Canals

by Everett Powers

  “Cases. We got our third this morning.”

  “Third?” Baskel said, confused. “I thought you just had one, yesterday.”

  “Nope. Three in three days.”

  “Shit,” said a guy with nicotine-stained moustache.

  “Yeah,” Lawless said, “tell me about it.”

  “No wonder you look like hell,” said a different guy, who smiled and showed crooked yellow teeth.

  “Thanks,” Lawless said, not smiling.

  “You got anything yet? Any leads, any idea who’s doing this?” It was Ex-Jock’s turn to speak. He looked at Lawless when he talked, but went back to Jensen’s chest before he got his answer. She crossed her arms and frowned.

  “We have some stuff, but we’re still waiting on labs and autopsies. I can show you what we have later today or tomorrow, when we don’t have five hundred people staring at us.” Then I can tell you about our funky DNA, shaky eyewitness, and, you’ll really like this, my psychic experiences! We’ll order pizza and beer.

  “Hell of a crowd,” Smoker said, looking around. “We should get moving before someone sticks a TV camera in our face.”

  “You want to see the body,” Baskel asked, “make sure it looks like your stuff?”

  Under no circumstances did Lawless want to see the body, but he hadn’t thought of a way to get out of it, so he nodded. “Might as well get it over with.”

  Yellow Teeth said, “You show ’em, Dave.” They’d seen enough.

  Lawless and Jensen followed Baskel onto the footbridge.

  At the tarp, Baskel said, “I don’t know how the other three victims looked but this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Whoever did this is one sick son of a bitch. I hope he rots in hell.”

  He lifted the tarp enough for Lawless and Jensen to see. The smell hit them first. Lawless, closest to the body, fought the urge to heave again. His stomach was empty but he still didn’t want hundreds of people to see him retching over the rail, his body out of control. He turned his head and took a deep breath.

  “I know what you mean, man,” Baskel said. “I lost my breakfast in the canal as soon as I got here. Ain’t no shame in it. Shows you’re human.”

  Lawless nodded and plunged back under the tarp, holding his breath. Jensen crowded in next to him. He first noticed the white legs and purple veins; old-lady legs. There were spots of blood on her white sneakers and a few drops on the wooden bridge. Jensen put her hand over her mouth and gasped, fighting to keep her breakfast down.

  There was a crater where her head should have been and something hung out of the hole, part of an organ, something familiar: Lawless realized it was part of her heart. The bite extended almost to her shoulders, stopping at the collar bone. Flies moved over the meat and blood in their drunken, random crawl, not caring who saw or hated them because the eating was seldom this good.

  Jensen’s stomach had had enough. She tried to make it off the footbridge, but didn’t. She leaned over the railing and vomited into the canal.

  Even though it was just vomiting, and no one really likes to watch someone else vomit, it was still action, something. The crowd pressed against the yellow tape and craned their necks, pushing and shoving, trying to see who was tossing their lunch.

  Lawless turned away while Jensen emptied her stomach; he was afraid to watch or offer comfort it would likely get him started. The smell and flies bothered him, but the woman’s appearance didn’t; he’d seen her before.

  “That’s enough,” he said to Baskel.

  Baskel let go of the tarp and they waited for Jensen to finish. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and walked off the footbridge. Yellow Teeth offered her a handkerchief and muttered something about it being the last clean one. Ex-Jock had lost interest, put off by the sight of her puking her guts out.

  “Well?” Baskel asked Lawless.

  Lawless nodded. “The first guy lost his arm and part of his chest. The second guy had his legs taken off, but got to keep his feet. He tied off one leg with his belt but bled out crawling to his truck. All we found this morning were feet. The rest of the kid was gone.”

  All four cops stared at him.

  Ex-Jock: “You find any anything in the water?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  They stared.

  Smoker, lighting a cigarette: “Someone hauls the body parts away?”

  Lawless hesitated. He had already told them more than he’d planned; he wasn’t ready for a tell-all. “You might say that.”

  Yellow Teeth: “We didn’t find shit here. No blood on the ground. No sign of a struggle. No witnesses. Nothing. You find more on the other cases?”

  “No.”

  Yellow Teeth again: “I don’t see how anyone could set all this up without leaving a mess. I mean, there had to have been gallons of blood.”

  Lawless saw an opening. “You know what, let me put together a package today and we can get together tomorrow morning. I’ll get you copies of the photo cds, labs, evidence sheets, whatever we got. What time you want to meet?”

  Baskel, apparently the lead detective, looked like he wanted something now, not tomorrow. But his divers were back and he had to release the body to the morgue, so he nodded and said, “How’s ten?”

  “Ten’s fine. You’re place or mine?”

  Baskel frowned. “Mine,” and he walked away.

  Jensen made to leave, but Lawless stopped her. “Let’s hang around for a minute, see what the divers found.” She didn’t look happy, but nodded.

  They joined the group talking to the divers. It was a brief meeting: the divers had found nothing.

  Lawless and Jensen left, trying to skirt the edge of the crowd. People stared at them as they walked by. A young shirtless male with a tall can of Budweiser in his hand got in Lawless’s face. “What’s the body look like, man?”

  Lawless knocked the can out of his hand. “It’s illegal to have an open container of alcohol in public. Now get out of my face before I throw your ass in jail!”

  Upset over losing his beer, the man jabbed his finger at Lawless and said, “Hey, man, why’d you scrum my brew?”

  Something slipped in Lawless’s head: he grabbed the man by the throat and threw him to the ground. The man looked into Lawless’s red face and saw madness in his eyes. Lawless squeezed and the man shrieked.

  “Aaah! Aaah!” He screamed in a high-pitched voice, like a girl’s. “Aaah! Aaaaah!”

  “Shut up, you bastard!” Lawless yelled into the man’s face, squeezing harder. “Shut the hell up!”

  The man shrieked louder and a crowd gathered, drawn by the comical sound and the action. Jensen pulled at Lawless’s arm, but he held fast.

  “Aaah! Aaaaaaah!”

  Someone in the crowd started to laugh. “He laughs like a girl,” a voice said over the shrieking. Others joined in laughing, more crowded up, but no one moved to help Jensen pull Lawless off.

  The man’s eyes bulged and Lawless was throttling him so tight he’d stopped screaming.

  Jensen grabbed his arm above the wrist and pulled, putting her weight into it. Lawless let go, but still looked at the man with rage.

  Jensen pulled at him. “Let’s go, Danny.”

  The man found his voice and screamed and the crowd laughed.

  Lawless let Jensen drag him away, lurching like a zombie, a red-faced member of the undead. By the time they got to his car, two blocks away, the rage had passed and all the fight had gone out of him. Jensen kept looking back over her shoulder, expecting to see a posse galloping after them with guns drawn. Reaching the car, she realized the posse would come later, disguised as a lawyer demanding money for pain and suffering. She pushed him into the passenger’s seat and got behind the wheel, started the car and made a U-turn, almost clipping a minivan.

  “That was a hell of a show back there,” she said, speaking for the first time since leaving the park. “What were you going to do, strangle him right there in front of three hundred people?”

  When h
e didn’t reply, she glanced at him. “Lawless?”

  He stared out the front windshield, unresponsive.

  “Hey,” she said, hitting him in the arm.

  He didn’t move.

  She wanted to vent and didn’t appreciate being denied her wish. “Hey!” She shook him harder, almost shoving his face into the dashboard.

  Still, he didn’t respond.

  “Great,” she said. “One minute he’s Hulk Hogan and the next he’s the Tar Baby.”

  He went out to the monster in his rage and found it in the canals.

  They drifted together in the current, and he understood why it liked it here: it was quiet and peaceful. The canal muted the sounds humans made; there were no sirens, no screams, no constant rumbling from the highway as mankind raced about on their silly errands, no canned laughter from the television, no school bells, no crying, no shouted threats, no gunshots; nothing, not even the sound of water flowing over cement walls. It occurred to him the creature did not possess the sense of hearing.

  It did have eyes, though, and he soon realized its vision was attuned to the gloom of the canals, but not to bare sunlight. He recalled how shocking and offensive the noontime sun had been when it, they, killed the woman on the footbridge.

  It was at peace here in the canal. It was home.

  Being with it in this psychic link or bond, he realized it felt the pulse of all matter. It discerned living creatures from inanimate objects by the nature of the frequency their forms emitted. The weakest frequencies were those emitted by inanimate objects because they had no life. These frequencies were white noise and were ignored.

  Lower life forms emitted frequencies higher than inanimate objects, but far below human frequencies, primarily because they felt no emotions higher than those associated with basic survival, such as fear and hunger. It had learned to also ignore life with such simple emotions as it was an inferior source of nourishment.

  Humans emitted frequencies of the greatest magnitude due to their greater capacity to feel: love, jealousy, hatred, envy, despair, joy — all higher emotions were many times more powerful than those associated with basic needs. These higher emotions enriched human flesh, making it sweet and a superior source of energy and nourishment than the flesh of lower life forms.

  For these reasons, the creature now hunted only human prey.

  They swam together in the country, away from areas of dense human population. It came here to temper its hunger, to rest while the planet’s bright star was out and it couldn’t hunt.

  The feeding on the footbridge was brazen and went against its survival instincts. Its genetic programming told it it was unwise to feed on human flesh too often, especially in the midst of their places of dwelling. But the prey had presented itself to it and it had been unable to resist the offering, so great was its hunger.

  He sensed the creature’s hunger was growing at an alarming rate.

  There was much more he wanted to know about the creature, but he was out of time; it had sensed his presence and was sending him back.

  And it was not happy he had hitched a ride with it as it swam through the canals.

  “Dammit, Lawless! Where the hell are you, you crazy son of a bitch!”

  Lawless had been laying on his back on Jensen’s couch for over an hour, and even though his eyes were open and his eyelids blinked, it was clear no one was home behind the pupils. She’d tried everything to roust him from his catatonic state, from throwing cold water in his face and yelling in his ear, to slapping him, hard. She pinched him, grabbed his balls, and tickled his feet, but got nothing.

  Finally, she sat on a footstool in front of the couch and cursed at him.

  She knew he was back when he said, “Where am I?”

  “It’s about time, you psychotic son of a bitch. You scared the hell out of me!”

  He sat up and looked around, disoriented. He looked at her, but she saw no recognition on his face.

  “Who am I, you dumb ass?”

  He ignored her question. “Why am I wet?”

  She shouted, “You don’t know who I am?”

  “Of course I know who you are. What I didn’t know, though, was what a foul mouth you have. You curse like a sailor.” He ran a hand through his wet hair, perplexed, as if his hair had never been wet before.

  This set off a new stream of obscenities from Jensen. She stood and stomped back and forth in front of the couch, swearing, stopping every now and then to jab a finger in his face. Lawless said nothing, correctly guessing the best thing to do was keep his trap shut.

  She plopped down on a bean bag chair, after calling him every name he had ever heard, plus some he hadn’t, and glared at him. He felt terrible but had no idea what he’d done.

  At some point in her ranting, she’d answered his question as to why his shirt and hair were wet, but he didn’t think she’d told him everything. He wanted to ask, but didn’t know if it was safe for him to talk yet.

  Carefully, he said, “The last thing I remember was Elk Park. We were leaving, walking through the crowd, and the next thing I know I’m flat on my back, staring at your ceiling.”

  “You don’t remember knocking a beer out of someone’s hand and trying to strangle him?”

  “No. I did that?”

  Lawless’s look of surprise was genuine, so she softened her stance. “Yes you did. You grabbed him by the throat and threw him to the ground. Then you proceeded to strangle him while he yelled like a girl.” She smiled a little when she recalled how the man had screamed, but when she realized she was smiling, snapped out of it and scowled at him. He had put her through hell for more than an hour and she wasn’t letting him off that easy.

  “If I hadn’t pulled you off, he’d probably be dead and your ass would be in jail. As it is, you’ll be lucky if he doesn’t sue you and the Sheriff’s Department for ten million dollars.”

  Lawless had no recollection of grabbing anyone by the throat, ever, but from the look on her face, he didn’t doubt his guilt. Lots of things had changed in the past few days.

  “What happened after that?”

  “I dragged your ass to the car and drove you here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “My place, you dumb shit. Where else do you think I would take you?”

  “Sorry.”

  She crossed her arms and said, “What happened?”

  It was here, looking at her, understanding she had used fury to keep fear at bay, that he realized he probably loved her. Although it’d been only a day, less than twenty hours, since she’d gone home with him, he felt they’d been together for months, even years, perhaps forever. The left side of his brain said he was infatuated with her youth and the sex, but the right side told him it was more than that. He knew he could tell her anything, even this.

  Her expression softened as he recounted his tale of riding with the monster.

  After he finished, she said, “Wow. I’m sorry I called you an asshole.”

  “What about all those other things you called me?”

  “Those I meant.”

  They grinned at each other.

  He asked for a towel, took his wet things off and dried his hair. She opened a bottle of wine, white, and they sat on opposite ends of the couch looking at each other and sipping, but not talking.

  Then she said, “Do you think you could do that again?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Ride with the monster,’ or whatever you called it.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t seem to have any control over my psychic trips. They just happen.”

  “’Cause that would be cool.”

  “Cool? What are you talking about? There’s nothing cool about it.”

  “Think about it.”

  He did, and said, “I see your point. If we knew where and when it was going to show up, we could be waiting for it.”

  “Yeah, that’d be real cool. We could do that.”

  He set his wine glass down and rubbed his forehead. �
�There’s just one thing. I’m afraid I’ll lose my mind; go on one of these trips, be inside that thing when it kills more people, and never come back.”

  She shivered. “You can really see it?”

  “I was inside it, feeling what it felt, thinking what it thought. It was like, I was me and it at the same time.”

  His cell phone chirped. He followed the sound to his jacket and dug the phone out.

  “Lawless.”

  He listened for a few moments. “What’d they say?”

  He listened again. “Yeah. Yeah. Same as before. They’re just trying to make sense of something that makes no sense at all. It’s not about you, Larry.”

  He listened some more. “You’re sure?”

  Then, “Okay. Say, Larry. I’m supposed to meet with Modesto PD tomorrow and share what I have on these killings. Any chance of having some autopsy reports to show them? I know today’s killings would be asking too much ... Right. Great. Just have her fax them over, would you? Thanks, Larry.”

  He clicked off, walked over to the window and peeked out between closed blinds, thinking.

  She said, “I take it that was Brouchard, the coroner?”

  “It was,” he said, without turning around.

  “Did he get the DNA results back on the Weston killing?”

  “He did. The DNA was identical to the stuff he took off Sanchez. The lab’s saying he screwed up both samples, that he’s incompetent. He’s furious.”

  He turned to face her. “We have two problems: how do we stop it and what do we tell the Modesto cops tomorrow?”

  She looked surprised. “What do you mean ‘we’? You want me to go with you to the meeting tomorrow?”

  His face reddened. “Well ... yes ... I would like it if you continued to work on this with me. I need someone I can trust, someone I can talk to who won’t think I’m nuts.”

  “Whoa. I never said I didn’t think you were nuts. You trip out on me again like you did today and I might just push you into the canal and let the monster have you.”

  He knew she was joking, at least partly, but he was serious. “My life was in your hands today and it will probably be in your hands again before this is all over. I don’t know why but I can’t imagine trusting my life to anyone but you. Thank you for taking care of me when I wasn’t here.”