belt and pulled it free, ripping open my trousers. I couldn't deny I stirred to see her, especially what she was showing, and my body reacted accordingly.
"It's good to have your attention," she said.
Without trepidation she ripped aside her secrets and hovered over me. She teased as she steered me tantalizingly close, grazing her skin. "Will you take the case, honey?"
"Yeah, all right," I replied.
She descended and we joined in a holistic moment of endeavor. She rocked with the uncluttered finesse of a seasoned professional. I'm not the best of judges but she seemed to partake massively of the enjoyment.
"You're not a good woman," I said.
"I tried it but the pay was bad," she whispered. She grabbed my head and sank her teeth into my neck.
Mina put the candy on the desk, my standard rate of a century a week. It would keep the rent monster off my back for a month, and possibly some food in my mouth.
"Where'd you meet?" I asked.
She leaned over and whispered in my ear. "Vinyl."
"You got a picture?"
She fished through her small purse and handed over a photograph folded in half. The waxy paper had aged to a shade of yellow. It was him, singing out the front of some band, using some kind of ridiculous totem pole as a mic stand.
"He got a name?"
"It's on the back."
I turned it over. "You're kidding, right?" I flicked the photo with my fingers as I looked up at her.
"Take it how you like. It's easy to remember, if not entirely accurate."
I wrote down Hugh, then his ridiculous surname, Jorgen, on a fresh piece of paper. "I need one of you too," I said.
"Would you like it with my clothes on or off?"
I pulled out my battered old Leica and took a happy snap of her. She didn't pose too much, just enough to be a sticker on the front of a warplane. She couldn't help blowing a kiss. Then she was gone, leaving only the scent of her domineering pinnacle, and smudged lipstick on the glass. There was an odd expression on her face as she left, somewher
e between shock, surprise and disappointment. It would be interesting to find out why.
I took the film down to the local drugstore where they offered quick and dirty processing for a fistful of decimals. I heard some more of those late-night birds flapping around, like the previous night, and I kept close to the buildings.
5
The morning made its usual commotion through the window. The sun glared like the inordinate thermonuclear explosion it was. Too early. Too bright. The stretcher was close to a bed of nails, comfort-wise, but it was home. A spot between my shoulder blades was itching, right where I couldn't reach, the spot only accessible if you had a short humerus or two. But from what I'd seen, short arms meant you couldn't be a lawman.
The city had its secrets. Most of the time it was loud and proud about them. You could know the metropolis without knowing about the terrace. And you could know a lot about the terrace without knowing about Vinyl. It was a place I'd heard about in uncertain whispers, but I'd never crossed the threshold, and this represented a dark hole in my understanding of the city.
The street Vinyl was on varied between the razzmatazz of the secrets window dancers--quality at the top of the menu--down to the decimal hookers hugging windbreaks in concrete alcoves. The street was brutal and blatant with its architecture reflecting the various levels of available service. But at least they advertised.
Vinyl was different. It was a big old warehouse made of stone and steel, three stories high and windowless. It presented a blank exterior to the street. No signs. No doors. No mailbox. No thank you. Its aggressive pre-industrial architecture repulsed all who strayed near. Most pedestrians crossed over to avoid the place, as though it might suddenly come to life and devour them like some stone-age monster; part tiger, part religious monolith, and part act of war. The occasional group of individuals could be seen milling on the corner wearing strange black shiny clothing.
There was a large gate on one side of the warehouse. Behind it was a narrow alleyway that ran down the length of the building. I rattled the cage and hollered for attention. No response. I looked at the lock. It was old, older than a teenage embarrassment. I'd seen one before, in the war. The recollection poked around in the back of my dusty memory box. It wasn't coming. I knew I'd seen the lock at a distance, where it held back something horrible. I shrugged. I couldn't remember what that something was, but I did remember how to open the lock.
