by J L Aarne
“I don’t know, you tell me,” Ezekiel said. “How many?”
Rainer laughed softly and glanced back up at him. “I was speaking hypothetically, Agent.”
“So, you guys are cops or something?” the tattoo artist working on Rainer’s arm asked. He looked between them and seemed skeptical. “You don’t really look like cops.”
“Oh, really?” Rainer asked. “Neither one of us?”
“Well, you sure don’t,” the guy said. He nodded toward Ezekiel. “Him, maybe. Except he’s dressed a little too nice for a cop.”
“FBI,” Ezekiel said.
“No shit?” the guy said. “That’s cool. You catch axe murderers and shit like that?”
“Not recently,” Ezekiel said. He exchanged an amused look with Rainer. “Right now I’m trying to catch The Lamplighter.”
“For real? Damn. That is fucked up. I’ve seen that on the news and that guy’s a freak.”
Ezekiel and Rainer both grinned. “Yes, he is,” Ezekiel said.
Ezekiel’s phone rang and he stepped away toward the back of the shop to take the call. It was Kenner calling from Olympia to update him.
There was a man raping and strangling elderly women in their homes in Olympia. He somehow got the old ladies to let him inside their houses and apartments then he tied them to their beds and stayed with them for a couple of days. During that time, he would rape them repeatedly and torture them. When he decided to move on, he strangled them with a scarf or a stocking from their own possessions. So far, he had killed five women and the detectives had exhausted all the usual suspects.
“So, you and the FBI guy, huh?” the tattoo artist with Rainer asked.
Ezekiel tensed and made himself remain with his back to them, though he instinctively started to turn around. He was standing far enough out of earshot that with the tattoo machine buzzing he would not have been able to overhear their conversation if he had been human. They thought it was safe to speak freely.
“Schechter’s got some ideas and we’ve helped them narrow their search,” Kenner said. “He seems kind of relieved about that since the whole thing with The Lamplighter.”
Ezekiel was listening for Rainer’s reply, so his attention was divided. “Yeah, well, the whole city of L.A. is The Lamplighter’s hunting ground,” Ezekiel said. “It’s frustrating. I’m glad he’s got something to work on that will bear fruit.”
“Heh, me, too,” Kenner said. “We’re working on a profile. I think we’ll have something more solid to give them by this evening. Tomorrow morning at the latest. You want us to come back then?”
“It’s a work in progress you might say,” Rainer said.
“No. Stick around and see it through,” Ezekiel said, thinking, It is not a work in progress. “We’ve got things under control here for now.”
“Sure, boss,” Kenner said. “Hopefully we’ll get him pretty quick. I hate this shit. It’s as bad as when it’s kids, you know?”
“Yeah,” Ezekiel said.
“Okay, well I should go. I’ll tell Schechter,” Kenner said. “He’s marking up their evidence board and giving the lead detective a nervous tic as we speak.”
Ezekiel could imagine. He didn’t know exactly what Schechter had, but he was definitely on the spectrum. “All right. Call me if anything comes up.”
He returned the phone to his pocket and went back over to where Rainer was. There was a chair nearby and he sat down in that and watched the artist working. He finished a U and Ezekiel started thinking about his own tattoos.
He had the Pinkerton never sleeping eye on his back and that was the largest one, but a lot of his body was covered in tattoos. There was a sleeve that ended above the cuff of his shirt on his right arm that was nearly complete. It was made up of many symbols of death; poisonous frogs and butterflies, plants and flowers, birds and their feathers. He still had some blank space on it for additions though. On the inside of his left forearm where Rainer was getting his done, Ezekiel had the phrase, “Stay Gold.” He had many others and one day he would likely run out of room. He had done it before.
“You like tattoos, Agent Herod?” Rainer asked. He had been watching him stare and noted the faraway look in his eyes.
Ezekiel looked away from his arm. “No, not really,” he said. “So, read any good books lately?”
Rainer scowled as Ezekiel had known he would. “No, I haven’t,” he said. “I was reading something, but it turned out to be a piece of shit and a fucking waste of my time.”
“God, no need to be a bitch about it,” Ezekiel said.
“Dude, are you sure you’re an FBI agent?” the tattoo artist asked. “Because you don’t sound like an FBI agent.”
“Yeah, well I’m on my lunch break,” Ezekiel said. Which reminded him to check his watch. “And my lunch break’s over.” He stood and headed for the door. “I’ll see you later, Rainer.”
“I look forward to it as always, Agent Herod,” Rainer called after him.
Ezekiel smiled to himself as he left the shop and crossed the street to his car. He drove back to the federal building in a much better mood and dumped Jacob’s offering of tofu and spinach in the trash before he sat back down at his desk.
That evening when he got home, Jacob was in the laundry room sorting clothes into the washer, listening to Gillian Welch on the stereo. Ezekiel turned the music down and went to find him.
“Hey, Zeke,” Jacob said. He turned a T-shirt right side out and dropped it into the washer. “You have a good day?”
“Sure, it was okay,” Ezekiel said. “What did you do?”
“Nothing much. Cleaned up around here mostly,” Jacob said. “Did you like your lunch?”
“Fuck no. Don’t ever do that shit to me again,” he said. “That was mean.”
Jacob stopped what he was doing and looked at him. “Ah… okay. I thought you’d like it.”
“Why would you ever think that?” Ezekiel said. Something occurred to him and he asked, “Did you stop taking your medication?”
Still holding a shirt in one hand, Jacob folded his arms and frowned at him. “No,” he said. “I’m a doctor, too, Zeke, and I like to think I’m not a moron. I know better than that. It was only tofu.”
“True. It could have been a beer can and a sewing kit, so I guess that’s something,” Ezekiel said.
“I never did that.”
“No, but there was that time way back when you tried to make me eat a dirty sock because you believed it was an avocado.”
Jacob continued to frown at him for a few seconds. Then he laughed and threw the shirt into the washer. “Okay, I’m sorry. What did you eat then?”
“I picked something up,” Ezekiel said.
“Uh-huh. Well, what do you want for dinner?” Jacob asked. “And please do not say fried cheese.”
“Fried cheese is delicious,” Ezekiel said. “No, I was thinking we could go out. Someplace nice. You know, have a date night?”
Jacob’s smile was big and pleased and beautiful. He tossed down the clothes he’d been sorting without looking at them again, leaned up and kissed Ezekiel.
They didn’t go out very often and that was mostly Ezekiel’s fault.
“All right. Someplace nice,” Jacob said. “I’ll go change.”
“That nice, huh?” Ezekiel said, but he was smiling, too. “Okay. I’m going to get in the shower. We’ll meet back down here in half an hour.”
Jacob kissed him again quickly then left him standing in the laundry room with the dirty clothes. Ezekiel heard his footsteps on the stairs overhead a minute later.
Chapter 24
Rainer assigned his beginning creative writing class a timed exercise and was kicked back in his chair with his booted feet on the desk reading the short story assignments he had collected. He had read two stories so far, one about vampires, both of them hormonal, overdramatic nonsense, and he was on his third. It was surprisingly good. There wasn’t a vampire or a throbbing manhood in sight. Which was interesting
since the main character seemed to be gay.
Except a page from the end there was a surprise wherein the character was proven to be exceptionally straight and heaving breasts made an abrupt and unwelcome appearance in a way that was completely irrelevant to the story.
Rainer became suddenly angry and did not bother to finish reading the last page. His chair dropped back on its legs with a thump and he stood. “What the fuck is this shit?!” he demanded of the room at large and hurled the story into the staring and startled faces of his students.
Those closer to him ducked instinctively away from the fluttering paper. A couple of them started to laugh, but it was soon cut off.
Rainer dragged a hand through his hair and pointed at a girl in the back. “Juliet Strand, my office after class,” he said.
The girl paled. She was a quiet girl and rarely spoke in class, but she was a good student. This was a mistake. It had to be fixed at once. Like a puppy peeing on the floor, the behavior had to be corrected early.
“Y-yes, sir,” Juliet said.
A few students read the results of their timed exercise aloud in class for the others to critique. Rainer was irritated from the outset, so he didn’t say much. He let them discuss it among themselves mostly.
After class, he returned to his office and Juliet Strand arrived shortly after him, looking afraid but brave. That cooled his temper a bit and he sat her down and asked her where she had gone wrong. It turned out that she had been afraid to turn it in the way she had originally intended to write it and that made Rainer angrier than the story itself.
He lectured her about cowardice, about what it meant to be a writer and the responsibility that came with it to not be a chickenshit when it mattered.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “If you’re lucky, you’ll have days when it’s fun, but there are going to be a lot of days when it’s not. It doesn’t pay well unless you’re one in a million, so being a coward about it is never the way to do it. You want to write, you do it right. Otherwise, if there’s anything else in the world you can do, you should probably try to do that instead.”
“You don’t think I should be a writer?” Juliet asked. She sounded like she wanted to cry then. He would give her that though; she sucked it up and still did not cry. “It was that awful?”
“It was that awful because it started out good,” Rainer said.
She smiled hopefully.
“Don’t smile. You should be ashamed of yourself for that very reason,” he said. “You fucked it up in the end because you were afraid. Conforming to what you thought I—your reader in this case—wanted. I don’t know why they had to get naked and fuck to drive that point home, but you took a piece of writing with potential and turned it into something I wouldn’t wipe my ass with.”
“I’m sorry,” Juliet said faintly. Her face was a little red and she looked more than ever like she was going to cry.
To avoid that embarrassment, Rainer stood and moved with her to the door. “Go back and fix it,” he said. “Make it right and bring it back to me tomorrow and I won’t give you the F.”
“You’re giving me an F?” she asked, surprised.
Rainer smiled faintly. “Fix it,” he said. “Now get out of my office, Miss Strand.”
She left and he hadn’t even sat back down at his desk when another student stuck their head in the door and knocked on it. It was Adam Blake from his Tuesday and Thursday interpreting lit class and he looked like he had been crying. Rainer pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes briefly with a sigh. He did not feel a headache coming on, thankfully, but he needed to get out of there before that changed.
“Yes, Mr. Blake?” he asked.
“Mr. B, can I talk to you?” Adam asked, stepping into the room.
“Is it important?”
“It’s about my paper,” Adam said. “The one um… Mr. Melmoth graded a couple weeks ago?”
Rainer went to his desk and sat down. “Uh-huh.”
“He gave me a D.” Adam looked at him expectantly for a minute and when Rainer didn’t say anything, he frowned. “I’ve never had a D in English. I don’t think it’s fair at all and I tried to tell him that, but he—”
“Called you a whiny, entitled little shit and ordered you to get the fuck out of his office,” Rainer said.
Adam blinked at him. “Uh. Yeah.”
“Why did you get a D?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m telling you. It’s not fair.”
Rainer steepled his fingers before him on the desk and bent his head to rest against them. He took a breath and let it out. “Okay, why did Mr. Melmoth give you a D?”
“He left a lot of notes on it. I didn’t really understand it all, but he said it was unoriginal, that my argument wasn’t any good, that I— He even criticized the sources I used!”
“Then that’s why,” Rainer said.
“But I don’t understand,” Adam insisted. “If you had graded it, I don’t think it would have been a D and that’s not fair.”
“It probably wouldn’t have been a D if I had graded it,” Rainer agreed. “I’m not as critical as Mr. Melmoth is. However, I would have pointed out the same things to you in my notes. I might not have marked you down for all of them, but I would have noticed.”
“But then—”
“Consider it a learning experience,” Rainer said. “If you don’t like it or if you don’t understand it, go talk to him about it. I would suggest you not tell him how unfair it is or make any demands about changing it though. He won’t do it and he will not be kind about telling you so. That’s what you have to look forward to if you make it through my classes, so start growing a thicker skin, Mr. Blake. Now, kindly get out of my office.”
Adam left looking stunned and a little betrayed. He was a smart kid and a good student and he had himself a bit of a crush on Mr. Bryssengur. He had come to him expecting him to be on his side.
Rainer began putting his things together to take with him so he could leave. There was another knock on his office door and he sighed.
“Hey, Mr. Bryssengur.”
It was a girl from his Monday, Wednesday and Friday class. Her name escaped him at the moment. She noted his look of bewildered annoyance and greeted it with a smile. She was a slender, pretty girl with black hair and facial piercings. She was smart and he remembered her because she had asked him in class if she could write her next student paper on the Nick Cave murder ballad “Stagger Lee.”
“Hello. Can I help you with something?” Rainer asked.
“Hi, I’m Mary. Mary Caspian?” she said. “Yeah, so, I’m having a Halloween party this weekend. It’s a costume party. And I was thinking, you’re kinda awesome. You know, creepy and weird, but awesome. Do you want to come?”
Rainer appreciated her blunt honesty. It made him smile. “No, thank you,” he said.
“Okay.” She frowned. “Why not?”
“I don’t socialize with my students as a rule,” Rainer said, just as bluntly. “Once I leave here, you don’t exist.”
“Um. So that’s that weird thing I mentioned,” Mary said. She reached over and laid a small black envelope on his blotter in front of him. “All right. If you change your mind, the address is inside the invitation. Bye.”
She cheerfully departed.
Rainer opened the invitation to find a small, one-sided card with a picture of a severed head in the middle of it surrounded by the party information. Amused, he put it in his back pocket.
He went home, changed into sweats and went for his run. When he returned, the door was unlocked and Elijah was sitting on the new sofa reading one of his student’s short stories with an expression of distaste.
“Hello, Elijah,” he said, passing him to go get a towel.
“This is dreadful,” Elijah said. He waved the offending paper at Rainer when he walked back into the living room.
Rainer pulled out the bench seat in front of the piano and sat straddling it. “Yeah? Whose is that?”
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“Jeffrey Valentine,” Elijah said. “You must despise your job. I don’t really understand why you even have one. Don’t you come from money, Rainer?”
“Yeah,” Rainer said.
“Then it’s just disgraceful,” Elijah said. He tossed the paper down on the coffee table on top of the stack of others.
“I don’t mind it,” Rainer said.
“Nonsense,” Elijah said. He tired of the subject though and gestured around at the room and its new furnishings. “So, how do you like it?”
“It’s very nice. Thank you,” Rainer said dutifully. Thomas liked his apartment much better after the remodeling at least and that pleased him.
“It is, isn’t it?” Elijah said. He pressed down on the couch cushion, testing it. “I find it much more pleasant and comfortable at any rate and that’s what really counts.”
Rainer lit a cigarette. “So, what’s up? You didn’t just drop in to see if I approve of the furniture. I was here with you when they delivered it.”
“I’m here to invite you to a Halloween party,” Elijah said. He produced a small card like a business card from the sleeve of his coat and held it out to him between his first two fingers.
Rainer took it. It had a hologram on one side of a snarling wolf and wild cat and a string of numbers on the other. “This is the second invite I’ve gotten today,” he said. “What kind of party?”
Elijah grinned. “A very exclusive party for people with our particular inclinations,” he said. “Let me put it this way: your date should not be anyone that you want to leave with. Thomas, for example, would not be a very good choice.”
“Ah, that kind of party,” Rainer said. He tapped the edge of the card against his bottom lip and considered it. He was tempted. Very tempted. But he had a prior engagement. “I can’t,” he said eventually.
“Why ever not?” Elijah demanded. “Kitten and I throw the very best parties. There is absolutely no risk involved. We have people to take care of the mess afterward. We’ll send a driver round to get you and they’re well-trained to look for potential tails like your FBI paramour-in-waiting. We’ll even provide you with a ride home at the end of the night and you’ll be whisked back here like Cinderella before the sun rises if that’s what you want. I fail to see the problem here.”