From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  Thomas shrugged. That this was the work of the Slasher was too obvious to bother replying. He stepped to one side, to move away from the smoke as Brewer lit a cigarette, and looked back at the crime scene. He believed he knew what Papa Jo-el had been doing. Would the houngan still be alive if he and Frank had helped him?

  “It’s connected, all right,” Frank said, “and the perp’s just upped the stakes. It’s not just blonde hookers now, and the hunting ground’s widening.”

  “You talked to Papa Jo-el yesterday,” Brewer said. “Did he give any indication that he’d be coming here last night?”

  “He said he wanted to help,” Thomas offered.

  Frank made a derisive noise. “Like we need help from slime.”

  “Right now,” Brewer said, “I’ll take what I can get—from any source.”

  Frank gave the lieutenant a quick rundown of their conversation with Papa Jo-el yesterday.

  “That fits with the voodoo paraphernalia lying around the bodies,” Brewer said thoughtfully.

  Frank just shook his head. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into this crap, too?”

  “Buying into what?”

  “Evil spirits and all that shit.”

  “No,” Brewer said. “But if Papa Jo-el was sincere in his beliefs, and we’ve no reason to suspect otherwise, it explains what he was doing out here.”

  “Well, why didn’t he do his little ceremony in the Zone?” Frank wanted to know. “That’s where the Slasher was doing his hunting.”

  Brewer shrugged. “Maybe the privacy this place offers was something he knew he just couldn’t get in the Zone. The thing we have to ask is, how did the Slasher know to find Pilione here?”

  Because the Slasher is a spirit and he was called to this place, Thomas thought, unable to stop the conviction that was growing in him. Called by Papa Jo-el’s ceremony.

  “We’ll need to talk to his people—friends, associates, whoever we can run down,” Brewer went on. “My gut feeling says the Slasher’s somebody Papa Jo-el knew. That’s the only way he could’ve known about what Papa Jo-el was planning.”

  “I don’t get it,” Frank said. “Why should he give a shit what Papa Jo-el was doing down here?”

  “Maybe our perp’s a believer, too,” Brewer said.

  Or maybe, Thomas thought, Papa Jo-el was onto something and the Slasher knew it was kill or be … what? What could you do to something that was already dead? Banish its spirit?

  He knew he shouldn’t be letting this take over his view of the case. That was one of the first things you learned: Keep an open mind, don’t narrow your investigation down to one pet theory, or you could easily blind yourself to the real solution. It was good advice in a normal situation. But then, the instructors at the academy had never dealt with a spirit of the dead before—had they?

  “The place it gets complicated,” Brewer added, “is that I was going over the surveillance reports on our witness, Mr. Michael Twitchy-eye’ Fisher. Seems he had himself a visitor yesterday. The name Billy Ryan ring any bells?”

  “Mickey Flynn’s Ryan?” Thomas asked.

  Brewer nodded. “The officer on stakeout got a photo of him. It’s Billy Ryan all right.”

  “The Irish mob doesn’t leave bodies around,” Thomas said, nodding toward the ambulances. Attendants were in the process of loading the body bags. “That isn’t the way they work.”

  “Except,” Frank said thoughtfully, “what if they’re trying to leave a message to someone?”

  “Or maybe it’s a third party,” Brewer offered, “playing the two gangs off each other. You see what I mean about complications?”

  Thomas and Frank nodded.

  “Have we picked up Ryan?” Thomas asked.

  Brewer shook his head. “We’ve got an APB out on him, so it shouldn’t be long—unless he knows we’re on to him. In the meantime, why don’t we get to work on Papa Jo-el’s people?”

  Thomas and Frank spent a fruitless afternoon interviewing Papa Jo-el’s relatives and business associates. By the time midafternoon rolled around, they’d talked to everyone except for Isabeau Fontenot, the woman who helped the houngan in his voodoo ceremonies. From descriptions they got of Fontenot, Thomas doubted she could be responsible for the killings—she just wasn’t big enough. Calling up her driver’s license on the computer just confirmed what they’d been told.

  Fontenot was a slight, striking woman, weighing in at just over a hundred pounds. She simply couldn’t have the brute strength required to have killed the Slasher’s first victim let alone be responsible for the carnage in the Tombs. They still had to talk to her, so they put an all-points bulletin out on her, to add to the one they already had out on Billy Ryan. While her sudden disappearance awakened Frank’s suspicions, it struck Thomas as ominous.

  There was something building—not just the tension that had a death grip on Thomas’s neck and shoulders, but something in the city itself. Throughout the frustration of the afternoon, as they’d gone from one low-rent apartment to another in Upper Foxville, he’d been all too aware of a sense of oppression that seemed to be gathering over the city. It was aided in part, he knew, by overcast skies, but the gloom of the cloud cover alone couldn’t explain the foreboding that had settled on him.

  He wasn’t alone in feeling it. In the squad room of the 12th Precinct, where he, Frank, and Brewer had met to compare notes, conversations were carried on in hushed tones by the other officers and suspects alike. The media people, while clamoring for information on the killings in the Tombs—and thank Christ, they hadn’t made a connection to the Friday Slasher yet—were oddly subdued in their own pursuit for information.

  Thomas and Frank were just finishing up their meeting, when the desk sergeant brought Thomas’s brother into the squad room. For one shocked moment, Thomas thought John had been arrested, but then he saw the visitor badge he was wearing and realized that his brother was here to see him.

  That, in itself, was unusual enough.

  John paused in the doorway. He was taller than anyone else in the squad room, broader-shouldered, his face wider, an impassive expression in his dark eyes. Except for the lack of his hunting knife, he was dressed much the same as he’d been last night—sweatband with the eagle’s feather, the long black braids, flannel shirt, jeans, and boots.

  He looked about the room slowly until his gaze reached the desk where Thomas was sitting. Thomas found his own gaze sliding from his brother’s features to take in the reaction of his fellow officers. They were looking at John as though his brother were some new low form of life, not bothering to hide their dislike.

  “They’re always going to look on us as second-class citizens,” John had told him once. “Why would you want to be one of them?”

  But he didn’t, Thomas tried to explain. I want them to see that we’re no different from them. We can do the same jobs; we’ve got the same needs and desires.

  “The only thing they want,” John had concluded, “is to keep us as far from them as they can.”

  That was the look Thomas saw now in the eyes of his fellow officers. They didn’t see a man; they didn’t see his brother. Never mind that John was clean and sober; all they could see was a dirty, drunk Indian lying in a downtown gutter, shouting abuse at passersby, or maybe some young brave down from the reserve, trying a little B&E, hitting a gas station, picking a fight in a bar. If he’s got to be here, they seemed to be thinking, then why isn’t he in cuffs?

  They don’t look at me like that, Thomas thought. But the ugly realization came to him as he was standing there: not anymore they don’t. Not to his face they didn’t.

  He turned to Brewer and Frank.

  “Are we about finished up here?” he asked.

  The lieutenant nodded. “Sure. Take a break.” His glance encompassed Frank as well. “Both of you.”

  “What’s your brother doing here?” Frank asked.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Thomas said. “Do you want to grab something to eat with us
?”

  Frank shook his head. “I think he wants to talk to you on your own.”

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “I’ll see you in an hour or so,” he added, then crossed the squad room to join his brother.

  “Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked John as they shook hands.

  “Let’s just walk,” John said. “Outside somewhere.”

  Once they had left the precinct, they walked west, toward Fitzhenry Park. John seemed wrapped in his own thoughts, but Thomas could be patient. He’d just wait until John was ready. When they reached the park, Thomas got himself a couple of hot dogs and a Coke at one of the concession stands that lined Palm Street on the park side. John settled for just a black coffee. When he brought it over to the bench to which Thomas led them, he popped the plastic lid, tore a small triangle from it and then replaced the lid. He fingered the little wedge of leftover plastic for a long moment, then stowed it away in the pocket of his shirt.

  “So what brings you to town?” Thomas asked as the silence continued to lengthen.

  “You do,” John said. “I’m here to help you with your case.”

  Thomas shook his head. “I can’t let you get involved in a police matter. This isn’t the reserve, John.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but there’s nothing you can do to help.”

  John took a sip of his coffee and said nothing. Thomas had to smile. It seemed he wasn’t the only person who’d learned something from their mother. He was tempted just to let the silence lie there between them, but he realized that’d be about as childish as when they were boys, trying to stare each other down.

  “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

  “You and me,” John said. “We’re going to bring the Slasher to us and deal with him.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  But Thomas knew before his brother replied. A picture flashed in his mind—three dead black men, lying sprawled amid the debris of their voodoo ceremony.

  “You know,” John said.

  Thomas nodded. “But we can’t do it.”

  “Why? Because you think it’s all crap?”

  “No, because I think it’ll work,” Thomas replied. “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he added, but he went ahead and told his brother about Papa Jo-el’s death, how it connected to the Slasher, what Thomas thought the houngan had been doing.

  “I’ll be damned,” John said softly.

  “So don’t you see?” Thomas said. “I can’t let you throw your life away. There’s no percentage in it.”

  “And what about all the others who are going to die if we don’t do something about this spirit?”

  “What do you care?” Thomas said. “It’s not like they’re from the reserve.”

  John was silent for a long moment. When Thomas glanced at him, the hurt in his brother’s eyes surprised him.

  “They’re still people,” John said.

  Thomas nodded. “I was out of line. It’s just … you and the rest of the Warriors. You’re all so hard-line.”

  “That won’t change,” John told him. “We just want what’s rightfully ours and we’ll fight to get it; the time for waiting’s long past. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about people. When we finally reach a solution, Tom, it’s going to have to include both Natives and whites in the equation.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what time do you get off today?” John asked.

  Thomas had only got halfway through his first hot dog. He set it down now beside the other one, his appetite gone.

  “I … ,” he began.

  “It’s the whole rules and regulations trip, right?” John said. “You’re afraid of what’ll happen if we fuck up. How your lieutenant’ll call you up on the carpet, maybe put a couple of demerit points on your record, is that it? Well, sometimes you can’t go by the rules, Tom,” he added before Thomas could respond. “Especially when you’re from the reserve. We don’t mean shit to them and never will. Don’t you remember what happened to Ronnie Bobbish?”

  Thomas couldn’t place the name at first, but then his mind went back, fifteen, almost twenty years into the past to when he was still living on the reserve. Once the memory came to him, he wondered how he could ever have forgotten. Sitting here in the park, he could still hear the arguments between John and their father, the final decision of the clan mothers, how John’s justifiable fury had turned to a cold anger. That was the year John had turned his back on talk of moderation and negotiation and joined the Warrior Lodge. He was thirteen years old.

  “He was the boy you said got—”

  “Not said,” John corrected him. “I saw him get shot. By a cop. I was there, Tom. I saw it happen. Ronnie didn’t run away like some people would like us to believe. And if somebody—Nos or the aunts—had just had the guts to demand an inquiry …”

  The anger Thomas heard in his brother’s voice was as bitter now as it had been all those years ago.

  “But you have to see it from their point of view,” Thomas said. “There was no body and the band was negotiating those logging rights which—”

  “We got screwed on, just as we always get screwed—Ronnie most of all—because nobody wanted to make waves. Nobody wanted the white man mad at us and maybe having their support cheques cut off.”

  Thomas sighed. “Okay. You’ve made that point before.”

  “That’s what hurt me the most when you first told me you wanted to be a cop,” John said. “It was like you were saying, who cares about Ronnie? It was like you were joining the enemy.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “My head knows,” John said, “but not my heart. Sometimes, like when I was standing in your precinct just now and saw you there, just one more cop among all the others, all I wanted to do was hit something.”

  “They—”

  “Couldn’t you see the way they were looking at me?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “That’s the same attitude that let Ronnie’s killer go unpunished. Jesus, I …” John shook his head. “Oh, what’s the use?”

  He slumped back against the bench. His gaze went out to the traffic going by on Palm Street, but Thomas knew he didn’t see the city; John was in the past, a thirteen-year-old again, helpless with his frustrated anger.

  “I’ll never forget that day,” John said after a few moments. His voice was so soft the words almost went unheard. “I don’t want to forget it.”

  The depression that Thomas had been fighting all day dropped like a thick blanket over him. It seemed no matter which way he turned, there was something to remind him of just how crappy the world was. The teachings handed down from the old Kickaha spoke of the world’s Beauty, how it must be preserved, how it lay all around one, if one would only look for it.

  Thomas couldn’t see it. He found it hard to remember if he ever had. He slouched beside his brother, the oppressive skies above just adding to his depression. There had to be a way to get away from it all, but he just couldn’t see it. No matter what John said, no matter his own mixed feelings about the job, he knew he had to see this thing through, and knew as well—by the hollow feeling in his stomach, the coldness in his chest—that Beauty was going to slip further and further away with each step he took. When it was all done, he’d be left here in the city with the taste of ashes in his mouth and all hope turned to sand, its last grains just slipping away through his fingers.

  The Slasher had seven victims to his credit now—at least seven that they knew of—but right now Thomas’s thoughts kept circling, whirling, around the memory of Ronnie Bobbish’s death.

  He’d never realized how much that old wound still hurt his brother. As John had said, it was one of the main reasons John had argued against Thomas becoming a cop, but it was also one of the reasons that Thomas had become one.

  Ronnie Bobbish. And John, so impassioned, asking, if there wasn’t going to be justice for Ronnie
, then how could they ever expect justice for anything?

  Years fell away until it felt as if that day had only been yesterday. That was the trick the mind could play on you; in your mind there was no past, present or future. Everything existed at the same time.

  It had been in the early spring, when everyone felt a little light-headed after all the dreary months of winter. John and Ronnie had taken off from the reserve and headed into town—just a couple of kids, not meaning any real harm, just goofing off, running through backyards and alleyways like a pair of high-spirited colts trying to outrun all the energy that the winter had pent up inside them.

  They ran into a cop in one downtown alleyway and knocked him down—not on purpose; they just came around a corner and there he was. Before they could stop, they had knocked him to the ground. And then they panicked. They took off, running side by side, ignoring the cop’s cry to stop. The gunshot had been very loud. Ronnie was running ahead of John. The bullet took him in the back of the head and dropped him in his tracks.

  John fell over him, the two of them landing in a pile, John’s head close to the back of Ronnie’s head—or at least where the back of Ronnie’s head should have been. John had scrambled back from the awful sight. Lifting his gaze, he saw the cop standing with his gun pointed straight at him.

  The tableau held for long moments, John related later, as though neither of them could quite believe what had happened. Then John bolted again.

  He cleaned himself up in a subway toilet, hut he was still a mess when he got back home. Their father looked into his story, but there was no report of a shooting incident anywhere in the city, no young Native boy brought into any area hospital, nothing to back up John’s story at all except for Ronnie’s disappearance and the fact that John simply did not lie.

  And that wasn’t enough. So nothing was ever done.

  But thinking about it now, Thomas realized that the patrolman, panicked, scared, could easily have just taken a page from the Irish mob’s book. Without a body, there was no crime … .

  Christ, he wished John had never brought up that memory. Not now, not when his own faith in the job was so unstable.