The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  Garvey braced his hands on his knees and straightened his spine. The skin ringing his eyes was puffy and red.

  “Hell’s not good enough for the men who did this. Some of those animals are still alive. We got to do something.”

  I said: “It’s still technically a crime scene.”

  “You won’t see me back in there,” Newbarr said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I headed to the truck. Stepped over Irvine B. Coughlin’s white-sheeted corpse to retrieve the grenade from the cup holder. Garvey taped it to the prowl car’s emergency jerry can with white medical tape from Newbarr’s kit.

  Newbarr said, “You boys better take a look here.”

  He directed us around back of the trailer. Written on the overturned roof in six-foot high letters spelled out in dried blood:

  LET YOUR SINS GO UNPUNISHED.

  Newbarr flicked his cigarette into the weeds. “What do you figure it means?”

  “It’s a threat.” Garvey slammed the trailer with his fist. “Can’t you see? Some sick twists killed these animals so they couldn’t be used to wipe out our sins.”

  Newbarr and I crouched by the semi as Garvey pulled the pin and heaved the jerry can through the trailer door. He’d hotfooted it fifty yards before an explosion bulged the trailer’s hull and threw him to the ground.

  Newbarr came over and set a shaky hand on Garvey’s shoulder.

  “It is my seasoned medical opinion that nothing could have survived that blast. Dangerous, foolish, but effective.”

  Before making our separate ways back to the city, Newbarr drew me aside. “I’ll need you to drop by the pathology lab. I’ve been putting off Eve’s coronary report—figure you’ll be able to fill in some blanks.”

  I assured him I’d stop by in the afternoon. Garvey set the car in gear and pulled out of the breakdown lane. Those five words kept turning over in my mind.

  Let your sins go unpunished.

  I couldn’t quite draw a bead on it.

  Was it a threat . . .

  . . . or an entreaty?

  Seditious Materials

  Garvey stopped at a Puritan’s Pantry on the way back. I went to a roadside callbox and fished in my pocket for a two-gerah coin. Eve’s nickel-plated profile glared up at me from its face. I fed it into the payphone.

  I rang dispatch and was patched through to the DMV. An office drone took Irvine B. Coughlin’s name and licence number and spat info back: no pink slips, no priors, an overdue parking ticket charged to his family minivan. A dead end. I rang dispatch again and got patched through to the New Nazareth Hall of Public Records.

  A clerk said, “Who’s requesting?”

  “Acolyte Murtag, NBPD badge number 1099. Criminal background check, one Irvine B. Coughlin, 28 East Ark Avenue, New Nazareth.”

  “One minute.”

  The clerk put me on hold. I listened to a recorded sermon on abstinence delivered by The Prophet of New Nazareth: each major metropolis had its own Prophet, instated by the Divine Council.

  The clerk clicked on. “Not much to relay. He fell behind on civic tithing seven years ago but has been prompt since his warning. No Reconditioning jolts. A good Follower.”

  So the killing had been random. After briefly summarizing the crime, I said, “You’ll have to send someone round to deliver the news to his next of kin.”

  “Will do.” The clerk’s voice maintained its chipper tone. “Give all glory to God.”

  I rang dispatch and ran a check on the location of the accident report call. The operator scrolled through the daily log and told me it had been placed from a payphone on Pilate Street.

  “Kiketown?”

  Dispatch affirmed. “Just inside ghetto limits.”

  When I relayed this to Garvey, he stiffened. “The heebs had something to do with it?” Fat beads of sweat dotted his upper lip. “Isn’t Goldberg’s shop on Pilate?”

  Tibor Goldberg was a snitch who ran a vintage record store in Kiketown.

  We motored down the Bakker expressway. The budgie chirped in the backseat; I’d put it in a shoebox with holes punched in the lid.

  Garvey mashed the gas and juked in and out of traffic. He thumbed the cap off another bottle of Hallelujah Energy Boost, chugged the yellow goo and hucked the bottle out the window.

  “We are gonna lean hard on that filthy snipcock,” he said, speaking of Goldberg. “Lean until his ankles snap.”

  I tried to ease him down. “The call came from Kiketown, but that doesn’t mean anyone there had anything to do with it. Could be the perpetrators knew it was going to be logged, and dialled from the ghetto purposefully to throw the dogs off their heels.”

  “Could be,” he said. “Could be the sun god Ra descended in his golden chariot and dialled the number with one flaming finger. Could be any wacko supposition. That’s why we lean on Goldberg and get some answers.”

  Garvey was only the palest shade shy of totally unhinged—in his current state, he’d peel Goldberg like a banana.

  He tuned the radio to RBJC and cranked it. The song was “Less Than Nothing” by Jimmy Saint Kincaid; the station was airing a memorial marathon. He took the first Kiketown exit and badged his way through a ghetto checkpoint.

  In the early days of the Republic it was concluded that to eliminate all heathens would be imprudent. It would wipe out a city’s workforce. Instead they were to be segregated—quarantined was the official nomenclature. Heathen families were allotted a single child and all children were to be indoctrinated into the State Religion. These policies ensured that over a span of generations all impure faiths would cease to exist. Be eradicated was the official nomenclature.

  The car bounced down a cobbled road, through potholes filled with oily water. The buildings were squat and trollish, clad in a layer of soot that pumped ceaselessly from a solid waste incineration plant nearby.

  We pulled up across from Divine Discs. Pilate Street’s lone payphone stood directly in front of the store.

  Garvey said, “Where’s the golden calf?”

  I hunted it out of the glove box; Garvey slipped it into his pocket. We headed across the street.

  Divine Discs was long and narrow with a high popcorn ceiling. Racks of vintage LPs, carefully organized and labelled, ran down both sides. It was dimly lit with forty-watt bulbs on account of Kiketown’s energy restrictions.

  The bell jangled as Garvey plowed through the door. The lone customer took one look at us and made a beeline for the exit.

  Tibor Goldberg stood behind a glass-topped counter. Tall and handsome in a malnourished sort of way, wearing black except for the red ID band round his left arm.

  “Here he is, sitting Shiva.” Garvey’s tone was more frightening for its mock-sunniness. “Busy collecting your pound of flesh, Goldberg?”

  Golberg laughed nervously. “Aboveboard and lawfully, of course.”

  Garvey tucked his chin and pooched his lips, nodding sarcastically. “An upstanding rat such as yourself, a guy who’d squeal out his own grandma for a few pieces of silver—why would we question your integrity in matters of commerce?”

  “Officers, it doesn’t have to be like this.” Goldberg said. “You want some skinny? That can be arranged. No need to pump me like the town well.”

  I insinuated myself between them, hoping to keep Garvey’s hands at arm’s length.

  “See that payphone out there?” I said. “At eight forty-seven this morning someone placed a call from it. You need to tell us who.”

  Goldberg looked confused. “Some guy?” he said hesitantly. “Some phone call?”

  I stared him down. “I didn’t say some guy, did I? Said someone.”

  Goldberg flushed. “I don’t know anything about any call about any crime.”

  “Who said it was a crime-related call?”

  “That’s righ
t, Goldie,” said Garvey, flipping through a rack of LPs. “Could be the guy was phoning in his winning lottery numbers.”

  “When’s the last time a Jew won the lottery? We can’t even buy a ticket. I keep my ear to the ground but my eyes down, you know? Now what I do know is, a family over on Zundel Avenue’s got a box full of menorahs—”

  Garvey pulled an old record: The Very Best of Christopher Cross.

  “Mind if I give ’er a listen?”

  Garvey centred the LP on the turntable and dropped the needle. Some guy started to croon about sailing. Garvey snapped his fingers and bobbed his head to the beat . . .

  . . . then, with one finger, he started to rotate the disc backward, tortuously slow.

  Mmmwwuooubbrooouuueeeeegertuaahhuueeeedddaaaa . . .

  “Ah, man,” Goldberg whined. “You’ll ruin the vinyl.”

  “Hear that?” Garvey cocked an ear. “It’s saying . . .” His eyes went wide. “Deliver your soul to the dark lord Satan.”

  Goldberg’s face fell. “Officer, now wait, there’s no way—”

  Garvey rotated the disc faster.

  Ggggooouuuwwweeeeiiiisllllooouuuugheepher . . .

  “Now it’s saying . . .”—hissing this through clenched teeth—“heave your grandparents into the roiling lake of fire! You heard that, Murtag?”

  “Sorry to say”—I bit my lip to deadpan the delivery—“but yes, I did.”

  “Selling seditious materials, uh?” Garvey was fired up, his tongue coated in a yellow film of Hallelujah Energy Boost. “Corrupting youthful Followers with subliminal messages—is that your angle?”

  Goldberg appealed to me. “Christopher Cross was a devout Baptist. His songs played on easy listening stations.”

  I tut-tutted: “The devil assumes beguiling guises.”

  Garvey snapped the record over his knee. Goldberg moaned. I rifled the stacks and picked East of Midnight by Gordon Lightfoot, and handed it to Garvey.

  “That’s a first pressing LP in its original jacket,” Goldberg pleaded. “Mike Heffernan on keyboard, Sheree Jeacocke singing backup vocals, produced by the incomparable David Foster . . .”

  “Relax.” Garvey switched gears, went fatherly. “That other album was an anomaly, right? Your entire shop can’t be packed with treasonous propaganda, can it?”

  Garvey rotated the Lightfoot album slowly, tortuously against the grain.

  Hhhuuoooooaaaarrrdddurtaaaassssstttrrreeeeoooiinnnwwwooowwow-woaaaaii . . .

  “You picking up anything?”

  I shook my head. Once I saw the relief wash over Goldberg’s face, I said, “Wait . . . wait, I hear it now. Coming in clear as a bell. It’s saying, Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of clay—”

  Goldberg cradled his head in his hands.

  “Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, now dreidel I shall play.”

  Garvey busted East of Midnight into shards. Goldberg yelped.

  “So help me, I’ll tear this den of sin apart!” Garvey shouted.

  “I can ease him off,” I said. “Just tell me who you saw.”

  “If I saw anyone I’d say so,” Goldberg grovelled.

  Garvey seized a record at random and broke it. A valuable one, judging by Garvey’s anguished reaction.

  “I don’t believe you,” I told him. “And until you make me believe, my partner’s gonna persist with this bull-in-a-china-shop routine.”

  “Well, well, well,” said Garvey. “What do we have here?”

  Now he was displaying the golden calf idol, which he’d discreetly tucked behind a stack of 45s.

  “That’s not mine,” Goldberg said dejectedly.

  “I found it in your shop,” Garvey went on, “and possession is nine-tenths of the law. Unless this is a tiny little milking cow. Is it a milking cow, Goldie?” Garvey turned the golden calf over, inspecting it. “Jeez, sorry, no teats. So we’ve got you on intent to distribute seditious materials and possession of a false idol. Enough to send you away for a long time.”

  Goldberg rested his forehead on the countertop. “If I tell you, can you promise immunity?”

  I said, “We’ll do our best.”

  “I don’t mean immunity from you,” he said. “Immunity from him.”

  “From who?” Garvey wanted to know. “You recognized this guy?”

  Goldberg straightened up. “I never seen him before. Or ever want to again.”

  Garvey looked very interested now. “Speak.”

  “I was opening this morning, at a quarter to nine. This guy shoves past me—couldn’t do otherwise, seeing as he was wide as the sidewalk.”

  I prompted him. “So?”

  “So he goes to the callbox. This guy was so huge he couldn’t even wedge his shoulders inside. Then before he leaves he opens the callbox door and just stares at me. Marking me, it felt like.” Goldberg shivered. “He looked evil. The most vile evil I’d ever seen.”

  I thought back to the trailer scene. Whoever had perpetrated that did indeed possess a core of perfect evil. “And then?”

  “And then he’s gone. And now, a few hours later, you guys’re here.”

  “You got a clean look at his face?” When Goldberg nodded, Garvey said, “Lock up. You got a date with our sketch artist.”

  Human Remains

  Garvey hightailed it to the stationhouse with Goldberg in the back seat. I led Goldberg down the hallway and through a set of frosted swinging doors, up a flight of stairs past the evidence lockup into an empty room housing a draftsman’s table. The artist wasn’t around so I shackled Goldberg to the radiator.

  “Sit tight, Tibor. You’re a heathen in a police station; everyone’s armed and nobody will think twice.”

  Goldberg tipped his chin at the portrait of The Prophet on the wall. “I am rendered paralyzed by his mesmerizing countenance,” he said sarcastically.

  I left him and put the bird on my desk. It was chirping animatedly in its box. I dug a pack of sunflower seeds out of my desk drawer and dropped a few in for it. Then I took the elevator down to SB2: Sub Basement #2. A cramped corridor led to a pair of swinging galley doors: PATH written on the left hand door; OLOGY on the right.

  I shouldered through into a large, antiseptically white room. Meat-locker cold: the chill amplified the intensity of the halogens popping and fritzing above. Storage vaults lined the walls. Red tags detailed their residents: H. GOTCHALL, M, FOLLOWER / B. FALGUNI, F, HEATHEN. The clatter of water pipes made it sound as if the cold corpses were knocking their metal cells in an effort to free themselves.

  Newbarr entered, followed by Doe. My heart trip-hammered. I thought back to the last time we’d been alone together, her naked in the moonlight. . . .

  “You’re both here,” said Newbarr. “Marvellous. Let’s get down to it, shall we?”

  He led us to vaults tagged EVE, F and J. S. KINCAID, M. When he rolled out the slabs there wasn’t much to consider: a pair of four-gallon Tupperware containers filled with charred debris, plus a Ziploc bag holding a sizzled lump of fur with the words “Canis—Erasmus” written on the plastic in black Sharpie.

  Newbarr acknowledged the slim pickings. “It’s basically guesswork. Bits of Kincaid could be mixed up with bits of Eve—even bits of the bomber.”

  “How did you separate them out?” I said.

  Newbarr gestured to Kincaid’s container, shrugged, said, “I put the most artistic looking pieces in there?”

  Doe barked laughter.

  Newbarr pried the plastic lids off. The expelled air smelled like rain-sodden cigarettes. He stirred through the meagre evidence with a speculum, turning over knobs of bone, melted dental bridgework, flame-scored costume jewellery. A diamond crucifix winked in one fire-blackened tooth.

  He plucked a slim metal ring from the ash. “Surgical stomach band—one of them had gastric bypass surgery.”


  I said, “Eve?”

  Newbarr shrugged. “Judging by his press photos, Kincaid wasn’t carrying any extra weight.”

  He rubbed his chin with the speculum. “I haven’t been acting coroner on many suicide bombings, but in those cases the bombs were homemade jobs, and badly botched: in the first case the bomb misfired and tore the bomber in half; in the second it exploded early, killing only the bomber’s accomplice. But this recent rash has been lethal: hundreds dead, hundreds more critically injured. There’s a chilling professionalism to it.”

  He shut the vaults and opened one tagged JOHN DOE, HEATHEN. Two more containers: one of ashes, another of charred metal balls. Beside them were a pair of steel-toed boots—with a pair of burnt and blackened feet still inside them. Next to them lay a scooped metal plate pitted with tiny bowl-shaped dents.

  Newbarr said, “The explosion was baffled by this.” He rapped the metal plate. “It ensured the bomber’s body and debris were blown forward, toward the crowd. Rebound effect. The blast was so fierce it snapped the ankle bones and tore the lower legs from the feet.”

  He picked up a boot and displayed the wax-smooth tread. “Melted to the stage. I had to cut them off the boards with a knife.”

  He rattled the container of balls. “Tungsten. The metal with the highest melting point. Iron or steel would’ve liquefied. The plate’s tungsten, too.”

  Doe said, “Can you give us a reconstruction?”

  Newbarr said: “Give me an intact corpse and I could examine the stomach contents, give an idea of that person’s heritage, make presumptions regarding their last seventy-two hours on this earth. Give me a crime scene with blood spatters, a murder weapon, tissue samples, footprints, fingerprints—Lord, anything. That’s the problem with bombings—the blast erases everything. No trace to work from. Back when we used forensic science, I could’ve scraped a shred of meat from the boots and gotten a DNA fingerprint. But never mind that. Here’s one thing that still confuses me.”

  Newbarr pointed out a series of burnt discs climbing like ladder rungs up the tungsten plate. “The vertebrae of the bomber’s spinal column—they’re fused directly to the metal.”