Warpath

by Ryan Sayles

  I grab the first shower bottle at my feet. See something about pumice rub and exfoliating and figure it has little grains of something in it. Great.

  I squeeze the bottle and a jet of it sprays across the room like this were the world’s most ludicrous money shot. Hits him right in the face. But more importantly, his eyes. He grabs at them.

  I stand up, trying to look as cool as I can with all the naked women. Of course, they’ve all beat feet. I would have thought they’d stick around to watch an uber-male like myself decimate a sex predator, but oh well. The cop in me says cuff him—not that I carry handcuffs anymore—and wait for back up. PD must be through the front door now.

  The rapist writhes; splashing shower water in his face before he blinks too much and the scrubby-grains rub through his eyeballs. Get to his brain. Exfoliate that. I decide one more punch for the road should do it.

  Grab him by the collar. Up on his feet. Defeated. “An ugly end to such a cocky piece of shit like you,” I say. He’s got nothing. He’s a million miles away down a hole from where we met on the street, him so confident that the situation was his to toy with. Funny how folks like the rapist—those who have never been tested; given a false sense of security—have their worlds shattered with one good punch. Conquered. Even his hands fall away, complete in their domination. Rear back, wind up.

  And then the smear floods down. I think it’s shower water and try to mentally brush it away. But it’s not going anywhere. Big Fry smear. A single trickle cascades, drawing behind it a million more like a freight train. A horse-drawn stampede on the backs of bulls done up in a psychedelic rainbow. Brain-frying. Gut-wrenching. I taste bile as the edges of my vision tingle with that certain special fuck you I get every time my noggin goes rogue. My mind numb. Muscles jelly. A swirl of mixing pastels before me, splashing my world and all it ever knew with a food fight of color. I try to swing. Just knock him out and we can be buddies lying here on the floor. No swing will come. I want it want it need it demand it but nothing.

  I barely feel it as I hit the floor, shower water draining into my open, twitching mouth. The colors go dark. My brain goes dark. I go dark.

  When I come to, I hear cops shouting back near the stalls. The rapist, he’s long gone.

  32

  Spent four hours with Saint Ansgar’s finest.

  One in handcuffs until Clevenger showed up and argued that I was not the rapist. His blood washed down the drain. His trail of destruction was hastily tied together. They missed some parts but they’ll connect the dots eventually. Written statement. Interviewed on a dash cam in the back of a squad car.

  The chief is through the fucking roof. Shots fired, car wrecks, chases. The chief himself comes up to the scene. Sees me. Storms up.

  “Well fuck me at a brisk trot, Richard Dean Fucking Buckner,” he says. The chief spent four years as an Army drill sergeant and it shows. Gets up in my face, trying to lean in the way they do with recruits. Command hand, the whole nine yards. “How is it a guy like you isn’t even a cop anymore and you’re still here at my crime scene with your dick imprint everywhere I look?”

  “Because I was working this case—”

  “You weren’t working shit!” His command hand goes right up to my head and I’m two seconds away from breaking those fingers. He can plume his feathers all he wants; his actual bite is dull. I know I still have teeth. “You were working on destroying my city! Anything else you accomplished was ancillary!”

  “Out of every cop standing here, only one of ’em had this guy in his possession.”

  The chief coughs a mocking laugh. “All right, Dirty Harry, where is the motherfucker then?” He holds up his hands and tours the area, looking lost and confused. “Please, display your great catch. Turn him over to me and I’ll give you the best citizen’s arrest award I can get past the city council.”

  Clevenger shakes his head. “He had the rapist, Chief. But that God-awful Big Fry overdose rose up—”

  “I ain’t fuckin’ talkin’ to you, Detective!” the chief shouts.

  “What he said was I had him. But you remember that huge Big Fry bust I got all those years ago that helped lock up three guys you could never nail when you were the Narcotics Commander? Remember that? That shit crept up while I was putting the gotchas on him. And while I was seizing on the ground he ran off. And none of your boys on the outside—”

  “Shut up, Buckner.” The chief has ice on those words. Quiet; an arctic fury. He gets close, and still thinks that because I call him Chief I’ll give him the leeway of one. “You got jumped by some two-bit thugs because you never could watch your back. Any crook on the streets knew if they wanted to stand a chance against a brute Jarhead ape like you, all they had to do was stay out of your wingspan. You got OD’d by your own faults. I had those shitbags. Fuck you if you think you and Garrett did anything besides cherry pick my work.”

  Close now, nose-to-nose. “I tell you what, Richard. Be the best witness you can be for the real cops, and then stay close to home. The DA might just want to talk to you.”

  “If it bothers you that I’m the best cop out there for your people to learn from, so be it,” I say, finger in his chest. “You can hen peck me all you want to, but never forget that every time you’ve been close to something, I’ve already gotten there.”

  “Except the rank of Chief.”

  “Only because I wanted the streets, not a desk and all the city council dick-sucking I could stomach.”

  “Look what it got you—” he says. I walk off. He takes a few steps after me, but even he knows better. Walking away I can see his shadow cast long and beside me, jumping up and down, waving his arms. Bits of words float to me from his vitriolic rant. Words like alcoholic. Brutal. Has-been and probably-a-murderer.

  I don’t listen. I need a drink before I find the rapist and kill him.

  Clevenger calls.

  The secretary is no help. Shell shock; spent most of her time in the rapist’s trunk. Can’t ID the make or model. Parked somewhere near the meet at the bar. Cops have canvassed the area, running every tag. He’s long gone.

  Tells me Willibald’s funeral is early next week. Wants me to come. I agree, get off the phone. Taped my right middle finger to my right ring finger. Might not be broke, but I could have used some stitches. Never got them. Get lost in the ice cubes of a scotch; the way all the angles turn smooth and roll along one another. How they refract the light through the booze. Leathery browns, sweet caramels. They all taste like oblivion.

  Beyond it, the front door to my apartment. Braced tight with a chair under the doorknob. No break-ins. Bleary and stupored, I sink into my couch.

  Then I sink further, and wash away from this life for a while.

  33

  Late evening

  Back in the day this was some Protestant office building.

  Built in the ’90s next door to a church which has now changed hands a number of times, sits the square, no-curb-appeal block of dilapidated shit where Thuggie supposedly hangs out. It’s in the right neighborhood. Has the right graffiti sprayed along the walls. The right ghetto sleds parked beside it.

  Late night. Stillness abounds the way it does when the darkness is lazy; ebon layers tossed like gauze sheets across the world. When I move a step, adjust on the concrete, I can hear the pebbles beneath my shoes collide like landsliding boulders. That loud in this stillness.

  Only three windows alight. Top floor. No silhouettes. No noises. Front door; dumb idea. Back door; just as stupid. Fire escape; why not?

  There’s only so much quiet a lumbering man like me can maintain when he is precariously balanced on an alleyway trashcan as he reaches for a secured fire escape hatch.

  I do it the best I can. Grab the frame, heave up. Stalk through the darkness, up the steps. Shadow passing by shadow, trying to avoid the metal creaks and groans like dead giveaways.

  Third floor, two darkened windows down from the lit ones. I get to the glass and realize I didn’t really come with a p
lan beyond entering the building and hurting people. I brought enough lead. My travel-sized lock picking kit. A glasscutter. And, of course, my dancing shoes.

  Inside, murmuring quiet. Just nothing. I squat down; cut the glass by the window lock’s latch. Tap in it; listen for alerts as the fragment falls noiselessly. Undo the latch, throw the window. Lucy, I’m home. The annoying wash of a lingering stench of weed. Mixes with cheap liquor. The carpet is pockmarked with cigarette burns. Stains. The walls have all been painted by graffiti artists.

  No sounds. Corner room. The two darkened windows I was outside of lead into here. Dead space. There are two doors leading out; one to the lighted room and one to somewhere beyond. Something tingles my guts. Crawls along my skin like an insect. Set up.

  I go to the dark door, stand near it for some time. Minutes drizzle along. There is a smattering of shitty furniture here. I take a cue from my own place and get a chair. Brace the door. Now, if fools are lying in wait on the other side, I’ll get a head’s up before they storm in.

  But something tells me my efforts are lost.

  I go to the lit door. A halo of light outlines the thing; a square phantasm in this graveyard corner room. I take the handle. Turn. Shove. Duck to the side; wait for the barrage of hot lead.

  Nothing.

  They’re better than that. Okay. Take hold of a small chair beside me. Throw it in. Clatters, bangs around. Falls and settles.

  Still nothing.

  I play a hunch. Step inside the doorway.

  Conference room made up like it was a thug’s cathedral.

  Graffiti murals tell the exploits of this rabble. Stations of the Thuggie. The door I step through leads into the empty space, twenty feet long and twelve feet wide. A door directly across from me all the way down, leads to the hallway and far, far away. Two windows to my right. Light left on. A small table in the center of the room. Bears a message for me.

  The first mural starts to my left. They work down the wall towards the opposite wall, follow it to the right and come back up towards me. That first mural is a colorful piece showing the art’s central figure—I gather from the labels painted at his feet this is actually Thuggie—as he stands before a man on his knees. In Thuggie’s right hand is the man’s bleeding heart, torn from his chest. Must be a vivid and bullshit depiction of the guy he killed that Andre from the 39th Street Felons told me about.

  The next shows Thuggie head and shoulders above a crowd of young men. His arms outstretched like he were a savior welcoming his flock. The neighborhood behind him cracked and disheveled. The third shows Thuggie sitting at a desk, piled high with money. Guns. Weed and white powder. Symbols of his greatness.

  They go on all around the room. Artwork displaying Thuggie as half Messiah and half Scarface.

  I walk over to the table. Six bottles of cheap swill rest on it. A note, poorly scribed in pen by someone who is functionally illiterate.

  We commin for U

  Have a dirnk on me

  Kil the lites when U leive BITCH

  THUGGIE

  So, Candy Man squealed. I’ll go back and look for him but he’s gone. No doubt about it. This note says a few things. One, they don’t know who I am. They’re just trying to scare me off. They know what I can do, not the least of that is breaking their people. Making them talk. Two, they’re afraid of me. They knew I was going to show, and rather than face me, they scatter and leave a note. Pussies.

  This isn’t even my brand. Turn off the lights when I leave. Please.

  All six bottles get emptied along the floor and walls. I turn off the lights as I step out; touch my lighter to the alcohol trail I left into the hallway. A blue flame sparks to life; runs away from me down the hall like it owes me money. Into the cathedral.

  Booze flames shoot up the walls like a reverse waterfall. Oranges and yellows snapping all around like they were little cavorting devils and I, Satan himself, just told them to make tonight count. The heat swims around, comes at me in waves. I start to hear little pops and cracks. Things are picking up.

  Black boils where the reds once were. A cancer of infernos devouring the construction. I back up, making sure the paints on the walls blister and curl before I leave. Thuggie’s murals reduced to simmering splotches of running paint. Good enough. Just as the first panels of the suspended ceiling cave in, I turn around.

  I go out the front door. Flames snapping and raging in the windows above me.

  I turned out the lights all right, motherfuckers.

  34

  Saturday morning

  “I’m looking for Joe Clarke,” I say, hating the smell of inside an old folks’ home.

  Prunes and convalescents wheel about. Some skit-skat along, others hobble, one woman sits in her wheelchair, staring off into whatever great void she’s trying to go down, one hand listlessly fiddling with her catheter’s collection bag.

  The double front doors behind me, sunlight pouring in like a great temptation to make a run for it. The front desk before me, one overweight caretaker plopped into her seat, her carrot-red hair dye job glowing about her scalp. Rather than get up to look for the man, she turns in her chair; a tremendous heave and shifting of all her rolls and bulges. Too much make-up, too little of anything else.

  A stubby finger jabs at a man. “That’s old Joe,” she says. “You family?” she asks, out of breath from exerting herself by turning in a chair.

  “I knew him from his days at the pawn shop,” I say. Step away.

  “I didn’t know he worked at a pawn shop,” said with a fake chipper reserved for customer service jobs.

  “Don’t care if you did,” I mumble, walk towards him. Joe Clarke is sitting on a bench, clearly visible through a glass side door. The door opens to a large, meandering court yard. Maybe it will smell better than the mélange of stale urine, antiseptic and unwashed-and-nearly-dead people in here.

  Outside, I sit down on the bench. Joe looks over.

  “I know you?”

  “My name’s Richard. As long as I’ve worked in the city I must have driven by your shop a thousand times. Always saw your name next to Barry’s on that big yellow sign.”

  “Yeah, but do I know you?”

  “I guess not, but I thought I’d come by—”

  “Whatever bullshit you’re sellin’, I’m not here to listen.” Joe turns away, crosses his arms.

  “You ran a blue-collar criminal enterprise fencing stolen goods through your pawn shop.”

  He gets hard. Looks back at me, the lines in his face set. “Don’t know you. Fuck off.”

  “Mickey Cantu’s last gig was going down after he got out of prison. I say last gig because he involved someone from your pawnshop and that someone betrayed and murdered him, then raped a woman. She’s dead also.” I stare at him.

  “I know no such thing.” He rocks forward and tries to stand but his back and knees aren’t in the mood. He rocks back, settles on the bench. Gears up for another try and I put a hand out. He stays seated.

  “All I want is a name.”

  “You think you can show up to a halfway decent raisin ranch like this one and point at some old man and then accuse him of bein’ around rapists and murderers? What, did you pawn me your wife’s weddin’ ring and I sold it before you could buy it back? Is that it?”

  “All I want is a name.”

  “I got news for you, jack. If you don’t want me sellin’ your shit, don’t give me the chance.”

  I lean in, one hand on his shoulder. “Listen, if I wanted to shake you down, I’d wait until you were in your room and struggling to take a piss and then do it. But I respect your dignity. I will not respect your bullshit. I used to be on the force, and I know dozens of guys like you. Stan Carlson from over on 82nd and Perry. Tom just off of interstate by the stadium. Enrique Mendez always had that asshole rooster running around inside his shop. When Bill Mahoney was robbed and murdered, I worked the case and got the bad guy. I did that.

  “I’m sure when you opened you were legit,
but as the neighborhood went downhill you had to fence to make the rent. Mickey Cantu was a good guy who liked being a cat burglar. The problem is, he walked into a set up and got axed for it. And he was set up by your employee. Now give me the name.”

  Joe stares off. No doubt he knew Stan and Tom and Enrique and Bill. No doubt he, like everyone who ever met Bill, hated Bill. It was only a matter of time that guy got shotgunned to death standing at his cash register, but it doesn’t make it right. I let it all sink in. Lean away. Sit down next to him.

  “I never knew no Mickey Cantu,” he says. “But if you got reason to believe it was my shop...”

  I pull out my Rum Coasts, offer him one. Joe looks over my shoulder at the desk, shrugs. Takes one. I light us both. Then I say, “Mickey made a deal with some guy he met in prison. Rob the house while the guy is out with his wife, Mickey keeps the score; the guy gets to claim his insurance. Only Mickey got a second dude in on it and that dude killed him and waited at the house. Raped—”

  “Ursa Hanchett,” Joe says without even looking at me. “Couldn’t have been anyone else in my crew. If it was one of my employees, it was Ursa Hanchett.”

  Sounds like a pervert.

  I nod, sit back. Joe takes a drag, scratches his chest. Says, “Hanchett’s old man, Bob, he waddn’t half-bad. He had a temper, but that man could eyeball somethin’ and nail the worth. Never was off, neither. Like those goofs on that travelin’ antiquities show where you bring your junk and they tell you the history and all that? That was Bob. And he loved that boy. But that boy was like...a snake or somethin’. Even when he was a kid I says—I says to my wife, ‘Francine, that Hanchett boy is either a fruit or a serial killer. He’s too soft and too connivin’.’ That’s what I says.”

  “And you think he was the rapist?”

  “He had some mental thing. Back in the day if they wasn’t right we’d just whisper, say they was retarded or whatever, but the kid could do math just fine and he, you know, he wasn’t like he was gonna need to live with his dad his whole life. But he was...off. There’d be months and months where the kid was nice and sweet and very likeable, he’d come around with girls and all that. Pretty girls, too. Some were from the right side of the tracks, others weren’t, but he was one of those guys that if he set his sights, he had ’em. But then he had this cruel streak.