Canals

by Everett Powers

  She made a face. “You’re too serious, Lawless. You need to lighten up.”

  “I’ll lighten up later. Right now we need to do some brainstorming.”

  She found two pads of paper and they sat at her dining table.

  “Hold on,” she said, getting up. “I’m out of wine. You want some more?”

  “Do you have any red wine?”

  “No, I don’t have any red wine. You get white or you get Coors Light.”

  “White’s good.”

  She got the wine and returned to the table.

  “What did we learn today? Anything?” he asked, getting started.

  “I learned not to take you to the park.”

  “Funny. Really, what did we learn?”

  She thought. “Something that’s different today is, it killed twice.” Then, “So far. I guess the day’s not over.”

  “Right. It’s accelerating its feeding pattern. When I was with it, that’s something I got. Its hunger is growing.”

  “That doesn’t really help us with anything,” she said. “In fact, it’s kind of scary to think it’s going to be killing more people.”

  “I know, but it’s something we learned and right now we’re just trying to get everything on paper. We can analyze it later.”

  She frowned. “We need to get some dinner. I’ve been hungry all afternoon.”

  “Well, yeah. You emptied your stomach in the canal, remember? Can’t you wait a little? What about a snack?”

  She thought, then went and made microwave popcorn. The smell of the popcorn kindled Lawless’s appetite; he devoured over half the bowl while finishing his glass of wine, then relented about dinner.

  She changed and they went to his place. He came out of his room wearing something she didn’t like.

  “Don’t you have anything ... younger?”

  “What’re you talking about, ‘younger?’ This makes me look old?”

  “Don’t get upset, but no one wears Dockers anymore.”

  “I wear Dockers.”

  “Yeah well, they make you look old. What else do you have?”

  She poked around in his closet, pulled out a pair of black jeans and a gray pullover knit shirt. “Here, put these on. Black’s slimming.” Then, with a twinkle in her eye, “You think you can find some shoes to go with it?”

  “I’ll try.” He pulled out a pair of Clarks and Rockports to mull over. Picking the Rockports, he said, “So you think I need to wear slimming clothes?”

  “When was the last time you used your department-issued gym pass?”

  “When was the last time you had that overbite looked at?”

  “Most guys think my overbite is cute.”

  “ ‘Most?’ How many are we talking about here? Twenty? Thirty?”

  They grinned as she checked out his new outfit. “Not bad. The shoes go good.”

  “Don’t tell me about the shoes.”

  They picked Mexican, went to a place they knew and ordered tamales and a pitcher of margaritas.

  They ate and chatted. He found out she grew up in Ceres, a small town near Modesto, and she learned he was raised in the Bay Area by a single mom. He said he didn’t know anything about his father, which was close to the truth. Her parents had been married for twenty-five years and she claimed to be the only one in her high school group not screwed up about marriage. She had two brothers and a sister. He was an only child. He didn’t play any sports, no surprise for her there, and she had never been a cheerleader.

  Back at her apartment, after parking, Lawless got his CD wallet out of the trunk.

  “What kind of music do you listen to?” she asked as they walked to her apartment.

  “Opera. It helps me think.”

  “Opera? You listen to opera?”

  “Yeah. Don’t you?”

  “I can’t believe you’re going to make me listen to opera.”

  “It won’t be on very loud. You might find you like it, if you give it a chance.”

  She stopped in the doorway, kissed him on the mouth and said, “I like being with you. You’re a fun guy. But I don’t know about this opera stuff. I have my reputation to think about, you know. If my neighbors hear opera coming from my apartment ...”

  He smiled and realized how natural it felt, being with her all evening.

  “That’s not the reputation you should be worried about,” he said, putting a CD into her stereo.

  “Oh, that’s real funny, Lawless. Wanna hear what they say about you at the office?”

  “No.”

  He adjusted the volume low. She made a face and rolled her eyes.

  With full stomachs and Italian opera playing, they went to the table and got back to work. They talked and discussed for an hour, until her head started hurting. They had a page of notes on what they would tell the Modesto cops tomorrow, but the page titled “PLANS FOR KILLING THE MONSTER” was blank.

  He put that page on top and said, “Okay. Let’s move on to how we’re going to kill it.”

  She sighed, put her face in her hands and said, “I can’t take any more of this right now. Between the opera and all this talk about monsters and death, I feel like my head’s going to explode. I need a break.”

  “You don’t like the opera? You should have said something. We can change it.”

  “You’re the one doing most of the thinking so if it helps you, I can live with it. I need a break, though,” she repeated.

  “Why don’t we finish this first? Then we can rest.”

  “Screw that. Let’s go to a club.”

  “Club? Modesto has clubs?”

  “Lawless, you’re so old.”

  Chapter 8

  Modesto did indeed have clubs; four, five if you counted the cowboy bar on

  8th Street. All were downtown, part of a redevelopment plan that began in the mid-1990s.

  Phase one was a new state-of-the-art theatre, and, across from the theatre, a city government building dubbed “City Center.” Next, north of the theatre, a thirteen-story DoubleTree Inn, by far the tallest structure in Modesto. After that, a convention center that shared walls with the Inn, a gamble the city hoped would attract out-of-town dollars. It eventually did, but not until the redevelopment plan was well into its advanced stages.

  Redevelopment fever spread from the City Center block outwards, more west and south than north and east. One-by-one, street-by-street, down went the old, up went the new. Most old downtown businesses either closed their doors or moved north to the mall, and beyond, to shopping centers anchored by Costco and Target. Replacing them were restaurants, a cigar room, the four clubs, attorneys, more restaurants, more attorneys, and assorted other businesses. The only old business that stayed was a pawn shop.

  Jensen took Lawless to Big City, the biggest and most successful club in town. The experience would be, for him, comparable to taking someone from rural China and plopping them into the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve. After entering the club and looking around, he estimated he could have issued a hundred citations for indecent exposure.

  Jensen took him by the hand, dragged him to a bar and ordered.

  “Here,” she said, handing him his drink. “No one drinks wine here. It’s beer or mixed drinks.”

  “Okay,” he grumbled. He hadn’t wanted to come, felt guilty for taking time off when they both knew the monster was going to strike again, soon, and that someone would lose their life. He argued on the way to the club that they should be preparing for tomorrow, looking at maps or taking target practice at the department’s shooting range.

  “It would be a shame if we got a chance to shoot it and missed,” he had reasoned.

  “We’ve been preparing all day,” she countered. “And besides, too much work and no play dulls the senses and slows the reflexes.”

  “I don’t see how drinking and dancing will sharpen our senses or improve our reflexes.”

  But he gave up, seeing her point about having some diversion time. After all, they didn�
��t know where the creature was or where it would strike next, and they couldn’t possibly patrol all two hundred and fifty miles of canals.

  He took a drink — it tasted like it looked: sweet and fruity — and watched in silent awe a part of his culture he had never experienced. Women with huge breasts and tiny waists paraded by, wearing pants that barely covered their pubic bones and tops that clung like a second skin. He stared, not with lust but in disbelief.

  Jensen saw him looking and said, shouting over the thumping music, “They’re fake, you know, so don’t get too impressed.”

  “How can you tell?” he asked, watching a redhead strut by.

  She looked at him like he was an idiot. “You think it’s natural for a woman who’s five-five and weighs one-fifteen to have breasts the size of cantaloupes?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “You’ve never thought about big breasts?”

  “I never thought about the ideal ratio between height, weight, and breast size.”

  She shook her head and looked out into the sea of writhing dancers, starting to feel the music.

  A minute later, a busty but fuller-figured young woman passed, chasing a tall guy with earrings.

  “What about her?” Lawless asked, nodding toward the young woman.

  “Fake.” Jensen said, starting to move.

  “I don’t get it. Hers were more in proportion to her body.”

  “They were perfectly round and exactly the same size, and they barely moved when she walked.”

  “So?”

  “So natural boobs don’t look like that.” She couldn’t believe he didn’t know all this.

  “Why not?”

  She tuned him out and started snapping her fingers.

  Lawless drained his glass. Jensen grabbed it and went back to the bar to get more.

  He returned to the parading females, with new eyes.

  She came back with something different, not so fruity, and suggested they find somewhere to sit where it wasn’t so loud; her lecture on breast implants had been shouted and her throat was sore. They found a table by a wall.

  Two young women with skinny waists and big breasts walked by. Jensen asked, “Real or fake?”

  “Fake.”

  “Right. You get to move to the front of the class. And you can stop looking now.”

  They sipped their drinks until a song came on that Jensen liked. She stood and said, “I wanna dance.”

  “Uh-uh, not this guy. I can’t dance.” He leaned back.

  “Everyone can dance, Lawless. Some know how and some don’t, but everyone can dance. Come on, I need to burn some calories.”

  “Go for a run, then,” he said, as she pulled on him. “Someone will take our seats.”

  “Not if we leave half-full glasses they won’t. And if they do, you can flash your shield and tell them to get lost. Now come on,” pulling, “you’re gonna dance with me.”

  He grumbled, but let her pull him up.

  She led him through the twisting jumping crowd into the middle of the dance floor, and it occurred to Lawless that he’d been to one dance his entire life, his high school senior prom, and he couldn’t recall whether he’d even danced then. He had no idea what to do. He looked around and decided to try and copy the moves of a black guy dancing next to them. Ten seconds later he gave up, thinking it would be easier to paint the Mona Lisa. He shuffled his feet back and forth, trying to feel the rhythm, failing miserably.

  Jensen was wearing tight black Bongo jeans and a simple white blouse unbuttoned to show cleavage, but nothing like what the other women were showing. Her eyes were closed and she moved with the music, blending in with the other young dancers. She opened her eyes, made eye contact, and put her arms over her head, gyrating her hips. Embarrassed she would do something so suggestive in public, he glanced around to see if everyone was staring.

  No one was; they were all dancing like her, except that Jensen’s moves were tame compared to what he saw. Several couples, if they were naked, would be having sex on the dance floor. Others were locked in what looked like a hip embrace: thighs thrust into the groins of their partners, grinding in-and-out, around-and-around. Men and women were taking turns sliding their hands up and down the bodies of their partners, lingering in places, making suggestive motions. He stared at one couple, his mouth wide open, until the guy noticed and shot him a dirty look.

  Distracted, he hadn’t seen Jensen coming in so when she closed his mouth with her hand, he jumped. She laughed and said, her mouth close to his ear, “Wanna try some of that?”

  His eyes grew big. “Here? With all these people looking?”

  She laughed again and turned her back to him, arms high over her head. She moved in, slow, hips swaying with the beat, until her buttocks nestled into his crotch. He shuffled, trying to keep in step with her, trying not to knock her down. What the hell is she doing? She leaned her head back into his chest and closed her eyes. He could smell her hair. He looked down her blouse. Her buttocks caressed him and he stiffened. Sweat rolled down his forehead. She danced against him for half a minute, a minute.

  He glanced to his left and saw a young woman staring at them, drunken lust in her eyes. She started copying Jensen’s moves, tried to get her partner to follow. He threw up, splattering his date and scattering everyone within a twenty-foot radius, including Jensen and Lawless.

  Taking him by the hand, she led him to their table, which, as she predicted, was still vacant. She kissed him on the mouth like she had at her apartment, only this time she lingered and probed with her tongue. She pressed her hips against him. He pressed back, almost out of control.

  “And you thought you couldn’t dance,” she said, breaking the kiss.

  Exasperated, he said, “That wasn’t dancing, that was foreplay.”

  Jensen laughed and they sat.

  Lawless downed his drink. “I can’t believe I just did that in public.” Then he grinned.

  Jensen was still laughing. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Detective. Now you can say you’ve dirty-danced.”

  He looked around. “Isn’t there another dance floor, one that’s not been puked on?”

  She laughed again, and he saw how her eyes twinkled when she laughed ,and he thought he loved her, again.

  Later that night, after their lovemaking, Lawless held Jensen in his arms, in a position very much like the one they had danced in at Big City. His ears still buzzed.

  They had left the club at eleven-thirty in a big hurry to get back to her place. An hour and a half of drinking and dancing in a sexually stimulating manner was more than Lawless could take. Jensen had said she wanted to stay longer but her behavior in the car on the way home said different; they pawed at each other, as much as Lawless could without wrecking the car, kissing and groping at red lights. Like high school kids. At her place, their lovemaking had been brief but vigorous.

  He’d asked her to set the alarm so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting with the Modesto cops, but she refused.

  “I don’t need an alarm. I just tell myself what time I need to get up and that’s when I wake up. Besides,” she added, snuggling into him, sleepy and content, “your dream will wake us up by five anyway.”

  “No. I’m not dreaming tonight. I’m sleeping.”

  “Whatever.” She was asleep thirty seconds later.

  Lawless fought sleep for a while, tried to concentrate on the creature, to reach out to it mentally. At least he thought that’s what he was doing. He hoped to link up to it again, see if he could find out what it was up to. He tried everything he could think of, even clearing his mind of all thought, thinking it would come to him, or he to it, or something. He got nothing and fell asleep.

  The creature felt him probing, like ship’s sonar searching for a submarine in the vast ocean beneath it. It had no intention of letting him in again.

  When he’d been with it before, swimming in the canal, it didn’t detect his presence because nothing l
ike that had ever happened. After it sensed him and sent him away, it recorded his frequency in its nervous system. Then, as a programmer rewrites software to block a particular virus, it reprogrammed its nervous system to watch for him. Now, when it felt him pinging, the new program threw up a psychic wall that kept him out.

  The creature did not derive joy from this victory, this adaptation. It did not know joy or sadness, happiness or grief. It could sense the impressions these emotions made in the psychic tide of life, but could not experience them. It knew only hunger.

  Another adaptation had occurred after it fed on the human the night before. When it first struck, it knew there was another human prey nearby. It left that prey alive because it was programmed to kill and flee, but when it decided to finish feeding on the human it had killed, it felt the live prey’s fear increase ten-fold. The combination of the nourishing flesh, already infused with rich emotional sustenance, and the heightened fear of the live prey made the feeding many times more satisfying.

  The creature made note of this and rewrote its code.

  Now, as it left the quiet of the country to begin its nightly hunt, it would test the new program.

  It was just after one in the morning when Gunther Burke parked the 97 Ford Escort rental on Cheyenne, near the upscale Whitegate subdivision in north Modesto. He hopped a brick wall and walked north on the bank of Lateral No. 7, toward Kampen, where he planned on robbing a house next to the canal. The moon was almost full and lit up the night.

  He wore two layers of clothing; the outside layer lightweight black nylon, easy to remove. Underneath, a jogging outfit. If seen he could lose the nylon layer, in the canal if possible, and become a jogger out for a midnight run.

  Burke was a thief because his parents were thieves, two of the best. The police never caught them and now, with five million in the bank, they lived modest but carefree lives in the Bahamas. He spent three months a year with them, relaxing on a white beach, and worked the other nine. He planned on retiring at forty and was right on schedule with almost two million in an off-shore account.