Skin the Cat

by R Sean McGuirk

  “Hey there,” she hissed into the lens. “I’m giving your dip shit detective a few more minutes before we start your granddaughter’s dissection. With or without him, I’m going to cut out all her organs, one at a time.” She crossed the room, unlocked the steel door and cracked it open. “You know,” she said glancing over her shoulder. “You shouldn’t have to die just because you have awful taste in men. I had the perfect plan and your stupid-ass boyfriend fucked it all up. I was going to let you go. But him? A no-show? You have to pay his debt. See, blood is the great equalizer.” She paused and glanced at the floor, eyes going black. “Yeah, we’re going to make a real mess out of you.”

  Carlina pulled a baggie full of white rocks and a glass pipe from her pocket and slammed the door shut behind her, taking a few moments to slide in a key and work the lock shut. Her heels clicked and faded down the corridor. With all my might, I twisted and writhed against the bindings, the terror lifting inside, my stomach going into knots. I shrieked and slobber eased down either side of my neck. Then I made a decision. I was not going to die here today. No way in hell. I scrambled, pushed, pulled and twisted. I contorted my body, and began swinging hard forward and back. To my astonishment, the chair I sat in began to rock. The old crude, metal laboratory chair was heavy. But it wasn’t bolted to the floor. I heard a door snap shut far down the hallway. I began rocking again, this time the chair angling forward enough that I felt the floor meet my toes. Each time I swung forward, the base of the seat clunked hard against the concrete, making a real racket. Carlina foot steps suddenly picked up speed. Closing in fast. She’d heard me. I swung my shoulders backward, leaning back for total leverage and banged forward again, this time balancing on my feet. Carlina was at the door, just on the other side now. She dropped her keys, and cursed. Breaking into a sweat, I grunted and moaned, inching forward on my toes, piggy-backing the entire chair, aiming for the tray of scalpels spread out on rolling table. Carlina began working the door hard with her keys, becoming frantic.

  With a final, massive lunge, I pivoted forward and toppled over the small table. Surgical tools scattered everywhere. Sprawled on my side and still tied to the chair, I kicked until my body aligned with a scalpel resting on the floor. My fingers frantically danced a bit and I came up with the blade. The lock rattled as Carlina worked it loose. With several slashing motions, my wrists went free. Then I severed the bindings all around my arms. Then my legs, and ankles. Up like a shot, I tore the belt off my face and flung it down. Carlina kicked the door open right as I hurled the small table into the basement window with a spectacular explosion. Glass showered down like a spilled bucket of diamonds. For a split second, my eye caught Carlina’s. Her mouth twisted like the wind had been knocked out of her lungs. I ran straight at the wall, kicked my foot against the heating unit, sprang into the window frame and wiggled out. I burst out across the green lawn of an empty college campus, where a lone maintenance man in the distance gave no notice at the woman covered in torn clothes sprinting to freedom…

  having escaped the Skin the Cat killer.

  43

  Climb Back Down

  I awoke in a hospital room wearing a paper gown, sheets compressed around my thighs, not remembering anything. A nurse jotted her name on a dry-erase board by the door. I sat up, head foggy, not wanting to know the answer because I already knew. “Where am I?”

  “Hey there Mr. Bardane,” she smiled with mahogany eyes, teeth bright beneath thick red lips, plum colored hair extensions bouncing down to her shoulders. “I’m your nurse Lavelle. You’re in the hospital. It seems you suffered a severe panic attack.” She smile bright teeth and patted the foot of the bed. “I can say despite how you feel, you are going to live.”

  I suddenly gasped. It hit me like a thunderbolt. Four minutes. Melanie. Oh no.

  I tore out of the bed, ripped off my gown, and the chest leads, and the wires and the I.V. in my arm. Naked as a baby bird, my new buddy Lavelle dashed from the room. My head swam. The floor shifted on its axis and sent my ass spiraling back onto the mattress. I came back to my feet trying to thread my feet into my jeans, getting the legs wrong, cursing under my breath, a real sense of desperation and urgency coming on. Four minutes. Melanie was in serious trouble. I had to be somewhere in a hell of a hurry. Anywhere but here. Jeans up, I lashed my belt around my waist, and located my keys. Shirtless and barefooted, stumbled into the doorway, ready to take on all nurses and security. Then she veered right into me. Coming into my arms. Pulling me tight. My keys hitting the floor. Taking a step backward. Then another. And another. Until we both fell across the bed. “Oh, Shade.”

  Caught in tight embrace, I felt something rise in my chest. But I pushed it away with an effort that made my eyes go hot. My pulse ticked in my throat. I didn’t let any tears fall. Not a drop. I refused. “Melanie,” my voice went thin with shame. “I failed you.”

  “You have to surrender Shade,” she murmured, dipping into some recovery. “You’re not well. When we are powerless over something, we have to surrender it unto itself.” I stole a quick deep breath to fend off the emotion.

  “Shade,” she whispered. “Easy my friend. Everything’s okay. Tell me, how are you?”

  I wanted to say fine. Stand me in front of the firing squad and watch bullets bounce off my chest. I wanted to climb a mountain and scream at the world, is this all you got? But I thought of what my therapist in Chicago had told me. The truth is always enough. I looked into Melanie’s eyes and she stared back. Waiting. “Melanie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m scared,” I said. “This? Whatever the fuck is wrong with me? I’m scared shitless.” And admitting this to another person suddenly felt so good and so right. I dabbed my eye before she could see it. I think. Melanie was beaming.

  “Thank you,” she said with a huge smile.

  I was totally lost. “For what?”

  “For sharing a slice of the real you,” she paused. “With me.”

  I nodded, and glance toward the window. “Melanie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How did you do it?”

  “How did I escape?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to live,” she smiled. “I fought for my life. And I escaped.”

  At that moment Wadsworth stepped into the room, eyebrows raised and Melanie rolled up to her feet. “Melanie, may I have a moment with this guy?” She smiled and left. I sat up.

  The Chief cleared his throat, and stepped forward, “Do you have a pulse?”

  I looked around at the monitors, the call button, the hospital bed, all the fixtures that made a hospital a hospital. “All this?” I opened my palms gesturing at the room, feeling shame tick in my throat. “Take a look around Chief. I have to ask, of what use could I possibly be to you or our department?”

  The old man dropped his head and grinned. “Shade, come on.”

  “I almost got your granddaughter killed.”

  The old man scooted up a chair. “How old are you Shade?”

  I raised my eyebrows at the off-beat question. “Almost forty.”

  “That’s young,” he smiled. “But it’s also double twenty.”

  He stopped and studied me with a certain kindness, wheels turning, thinking how to put it. “Vanessa, being your power of attorney, called me with your chart. They thought you had an epileptic seizure. Your panic attack was that brutal. They even have a potential diagnosis: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I mean son, you’ve got some real problems. You’ve been through a lot my friend. And you’re doing all this sober.”

  “What’s the difference?” I threw my palms up. “I may as well drink.”

  “Horse shit.”

  “Chief,” I dropped my arms, my voice going soft. “Face it, I’m damaged goods. In the heat of the moment, with your granddaughter’s life at stake, the best I can do is pass-out in a parking lot. The only honorable thin
g I can offer now would be my resignation.” I hesitated but made the decision right there. “I quit.”

  “Jesus,” the chief smiled with piercing blue-eyes. “You really have a rock-star ego.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “So you were a real hot shot in Chicago,” he shrugged. “But that don’t amount to a hill of beans out here, boy.”

  “Is that so?”

  “What you have is not unique,” the Chief crossed his legs and weighed me with his eyes. “In our youth, we were all invincible Shade. You. Me. The world belonged to us. It was here for the taking. But then time. Oh yes time, creeping along in its steady pace day to day. We eventually found we bleed just like other people. That we hurt like others. Like our hard-luck friends, at times we find we failed more than we succeeded. And when you reach my age, you discover you’re going to die off, just like the rest of the world and its people. If you’re feeling vulnerable Shade, it’s a damn good thing.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but I respected this man. I had to know. “Why’s that?”

  “Because it means is that you’re finally growing up.”

  I looked toward the window, white clouds suspended against a grey sky.

  “Shade,” he continued. “If you hadn’t caught Svidi Malhotra when you did, Carlina would have gotten away with everything. So yeah. You might see a psychiatrist. You might be put on psych meds. Who the fuck cares? You are one hell of a detective. So be one.” He glanced out the window and studied the clouds along with me. “Time has taught me one thing. People love us for our imperfections- not our talents. So climb back down, and join the human race. Be damaged Shade. Be loved. And be awake. For time is of the essence.”

  After my hospital discharge, I joined Wadsworth in the hallway. I had the prescriptions in my hand. This time I didn’t throw them away. When we reached the elevator and stepped on, the old gave me his back. “By the way,” he said staring forward as the elevator doors slid shut. “I formally decline your resignation.”

  44

  No. Yes. No.

  Two weeks later the unspoken consensus at the precinct was that Carlina had vanished. There was absolutely no sign of her anywhere. Mayor Breznik didn’t like it one bit. On the other hand he was relieved enough that she was gone because the murders had stopped. At a private meeting closed to the media he said, “We’ll just play like we ran her out of town.” It was a little more than a desperate, knee-jerk reaction of a politician wringing his hands at an upcoming November election. Plus spinning the story this way made it sound like law enforcement had done their jobs. Sort of anyway. At least none of us would fired until after the elections.

  But while Breznik was blindly satisfied just to have Carlina out of his hair and content to drop the subject altogether, the gossip machine in Story Mount was on fire. There’s been multiple sightings. She’d been seen at the drugstore, crossing the street in sunglasses, spotted walking on the bridge across the Cumberland River. All the stories verified nothing and in turn, fueled more and more wild speculation. Where did she go? A new favorite theory floating around the precinct was that she fled deep into the woods and blew her brains out, somewhere near the trailer park where she was raised. The runner-up concluded she’d thrown herself into the river, a new mythological spin on Lover’s Leap. But I didn’t buy any of it.

  Characters like Carlina were a dime a dozen back in Chicago. “I am number one” and “more is never enough” are the bedrock mantras of your everyday psychopath- especially those with no self-destruct button. Carlina was an ego-stoned junkie that saw the world as a contest, a place where fellow Earthlings were little more than plastic game pieces to be shuffled around a board to get her needs met. There’s no way in hell she killed herself because suicide required a conscience- and she didn’t have one. If I had to lay money on the table, I’d bet she hacked off her hair, dyed it any shade of unnatural and fled to a seaside town in the third-world tropics where she performed cash-only medicine under the radar. Footsteps approached with a soft shuffle-click. I remained crouched over my desk, jotting notes, not looking up. “Hey Chief.”

  He paused. “How did you know it’s me?”

  “I recognized your shoes.”

  “How did you know they were my shoes?”

  I turned in my chair, peering at him. “Who else would be wearing your shoes but you?”

  “But…” he lifted his index finger and stopped, a vague smile coming on. “You’re toying with me.”

  I smiled. Summer was winding down. Life was moving on. Brant and Lilly were signed up for public school and would be sharing bus rides with their Bodwell cousins soon enough. Since my latest episode, my newly assigned psychiatrist prescribed one of this and two of that. I checked with Kathleen Hodges and she agreed with it, but with a deep warning that emphasized only as prescribed. The pills worked. I was a bit emotionally blunted. Say, ten percent. And the panic attacks stopped altogether. But a part of me still felt paper thin and maybe even easy to tear. One of the prescriptions warned about the potential for slight paranoia. I only caught a whiff of that a couple times while out driving. That someone was following me, but I pulled off each time and tailed them and both times, it turned out to be a side effect of the prescription. I got an AA sponsor and started working the steps with diligence. Two coffee-cup meetings per week and I was making progress. The Chief extended an offer to become a fulltime detective and I accepted it. I’d joined a gym and loosened my hip socket until I could walk without a limp. The Ford Taurus was going faint and losing its transmission against the rugged Kentucky mountain territory. I would retire it soon and began browsing for a pickup truck, looking for a used Chevy or anything with four-wheel drive. Now that I was assured a steady stream of income with fulltime employment, I considered getting a truck as early as tomorrow. I realized Wadsworth was still standing there. “I have some news.”

  “What Chief?”

  “Debbie came to.”

  I stood to my feet. “When?”

  “Sometime this morning.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “She’s actually talking.,” Wadsworth nodded. “She can move her arms and legs. She remembers what happened. The doctors feel positive about her condition. You wanna’ go see her?”

  My heart leapt.

  A few days later, I pulled the trigger. I swapped the Taurus out for a used Chevy pickup truck with four-wheel drive and mud tires. Sure, it was ten years old and had 150,000 miles, but it was perfect for the terrain, and sitting up tall gave nice command of the road. In the evening, I’d agreed to take Melanie out for a movie and dessert in the evening. The sequence of events with Carlina Malhotra had left us both feeling unsure of the world, but this somehow brought us uniquely closer inside a state of shared vulnerability. Our friendship had deepened. But when I thought of Melanie, I couldn’t see her face. I could only see Emily. This was a private thing I wasn’t ready to share with my counselor. Evening came and I drove over.

  “Nice ride cowboy,” Melanie laughed as she climbed into the truck, pulling the passenger door shut. With her hair up, the dark wisps fell about her neck, me recognizing a certain new delicacy in her I’d never seen before. I quickly looked away.

  “You know Shade,” she said playing with the power window and checking it all out. “This truck fits you. A little more rugged. Handsome.”

  I dropped my chin a bit, forgetting how to take a compliment, then remembered. “Thank you.”

  We caught a movie in downtown Story Mount, in an old but refurbished theater. An independent film. A comedy romance. The ebb and flow of audience laughter came and went as my thoughts drifted from work, to the kids, to Melanie and what the hell I was trying to accomplish here with this woman. She seemed nice enough. But beyond Lilly and Brant, I didn’t know how much love I had left in my heart for anything else. Or anyone. Until the affair, Emily had been devoted to me. For years and years. A rare
find. Most folks these days struck me as heartbreakers, devoted to people, places, things, status, or worse yet their public, or worst of all- themselves I looked at Melanie. She seemed self-absorbed. Selfish in the friendliest way. But we were both in early recovery. I had no right to judge this girl. I didn’t know shit about her. And that’s why I remained in a cocoon of safety. My therapist said I had trust issues. That my weapon of choice was evasion. My signature. You play the game, but count me out. Time is fleeting. I have no time for charades. Hand me a motorcycle and watch what happens next. An old colleague and dear friend called me just a couple days ago to check in. He’d said I’d vanished. I told him I’d meant to call. That the new, sober me could be a bit remote. He said bullshit. “Shade, you’ve always been this way. Dina and I were just talking about you today. We agreed one of the things we love about you is that you are genuine. There is none of this bullshit posing for status. While everyone else is busy comparing themselves to each other, Shade Bardane says fuck all that, I’m riding into the sun…”

  Stone-cold busted. I took that moment to tell him how much I loved them back. How grateful I’d become for the things that really mattered in life. After the movie Melanie and I walked outside and turned down Exodus Avenue, arm in arm, me wondering if she noticed I was emotionally on guard. She’d mentioned last week making me bristle. I couldn’t even recall what it was. But the comment found me pulling black wings over my body, adding a layer of protection. The first real chill of the season blew into our clothes and arms folded over her chest, she shuddered in her sleeveless black blouse. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled. “The mountains are cooling off,” she gave the sky a nudge. “Goodbye summer.”