[Darkthorn 01.0] Pond Scum

by Michael Lilly

  “And Cross?” I ask, trying not to sound too eager.

  Love shoves a paper in front of me, a most unpleasant mugshot.

  Martin fucking Jackson.

  “What the hellll?” I say, apparently out loud; Love is raising an eyebrow at me. I study the photograph, making room for human error, but this is definitely him. I was right the first time.

  “I need to get on something. Thanks a bunch, Love.”

  “Aww, shucks,” he says.

  “Shut up,” I say, but suppress a laugh anyway. He must have used that joke a thousand times by now.

  “Want me to come with? I’m bored as hell. You could hear a fly take a shit in here, it’s so dead. Swear to Jesus.” I like Love. Todd. Todd Love. I like Todd Love. He looks at me with an evidently practiced puppy dog plead.

  “Suit up,” I say. I’m not entirely sure what possesses me to allow for his company on this trip, but of all of the people presently in the building, I’d pick him over any of the others. He’s confident and charismatic, two traits that are absolutely invaluable on a detective.

  We stand up and head for the door, he by my side rather than behind me. After ensuring that we’re both armed and equipped with various tools (I brought a hacksaw from home, just in case), we depart on foot.

  “Why not take a squad car?” he asks.

  “We need a little more subtlety,” I say. We both wear jackets, concealing our firearms and other tools. Once again, mine feels heavy at my hip. Odd though it may be, considering my double life, having the power to end a life holstered at my hip intimidates me. It bears more than physical weight.

  For whatever reason, I have never liked using a gun. I’m a good shot, and am quick on the draw when I need to be, but I prefer not to use them. Given the option, I would gladly live in an alternate universe in which our tools of combat never advanced past swords. I suppose the difference between me and most men is that, when they hold a gun, they feel powerful. Me, I feel dangerous.

  We make our way to the street where Jackson lives, walking quickly but casually.

  “Soooo,” Love says.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “You wanna tell me what we’re doing? Where we’re going?”

  “Oh. Right. Detective Connors?” Love nods. I continue: “She’s missing. Disappeared last night. I would’ve called in the boys, but I have reason to believe that at least one of ‘the boys’ is responsible for her disappearance in the first place, so I couldn’t well do that without potentially jeopardizing her life.”

  He looks at me incredulously, making a visible effort to keep his jaw off the sidewalk. I raise my eyebrows to say, I know, right? Fucked up, but that’s how it is, I guess. He shakes his head and we round the corner where I hid the first time. I pull him into the small concentration of vegetation and we crouch. I point out the house to him, then explain most of what’s happened so far. I omit the details of the house’s structure; he doesn’t need to know that I came here on my own earlier.

  In addition, I leave out the part where I murder my dad and try to frame a prominent detective in a major metropolitan city. For obvious reasons.

  This time, the car is not parked in the carport. The nice thing about having backup is that I don’t have to care when Jackson comes home. Wherever I go, I have Love watching my six o’clock while I watch his.

  I tell him the plan (Go in. Save friend. Leave. If baddy shows up, take care of baddy) and we cross the street, not bothering to check if we’re being watched; it’s faster and more effective just to assume that we are. This time, I can accept that.

  For a November afternoon, it’s remarkably warm, and I begin to sweat underneath my jacket.

  I knock on the door. No reply.

  As I pick the lock, Love says, “Don’t we need a warrant?”

  “Eh,” I grunt. “We’ll call it probable cause or some bullshit. My priority right now is getting Beth safe.”

  “Beth, eh?”

  “Detective Connors. We’re friends. Now shut up.”

  The lock clicks open and the door swings without a sound. We cross the threshold and I thank whatever divine providence exists that Love knows how to be quiet, too. A fellow artist. The smell of baking sweets from before has since diminished, leaving behind only the smell of oldness. It still smells nice, which annoys me.

  This time I make sure my phone is on silent. We walk through the house, first through the living room into which the front entrance leads, then on into a laundry room. The ‘too homey’ sensation takes another stab at me. If Beth’s house is the domestic version of Ellen DeGeneres’s hair, this house is the domestic version of a grocery store birthday cake. Too sweet—artificially so, even.

  Through the laundry room is a flimsy metal door with a spring hinge and a window, through which I see that the backyard looks much like the front, but with a shed.

  We continue our perusal of the house, ascending a flight of stairs on the other side of the living room. Careful to remain calm but alert, we listen hard for any noise, but unless we’ve both gone deaf since we opened the front door, we are the only moving things in this house.

  On the second floor, a hallway sports two doors on either side: a utility closet, a linen closet, a full bathroom, and a bedroom. There’s nothing of import in either of the closets, so far as I can ascertain. The bedroom, quaint, with an old queen-sized bed with a plain navy blue duvet, also presents very little to look at, and nothing at all worth noting.

  Frustration starts to build, pulsing from my core and radiating to my extremities, resulting in a sort of anticipatory shake. We open the bathroom and find an odd sight, electrifying my nerves; I’m fairly certain that I’ll register on the Richter scale soon.

  Most of the bathroom is normal enough, but in the bathtub lies a series of gardening tools: shears, a hoe, a trowel, etc. They have beads of water on them, like someone was just showering and dissolved into a pile of yard tools when they heard the door open.

  I look at Love, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.

  The look he shoots back, shaking his head: Fuck if I know. I got nothin’.

  The natural next step is to check the shed. I was inclined to look in there when we first saw it, but I didn’t want to risk being seen from a rear window of the house if there was someone in here. Now that we’re confident that there isn’t, we descend the stairs, ears still perked for the sound of a parking car. Or anything.

  Adrenaline thick in my system, I unlock the back door and step through it, locking it after Love steps through. We cross to the shed, which has a lock, but it’s not engaged. Instead it dangles uselessly from the end of its chain, glinting in the weakening November sunlight.

  The door shudders open loudly, stubbornly.

  Facedown on the floor in front of us lies Thumper. He is either unconscious or dead, and judging by the profuse bleeding from his eye (only his right is visible), neck, and various other areas, I’d bet on the latter.

  A voice rises from the dark far corner of the shed: “About time you showed up.”

  Ten

  “Come here, fast, get me out of these,” Beth says, displaying her cuffed hands and foot. Her hands are cuffed together, her foot to a pipe. I hurry to her and use my key to unlock her cuffs, fumbling slightly with the handicap of the gloves.

  Hands free, she rubs her wrists while I free her foot. There’s visible redness everywhere that she was cuffed. She shakes her foot, then pulls me into a hug. She’s in rough shape; bruises decorate her jaw and what’s visible of her arms. Her right eye is puffy and swollen, and dried blood cakes her nostrils and lips, as well as her head, in parts.

  “Thanks for coming with, Love,” I say.

  “Love? You two a thing?” says Beth. I laugh, and Love turns scarlet. She hugs him, too. “We need to bounce. Fast. The other guy came and saw him, and went somewhere, I’m not sure where. I thought you would be them until I saw you. Just about shit myself. But I’d really enjoy not being around when they get back. Yeah?”
r />   “Let’s go,” I say. “We did walk, though—”

  “Of course you did.” She rolls her eyes.

  “—so let’s get going. We’ll head back to my place and we can regroup and figure out what the hell is going on.”

  “What?” she says, half feigning incredulity. “We get the honor of imposing on the great abode of Remy the Solitary?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on.” While I never have guests over, my place is still equipped to handle them, if necessary; I suppose that having a ‘welcoming’ home is one of the few human things that I can do to tie myself to sanity, anchoring me while I perform my dark duty. As long as I have a home that could harbor guests, I can’t have ventured too far into the void. Not so far as to be irretrievable, at least.

  The walk back to my place is tense; though no one will admit it, we all fear that Martin ‘Cross’ Jackson will roar up behind us in his Ford and run us down. No such thing happens, however, and we make it back to my place unnoticed, except perhaps by the forever-watching eye that seems to be informing Keroth of my whereabouts and whatabouts at all times.

  We walk into my apartment, and to my relief, Odin trots happily out of my bedroom down the hall, tail wagging, indicating that no surprises lurk for me within. I pet him, giving my mood a pleasant and surprising upheaval. His coarse fur running through my fingers brings solidarity and comfort like a security blanket.

  “Let’s get some food and water first,” I say. My sandwich earlier wasn’t all that filling, and I figure Love is hungry, but mostly it’s for Beth’s sake; they can’t have been feeding and hydrating her well in there, if at all.

  I set out glasses of water for them to drink while I heat up servings of my soup of the week, along with some French bread and some cherry tomatoes. Love picks at the tomatoes, intermittently having a bite of soup or bread, while Beth ignores the tomatoes completely and seems to be in the midst of an attempt to consume the bread and soup simultaneously. Love watches her in awe.

  Fighting through a case of the hiccups, Beth says, “All right. So the night after we found your dad, I went home from work. It was already dark. I heated up some dinner and sat at the bar to eat it. I heard something in the pantry. I pointed my gun at the door and asked who was there. The door flung open and I shot him in the chest. He recoiled, but he must’ve been wearing a vest, because he still got back up. I was about to aim for the head, but then I got tackled from the side. Must’ve been someone hiding behind the couch. I went down hard, and immediately felt hands on me trying to pin me down. I figured there wasn’t much of a way out at that point, so I reached around for whatever I could find. My fork was within reach, so I nabbed it and tucked it into my bra without them noticing. I played helpless for a while, but when Dirtbag McGee started fondling my tits, I pulled it out and stabbed him as many times as I could and wherever I could. He died on his way to the door of the shed. Then the others came. Guess who was there.”

  “Martin Jackson?” I say.

  “Martin fucking Jackson.”

  “Cross.”

  “Yep. Your turn. What happened on your end?”

  I have a sudden, brief urge to tell her about killing my dad, but decide that, if there ever will be a moment in which to divulge that information, this isn’t it. My past is a part of me that I share with no one, not even Beth. If I tell her that I killed him, I also have to tell her why, and that’s a level of vulnerability that no human has yet earned from me. Not Beth, certainly not Love, and sometimes, not even myself.

  Just Odin.

  “I went to the office to look for you, and couldn’t find you. Sanders was looking for you, too. Said it was urgent, so he had been trying to call you, but you wouldn’t answer. After thinking about it later that night, I realized that you always answer your phone. So I walked to your place to check on you. Your car was in the driveway and your lights were off, but it wasn’t that late yet, so I got suspicious. I called you and you didn’t pick up, nor did I see any lights turn on or any movement inside. So I went up to the door and called one more time. I heard your phone inside, but still no movement or anything. So I let myself in and disabled the alarm, then found the scene in the kitchen. As I was going over it, I found a hair near one of the fallen bar stools. I took it back and had Sanders look at it, and in the meantime, I looked at profiles of some of the more shady characters we have around here. Martin Jackson showed up, and his hair looked a lot like the one I pulled from your house. I went to Martin’s once, earlier today, but right after I got into the house, my phone rang, so I bailed; I wasn’t sure, yet, whether or not anyone else was in there. I took the call and it was Sanders. He said it was Patrick’s.”

  I pause, ostensibly to take a breath, but largely to watch her face, and also stealing a glance at Love. I feel like they believe me thus far.

  I continue: “So I went to Patrick’s.” Beth’s jaw drops. “And I didn’t really find anything, but when I got to the master bath, he appeared behind me and pointed a fucking gun at me.”

  “Wait wait wait,” Beth says, “does he still have that god-awful artwork on the wall in the guest bathroom?”

  “Yeah,” I say, wondering whether she was going anywhere with that.

  She nearly falls out of her chair laughing, and so do I, and then so does Love. It’s this moment that banishes the gloom, the terror and hopelessness of the situation. In order to view a hopeless situation objectively, and thus hold a torch to the otherwise enveloping darkness of hopelessness, I suppose you have to let yourself step outside of the despair, even just for a minute.

  I finish relating my story, the rest without the taint of dishonesty, and she nods along the way.

  “So, why didn’t you call the police as soon as you figured out I was missing?” Beth asks. Shit. I was hoping she wouldn’t. But I think I knew she would.

  “I thought there may have been someone from the squad involved. In which case, if I got the guys on it, you might’ve gotten dead.”

  “Really dead,” she agrees. “But what made you think that?”

  “Just that you disappeared shortly after I sent you the text about our friend from Portland.” I don’t want to name names in front of Love, but he probably knows who it is anyway. Oops.

  “I fucking hate that guy,” says Love. I like Love. Todd. Todd Love. I like Todd Love.

  Beth and I laugh, and as soon as he sees that he’s in the clear, Love laughs, too.

  “So, what do we do?” Beth says, as soon as she can breathe properly.

  “What can we do?” I ask. I try not to show it, but even objectively, the situation seems impossible to beat.

  “Are you sure that this guy did it?” Beth asks.

  “Not at all,” I say; overconfidence may give me away. “But like I said, he’s known my dad for years. And frankly, he just rubs me the wrong way.” At one point, true in more ways than one.

  Beth trusts my instincts. Not because they’re necessarily good, but because most of my ‘hunches’ point her toward the person I’ve already picked out as the killer for that particular homicide.

  A silence rests on us, the ceiling itself mocking us for our inability to defeat Keroth. We finish our food, and even Beth has some of the salad. If it weren’t under such grim circumstances, an outsider looking in would think that we’re having a grand time. And indeed, I enjoy Beth’s company, and am coming to enjoy that of Love, but these aren’t sentiments to which I can afford to give any real amount of attention just yet.

  “Why don’t we sleep on it?” I say. I, like most humans, think better when well-rested, and having Beth safely back out of harm’s way, in tandem with my perpetual fatigue, should allow for a deep, restful slumber, as beautiful as it is rare.

  “Yeah, um,” Beth says. “There’s no way I’m walking home. With or without you, I’m not willing to take the risk that some goon is out there in a Cadillac with an Uzi ready to rip us to shreds the second we hit the pavement.”

  “Probably a reasonable call,” I say. />
  Love glances at me beseechingly, with his impeccably rehearsed puppy dog eyes.

  “Both of you stay here tonight,” I say.

  Beth showers first, as she’s the one caked in blood and dirt and Hades only knows what else. She doesn’t have any clean clothes to change into, so I lend her a pair of gym shorts and a tee shirt. Even in the baggy apparel of another person, bruised and beaten, she looks MUCH better, and I begin to see that she will, eventually, recover the familiar, dominant light of her personality.

  Beth sleeps on the pull-out bed from the couch in the living room, despite Love’s and my protests; it’s visible and vulnerable immediately upon opening the front door, and there’s virtually nothing and no one to stop a potential intruder from coming in and opening fire. Besides, the bed in the bedroom is far more comfortable, and she needs the rest the most. But despite our insistence otherwise, she lies down on it and smiles at us, giving us our cue to leave.

  Without a sanguine mud mask to remove, Love and I are both ready for bed rapidly, and he, too, borrows some old clothes; these two are lucky I like to lounge.

  I have a massive bed, for no reason other than the luxurious feel of being able to toss my extremities in every direction and still be met with more mattress. For once, its size comes in actual, practical use, as Love and I retire. The shades and curtains are drawn on every window in the apartment, and beautiful darkness envelops me and loosens tension’s grip on my mind.

  I’m almost asleep when Love speaks, quietly: “You did it, didn’t you? You killed him. Your dad.”

  Fuck. My previously settling heart revs up again, like a boxer shaking himself back into consciousness three seconds shy of a knockout.

  “Why would you say that?” I ask casually, throwing a bit of offended into it.