To Bring My Shadow

by Matt Phillips

  “Enrico Frederico Pablo Castaneda. Five-eight, one-ninety-four. Brown hair and eyes. Organ donor.” Slade squinted at the Arizona state driver’s license in his hand. “Got himself a cartel tattoo on his neck, if I’m not mistaken.”

  I peered over Slade’s shoulder at the small image on the license card. There it was on the guy’s skin: Black rosary beads slithering from beneath the collar of his shirt, stretching around behind his neck. I knew the beads led to a depiction of Santa Muerte—Saint Death—over the guy’s heart. Cartel? Maybe. Gangbanger? Likely. Lover? Nope––probably a fighter. “Let’s not jump the gun on this one,” I said. “Could be he tripped, fell, landed in the damn oil drum.”

  “Right,” Slade said, “And he slammed his fingers in a car door…along with his pecker.”

  Captain Ryan Jackson, a former Marine with a commendable beer belly and jowls thickening by the month, lifted the crime scene tape for us and we ducked beneath it. “Right this way, boys,” he said. “I hope me getting down here before you don’t portend a fuckup.”

  Slade followed close behind Jackson. He said, “I had to pick Frank up is all. Stopped for coffee.”

  “You two are going to need more than coffee for this one.”

  I followed with a noncommittal saunter. I liked the captain, but that made me suspicious of him. Like with most of the department, I felt like he was waiting (or hoping) for me to fuck things up for myself. But I cleared cases. Turn enough red into black––hell, they’ll let you get away with murder. I hadn’t taken it that far yet, but I came close. Most of us did at one time or another. Can’t say I’m proud of that, but it’s the truth. We followed the captain down a cement path across more dark jetty rocks and smaller riprap. The path split from a cement walkway curved north away from the bridge and ended in a dirt lot next to one of the warehouses. The cement poured into the jetty was not the work of a craftsman. It seemed ill-planned. “What’s up with this path, Captain? We know anything about it?”

  “Looks like something a few fishermen put in,” he said over his shoulder. “Throw a few globs of cement in the right place and you got a staircase to your favorite fishing hole.”

  The cement steps––they became steps after twenty-five yards or so––descended to the waterline. I could see there was a small stretch of beach there, say fifteen feet wide or so, but it was covered by the tide. The oil drum was sitting in the sand, about one-third covered by lapping water.

  And the oil drum was upright.

  Slade said, “They put it here. It ain’t something that washed up.” I nodded along with the captain.

  In the oil drum, I saw the lumpy texture of wet hair, one booted foot poking out like a boy’s too-loose tooth. I’d have to get closer to see more.

  Captain Jackson said, “We got a couple of teenagers found the thing. Boy and a girl. Neon pink fucking hair, if you can believe that. Out here for a little midnight loving. Said they got here and made out for a while, decided to wade in and see what the hell this was. They’re high as shit, the two of ’em. Like fucking hot air balloons.”

  “Nice surprise after a toke or two,” I said.

  “Yeah, Frank,” the captain said, “Must have been a real turn on.”

  “We’ll talk to them tonight.” I sneezed twice, wiped my nose with the back of my sleeve. “Before they forget all the important shit.”

  “We already got them down at the station. Be there until you say they can go home to momma.”

  Beside us, in a clear storage box marked SDPD, there were a few pairs of wading boots. Slade pulled off his dress shoes, set them in the box one at a time as he slid the boots on over his fancy argyle socks.

  “Look at you,” I said. “A seasoned pro, down to the toes.”

  “You look good, you catch more crooks.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Prove that one.” I patted my significant beer belly. “The fuck do you think I’m doing?”

  He ignored me, stepped into the water and moved toward the oil drum.

  Above us, the bottom side of the bridge lifted in pendulum, stretched like a curved cement finger to the first pillar, maybe fifty yards out into the bay. The bridge hit two hundred feet at its apex. It made a hell of a choice for suicides. A sure thing. A majestic and unforgiving sure thing. I knew that as well as anybody in the city, from my beautiful Miranda. I felt my bottom lip start to give as I stared up at the bridge, followed its line to the midpoint. For a moment I imagined what it must have felt like: the wind was cold that night and it would have run through a body like ice. It was a clear night though, a rare night when stars burned through the city’s skyline. It must have been like plunging into––

  “Frank? You okay, pal?” Slade looked back at me from the water. He had his notepad and pencil out, that determined, hard-ass detective glare on his face. “You alright with this, Frank?”

  I cleared my throat, avoided Captain Jackson’s eyes. “I’m fine, Skinny. Let’s see what we got here on this fine, fucked-up midnight.” I removed my shoes and replaced them with wading boots.

  Captain Jackson looked uncomfortable, scratched at the folded skin beneath his chin. He coughed once and said, “I’ll leave you to it, detectives.” He grunted as he climbed upwards along the jetty. Soon, Jackson was gone, vanished over the top of the jagged rocks.

  Slade moved toward the oil drum with deliberate caution and observance. I took a deep breath, pushed Miranda from my mind, and stepped into the bay’s black and lapping waters.

  Chapter 4

  In my life, I’ve seen ugly things.

  You don’t know evil until you find a dead girl in a suitcase. Or see a single mother gunned down in a liquor store. Or watch a video with masked men beating a teenage kid to a bloody, motionless pulp. I’m not saying this to prove I’m some harbinger of justice—to hell with that. The more I do this job—and the more crimes I solve (or don’t solve)—the more I get confused about life, about death, about making bad things right. I know most of what me and Skinny Slade deal with has to do with poverty or drugs. And those two things have to do with money.

  Let’s call it what it is:

  Murder is the street talking back, and the street has a dirty fucking mouth. This was what I was thinking as we sat in our department-issue Ford Focus on a vacant street, a dead man folded into a barrel not more than fifty yards from us.

  And missing his fingertips and shriveled dick.

  I sipped cold coffee in the passenger seat while Slade checked back over his meticulous notes. Both of us had the bitter taste of vomit on our tongues.

  Slade said, “That tech was right about the fingers. Looks like maybe a hand tool. Bolt cutters, I’m betting. Like when you cut through braided cable and have to rip hard to get it to split.”

  I nodded, looked out at the street and the warehouses. As the night wore on, a gray sheen began to cover everything—part sea mist and part lengthening night. “Maybe, but it’s best to let the autopsy do the talking.”

  “I hear you, Frank. I’m just thinking.” Slade turned a page in his notebook, grunted. “Man, hell of a message to cut the guy’s Johnson down to a nub.”

  I finished my coffee, jammed the cup between my legs. “Yeah, it’s a fucking sign alright. No doubt, this is some down and dirty drug business. To me, it’s weird they left the guy here. Most shit like this goes down in TJ. You and I know that––what’s the fucking deal?”

  Even sitting here in the car, with the engine running, I could still feel the wet lick of the bay water, the mush of sand beneath my feet. The dead body in the oil drum haunted me: I couldn’t shake the look on the vic’s face. His eyebrows were flat and black as worms, spread apart over a fat nose. A broad cheek on one side of his face was wedged against his knobby, broken knees. Folded up like a goddamn case file. Cause of death, we thought, might be the small bullet hole just above his heart, in the center of his chest. Not before a shit-ton of torture, though. I figured that, too, would be determined by the
autopsy.

  “That hole in the vic’s chest,” Slade said, “probably some small caliber pistol––a put-him-out-of-his-misery shot. You think they got whatever information they wanted?”

  Out the windshield, I watched some young patrol officers wander into the street, stand in a circle shooting the shit. Guarding the scene while the techs did their thing. I knew we wouldn’t close this case on evidence—we’d close it on word-of-mouth, if we closed it at all. “Maybe the whole thing is a message,” I said. “A whodunit for the press. Smoke and mirrors to scare somebody. Another drug kingpin, maybe. Or the feds. A fuck you to CBP, FBI, Border Patrol.”

  Slade looked up from his notebook, turned his head to squint down the street. Yellow streetlights shined every twenty-five yards or so, breaking the night gray like weary spotlights on a community theater stage. “You see a reporter somewhere? A fucking news van?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet, Skinny. Not until you get on the horn.” Slade, like I said before, was a ladies’ man. He had romantic notions when it came to a few local news reporters. The man knew what it was to diversify—he had print, TV, and radio in his portfolio.

  Slade grinned, looked back to his notes. “You know I’m exclusive with Georgia now.”

  “Georgia Frost, from the UT?” A beautiful lady––if a little tomboy-like––who worked the crime beat on weekends. She taught elementary school during the weekdays. It’s hard in San Diego for journalists. “Miss wannabe Edna Buchanan?”

  “You got it, Frank. Exclusive as a downtown club, baby.”

  “How long has it just been Georgia?”

  “Week or two.” Slade flipped another page in his notebook.

  “Shit,” I said. “A week ain’t time, man. It’s a breath. A blink of an eye. If that. Talk to me when you got twenty-five years in the thing.” I leaned down and peered out my window at the scythe-shaped bridge. I wanted to think Miranda didn’t feel pain, that she died without any hurt. But I knew that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. “Talk to me,” I said, “when you get the wind knocked out of you by the lady with one goddamn look. She can do that to you, you got time into it. Good time, too. Over-fucking-time.”

  “No, Frank,” Slade said. He was looking at me, the bottoms of his eyes shiny and wet. “I ain’t got any time into it. Not a damn second worth counting.” He frowned and tried to clear his throat. Must have had a frog in there. He said, “I sure miss your wife, Frank.”

  “Me too. Goddamn. I miss her too.” We sat there in silence. The street cops kept telling dirty jokes and the night stood as still as a dead man’s promise. The gray had given way to black and I wanted the morning to come before I got too deep into the cold blackness of my own depression.

  Yeah, I thought, I’ve seen some ugly things in my life.

  Sure have run into some beauty, though. Plenty of beauty out here in the devil’s playground. But that’s a twisted hell, too. Because every second somebody’s got to die.

  And one night it was my wife, Miranda.

  One night it was Miranda.

  Fucking bridges.

  I sighed and said, “We better get our asses back to the station, talk to those teenage lovebirds.”

  Chapter 5

  I don’t understand pink hair.

  But who does?

  When I sat down across from Celeste Richards—five-four and one-ten, seventeen years old—she looked at me like I was fuzz, like she knew the back seat of a patrol car better than the inside of her own head. She nodded at the interrogation room’s beige, graffiti-covered walls. “You should hire a new decorator—this place makes me feel like slitting my wrists.” Her mouth turned down in dramatic disgust.

  I smacked my lips, opened my notebook to a blank page. I stared at the tip of my pencil before pinning her with a cop’s glare. Sometimes, with kids, it worked.

  Celeste shrugged, ran purple fingernails through her pink hair. “Can I go now? My mom’s going to be pissed if she wakes up for work and sees I’m gone.”

  “What’s mom do?” I sucked coffee grounds from between my teeth, ran my tongue across my lower lip.

  “Dudes like you.”

  “Really? Your mom works the street? What’s her name?”

  The teenage girl’s face softened—she was afraid of me, or she loved her mom. I saw her regret the implication that her mom was a hooker. There was a human inside Celeste somewhere, despite her teenage exterior. “My mom’s a nurse at Mercy Hospital.” She looked down at the fold-away table, ran one index finger in an oval pattern across the table’s surface. Without looking at me, she said, “You don’t have to tell her about this, do you?”

  “So you’re a fake tough kid. The whole punk facade, is that it?”

  “I’m a fucking teenager, old man.” She looked at me and I noticed her eyes were hazel. Same color as my wife’s. And my daughter’s. Celeste tugged at a lock of pink hair. “This is just to piss my mom off.”

  I smiled. “Bet it worked. How’s it going to be when I drop you off this morning?”

  “C’mon, sir. I can get home on my own. Don’t tell my mom about this. She’ll fucking—”

  “What are you going to give me, Celeste?”

  “About that?”

  “What were you and...” I consulted a page in my notebook. “Turner, sweet little Turner, doing under the bridge tonight?”

  Celeste’s face got pissy again. Her eyebrows crunched down on her button nose and she twisted her mouth toward one cheek. “I was giving him a blow job. What do you think?”

  “Midnight romance, huh?”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  “Your momma teach you to talk to cops like that?”

  Celeste sighed. “It’s our two-month anniversary, okay? We just wanted to make out and smoke some weed. That’s all it was. It’s a place to be alone…together.”

  “You go down there a lot?”

  “Not really.”

  “What time did you leave your house with Turner?”

  Celeste looked at a pink Hello Kitty watch on her left wrist. “He came over at eight. When my mom fell asleep we snuck out. I think we left at, maybe, ten-ish? I don’t know, man. Am I going to get my phone back soon?”

  “And it takes how long to get to the bay bridge from your house?”

  “Turner’s friend dropped us off. It took, like, ten minutes or something.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  Celeste leaned back in the chair, crossed her arms. “Ask Turner. It’s his friend.”

  “I’m asking you, Celeste.” I straightened in my chair. Nothing like a teenage girl to try your patience. I thought about my daughter, Kimmie. She was twenty-eight, worked as a barista in Oakland. Fucking liberal arts education. As a teen, Kimmie liked to push buttons. She’d ask you to pick her up and get a ride with a friend instead. Told us she was a lesbian during the summer before her senior year. Then went to senior prom with the second-string quarterback. Truth was, I didn’t know much about Kimmie, the adult version of her.

  I felt a glob of deep shame form and solidify in my belly.

  The last time I saw Kimmie was at Miranda’s funeral. A new tattoo peeked out the top of her black blouse, creeped along the too-visible fold of her cleavage. We stood over Miranda’s grave, just the two of us. Kimmie’s younger brother couldn’t make it—something about a court date for a corporate client. Goddamn lawyers. Always too fucking busy to see off the dead. I supposed that’s why we have preachers. Still, I was pissed at Norton. And I was too grief-stricken to comfort Kimmie. Or too chicken-shit. She cried like a toddler and I stood there with my dark sunglasses on, big fat tears hiding behind my eyeballs. Yeah, chicken-shit. That was it.

  I thought I better call Kimmie. Though I doubted she would answer.

  Celeste sighed from her toes and said, “I think his name is, like, Rambo or something. Can I go home now? Can I have my fucking cell phone back?” She shifted in her chair, pinched the bridg
e of her nose between pinkie finger and thumb. “You’re killing my high, you know that?”

  “Rambo, like the Stallone movie?”

  Celeste said, “Who’s that?”

  Jesus. I found it hard to believe Sylvester Stallone’s pure and absolute genius could be lost on anybody, teenage girls included. “You don’t know Sly Stallone? What are you, some kind of loser?” I listed the greats, ticked them off on my fingers one by one. “First Blood. Rocky. Rocky II, III. Shit, all the Rocky flicks. Cop Land. That Get Carter remake.”

  “It’s like you’re speaking a different language.” Celeste shook her head, bent her lips into a pout.

  “Okay, wait. How about The Expendables?”

  “Oh, that’s one of those stupid action movies, right?”

  Stupid action movie? Wow, I thought, these fucking kids need a lesson in—

  The door swung open behind me and Slade’s voice came, “Frank—I need you to get in here for a second.”

  I stood and shook my finger at Celeste. “We’re going to finish this, Celeste. I’ll be back.”

  “Whatever. Bring my fucking phone, okay?”

  I could feel Celeste’s glare as I followed Slade out the door and down the hall.

  Turner Malcolm, unlike his girlfriend, did have a bit of street inside him. He was a burly nineteen-year-old with a long scar running across his forehead. His short hair, like Celeste’s, was colored pink. He had mean little eyes set back in deep sockets. He wore the garb of a high school goth kid: black Doc Marten boots, tight black jeans, and a black T-shirt with a heavy metal band on the front––The Liars. Turner leaned backwards in his seat when we walked in, belched with punkish braggadocio. “One fat cop and one skinny cop,” he said. “Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. Sweet. It’s like an after school special or something.”

  Me and Slade took our seats.

  “Let’s get back to your friend,” Slade said. His notebook, now flat on the table, was full with scribbled notes. “Frank here wants to listen, too. If you don’t mind.”