Walk Hand IN Hand Into Extinction : Stories Inspired By True Detective

by Christoph Paul

  “And a dog talks to you.”

  “And a dog talks to me.”

  “It’s enough,” Yeller said. “There are no small deceptions. Each and every one is an aberration to reality, the tiniest crack in the façade. In enough time you will tell so many lies that the façade will disintegrate and your reality will merge with the truth.”

  Justin took a long drag off his cigarette. “Reality. Truth. And killing people.”

  Yeller wagged his tail. “Don’t be confused. This isn’t a wheat and chafe argument. This world is all chafe.”

  “I think I’ve proven that I’m not listening to you.”

  “But you don’t deny that I speak the truth.”

  “The truth is that a talking dog is going to follow me around forever. Or at least until you get hit by a car.”

  They ventured deeper into the forest. Justin picked his way through the trees and Yeller scouted all around him, never straying more than a few yards from his master. He sniffed through the fallen leaves and pissed on a few trees, muttering things that Justin couldn’t hear. They stopped as Justin put out his cigarette on a stone, taking care to grind out every cinder.

  Yeller trotted up with jagged leaves tangled in his shaggy golden hair. “Where are you going?” he said. “You’re wandering further than usual.”

  The dog wanted him to argue, and Justin knew to be noncommittal. “I’m just wandering, I guess,” he said.

  “There are no random steps taken,” Yeller said. “You are being summoned, drawn into the primal unknown to face your destiny.”

  Justin said nothing. He put the wrinkled cigarette butt in the pocket of his jeans and took out his pack to light up another. Then he walked away. Yeller watched him for a moment before running to catch up. They kept walking, the leaves crunching beneath their steps, Justin stealing glances back the way they came so he didn’t get lost. He was leading them northeast, toward who knew what.

  Yeller barked.

  Justin looked to see the dog staring at something, his legs stiff and his nose pointing through the trees. He walked over, the cigarette drooping from his lips, taking his time. He figured this might be another one of Yeller’s tricks. He stood over the dog and looked in the direction his snout was pointing.

  “What you figure that is?” Yeller said.

  “It’s a cabin,” Justin said, squinting at the big wooden box with saplings growing up against the walls. “Looks old.”

  Yeller looked up at him, waiting for direction.

  “Let’s check it out,” Justin said.

  “This is strange,” Yeller growled.

  “Still just walking, Yeller,” he said as they approached the cabin. “It’s not as ominous as you think.” They stopped a few paces from the open door of the cabin, the interior black and shadowed.

  “This place has been here a long time,” Yeller said. “A hunting cabin, probably, but it’s abandoned now. There’s something inside, though. I smell blood.” The dog looked up. “Will you go in?”

  “Into the spooky abandoned cabin?” Justin said, and sucked hard on his cigarette. “Why not?” He walked up to the doorway and stubbed the cigarette out on the splintery doorframe, standing right in front of the dark interior of the cabin. A cold breeze seemed to pulse in and out of the doorway, breathing on Justin and lighting up the cinders that fell from his cigarette.

  Yeller watched him disappear into the shadows. The dog slowly walked up and sniffed at the cigarette ashes scattered at the foot of the doorway. When he was sure there was no trace of smoke or burning, Yeller stepped inside after his master.

  The cabin was a single room, with just a few rays of light from a dirty window in the back wall. The place was coated in dust and spider webs. Yeller saw Justin down on his haunches, squatting low and examining the floor. The dog came close to see, but his nose already knew what it was from the stench lingering in the air.

  “Blood,” Justin said, lighting up another cigarette.

  From the flash of the lighter they could see the scene. A circle of blood covered the center of the floor, coating the wooden planks like dark mud. Justin raised the lighter and they saw the source of the blood sitting before them like a monument of mutilated flesh with a halo of flies buzzing over its head.

  Yeller and Justin took their time studying the specifics of the dead man. He was the recipient of carefully applied violence, a terrible wrath that had been cultivated and controlled. He sat in a wooden chair, nude, a rope wound around his waist to hold him up with perfect posture. The hands rested on the arms of the chair, a nail through each palm to hold them fast. The feet looked to be nailed to the floor as well, caked in dried blood.

  Between his legs was an open gash where most of the blood had spilled. The missing genitals were stuffed into his mouth, a bit of hairy meat parting his lips. The top of his face was hidden by his scalp, cut and peeled from his head and draped over his eyes like a mask. The skin was dry and shriveled, the blood turned to crust. The halo of flies took turns crawling around on his exposed skull.

  “Is it ominous yet?” Yeller asked.

  Justin blew a plume of smoke at the dead man.

  “This is someone’s work,” the dog said. “This man was prepared, made into some psychopath’s art project.”

  “Looks like he was tortured,” said Justin. “The scalping and castrating didn’t kill him, the loss of blood did.”

  “This is evil, Justin. This is horror born from hell. He couldn’t have deserved such pain. He was some innocent man, going about his business, before some monster leapt out of the shadows and grabbed him, brought him back here. Now you see, Justin. This is the wickedness I’m always telling you about.”

  “You’ve been begging me to go to the grocery store and mow everybody down with a machine gun.”

  “I’ve never begged you, Justin.”

  Justin sucked on his cigarette. “This isn’t just evil,” he muttered. “It’s somebody’s ritual. This is somebody’s murder den. But then why would he leave the body here to rot?”

  “Part of his ritual, perhaps.”

  “Maybe,” Justin said. “Maybe it’s like you said, an art project. Maybe he wanted somebody to find it.”

  Yeller sniffed at the blood and took a step back before sitting on his haunches. “Justin,” he said softly, “we found this for a reason. You were meant to be here, to find this room and the horror that’s inside. It’s up to you now, to bring it into the light, because the creature that did this? He has to be stopped. A thing like this can only lurk in the shadows for so long. You’re looking into the eyes of evil, Justin, and you have the power to end it.”

  Justin chuckled, and in the quiet darkness it sounded vicious. “I told you to stop telling me to kill people.”

  “It’s not like that!” Yeller snapped. “I’m just saying… take revenge. For this man and who knows how many others this has happened to. You can find this killer. I’ll help you. You can become the hand of justice and rid the world of this evil.”

  “You just want me to kill.”

  “And this is the best reason to do it!” Yeller said. “Besides, this is all evidence and now that you’ve seen it you are a witness. Perhaps you are an accessory, if the police decide it. They could actually pin this murder on you if they find out about it. All the more reason to find the killer yourself and be done with it.”

  Justin looked over at his dog. “How would we find him?”

  “I can track his scent!” Yeller said, his tail wagging.

  “And the police would never have to know?”

  “Precisely!”

  Justin stood up, sucking hard on his cigarette. He walked around the circle of blood to the back of the cabin. The dog watched. Justin went to the dirty window, where dusty curtains hung on either side. Justin took out his lighter and held a flame to the bottom of each curtain. “The first thing to do,” he said, “is destroy the evidence.”

  Yeller let out an excited bark.

  The two of th
em left the cabin as the flames ate away the curtains and spread to the old wood that made up the ceiling. The thatch roof began to smoke as Justin and Yeller walked back into the woods. The fire overtook the cabin as they left the woods and walked up the street back to Justin’s house. Yeller’s tail wagged the whole way.

  Later that night they heard the sound of sirens and fire trucks. Yeller lay on the floor next to Justin’s bed, wondering how much of the forest had burned along with the cabin. He listened to Justin lying in the bed above him. He knew he wasn’t asleep, but his breathing was slow and shallow. The dog’s tail stopped wagging and his mind drifted away, dreaming his evil dreams.

  Yeller woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. He wasn’t certain what was happening, but he knew Justin was betraying him.

  Very quickly, Justin wrapped the dog in a sheet and tied it up with rope. The dog tried to buck his body and gnash his teeth at his master’s hands, but within moments he was wrapped tight and thrown over Justin’s shoulder. He carried him outside into the backyard and into the woods. He walked a few yards before he dropped the dog on the ground. Then Justin lit a lantern and set it next to Yeller. The dog’s snout protruded from the cloth cocoon and one eye could see a shovel in the soft light leaning against a nearby tree.

  Yeller’s brown eyes went wide as he watched his master dig. “Justin?” he said. “What’s happening?”

  Justin silently plunged the spade into the dirt, repeating the motions again and again. Yeller watched him carve out a dog-sized hole in the forest floor.

  “Why are you doing this?” the dog said.

  Justin kept digging. Yeller sniffed and smelled smoke in the air from the burnt cabin. “You… you are the one, Justin. You killed that man in the cabin. Didn’t you? After all these years you finally did it.”

  “No,” Justin said. He stopped digging and turned to look at the dog, his face lit by the lantern’s soft glow. “You’re trying to confuse me.” He started digging again.

  “Then why?” Yeller barked.

  “Because you killed that man in the cabin. You tortured him and displayed him, and you waited for me to find him so you could deliver your fancy speech about wickedness and the hand of justice. I’ve been thinking on this all night, waiting for you to go to sleep. You killed to get me to kill… to get what you always wanted.”

  The dog stared for a moment. “Oh… okay, look…”

  Justin’s shovel stabbed into the earth once more. “I figured you’d be happy,” he said. “Happy that I’m finally killing someone. Even if it’s you.”

  Yeller said nothing. His face lay flat on the ground, limp, motionless, one eye staring up at Justin as he finished digging the hole. Justin lay the shovel aside and came to pick up his dog. Yeller’s head hung limp as he lifted him and laid him in the ground. He picked up the shovel and began filling the hole. The dog said nothing as he was buried alive. He just stared up at his master, and in the dim glow of the lantern the man stood tall in the darkness like an avenging angel.

  5

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF BAD MEN by Tom Leins

  We are on the fifth floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. The Cantonese whorehouse takes up the entire fourth floor of the building. I’m gaffer-taped to a wooden chair in a room that is small enough to be a prison cell. There is a rack full of shotguns above the TV and a long brown stain on the ceiling, roughly the size of a body. Gilligan referred to it as the ‘Games Room’.

  Gilligan is huge. He looks more like a wrestler than a cop. In truth, he’s barely a cop. He’s a small time racketeer with a badge and a gun. The sleeves of his hounds-tooth jacket are rolled up to the elbow. His hair is scraped back and hangs limply over his collar. He has the bloated features of a long-time vodka drinker. The puckered pink scar between his left eye and his jawbone pulses angrily. He hits me in the face – twice, in quick succession. I work a tooth loose with my tongue and spit it at his feet.

  “I’ve always had a soft spot for you, Mr. Rey … in the middle of Clennon fucking Valley.”

  The sickly voice belongs to a cadaverous sex offender known as Meat-Rack. He is wearing a dark suit and a short-brimmed hat. His clothing smells like a hooker’s mattress. He’s half Cantonese and all-the-way sick. He has links to the Triad, but he’s not a major player.

  He coughs in my face and it smells of Babycham.

  “Mr. Gilligan, please prepare the crate.”

  Two days earlier.

  “I’m sorry – I’ve interrupted your lunch, haven’t I?”

  The woman in the trench-coat looks nervous. She has sleepy-looking brown eyes and her hair is a soft shade of honey-blonde.

  I crumple my beer can and toss it towards the wastepaper basket. It misses.

  “Don’t worry, I was just finishing up.”

  She hovers awkwardly in the doorway. She has the lithe, long-legged body of a dancer.

  “My name is Sylvia Lloyd. I wonder if you can spare a few minutes of your time? I have a job I would like to discuss.”

  I gesture towards the swivel chair opposite me. It was salvaged from a skip, but it doesn’t look too bad.

  She sits down slowly, and gazes warily at the office walls.

  One wall is plastered in press clippings for all of the cases I have worked on – at least the ones that ended well. Another wall contains photos of all of the missing persons that stayed missing. The wall behind me is blank apart from a faint blood spatter-pattern that has been there since a man called Clarence Clement pulled a knife on me two years ago. Admittedly, that had nothing to do with the day-job: I picked up his wife in the Dirty Lemon one Friday night.

  I didn’t realize that she was married, and I took my beating like a man. However, I felt that the knife was excessive, and I broke his arm in two places and pushed him down the stairs. The paramedics had to scrape him off the pavement outside the North Atlantic Video Lounge. I left the blood on the walls partly out of laziness and partly as a reminder of my own mortality.

  I inherited the office from a disgraced ex-cop known as Wet-Look around four years ago. He was a bad man, one of the worst I have known. For some reason he left me the office in his Will – believed we were kindred spirits – on some level, at least. The only other things he left behind were an upholstery knife and a half-empty bottle of ulcer medicine, both of which I found in the top drawer of the desk.

  I have been tracking down missing persons and other miscreants for around five years. It pays surprisingly well – even in a small town like Paignton. Nowadays I turn down more work than I accept, and the only jobs I agree to take are the ones that I can’t think of a good reason to turn down.

  Sylvia unbuttons her trench-coat. Her leopard print blouse clings to her breasts. I’m ashamed to admit that she has my attention.

  A shabby-looking fat man stumbles through the door, breathing heavily. He stinks of rotten cigarettes. His nose has been broken so many times he has to breathe through his mouth. It gives him an unfortunately slack-jawed appearance. I open the desk drawer and put my hand on the rubberized grip of one of my two claw hammers. I don’t plan on getting stabbed in my own workplace again in a hurry.

  Sylvia looks alarmed.

  “Mr. Rey – this is my husband, Frank.”

  I drop the hammer, and slide back into my swivel chair. Jesus. My back feels slick with sweat. I look around for another beer, but come up short.

  Sylvia passes me a photograph. The picture seems to be of her and another girl.

  “My daughter: Priscilla. I was 15 when I had her – people say that we could pass for sisters.”

  I nod. She’s very attractive. Full lips, strong chin, high forehead.

  “Last week she was offered £300 for a photo session by two men on Winner Street. They had business cards, credentials. I encouraged her to go along.”

  “What happened?”

  “She never came back. Frank went looking for her, but he asked the wrong questions in the wrong pubs. They broke all of his fingers and fractured his
cheekbone.”

  I glance up at him and he grimaces, awkwardly. I stare at the press clippings on my wall instead.

  “Any other distinguishing features?”

  “She has a large tattoo of a black flower on her back. I never liked it.”

  Sylvia re-applies her maroon lipstick. It makes me feel slightly queasy. I slide the photo into my desk drawer, next to the hammers, and take a deep breath.

  “OK, I’ll take the case.”

  “What’s your daily rate?”

  “Don’t worry – I’m very affordable. We can settle up later.”

  She clasps my hand.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rey.”

  I withdraw my hand.

  “Don’t thank me yet. Write your phone number down on this pad and I will contact you in one week or less. I’ll be frank with you: if I can’t find her within seven days she is probably already dead.”

  A solitary tear trickles down Sylvia’s cheek. Frank’s breathing becomes ragged and he vomits on the carpet.

  The basement at Paignton police station has been painted brown so that the blood doesn’t ruin the walls.

  I’m not a cop. I’m not even a good man. But I am effective. Last year I tracked down a man that the press called the Plastician. He was responsible for the murder of six girls – four of them prostitutes. One of them was only eleven.

  Carver – Detective Inspector Carver to his colleagues – used to hate my guts. Luckily for me, he has always hated the Triads more. I used to do investigative work for a mobster called Malcolm Chung – well before Carver’s time – and that particular career move still seems to carry weight locally.

  When a Cantonese girl was found in Palace Avenue Gardens with an eyeball stuffed in her mouth Carver offered me a commission to track down the men responsible. I delivered on my end of the bargain, and now we have a quid pro quo arrangement. He doesn’t get in my way, if I don’t get in his.

  Simon Sloman is a methedrine addict. He has a tough face and a broken nose, but he is too soft for what Carver is about to do to him. The interview room stinks of ruined lives. I’m watching Carver through the scratched one-way Plexiglas. He paces the room like a caged animal, scratching at his acne scars. If I didn’t know him I would think that he was the skell, not the cop. The ridge of scar tissue on the bridge of his nose twitches as he starts to talk.