What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  “Help sell it. Horror and depravity. I see now it wasn’t a good idea. You pegged it as bullshit right away. Kudos, et cetera.”

  The cruiser materialized out of the darkness, no more than a hundred yards away. Jarsdel had to figure out a way to get to the weapon.

  “The letters,” he began, but Sponholz cut him off.

  “Used his left hand, while it was still attached, to deposit prints and contact DNA on letter number one. The right hand by then was highly necrotic, and I was worried there wouldn’t have been sufficient oils in the skin, so I threw it out. By the time the Michews came along, the Creeper was dead, hand dried out. That’s why I made only patent prints in blood. I also made sure to rake her nails over the skin a few times, get some epithelials in there.”

  “What about the teeth marks on Natalie Minchew’s thigh?”

  “Old-fashioned way. With his teeth.”

  “You removed his teeth?”

  “No, that’s idiotic. I removed his head. Then it was simply a matter of opening the jaw and clamping it down manually.”

  Jarsdel felt heat rising in his cheeks. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why kill the Minchews? What were they to you?”

  “That’s the point, Tully. Weren’t anything to me. Completely unconnected no matter how many COMPSTAT systems you sicced on ’em. Chosen at random at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “You pushed me to it. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “It’s my fault?”

  “I’m not gonna say it’s your fault directly. I’m responsible for the things I do. But I can definitively say that if you hadn’t cornered me that day you came over to the house—all your questions and everything… Yeah. They’d still be alive today, least as far as I’d be concerned. Meteors and what not, I can’t guarantee.”

  Fifty yards to the cruiser. An icy fist turned in Jarsdel’s stomach. “Clarify this, please.”

  “Nothing much to it. Needed the Creeper to kill someone else to take suspicion off me. Someone I would’ve had no motive to harm. Sounds pretty heartless, but until you’ve been in a situation like that, where you need to keep shoring things up to keep yourself safe, you can’t really have an opinion. If you’d asked me a month ago, I would’ve said I didn’t have it in me. You discover things about yourself when the chips are down.”

  “You suffocated a six-year-old girl.”

  “Not something I celebrate. But if I’d left her alive, you woulda wondered why. Besides, what kind of life would that’ve been for her, with both parents gone?”

  They were almost at the car. Whatever Sponholz had in store for him would happen soon. Whether he’d gun Jarsdel down and take the cruiser or keep him hostage in case they met up with some cops, it wasn’t much of a future. Once Sponholz threw him in the back of the squad car—no door handles, stuck behind a thick plexiglass shield, there was no way it could end well.

  “Oh.” Jarsdel lurched forward and clutched at his stomach. “Feel sick.” He fell to one knee, bracing himself against the night-cooled ground with the palm of his good hand. He immediately realized he’d need that hand to get to the gun, so he pitched sideways, curling his body, bending his knees and scooting the ankle holster within his reach.

  He glanced up at Sponholz. The lieutenant looked back at him, his expression oddly vacant. Jarsdel tugged at the leg of his slacks. Night air kissed the skin on his bare calf. His fingers brushed against the warm grip of the pistol.

  “Groggy. A little dizzy,” he said.

  “This the end of the road?” said Sponholz. He made a little figure eight in the air with the Glock.

  “I’m almost—”

  “This sucks. I’m really sorry.”

  Jarsdel’s hand closed around the grip of the Bodyguard. He tried not to let the victory show on his face. “I’m getting up. Don’t shoot.” He pulled the gun free and began to roll onto his back.

  “Gotta get up quick if you’re—hey!” Sponholz leapt forward, slamming his work boot down on Jarsdel’s arm, just below the elbow. Twice more—fast. The twin bones of his forearm snapped—he could hear them go—and the agony followed right behind. He shouted something wild, incoherent—a cry from his soul. It was like no sound he’d made before, and it took a moment to realize it was coming from him. Jarsdel’s hand spasmed, releasing the gun. Didn’t matter—he wouldn’t be able to lift it now anyway.

  “Stupid,” said Sponholz, nudging the Bodyguard out of reach with the toe of his work boot. “Stupid as the day is long.” He raised the Glock, pointing it at Jarsdel’s face. “Bet that hurts, huh?”

  Jarsdel willed his hand to move, to grab for the gun anyway, and succeeded only in rubbing his fingers against the fabric of his pants. Something in his pocket made a soft clink. Curious, he touched it again. Whatever it was separated into several pieces. Small, hard edges, metal. His keys, of course.

  His keys.

  He worked at them through the cloth, tugging them up toward the lip of his pocket. Terrific, urgent pain as his tendons yanked on his fractured bones. He wouldn’t be able to get the keys free.

  “Wanna close your eyes?” said Sponholz.

  His pants were thin enough that he could make out the shape of each object. It was just one he cared about, small and egg-shaped. And there it was.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Jarsdel’s thumb found the raised surface of the button on the SkyTrace key fob. He pressed it twice.

  A vibrant green dot appeared on Sponholz’s leg. From behind Jarsdel, there came the whir of a motor.

  Sponholz squinted at the squad car. “What’s the—”

  It was all he managed to say. The air cannon gave a short whooshing cough, and the SkyTrace tracker slammed into Sponholz’s knee. He yelled in pain and confusion, squeezing the Glock’s trigger and firing a shot that went screaming off the asphalt. His hand was unprepared for the recoil, and the gun leapt out of his grip like something alive.

  “Wow! Shit—what is it? Tully!”

  Sponholz stumbled backward, battling with the strange protrusion, swatting it, yanking at it. Jarsdel swung a leg to intercept the lieutenant’s retreating footsteps. He hooked Sponholz’s heel, and the man was airborne, eyes bugging in surprise. He landed hard and let out a howl.

  “Oh no! Oh my God…”

  Jarsdel’s right hand was useless, so he had no choice but to use his left. He rolled over his broken arm, straining to reach the Bodyguard. It was too far, at least a foot beyond his fingertips.

  “Oh, no, no, no! Wow!”

  Jarsdel got to his knees. Neither of his hands could support him, so his knees took the full weight. His progress was slow, the rocks and pebbles of the shoulder pressing into his skin.

  “Wow, oh man. Man, oh man.” Sponholz groaned. “Right on the tailbone. Could be broken—God! Oh no, no no. What are you doing? What are you gonna do?”

  Jarsdel shivered. His skin had broken out in a cool sweat, and the burning in his arm seemed muted somehow.

  I’m going into shock.

  He reached the Bodyguard and extended his trembling, bloodied left hand.

  “Gonna shoot me, Tully?”

  Jarsdel sensed movement from Sponholz’s direction, heard the slap of hands against asphalt. Another groan as the lieutenant shifted his weight. He was looking for the Glock.

  Jarsdel picked up the Bodyguard, astonished at how heavy it seemed. A five-round cylinder, the wadcutters packed inside like little steel fists.

  “You shoot me, and you’ll never know who the Creeper is.”

  Jarsdel fell back into a sitting position. He looked over at Sponholz, who was crawling along the shoulder. Moonlight glinted dully off the Glock. Two feet away and closing.

  “Be the biggest boogeyman LA’s ever had,” Sponholz went
on. “Tear yourselves to pieces looking for him.”

  Jarsdel aimed at the lieutenant’s ribs, but the macerated fingers of his left hand refused to hold the weapon steady. The barrel sagged. Without thinking, he tried bringing his right hand up to support the gun. His shoulder moved, and the nerves in his forearm shrieked as the fragments of bone ground against each other, but that was all.

  Sponholz was almost at the Glock, and there was nothing wrong with his hands.

  Jarsdel closed his fingers around the Bodyguard’s grip, ignoring the electric pain. He closed his knees, making an impromptu shooting rest, and notched his wrist in the gap.

  “You’ll tear yours—”

  Jarsdel fired three times. Sponholz’s body jumped as if pulled by invisible ropes, his jaw vanishing in a spray made black by the moonlight. He spun onto his back—one hand arcing before bouncing lifelessly off the pavement, still clutching the Glock.

  Jarsdel watched and listened. He expected a final tremble, an exhale, a slow falling of the chest. Nothing happened, and he thought perhaps Sponholz wasn’t really dead, that the best thing to do would be to put the remaining two shots into the sprawled form.

  But he realized there would be no change, not while he watched. It had already happened. The teeming bacteria inside the lieutenant’s gut would never go to work on another taco plate from Señor Fish. Their next meal would be the host itself.

  Jarsdel had killed a man. Had torn Edwin Darrel Sponholz apart with a handful of wadcutters and sent him careening into whatever was next, or whatever wasn’t. His mind told him this was the most important moment in his life, the place of starkest divide between before and after. His mind told him he needed to understand the significance of what he’d just done, that he needed to feel it deeply and have it sit with him for days and weeks, and only after an appropriate amount of time had passed could he demote it from his fullest attention. And it had a right to haunt him, because it was a homicide, a taking of a life. Even villains had a right to haunt you if you killed them.

  His mind told him these things and a thousand more, but he was too tired to listen. He lay down on the dry grass bordering the gravel shoulder, turning his face to the limitless, twinkling sky.

  26

  Jarsdel stood in Varma’s office. Without her paperwork and laptop, there wasn’t much to see. Her two shallow desk drawers were empty except for a dried-out ballpoint and a handful of paper clips. The only thing remaining that hinted at the identity of the late tenant was the poster of the three men, sated to the point of stupefaction, lying beneath the strange, leafless tree. Jarsdel wondered what it meant—the roast pig trotting around with a carving knife shoved in its back, the soft-boiled egg running on those plump little legs, the figure emerging from the thick, creamy cloud, spoon gripped triumphantly ahead.

  “Tully? Hey. Didn’t know you were back.”

  Jarsdel turned and saw Kay Barnhardt. “Hey,” he said. “Not sure I’m back, actually. Kind of in limbo right now.”

  “Are you…” She gestured at his right arm. It was visibly thinner than his left, the muscles still awakening from atrophy since the cast was removed.

  “Fine,” said Jarsdel. “Better every day.”

  “They gonna put you with Morales again?”

  “Gavin hasn’t decided yet. So he says.”

  “He’s looking for you, by the way.”

  “Gavin? Wonderful. Useless mooncalf.”

  “Might want to tread carefully,” said Barnhardt, with an uncharacteristically impish smile. “Hasn’t been in the best of moods.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was in his office the other day about a case, and he started in with his amateur scientist routine again. I was frankly tired of it, so I thought fine, he wants to talk science, we’ll talk science.”

  Jarsdel grinned. “He had trouble keeping up?”

  She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Just a little. I think it really stopped being fun for him when I asked his opinion on the Higgs boson and its relationship to mass generation theory.”

  “You have the thanks of a grateful department,” said Jarsdel.

  “My pleasure. So what’re you doing in here?”

  He glanced at the poster. “Looking for answers, I guess. Don’t know exactly what I was hoping for.”

  “Closure, I’d imagine.”

  Jarsdel shrugged. “Not really sure what there is to close. Hardly knew each other.”

  “She was charismatic,” said Barnhardt. “It’s easy to understand why we believed in her.”

  Jarsdel was uncomfortable. “What about you? Must bother you. I know you admired her work.”

  “I did. That’s true.” Barnhardt stepped into the room, then looked up to study the painting. “Strange choice. Cockaigne. Should’ve asked her about it.”

  “What? Cocaine?”

  “Cockaigne. Different spelling. The land of plenty, where all your wishes are granted. Medieval peasants used to fantasize about a place where the social order was upended, where food and sex were always available, where you never had to work, and the weather was nice year-round. You know the song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’?”

  “Maybe. Sounds familiar.”

  “It was in O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coen brothers movie.”

  Jarsdel shook his head. “Sorry, not a big movie guy. Something I’m working on, though.”

  “Anyway, it deals with the Cockaigne mythos. Updated for the twentieth century, but the basic ideas are still the same. An Edenic wonderland, a surrogate heaven—maybe even better than the actual heaven, since it exists outside the strictures of morality or religion. You don’t have to sacrifice anything, don’t have to transcend yourself or conquer sin and desire. In other words, no need for the purity of mind and body demanded by God. Come as you are, all your ego intact.”

  “What’s the catch?” said Jarsdel.

  “There is no catch. That’s the point. You get there and that’s the end. That’s your destination.”

  “Where d’you go after? Back to the real world?”

  “There is no after. That’s the end, that’s the reward.”

  “Reward? These people get to sidestep their final judgment? Seems like the Church wouldn’t have liked the concept very much.”

  “It didn’t. But Cockaigne wasn’t connected with an opposing theology. I mean, no one actually believed in Cockaigne, or thought they’d eventually make it there. There was no pagan deity overseeing the place. It was more like a ‘fuck you’ to reality. A place to daydream about and escape from the unpleasantries of daily life.”

  Jarsdel regarded the print on the wall with renewed curiosity. “Doesn’t look nearly as much fun as the brochure.”

  “Well, that’s the statement this artist is making. Bruegel the Elder. Didn’t think much of gross pleasures, so he envisioned Cockaigne more as a kind of cultural sinkhole.” She pointed at the three men lying beneath the craggy tree. “Here’re the major archetypes of the time—the knight, the farmer, and the scholar. But they’re just deadweight now. Farmer isn’t farming. You can see he’s sleeping on top of his flail. The scholar isn’t reading his book, and the knight has abandoned his lance. Give people everything they want, Bruegel suggests, and they abandon their responsibilities. Society just falls apart.”

  “But I don’t get it,” said Jarsdel. “It’s not a real place, so it’s not as if there was an actual danger of something like this happening. It’s like warning people to stay out of Willy Wonka’s factory.”

  Barnhardt considered. “More like he was telling people their fantasies were stupid, shallow, borne of ignorance. That they weren’t smart enough to know what was best for them.”

  “No wonder Varma liked it.” Jarsdel looked at the painting again. “Does anyone ever really get closure? I mean in general. Just out of curiosity.”

 
“No.”

  He turned to face her. “No?”

  Barnhardt shook her head. “Closure’s not something you can get from an external source. It’s something you create, something you build within yourself.”

  “I don’t understand her. Why she did the things she did.”

  “You might never. And that’s okay. Not your job to know everything.”

  “It bothers me for more than just that reason,” he said. “She was brilliant. Varma was brilliant. There’s no arguing against that. And if here you have a person that smart who was pushed to such a desperate act as faking an assault, you have to wonder if maybe the decision was intelligent, or that it was at least informed. Maybe her ideas were so obviously correct that she absolutely had to get them into use.” He left out the part about her slicing his hand open. He’d somehow been able to quarantine that troublesome fact in his own mind, keeping it separate so it didn’t contaminate his new thesis.

  Barnhardt looked at him with nearly the identical sad expression Morales had given him in his apartment. “Sounds like special pleading. You really believe that?”

  “She was smart.”

  “Yes.”

  “She knew better than to fudge her numbers and massage the data to get herself seen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes—so exactly, right? Doesn’t that say something?”

  “It does,” Barnhardt agreed. “Says she had a personality disorder.”

  “I was counting on her.” The words were out before he could vet them.

  “To do what?”

  “Don’t think I ever really thought it through. Vague stuff, visions of the city coming together, everything made suddenly, effortlessly whole. We’d be model of utopic possibility, and somehow it would just flow outward from there and in a few years we’d be living under the benevolent guidance of philosopher kings.”

  “A magic bullet?” She didn’t make a meal out of it, didn’t have to.

  “Yeah,” said Jarsdel. “I know there’s no such thing. Never has been. Except maybe just this once, maybe it was true.”

  * * *

  Another meeting in another office. Regardless of what Gavin had to say to him, Jarsdel thought, he was going to take a week off the moment he was out of that chair. He didn’t care if the mayor summoned him; it would be a week with no offices or desks. Maybe to Catalina Island. The Pavilion Hotel had wine and cheese on the patio each evening, and he could spend his days walking Avalon and reading—get through two or three books at Café Metropole or the Descanso Beach Club.