Karma

by Grant McKenzie

  His father’s present had been two days of pain sparked by a cold chicken leg that had gone missing from the fridge. Reddy’s arms were twisted until the bones threatened to break. A small kitchen knife was used to cut around his baby toe — the pain so intense he bit through his lower lip. The knife also cut into his scrotum and left its mark in a scar that ran from hip to knee.

  For an encore, his father forced him to sit and beg like a dog. When he was unable to do this properly, he was punched repeatedly in the face. Reddy escaped after his father passed out from exhaustion and alcohol.

  If not for the public library and its free use of books and computers, Reddy would have jumped off the Michigan Avenue Bridge that first night. It was a thought that never left his mind every time he wandered near it. He had read the Chicago River flowed backwards — some kind of turn-of-the-century engineering trick to take away the city’s sewage — and that’s where Reddy wanted to go, backwards. Back before he was a child; back before he was born.

  “Who de fuck’s Theresa?” J-Cloth wiped his nose on a shirtsleeve. The stiff cloth was crusted with dried snot and crumbling scabs of blood.

  J-Cloth’s skin was as pale as the underbelly of a dead fish, which made his dark, almond-shaped eyes and thick black hair seem all the more out of place. The eyes and hair were the only things he ever inherited from his deported Filipino mother. The rest of his genes came from someone his mother either didn’t know or didn’t care to remember. The note pinned to his shirt when he was three years old never made that clear.

  J-Cloth mumbled through teeth that had rotted into brown stumps, making the words stick together until they formed one elongated mashup: “whodefuckstheresa?”

  “Says you call her . . .” Reddy couldn’t say the words, and he hated his voice. Unbroken, it was high-pitched and embarrassingly girlish.

  “Fuck, boy. Spit it out.”

  J-Cloth puffed out his chest and stretched his lips across the broken rake of teeth. He was no older than 20, but his hollow face, matted with patches of flaking psoriasis, reflected a lifetime of dealing and using in the rain slicked back alleys of New York.

  “Theresa’s young.”

  “Way I likes ’em.” J-Cloth moved his shoulders to an inner beat as if preparing to burst into song, run a 100-yard dash or piss himself.

  “She has scars.”

  “Aahhh!” J-Cloth grinned wider. “I knows who you mean. Scar Pussy. Little blonde thing, skinny as a rat, strange fuckin’ electrical scars up her thighs that go right inside.”

  Reddy’s stomach tightened into a knot. “Yeah. That’s her.”

  “You ever see how deep those scars go?”

  Reddy stayed silent, not trusting himself.

  “They go fo’ fuckin’ ever, boy. Deep into fuckin’ pink. Never saw de end.”

  “You tried?” Reddy’s tone was flat.

  “Sure. Fuck sure,” said J-Cloth. “I’ma curious muthafucka.”

  Reddy held his breath for a second. “So can you help me out?”

  “Sure ting, bro. Any friend of Scar Pussy ... what you need?”

  “Crack.”

  “Much?”

  “Couple rocks?”

  “Shit, you wastin’ ma time.”

  “That’s all I got cash for.”

  J-Cloth wiped his nose on his sleeve again. He tried his best to avoid the still wet smear from his last swipe, but flakes of dried-up snot broke off and stuck to the sides of his wet nose.

  “Ever bin fuckup de ass?” J-Cloth’s easy tone attempted to imply that he was merely curious.

  “What?”

  “You hear.”

  Reddy shook his head.

  “Suck dick?”

  Reddy shrugged.

  J-Cloth nodded in understanding. “Tough not ta suck dick in this world if you wantin’ somethin’, huh?”

  Reddy stood motionless, his heart beating a thousand times per minute.

  “Tell you wha’.” J-Cloth moved a sandpaper tongue across dry lips. “I break your ass cherry, a’ight? You get three hits on top of two you pay for.”

  Reddy didn’t react.

  J-Cloth showed his brown stumps. “Tha’s right,” he said. “Five hits for price of two — or else get de fuck gone and waste some other nigger’s time.”

  “What about just the two I can pay for?” Reddy asked.

  “I ain’t sellin’ no two,” said J-Cloth. “I look small time to you?”

  Reddy stared at him through eyes burning on the brink of tears.

  “I ain’t got all day,” said J-Cloth. “What’s it gonna be?”

  Reddy swallowed a sour ball of saliva and nodded.

  “That’s de spirit.” J-Cloth slapped his hands together. The clap sounded more like a squelch. “You’re gonna like ol’ J-Cloth. Ma dick is skinny, but ma reach is deep.”

  “Where we gonna go?” Reddy’s trembling voice betrayed his fear.

  J-Cloth snorted to clear his nasal passages and jerked his head in the direction of a doorway further down the alley. “It’s a little dark for ma liking,” he said. “But it’s dry and I’m hoping you’ll squeal enough to make it real nice.”

  Reddy shuffled down the alley with shoulders hunched and hands buried in oversized pockets. He flinched when J-Cloth gripped his collarbone and pushed him deeper into the shadows of the deserted doorway.

  “Don’t you want the money?” Reddy asked urgently.

  “Later.” J-Cloth unbuckled his pants. “Show me yo sweet virgin ass.”

  Reddy turned to face the wall and unbuckled his pants. As soon as they fell below his knees, J-Cloth’s hands were on him, tugging up his shirttail and pulling down his underwear.

  “I ain’t got no lube, a’ight?”

  The sound of J-Cloth spitting into his palm made Reddy’s stomach lurch.

  “Wait!” he yelled urgently. “I could suck you a little first. Get things wet.”

  “I don’t mind dry.” J-Cloth pressed himself against the boy. “But there ain’t nothing wrong with a little af‘n’af. You do ’ave a sweet mouth.”

  “Okay,” said Reddy. “I’m going to turn around. Why don’t you close your eyes?”

  “Sure thing, sweet cheeks.”

  When Reddy turned around, J-Cloth had both hands on his hips. His long, thin penis stuck straight up like a tin whistle and his eyes were open wide.

  “Tricked ya,” he said with a grin. He bent from the waist to stare straight into Reddy’s eyes. “I like to watch.”

  “Good.”

  Reddy unleashed a snarl as he plunged a six-inch stainless steel ice pick deep into J-Cloth’s left eye. The drug dealer screamed as the pick was ripped out of his socket, spraying chunks of gelatinous matter across his cheek. The scream was silenced when the pick plunged down again, this time into his throat.

  The pick rose and fell a total of twenty six times — one puncture for every time J-Cloth had forced himself on a 14-year-old girl named Theresa. A girl he called Scar Pussy.

  When Reddy was done delivering his message, he dropped the pick beside the body and staggered into the alley. He was covered in blood, but didn’t care. For the first time in years, he actually felt like crying — and the sensation was wonderful.

  Yanking up his pants, Reddy dug into one of his pockets and produced a plain, white business card. It was blank except for five, laser-printed letters that spelled K.A.R.M.A.

  He let it fall from his fingers to land near J-Cloth’s leaking corpse.

  Turning his face up to a gentle rain, Reddy could feel tremors building deep inside his soul — the beginning tendrils of shock.

  “Hey, Theresa!” he yelled toward the sky that loomed somewhere above the blackness of the Manhattan skyscrapers. His voice cracked. “Wherever you are . . . whoever you are. I love you.”

  Tears ran down Reddy’s blood-drenched cheeks as he turned and walked deeper into the alley. Once he got it together, he would change into spare clothes and catch the bus back to Chicago.

>   Pity he would never get a chance to meet his girl face to face, but in his heart he knew that she loved him, too.

  Chapter 8

  With the Beast idling contentedly, Hackett shrugged out of his wet jacket, switched the heater on low and climbed into the cargo area.

  Opaque tinting on all the windows — a fallback to the early days when he shot on film and used the roomy interior to develop negatives and prints — made him practically invisible to the outside world. A heavy black curtain was tucked into a niche directly behind the front seats and could easily be slid along a channel in the ceiling to seal the rear from the remaining light that filtered through the windshield.

  In the digital age, total darkness was no longer necessary but Hackett kept the curtain installed for those nights when he found himself on a long stakeout for Fats or got wasted at a party. Then, he could slide the curtain shut and unfold an Army-style cot he had bolted flat against one wall.

  A sleeping bag and pillow, along with a constantly changing selection of odds and ends, were stored opposite the cot inside a large metal footlocker bolted to the floor just behind the sliding door.

  With a practiced hand, Hackett lowered a sturdy metal table, that similar to the cot was secured by an industrial-strength hinge and some serious DIY welds, and unfolded its two front support legs.

  To accompany the table, he yanked a plain metal stool from a pair of spring-loaded clamps. The chair’s padded seat had been worn over time into a familiar and comfortable fit.

  Hackett placed his laptop on the table, plugged the power cord into a socket that drew from the Jeep’s twin batteries, and opened the lid. The sharp screen came to life in high-resolution color.

  Next, Hackett ejected the memory card from the camera and fed it into the computer’s SD slot. A single tap of his finger launched Adobe Photoshop, a professional-quality graphics program that was used to manipulate and control color, crop and resolution, among a multitude of other things. In the right geek’s hands, Photoshop was a dangerous and magical tool.

  Hackett scanned the photos. There, frozen in time by a few million pixels of data, was his Uncle Frank reeling backwards, knees sagging and face bleached white, his shocked eyes locked on whatever lay in a pool of blood beyond the unmoving feet of a corpse.

  What do you see, Uncle Frank? Do you know him?

  Hackett shook the questions away and got to work. He selected the frame he liked best, cropped it for maximum effect, sharpened it just a touch, and saved a copy onto his laptop’s internal hard drive.

  Despite the gloom of the washroom’s interior and the awkward angle of the shot, Hackett knew he had a definite front page hit.

  Now he just had to convince the buyer.

  Hackett picked up his cellphone and hit speed dial. It rang twice.

  “Seattle Times. Photo desk.”

  “Bill, it’s Tom. Stop the presses, my friend, I have a scoop.”

  Bill snorted with disgust, a reaction most journalists have to the word scoop. Today’s newsrooms prefer the term exclusive, which they use to describe everything from a one-on-one interview with a death-row killer to a sneak peek at the latest swimsuit styles.

  “The presses are stopped, Jimmy O — especially four hours before the fucking deadline. What’ve you got?”

  “Murder in the park.”

  Bill’s disappointment was hard to miss. “Are you talking Volunteer Park because we’ve got a staffer down there.”

  “Yeah, I saw him and I can tell you exactly what his overpaid, lazy ass is going to deliver.”

  “Go on.”

  “A boring ol’ body bag being transported to the meat cart. That’s also the shot the Post will get stuck with, since the two of them seem glued at the elbows. And you know the talking heads don’t like to get their designer shoes dirty, so they’ll have fuck all.”

  “Probably true.” Bill’s curiosity was piqued. “What do you have?”

  “I was inside.”

  “What! Bullshit.”

  “No Bull, Bill,” Hackett teased. “The shot is gold — we’re talking five columns above the fold.”

  “Yeah, right.” Sarcasm coated each word. “The assholes around here wouldn’t give me five columns if I had the Pope spanking a bare-assed nun.”

  Hackett cracked up. “OK, four columns.”

  Bill hesitated. “Management’s not big on dead bodies. We’re all trying to be sensitive and PC these days. If prisons could afford advertising, we wouldn’t even report on crime. Hell, they were ready to hire you on the spot when you came through with that shot of our beloved-now-that-he’s-finally-the-fuck-out-of-office former president kissing some foul-smelling, big-lipped fish during his last vacation trip through here.”

  “Hey, that was a great shot,” Hackett protested. “I won the Associated Press picture of the month and a spot on the last page of Reader’s Digest with that one. Not to mention I almost got my ass severely kicked by two Secret Service agents who, thankfully, wore the wrong shoes.”

  “Yeah, it was a good shot,” Bill admitted. “But what fucking news value did it have? On the same day, I had a blond-haired toddler run down by a drunk driver. His fucking red-and-white, pretty-as-you-like tricycle was crushed under the wheels. Talk about drama, but we wouldn’t run it because it might upset people. Well, fucking right it might upset people. Christ, I didn’t have a drink for three days.”

  “I sympathize, Bill, you know I do,” Hackett interrupted. “But time is wasting and if you don’t want this shot, the Post is itching. You’ve been kicking their ass lately and they might see this—”

  “Yeah, yeah, shave the bullshit,” Bill jumped in. “This is frontable?”

  “100 percent and it’s got great news value. Could make both you and management very happy.”

  Bill snorted again as if the mere mention of his name in the same breath as management turned his stomach sour.

  “OK, send it in and I’ll take a look, but I’m not making promises.”

  Hackett tethered his phone to the laptop and logged into the Times’ ftp site. It took only seconds to connect to a dedicated folder on the Times’ photo desk.

  “It’s uploading now.” Hackett glanced at a bar graph displayed on his monitor. “I’ll need to know your answer ASAP.”

  “I’ll call back soon as I can.” Bill broke the connection.

  The next call was to the Associated Press who handled most of Hackett’s photos for the news wire and also gave him frequent work as a stringer for the Mariners, Seahawks and SuperSonics games when their regulars were sick or on vacation.

  “AP. Heidi.”

  “You know, Heidi,” Hackett began, “I’ve always wondered if you’re as sexy in person as you sound on the phone.”

  “Hell, I’m so hot I’d melt your eyes.”

  Both of them laughed.

  “I needed that,” Hackett said. “After talking to Bill, you feel like the sky is falling and it’s all your fault.”

  Heidi laughed some more. “But you have to know Bill wouldn’t be so paranoid if everyone else wasn’t an asshole.”

  “True.”

  “So what have you got for us today?” Heidi asked.

  “Remember that award I won in April?”

  “Vaguely,” she said dryly.

  “Move it to one side, baby, ’cause you’re going to have to put another right beside it.”

  “You’ve got to get another line, Tom. You say that every time you send a new shot.”

  “But this time I mean it.”

  “And where have I heard that before?”

  “Ouch. Having boy trouble are we?” Hackett asked.

  “Girl trouble actually, not that it’s any of your biz.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “You’ve got one?”

  “Ouch, again.” Hackett groaned. “I’d hate to be the girl who’s let you down this time, but if you ever decide to try a little hetero-romance. . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, like
owning a prick makes you any more sensitive to my needs.”

  “It wasn’t your needs I was thinking about.”

  Heidi burst out laughing again.

  “Thanks,” she said after a moment. “I needed that, too.”

  Hackett explained the photo, adding his usual disclaimer that it could only be distributed outside Seattle because he was selling the city and area rights to either the Times or Post-Intelligencer.

  Once the monetary and cutline details were ironed out, Hackett cut the connection. A quick glance at the laptop told him the photo had finished uploading to the Times. A few taps on the keyboard started the process again, this time to AP.

  Hackett had less than a minute to catch his breath before his cellphone rang.

  “This is fucking brilliant,” Bill’s voice screamed in his ear. “Who’s the cop?”

  “Sergeant Frank Collins.”

  “I.D. on the detectives?”

  “Sorry, no, but I’m sure they’re with homicide. I assume your reporter will I.D. the victim.”

  “Yeah, as soon as the relatives are informed. If he’s local that shouldn’t take long. Hell of a lot of blood though, huh? Christ, the look on that poor bastard’s face. You’d think he’d seen his own mother lying on that floor.”

  “Yeah,” Hackett said quietly. The scene replayed itself in his head. What had shocked Frank like that?

  “So how much you asking?” Bill’s mood had vastly improved.

  “What you offering?” Hackett fired back.

  “Hell, you know management around here. They’ll want it for fucking free and then bill you for the trouble of remaking the front page.”

  “I’m thinking five hundred.”

  “We’re thinking three.”

  “Go four fifty?”

  “Hold on.”

  Hackett could hear Bill talking to several other people. He deliberately kept the mouthpiece only lightly covered, wanting Hackett to know the final price was out of his control.

  “Three fifty,” Bill said when he came back on the line. “And we get exclusive city rights.”