Down These Strange Streets

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  “Sounds like you needed a girlfriend,” Mason said.

  “Oh, I did,” Scarrey said. “No, I stumbled into riders because I hoped to.”

  “Riders?”

  “It’s what people in the trade call them. The things that live just outside the world, trying to get in.”

  “Why not just demons?”

  Scarrey took a long drink of his lager, his frown drawing lines in his forehead. He smacked his lips.

  “What’s the difference between an angel and a demon?” he asked.

  “One’s good, the other’s evil.”

  “What’s good, though? What’s evil? I mean, yes, you and I agree, I’m sure about almost everything. Hurting people who don’t deserve it is bad, being compassionate is good, and so on and so on. We likely even agree on particular cases. But even if every man and woman and child straight out of the womb agreed that something was a wrong thing to do, does that make it true or absolute? I doubt you’ll find anyone who approves of tuberculosis qua tuberculosis, but we haven’t asked the bacilli’s opinions.”

  “So Beleth the King of Hell’s an angel?” Mason said.

  “If you agree with him, why not?” Scarrey said. “If he destroys the things that you think should be destroyed and protects the things you want protected. Read the Old Testament; you’ll see that angels are terrible, frightening things. But they work in the service of God, and since you’re reading the Bible, you likely believe that God is good, and so . . . The difference between an angel and a demon is whether you both vote Republican.”

  “And how would you agree with something like . . . what we’ve got locked up?”

  Scarrey’s face lit up. For a moment, all the ingrained uncertainty and apology and awkwardness were gone. Mason felt like he was seeing someone different from the man who’d come in to see the prisoner.

  “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? The mystery, not the puzzle. What kind of man would invite that into himself? One who hates women. One who enjoys sadism, or . . . or finds it reassuring somehow. One who is driven to it by fear.”

  “Or is a fucking nutcase,” Mason said.

  “Oh, Detective,” Scarrey said, chuckling, “if you don’t like my ideas about good and evil, you aren’t going to be satisfied with my opinions on sanity.”

  The food arrived. The steak was black as a lump of coal, with a thick crust that bubbled and sizzled. Steamed carrots and broccoli florets adorned the side of the plate, alternating with the regularity of soldiers in formation. The dab of mashed potatoes smelled of hazelnuts and butter. Mason took a bite of the steak, and his eyes went wide. The forty-dollar price tag made more sense. The waiter put Scarrey’s salad in front of him, and a carved crystal plate with crumbled feta beside it.

  “Gentlemen,” the waiter said, “the manager wanted me to tell you that all of this will be complimentary today. If there’s anything else I can get for you, just let me know.”

  Scarrey made a little clicking noise with his tongue and teeth and shook his head.

  “Tell her that she’s really entirely too kind.”

  “Yes, sir,” the waiter said, and backed away with professional and wellpracticed grace.

  Mason reevaluated the man across the table from him, but he kept coming back to the same place. Even now, on his home territory, he kept his elbows in at his sides, and he smiled unconsciously, nervously. But the chief could ask favors of him, and fancy restaurants downtown fed him for free. It didn’t fit. Scarrey sensed the attention and fidgeted.

  “The manager and I go to the same church,” he said around a mouthful of lettuce. “Your chief attends services there too.”

  “Really?” Mason said. “I wouldn’t have made him for the pious type.”

  “Unitarian. Do you like the steak?”

  Mason took another bite. The burned taste of the coffee crust, the salt and juice of the meat. The blood.

  “It’s great.”

  SOBINSKI’S APARTMENT WAS THE UPPER LEFT QUARTER OF A FOURPLEX. THE neighborhood was a mix of lower middle class and the wealthiest ranks of the poor. Dogs ran loose on the street in a ragged pack that watched Mason and Scarrey with the wariness of locals for outsiders. As they walked up the battered steel stairway, footsteps chiming, the smell of cooking sausage wafted up at them from the downstairs apartment. After the steak, it was a little nauseating.

  Mason cut the seal, unlocked the door, and let Scarrey through. The place looked the same as it had the first time Mason had seen it. Tiny kitchen. The stovetop hadn’t seen much use, and the door of the microwave was spotted with splatters of brown. Narrow living room with a big flatscreen TV that was the only high-end appliance in the place, a beige carpet that couldn’t hide the drips and stains, and a floral couch with a rip at the side that leaked yellow-white stuffing. Scarrey walked around the rooms slowly, his hands in his pockets. Mason wondered whether it looked different to him, and if it did, how.

  “Did you arrest him here?”

  “Yeah,” Mason said. “I think he knew it was coming.”

  “And he tried to run?”

  “Out the back window. Fire escape. We caught him in the alley.”

  “Mmm.”

  Scarrey went down the two steps’ worth of hall to the bedroom. Single bed, unmade. Dresser with a pile of junk mail and bills. Socks on the floor. Scarrey squatted on the floor, looking under the bed.

  “This was where you found the box of occult things?”

  “The robe,” Mason said. “A bunch of fucked-up DVDs. Some books. They’re all back in evidence if you want to look at them.”

  “That’s all right. There are other boxes down here, though.”

  “Yeah. Crap storage.”

  Scarrey went down on his hands and knees, fishing the white cardboard out into the room. Old clothes in wads. A book on how to pick up girls. A stack of pornographic magazines. Two old bricks. A pile of yellowing paperbacks held together with a wide rubber band. A collection of DVDs teaching magic, juggling, unicycle riding. Scarrey ran his fingers over everything like he was flipping pages in a book. He paused, eyes narrowing.

  “Missing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The circus training disks. One’s missing,” Scarrey said. He picked up the one on juggling. On the box, a guy in clown-face makeup was grinning, a cartoon circle of blue dots and streaks standing in for actual juggling balls. Scarrey read through the text on the back, his lips moving. He made a satisfied grunt.

  “Something?”

  “Nothing unexpected,” he said. “Contortion.”

  Scarrey dropped the disk back into the box and picked up the pile of paperbacks.

  “Contortion?” Mason said.

  “Bending,” Scarrey said. “It’s when someone—”

  “Yeah, I know what it is.”

  “More to the point, it’s the one he lost. Or got rid of. I don’t know whether he intentionally removed it, or if it was just something he had out often enough to misplace, but it hardly matters. And these, ah look. From a church library. Chariot of the Gods. Releasing Your Inner Light. Satan Among Us. Ah! Look. The True Meaning of the New Testament, by Reverend J. Linklesser. As if there were only one meaning! But . . .”

  The rubber band came off with a snap, and Scarrey let the book fall open. Mason saw underlined passages flicker by.

  “Aramaic?” Mason said.

  “If English was good enough for our Lord and Savior . . . except, of course, it wasn’t.”

  “It’s crap then,” Mason said. “All that shit Sobinski’s pulling. He’s not possessed.”

  Scarrey looked up from the floor, baffled.

  “Of course not. I mean, I had to check the site of the sacrifice to be totally certain, but really. John Zombie?” Scarrey grimaced and shook his head. “Semitic languages like Aramaic are Afro-Asiatic, not Afro-Caribbean. And Mait Carrefour and Marinette are very specific loa, neither one associated particularly with Jacob’s Ladder. You were quite right about the man, he really isn�
��t very good. Not that he’s evil. I mean he is evil, he killed that poor girl, but he isn’t very good at what he does.”

  “Wait a minute, you knew he wasn’t possessed?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then, excuse my saying it, but what the fuck are we doing here?”

  “Oh,” Scarrey said. “I’m sorry, Detective. I’m not here to find whether he’s possessed. I’m here to find why he’s pretending to be.”

  “Insanity plea,” Mason said.

  “No, that won’t do. For one thing, in practice that defense never works. Even if it did, life in prison isn’t appreciably different from indefinite detention in a mental institution, except that the prison is more pleasant. Now, given how badly he’s done everything else, your man Sobinski might not have realized that.”

  “Straight-up insanity.”

  “He could have had some kind of psychotic break. Not to the degree that he couldn’t plan and carry out a complex crime. And he didn’t seem to have any signs of Beleth the King of Hell before he was arrested. Possibly being caught induced psychosis as a way to distance himself from responsibility, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “Well, there are some problems with it,” Scarrey said, softly. “I have a hard time saying that a man who did what he did is well, mentally, but I think, I think, I know what he was looking for.”

  “I’VE ALREADY TOLD THE POLICE WHAT I KNOW.”

  The sausage cooker downstairs was a thick-boned Korean woman in her late forties named Anna. Her kitchen was exactly the same layout as Sobinski’s, but with less light and more cooking. She stood at the stovetop, stirring a pan of sizzling meat. The smell of hot gristle and salt hadn’t gotten less repulsive by being closer. Scarrey didn’t seemed bothered by it.

  “I’m not a policeman. Did he seem to have many friends?”

  She scowled at Scarrey, then up at Mason, then at the food cooking before her.

  “He didn’t have any for very long. He was one of those people who knows someone really well for a little while, then moves on. Drank too much. He was always . . .”

  She shook her head. Scarrey looked at his own clasped hands. For a moment, he could almost have been praying.

  “Frightened,” he said.

  Anna glanced at him, then nodded.

  “Could put it like that. He was always talking about how the liberals were going to take away our rights, or how George Bush was really working with the Saudis. He was pretty evenhanded about his politics. Give him that. Hated everybody.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “For a little while.”

  “Did he frighten you?” Scarrey asked.

  “No, never.”

  “Does that frighten you, considering what he did?”

  “Yeah,” she said, turning off the burner under her pan. “Yeah, it does.”

  She turned to the refrigerator and took out a round loaf of uncut bread. The place was so small, she didn’t have to shift her feet.

  “How did the two of you end your acquaintance?” Scarrey asked. Mason shifted his weight to his left foot. Anna took a knife from its stand and slit the loaf of bread down the side. She was quiet for long enough that Mason started to wonder if she’d heard the question, and, if she had, whether she’d answer it.

  “He didn’t hit me,” she said. “He didn’t even get mean. He just drifted off. Didn’t come down for dinner anymore, and so, after a while, I stopped cooking for him.”

  She pushed a lock of hair back over her ear, put down the knife, and bent the opened bread, the crust cracking under her fingers, and the soft white tissue of the loaf blooming out.

  “I was going to cuss him out,” she said. “But I never got around to it. I wonder. If I had . . .”

  “Did he take up with another woman?” Scarrey asked.

  “No. He was in a band. Teaching himself guitar. Only lasted about a month. Then there were a bunch of Jesus freaks he had over for a while, until they stopped coming. I stopped paying much attention after that. I don’t think he was the kind of man that ever knew much peace.”

  “Would you call him depressed?”

  She opened the refrigerator again and took out a tub of fake butter and used the same knife she’d cut with to spread it.

  “No,” she said. “He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t depressed. He was . . . hungry? Scared? Shit, I don’t know what you want to call it. He was messed up. Bad childhood or something. He was always looking for something, always had a scheme for how it was all going to be okay this time. Only it never was.”

  She was still scowling, but the angle of her shoulders had changed. Her guard was coming down. Mason tried to keep his own expression soft and unintimidating. He wasn’t much in practice for that.

  “You guys want some food?” she asked.

  Jesus no, thought Mason.

  “Please,” Scarrey said. “That would be lovely.”

  “None for me,” Mason said. “Just ate.”

  She brought a plate over to the small, peeling-laminate table. The meat was gray with flecks of brown, surrounded by a haphazard fall of half-cooked onion. The bread and fake butter perched on the side.

  “All I got’s water,” she said.

  “Water would be lovely,” Scarrey said with a big, goofy grin. “Most important nutrient there is. Hydration.”

  As she got a glass from the tap, Scarrey tucked into the meat as if it were the best thing he’d seen all day. Mason made a point of not noticing that Anna had wiped the water glass clean before she filled it. When she handed it to him, Scarrey nodded his thanks. Anna sat across from him, her lips pressed thin, as if offering them food had exposed her weak spots and she regretted it now.

  “I know it’s an odd question,” Scarrey said around a mouthful of sausage and onion, “given everything you said about him, but I have to ask. With all the fear and the reaching out and letting go, all the brief attachments to people and causes and so on, did he strike you as hopeful?”

  Anna furrowed her brow.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s a weird way to put it, but . . . Yeah.”

  “Ah,” Scarrey said, and his smile left him looking satisfied.

  “WHAT DID YOU MEAN, THE MYSTERY, NOT THE PUZZLE?” MASON ASKED. They were driving down Central toward the university. The afternoon traffic was starting to thicken, the distant early warning of rush-hour gridlock.

  “Have you ever considered the difference between them?”

  “Can’t say I have,” Mason said.

  “You should. It’s important, given what you do.”

  “Solve mysteries?”

  “Sometimes,” Scarrey said. “But more often, I think, puzzles.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s the difference?”

  A van moved up beside them, gunned its engine, and tried to pass. Mason sped up just a little to stop it, and the van slowed back.

  “Puzzles have solutions,” Scarrey said. “Do you have a napkin? My fingers are . . .”

  “There’s some wet wipes in the glove box,” Mason said.

  “Thank you. Puzzles have solutions. The lock opens. The wine bottle comes free.”

  “You figure out whodunit,” Mason said. “I get that.”

  “Mysteries aren’t like that. With them, there’s an element of judgment. Guesswork. Not just to reach the solution, but within the solution itself.”

  “That sounds really deep,” Mason said, “but I don’t know what the fuck it means.”

  “Which makes it a mystery,” Scarrey said. Mason laughed.

  Back in the office, Anderson was at his desk, grinning and high-fiving everyone who passed by. His wide-set face and too-handsome looks didn’t have the haunted look they’d acquired in the past few weeks. Mason grinned.

  “Good to see you finally showing up for work, slacker,” Mason said.

  “Smoked all my dope,” Anderson said, returning the joke. “Figured I’d better come in, hit up the evidence locker, eh?”

 
From across the room, Diaz growled.

  “Take it outside. I’m trying to work here.”

  Mason lifted his eyebrows, but Anderson shook his head and pointed to the door. They paused in the hallway, Scarrey looking from one to the other in confusion.

  “What’s up?”

  “The perp on Miawashi? Yeah, he’s gone. Not at his mom’s place. Not with his girlfriend.”

  “Knows we’re looking at him,” Mason said. “Well. He’s got to be somewhere.”

  “Makes it a puzzle,” Scarrey said, cheerfully. Anderson met Mason’s eyes with an empty expression. He didn’t get the joke.

  “Internal Affairs finished chewing you over?”

  “I’m not getting a written apology or anything, but yeah. That’s done,” he said. “What about you two? Good day?”

  “Possibly excellent,” Scarrey said.

  “Track down the global satanic conspiracy?”

  “Wouldn’t go that far,” Mason said. “Pretty well established that Sobinski’s full of shit, though.”

  “Even with the . . .” Anderson moved his arms back into an awkward pose, mimicking the prisoner.

  “Even with,” Mason agreed. “I’m thinking we get some of the stuff we found, and we can use it pretrial if his lawyer tries to get him declared incompetent. Still no confession, but . . .”

  “Well,” Anderson said, nodding slowly. Maybe impressed, maybe pretending to be impressed. “Go with God.”

  “Yes,” Scarrey said. “I was hoping I could see the prisoner one last time, though. If that’s not too much trouble?”

  “Fine with me,” Mason said.

  “Um,” Scarrey said, looking pained and embarrassed.