Habeas Corpus: Black Womb (Black Womb Collection Book 1)

by Matthew LeDrew

  He took a long pause, meeting her gaze evenly. He reached over, picked up her drink, and took a small sip before asking, “What? What don’t you need?”

  “Ugh!” she screamed, her cheeks puffed out with frustration. She thrust her fingers into the air, then turned on a dime and leapt off of the table, pausing for a moment to see if Xander would try and stop her. He didn’t. She walked away, trying hard to take as much swivel out of her hips as humanly possible.

  Shnieder stepped out from behind a tree, his eyes behind him at the two young girls having a smoke by the corner. He bumped into Cathy, who narrowed her eyes at him in frustration.

  “I... I was just...” he stammered, slowly backing away as he realized their bodies as a whole were touching.

  She set her jaw, her mouth seeming to become smaller as she got even angrier. “Men,” she spat finally, disgust in her voice, then shoved past him.

  Shnieder, awestruck and looking very much like a small furry animal caught in the headlights of a eighteen wheeler, turned to Xander for explanation. Xander merely shrugged one shoulder lazily, maneuvering the straw of Cathy’s former drink to suck up the last little bit of cola.

  Mike stomped into the playground, almost knocking into Cathy and barely realizing it was her, his eyes fixed on the picnic table at the far corner which Xander occupied. “Oh!” he squirmed, trying to get around her. “Sorry, babe!”

  She gave him a little shove, then made her way past him and toward the bottom floor locker room to get ready for her Biology class.

  He squinted, and could have sworn he could hear her touting profanities against testosterone on her way down the stairs. He shook it off, regaining his set jaw and driven stare. Mental note: if I ever understand that girl, commit self into nearest mental hospital.

  He made a beeline across the grounds for Xander, who watched his approach calmly. They both ignored Shnieder, who was still whimpering next to the tree after his confrontation with Cathy, rubbing his bald head and trying to wrap his mind around girls.

  Some things, it seemed, didn’t change as one got older.

  Mike stopped a foot in front of Xander, who was now staring down into the drink cup, as if there were something in the bottom that nobody else was aware of. It was something he did when he was depressed. His mind started latching on to simple things, trying to keep itself occupied so that it wouldn’t drift back -- to her. Mike knew this and often dealt with invading thoughts in the same fashion, but he found different things to grasp his thought processes. He took out a C.B.H.S yearbook of last year’s date and threw it down onto the table between them, the leather binding smacking against the wood with a hard thump.

  Xander ignored this, seeming very intent on discovering what lay just past the bottom of his drink cup.

  Mike motioned toward the yearbook with one hand, still with no words, his jaw seemingly locked shut.

  “Did you tell Cathy what a carpenter’s dream was?” Xander asked finally, still ignoring the green leather book with Coral Beach High School engraved on it in golden letters.

  “Open the book,” Mike sighed.

  “Are there bars full of chocolatey goodness inside?” Xander asked with a weird, manufactured grin. “I’ve got a weird case of the munchies today.”

  “Just open it, okay?” Mike growled, annoyed at Xander’s indifference. “It’s important.”

  “Is this for real, or is this like the time you told me my parents were dead?”

  “Open. It. Why is this difficult?”

  Groaning at the mere idea of movement, Xander lifted his arm and opened the front cover. He began to flip stupidly though the pages. He passed a picture of Sara with some senior at last year’s grad, blowing a kiss into the camera. He turned the page quickly, then looked up at Mike. “Is there a point to this, or are we just taking a fantastic trip down memory lane?” he asked, his voice sounding tired and old. He stopped, pretending to point to a spot behind a brick wall, his voice filled with mock wonder. “Hey, look! It’s that spot where I threw up after the middles threw me a beating. Good times!”

  “Page seventy-four,” Mike replied, disregarding his friend’s crudeness.

  Xander flipped open to the page Mike had said to go to. It was an eighth grade gallery from last year, with all of the students’ individual shots. He shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

  Finally, Mike sat down across from him, turning the book sideways so they could both look. After scanning the assortment again for a moment, he came upon a picture of a brunette girl with green eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, the kind that really showed up in sunlight. She had a nice smile, like something out of a movie. Mike tapped the picture twice. The file name next to it said Julie Peterson.

  “Cute,” Xander agreed, nodding.

  “She was walking home from school last week, the way that she has taken for nine years. The same way we take home. Three guys, the youngest was probably twenty-eight, grabbed her and dragged her into an alley. They all raped her, and they all took a turn, and then they beat her,” Mike said, leaning in closer to Xander as he spoke. “The doctors are saying her uterus is pretty much demolished. And you know what? The alley was right across the street from her house. She has to look at it now every time she-“

  Xander raised a hand for him to stop, and he did. There was a long moment of silence then, as Xander traced the outline of the girl’s small face with his index finger, then carefully closed the book. He pressed his elbows into the wood of the table, knotting his fingers together in front of his mouth. “What are we going to do about this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mike admitted, slumping down onto the table. “Can we do anything? Should we? She isn’t even going to press charges.”

  “What?!” Xander yelled in astonishment, gaining the attention of the principal. He calmed himself, then repeated: “What?”

  “She won’t tell anyone who did it. Most people in school are just calling her a slut.”

  Xander shook his head. “The ignorance of this school’s student body amazes me sometimes. What about a rape test?”

  “She has to give consent, and as soon as the doctor mentioned it she wouldn’t let him near her again.”

  “Can you really blame her?” Xander reasoned. “If I’d just gone through that, I wouldn’t want any cruddy old man going down there with a pair of forceps any time soon.”

  “Guess not.”

  They both sighed, just as the school bell rang. They looked up into the Science Lab as one, watching Cathy as she sat down to her Biology class. She waved to them, all the anger she’d felt moments ago having wasted away in the halls.

  “I can’t help but think that it could have been her.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Xander nodded glumly.

  “Are we going to do anything?”

  Xander looked up at Cathy, sadness creeping over her soft face as she started to stare into space. “Oh, you’d better believe it.”

  CHAPTER THREE:

  SUPER HERO

  Cathy stared blankly out the window of room two oh three, watching a few sparrows dance and fly about. They interacted with one another playfully between the rays of sunlight that streaked across the sky in such well-defined lines that they almost looked solid. A few strands of her jet black hair fell down in front of her face again, and she considered taking the special bio-room scissors and lopping it all off. She settled for simply pushing it behind her ear for the fifth time that minute. That was okay, though. The little annoyances helped. They meant that she had something to focus on. That she could pretend she didn’t hear their voices.

  All around her, the rest of her Biology class was talking, most of them so loud that she couldn’t have blocked them out if she’d wanted to. But every now and again, there was something worse. The quick rush of air that accompanied a whisper. Every time she turned to look in whatever direction it had come from, notes would mysteriously drop from desks and eyes would dart away to the nearest available
place, many of them choosing to watch the sparrows as well.

  She closed her eyes and let her chin drop until it rested against her blouse. It was white with little frills across a neck that was unusually high for her. She was also wearing pants that were higher up her stomach than she’d ever worn before in her life. She might as well been wearing overalls.

  Yet still, they whispered.

  Even Mr. Miles, standing at the head of the class pointing out the greater aspects of evolution and the Darwinian theories, something about birds on islands in a place she’d never heard of before. He wasn’t saying a thing about her, at least not verbally. But his eyes were casting odd glances her way. At the beginning of the year, those eyes had been kind, the wrinkles around his cheeks had made him look warm, and his British accent had marked him as a kind soul. Then, after the murders, his gaze turned to pity. That one had been popular among a lot of the staff at first. They looked at her the way she looked at the children from Afghanistan in one of those telethon pledges for PBS. In the final stage of this ‘face evolvement’ theory of hers, it was like the dual islands of birds in Darwin’s theorem. Half of the school’s population had done what Miles was doing now: looking at her with a kind of suspicion that was hurtful for both of them to have on his face. The other half (a segment grossly populated with boys) were looking at her as if she were, in their own words, a ‘slutty piece of tail.’ She never did understand that expression, but she felt she was starting to get the gist of it now. She looked down, and realized that her bra was visible through her blouse in this light. She grabbed her jean jacket and quickly pulled it over herself, then glanced at Mr. Miles, who suddenly seemed to no longer harbor any interest toward her.

  She clutched her jacket around herself and leaned her delicate head against the window, deciding it best to keep her attention focused on the sparrows.

  “So how are we going to do this?” Xander asked Mike as the latter stowed his bag back into his locker, the halls wonderfully vacant at this time of day. It seemed as though Mike was very angry at the book bag, but Xander decided it best not to comment to that regard, lest he become the subject of his rage in its stead. I swear, if my life gets any more like a Shakespearian play I’m going to start auctioning off the TV movie rights, he groaned mentally, rolling his eyes as the bag’s belt buckle kept falling out and preventing Mike from closing the locker door.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice borderline sarcastic, just enough so that Xander couldn’t make heads or tails of what he meant. He slammed the locker door shut, the lock snapping into place despite the fact that the strap was still hanging out. “You being the big time superhero and all, right?”

  That time the intention of the spite-dripped words was clear. Xander closed his eyes tight, turning his head away from Mike to brush away the pain that comment had just inflicted. Engen said they were trying to make me so that I couldn’t be hurt, he recalled, somewhere in the deep reaches of his mind. I don’t think they did a very good job. “Well, who signed their name to her portfolio in the yearbook? Best friends and crap?”

  Mike stopped, turned, and smiled at Xander, waving a finger at him. “Watch out. You were pretty close to a good idea there.”

  “I’m past due,” Xander agreed, shrugging as the two started moving again. “What do you mean, ‘almost’?”

  “See, I thought of that already. But we’re gonna have a hard time tracking down most of her old buddies from the last few years.”

  “Why’s that?” Xander moaned, thinking of all the fun of sifting through yearbook photos.

  “You killed them all last week,” Mike replied. His tone was blunt. He did not even pause as the statement stopped Xander dead in his tracks just long enough to grimace, then move on.

  “So, what else do we have going for us?” he asked, knowing that he would regret asking the question.

  Mike stopped at locker three fifty eight, spreading his arms before it and making himself look like Vanna White, or one of the models on the Price is Right. The locker was burnt along the bottom edge, most likely from a lighter, and the rest of it was decorated with Metallica and Guns n’ Roses stickers and decals. There was also a playing card with a naked lady on it, certain areas of which had been covered with Smurf bubble gum tattoos. “We have our ability to break and enter, and our willingness to do so.”

  “Is that Sud’s locker?” Xander asked, raising an eyebrow in his direction and pointing to it dumbly.

  “You know anyone else who would perform these indecencies to his own property?”

  “True,” Xander nodded, stepping up to it and giving it a good, hard look. “Now, for the fun part: why are we breaking into Sud’s locker?”

  “Because it’s also Tommy’s locker.”

  “Okaaaay,” he sighed. “Why are we breaking into Tommy’s locker?”

  “I think the question you should really be asking is: why wouldn’t we?”

  Xander shot him a look.

  Mike leaned his arm against the next locker, and his head upon his arm. “It’s like this: Julie Peterson was at Grendel’s party a few weeks ago, just like the rest of us, right? This was just after at least one of her friends was killed, and on the night that a great deal more would be. Chances are, she needed someone to talk to. Someone she felt she could tell things to...”

  “Someone, should he still be alive, that she might have told her rapists’ names to.”

  Mike grinned and fanned out a palm before Xander. “Give the man a prize.”

  Xander did a small bow, then returned to a more serious mindset. “I still don’t see what this has to do with breaking into Tommy’s locker. Not that I’m really opposed to the idea.”

  “Okay. Remember before everything started to go downhill at the party?”

  “Vaguely. I was Mr. Concussion when things did go bad, so I wouldn’t trust anything I said.”

  “Same here, but, Tommy was running around with that little camera of his snapping pictures, wasn’t he?”

  Xander smiled. “And one of those pictures probably caught Julie chatting it up with her newfound friend.” He pointed a finger at Mike approvingly. “Nice.”

  “I like to think so,” he complimented himself, doing his own half-bow this time.

  “So, ladies first?” he said, motioning to the locker as he backed away from the metal squares, keeping an eye out for Shnieder. “We should have brought Cathy. If any of our staff comes, they’ll be too busy gawking at her to notice anything we’re doing.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Mike grunted, drawing back a fist and slamming it into the Metallica stickers. He kept punching until blood erupted from his knuckles, splattering against the green metal in a semi-circle from the point of impact. In spite of that, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

  Xander raised a hand to stop him, and Mike pulled off. He was hunched over from exhaustion now, breathing hard.

  “I think you’re forgetting something,” Xander said, in an annoying father-knows-best sort of tone.

  “The Black Womb?” Mike gasped, from lack of oxygen, not astonishment. He’d actually expected Xander to pull that angle.

  “Nope,” Xander grinned, tapping his right index finger against his temple. “We’re dealing with idiots here, Harris. To catch an idiot, you have to think like one. Something I’m known to be good at.” He said this as if it were an accomplishment.

  “A’ight. Fine. How do we get into their locker, idiot?” he asked, rolling his eyes.

  Xander reached out, pulled on the lock and took it off, twirling it about in his hand.

  “Are you telling me that wasn’t locked?”

  Xander reached out and patted his friend on the head. “That’s why I’m the big time superhero, and you’re the sidekick. Now grab the photos, Fallout Boy.”

  Officer Tim White smiled graciously at Officer Lensherr as he stepped through the revolving doors of the Coral Beach Precinct, even waving a two-fingered salute as he started to peel out of the beige trenc
h coat he’d worn into the office today. He had already regretted taking it off of the rack. The day had turned out to be more humid than any day in September had any right being, making all of his joints feel chaffed and scratchy under the suffocating fabric.

  He was a tall African-American man, broad across the shoulders and looking as though he worked out at least some of the time. Muscles that were tightly coiled and honed to perfection ten years ago had begun to sag. What he had once referred to as his six-pack abs had since been downgraded to a small keg, but he still turned a head every once in a while and that was enough for him. His black hair was neatly trimmed close enough to his head that you could see that his hairline was beginning to recede. His complexion was dark and teeth bright white, so that when he smiled it could be seen clear across the room.

  Officer Lensherr smiled back and waved courteously, then grabbed a handful of files from a mail cart as it passed by and started to sort through them as he headed back to his desk, not looking up at Tim again.

  Tim smirked a little, laid his jacket over the wall of his office (which was really nothing more than a cubicle) and then leaned back in his chair. He’d been getting a lot of responses like the one Lensherr just gave him lately. Mostly because he wasn’t Officer Tim White anymore... now he was Agent Tim White, a fact he had to remind himself of at least twice a day. He had received the honor less than two days after apprehending Adam Genblade, the man responsible for the Coral Beach Massacre. For ten years he had been the only African-American on the force here in Coral Beach. Even though none of them had ever given him a hard time or so much as told an inappropriate limerick, he still felt a smug feeling of satisfaction at being the first one to ever be promoted out of the department.

  Leaning back with his hands behind his head, he stared out the open window and watched a few cars go by, puffing air in and out of his mouth. After a moment he turned back toward his cubicle. For the first time in a decade, there was nothing on the walls but unused tacks and his phone. Usually it was adorned with different cases or elements of cases, mug shots or evidence photos. The north wall was usually reserved for ongoing cases, mostly missing children and robberies. Now the wall was empty and all of the cases had been reassigned to other officers. That redistribution of casework had made him the source of a few unhappy stares in the past few days, but most people had been more than happy to pick up the slack.