EVENING
Walker stands beside Rawls in a dark corner of the motor pool. He looks into his partner’s eyes and sees lingering traces of fear. He figures Rawls sees the same in him.
“They took the guy to Mercy, but he died in transport. Just bled out.”
“Jesus.”
“The tongue was the worst part. Fucking thing kept moving for almost a half hour.”
“Ricky’s wasn’t a pretty scene, either.”
“And Thomas still isn’t gonna work on getting us a warrant.”
“Bullshit.”
“I mean, I see it. We don’t have any direct ties to this shit, but still.”
Walker rubs his face with hands that need to be washed. It’s been too long a day, and he knows it isn’t near done. “It’s got to stop though, man. This fuck pile we saw today is only gonna get worse if gangbangers are on the streets trying to go voodoo on us.”
Rawls nods.
“But if we take down Dobbs tonight, it could stop. Somebody with a good head on their shoulders moves up, and the streets go quiet again.”
“Who moves up?” Rawls asks.
“Whoever we back. That doesn’t matter until tomorrow.”
Rawls stares at the pavement for a long moment. Thoughts cross his face as creases of worry. His breath is a slow, purring thing.
Finally, he looks up.
“Great. Let’s grease this asshole.”
Megan lifts the yellow crime scene tape and enters the house for the second time. The dead Mexicans are gone, carted off to the county hospital and deposited in the morgue, but no one has come to clean the scene yet. That’s good.
With night coming on fast, darkness saturates the house. She sees faint shapes, but no details. She steps onto the soaked carpet and hears it squelch beneath her shoes. The scents of death remain. She breathes deep and feels the aroma creep through her body, latch onto her bones and work its way into her very structure.
She clicks on the flashlight in her hand and aims it at the wall. The words scroll from ceiling to floor. They’ve dried a little more, and now they’re a dark brown against the yellowed paint.
Why am I here? she wonders. Why on earth am I doing this?
Because you want to.
She begins to read.
“We are everything and, and we are one and the same....”
Walker pulls onto Rose and slows the car a little. They’re three blocks away from Dobbs’ safe house, and he feels insects crawling through his belly. He thinks about one banger playing games with a girl’s intestines and another eating a child’s heart. He thinks about the empty apartment building and the dead girl in Ricky’s bed, the look of quiet horror in the dealer’s eyes in the second before he pulled the trigger. He thinks about all of it, and he wonders what might be waiting for them three blocks down the street.
“You ready for this?” he asks Rawls.
“Sure thing.”
He takes his eyes from the road and gives his partner a look. “I’m serious. Are you ready for this?”
A shrug. “I think so. Shit, I don’t know. What are we gonna see at this place? What’s Dobbs gonna be up to?”
“I wish I knew.”
“I wish I didn’t have to find out.”
“Amen.”
“I’m not gonna lie, man. The shit we’ve seen today, it’s got me spooked pretty bad.”
“Me too.”
“Yeah?”
“Swear. Look, there’s the majority of my brain. It says this is just a bunch of strung-out gangbangers talking out their asses and acting crazy because they got a bad cut of dust or something.”
“But?”
“But then there’s the part of my head that saw the look in those bangers’ eyes. They believed this shit, I mean really believed it. I think about that—about the sheer belief I saw in their faces—and it gets me thinking.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I know you do.”
He hears Rawls take a deep breath. The man lets it out slow. “So what do you want to do?”
“I want us to be careful. You watch my back, and I’ll watch yours. Same deal as always.”
Rawls nods. “Deal.”
“Okay.” He pulls the car over to the curb and yanks the ski mask down over his face. “Time to go to work.”
2Bit doesn’t want to go back in the house. He wants to run away. He wants to hurt himself, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, blast any more memories all to hell. He can’t do it, though. His legs keep pulling him toward the house.
He remembers what he put in the pot on the stove. He remembers cutting them off the dead Mexicans one at a time. Normal homeboys don’t do that shit. Crazy motherfuckers do.
He don’t want to be crazy.
But his legs won’t stop dragging him forward.
He sees the yellow tape criss-crossing the open door. He thinks the door should be shut, but then he sees the light inside, a single beam that roams back and forth, pointing at the living room wall. He sees images of himself dipping his finger in a shallow puddle of blood and writing letters on the wall. He grinds his teeth, closes his eyes, and the images disappear.
It could be a cop in the house. He knows it’s dangerous, but his legs just keep moving. Somewhere in his mind, he knows he’s lost control. The house has him now. The things he did there changed him, and it doesn’t matter if he remembers all of them or not. Now, he’s playing a part. He wants desperately to break free, but he fails again and again.
He grabs the yellow tape in both hands and rips it down. The flashlight’s beam moves, finds his face. The white spot blinds him, but he don’t blink.
“Hi,” a voice says. Female. Deep. The light returns to the wall, and somehow he can see her. She’s tall, pale. She stands naked in the middle of the blood-drenched room. He sees a uniform discarded at her feet. Five-oh. He watches as she shifts her weight and old blood smears her toes. He hears her voice repeat words he barely remembers writing. He turns and follows the flashlight as it roams words he’d never imagined before last night.
“I wrote those,” he says.
“I know. They’re beautiful.”
He approaches and stands at her side. He places a hand on the small of her back and feels sweat on her smooth skin.
“Why you here?” he asks. He hears his voice shake, and he realizes his body is burning with anticipation.
“For you,” she whispers.
She drops the flashlight, and her arms close around him.
Walker rushes down the sidewalk in a crouch. His service pistol feels warm in his hands. He hears Rawls’ nearly-silent footsteps right behind him.
Rose Street is quiet, dark. No voices or music or television programs. No cats yowling into the night or dogs barking at yowling cats. Something has turned Compton into a ghost town.
He reaches the gate that leads to Dobbs’ safe house. He remembers the last time he was here, delivering a witness to some of the Gray Street rank and file. He kept a lid on a war with that delivery. He hopes his presence here tonight will do something similar. He reaches out to open the front gate and realizes he doesn’t have to.
Rawls taps him on the shoulder, points to the home’s front door.
“Shit.”
It’s standing open, yellow light spilling into the night. From his spot on the sidewalk he can see the legs sprawled in the opening. It reminds him of the kid with a hole in his torso.
Something awful has already happened here.
Walker motions for Rawls to follow. “C’mon!”
Together they rush toward the front door.
Waves of pleasure surge through Megan’s body. She bucks on top of the stranger, grinding her hips harder and harder against his. She digs furrows in his chest with her nails. Her breath hitches in her throat, and sweat traces cooling trickles down her body.
Something rumbles deeper in the house, a sound like an angry lion stalking prey through high grasses.
A spike o
f ecstasy pierces her spine, and she cries out. The man beneath her grunts in a steady rhythm.
“We are everything and all,” she says between panting breaths. She can sense the blood that soaks the carpet creep toward their heat. It’s almost time. She’s never felt more alive. More needed.
“Darkness below!” she gasps.
“He stepped through,” the man says.
The rumble becomes a roar.
The yellow light pulses as Walker crosses the threshold. He recoils from the body in the doorway. Basketball shoes and baggy track pants give way to a torso that’s been skinned. Bloody muscle catches the sick light and spins it off in different directions. The corpse lacks a head, and Walker wonders if they’ll find it in the house.
“Mother of all hell,” Rawls whispers as they enter the living room. Half a dozen corpses line the room. Somebody’s nailed their wrists and throats to the walls. They stand in a mockery of life, their faces glazed with something that’s both wonder and horror. A woman whose legs have been torn away wears her dying scream like a mask. The bare spaces that remain between the bodies have been filled with writing.
“Fuck,” Rawls says. “That’s the sort of shit that banger spouted in interrogation.”
“Quiet.”
Walker watches the bodies. Dobbs isn’t one of them. He imagines them tearing loose from the wall and shambling toward him. He shakes the thought away. Until he finds Dobbs, he needs to concentrate.
Another light pulses from the kitchen doorway. It cycles faster than the living room’s bulb, almost quick enough to be a strobe light. It matches the speed of his racing heartbeat. He feels it pull him like a strange, false gravity.
He catches Rawls’ eye and then cocks his head at the doorway. His partner nods.
Walker steps into the kitchen, his pistol up and his trigger finger itching.
A muscular, naked man stands at the sink, facing away from them. The flesh of his back ripples as he breathes in and out. Blood smears his skin. More coats the cracked linoleum.
“Malcolm Dobbs,” Walker says. “Turn around nice and fucking slow.”
The man’s skin ripples again. Walker sees something that looks like a thick cord wriggle beneath the flesh. He blinks, and it disappears.
“You ever wonder what’s behind the world?” the man asks. He starts to turn around.
“Hands up!” Walker orders. “Behind your head, asshole.”
The man keeps talking as he follows Walker’s command. “I used to wonder all the time, used to really want to learn that shit.” His voice sounds strange. Maybe wet. “I knew this wasn’t all there was, man. There had to be something else, something below. A darkness.”
Malcolm Dobbs smiles. Blood runs from the corners of his mouth, from his nose and ears and eyes. Something rips.
Walker thinks it’s too hot in the kitchen. The air closes in on him. Somewhere far away, he hears somebody blubber. Maybe Rawls. Who knows?
“I opened a door in the wall,” Dobbs says. He coughs once, and a wet morsel splats against the floor. “And I stepped through.”
Walker senses Rawls falling to his knees. He feels tears sting at his eyes. “You’re under arrest,” he says, but the words leave his mouth as a croaking sob. He knows he should pull the trigger, but he can’t find the strength. He can barely stand.
“The door doesn’t close, though. It just hangs open. I tried, but I can’t budge the motherfucker.”
The light strobes faster and faster. Walker sees fingers claw at the inside of Dobbs’ body, fighting to break free. He feels his mouth fall open. A sound comes out, and he thinks he might be screaming.
Dobbs’ smile splits at the corners. Holes appear in his chest.
Walker shoves the pistol in his hand past his lips to cut off the scream.
Darkness.
SOMETHING WENT WRONG
When Thomas heard the first knock at the motel room door, he chose to ignore it. Instead, he focused on the dust. Lots of dust. Everywhere he looked. It spiraled in streaks on the fake brass doorknob, and it coated the chipped nightstand in a thin sheet. Motes twirled lazy pirouettes through the shafts of hot sunlight that chopped the room from window to wall. With a grim set to his mouth, he decided he hated the room. Of all the places to meet.
A groan from the bathroom. He ignored that, too.
He tugged the handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose into it. All the dust was going to turn his allergies into a real trial. Cedar season only made matters worse. January in Austin, Texas. Already, it appeared 1958 was going to be an awful year.
Another knock. Not urgent, but with a little more authority than the first. His eyes ticked to the door, the pool of shadow that filled that corner of the room. He’d have to cross the floor to reach it.
So what? He found no need to keep stalling, so he climbed to his feet and brushed his hands down the front of his slacks. With steps both lazy and staccato, he crossed the room, slicing his way through the space, thinking about the dust crashing across his chest and feeling his sinuses grow angry, the pressure there inching toward awful. As he reached for the doorknob, another groan drifted from behind the closed bathroom door. He cast a single sneer toward the room as the sound died. So much trouble. All the damn trouble in the whole damn world.
He rubbed his fingertips together, the sound like sandpaper, and then turned the knob. The latch clicked, and he pulled open the door. Orange light fell on him, and he squinted. Something shuffled outside the door, and he gave his guest a pained smile, motioned to enter while still trying to shield his eyes.
Heavy footsteps passed him, maybe not footsteps but stones being dropped at regular intervals. He recognized old shoes on cheap floors when he heard them, though. When he heard the creek of rusty bedsprings and knew the visitor was past him, he closed the door and waited for his sight to return, standing there with his hands crossed behind his back.
When his sight returned, he saw the white, wrinkled shirt with the top button undone, the dry waddle of throat that rested in that V of fabric. He saw eyes that were gray and wide and a little shiny with water, saw the calm and cold determination. And the thrill. The old man had eyes like a clever and mean child, capable of thrusting knives with a wink.
The old man—the name Jenkins didn’t quite fit—watched him, sitting on the edge of the bed and saying nothing. Fingertips drummed on cotton trousers. Feet in scuffed shoes ground into the floor and then fell still. A swallow filled the silence like the twisting of a stretched rope.
Thomas watched Jenkins and refused to show any emotion. He resisted itches and breathed deep, ignoring the dust that tickled his nose and throat. Through moments that stretched and refused to yield, he held still and kept his eyes on those gray irises. Moments became minutes, became longer.
Jenkins breathed deep and released a disappointed sigh. He clapped his hands against his knees and hitched his shoulders into a shrug.
“Well?”
He shook his head and rubbed his temples. “Something went wrong.”
“Then steps must be taken.”
“Like?”
The old man’s eyes shifted to the side. For a brief moment, his fingers resumed their cadence. Then, he swallowed again before examining his nails.
“Tell me who knows.”
The first sack arrives after midnight.
Ben wakes when somebody pounds on the door. The hammering sound startles him from sleep, and he leaps from his bed, his mind already racing. Fire. Tornado. He wonders what other disasters might have occurred, but then he looks out his bedroom window and sees nothing but the apartment complex and a calm night.
He tosses the pillow he had been hugging to his chest. In his dream, it was a woman, somebody warm and wonderful. That was last year, though. Now, it’s 2012, and he lives alone. The pillow isn’t anybody. Certainly not….
Melissa. Her name appears as his next thought, and he rushes from the room in T-shirt and boxers, the frantic motion chasing his cat, Si
mon, under the bed to hide. As he sprints to the door, he thinks of all the things that may have happened. They flash through his brain in a terrible slideshow of car accidents and falls and broken bones. He wonders if maybe something happened to the dogs.
Even so close to frantic, he still checks the peephole. A part of him hopes he’ll see Melissa waiting for him. Maybe something’s wrong, or maybe she’s lonely. He sees nothing but the empty landing outside his apartment though, and it doesn’t make any sense. Ideas wander through his head—a drunk or kids playing pranks—but he opens the door, regardless. He’s out of bed, and it’s almost two in the morning. Might as well go a little farther.
The landing is still. Whoever knocked on his door is long gone. It occurs to him that he didn’t hear any footsteps pounding away from the door, but he was mostly asleep at the time. Hell, he still is. As he leans his head out and looks left and right, the world sits behind a haze of fatigue, all the edges soft, the distances different than they should be.
He almost fails to notice the sack. Grumbling, he starts to close the door, but his eyes catch sight of crinkled brown paper. Pausing, his head sticking out from behind the door like a snooping old woman, he eyes the bag. A simple, paper lunch sack, the top rolled shut. It sits there like a lonely puppy, almost expectant. He sniffs at the air, but doesn’t smell anything. The suspicion it might contain a nice lump of shit weighs in his mind, but then maybe the bag would be on fire. He remembers the prank well. His step-father used to tell him about it whenever he tried to be funny.
Cautiously, Ben steps out from behind the door and lowers himself into a crouch. He reaches for the bag. The paper feels old and soft against his fingers, and his eyebrows knit with curiosity as he unrolls the sack and opens it, tilting it so he can peer inside.
He gasps and almost throws the sack across the hall. Instead, he recoils, something hitching hard in his throat. Scrambling backward, he slams the door and locks it before dashing for his cell phone. His fingers are numb and shaking, and it takes him three tries to dial 911.
Will the Sun Ever Come Out Again? Page 5