by Joe McKinney
“I’ve never seen anybody go comatose with fear,” Levy said. “I’ve seen men lock up, sure, but never like this.” He chewed on the skin at the corner of the fingernail of his right thumb and then spit it into a trashcan below the TV. “I don’t get it.”
“Me either.”
“What do you think? Are we wasting our time with this guy?”
“Probably.”
Levy shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why is he like that? What did he see in there? I mean, he obviously saw something.”
“I’m sure he did,” Anderson said.
There were six interview rooms, and all of them were in use, all of them with a video feed to the TV screens in front of them. One of the screens showed a junkie named Gustavo Guerrero, who’d been found sleeping in the tall grass near the south entrance to the plant. He’d told them he’d shot up inside the plant earlier in the day and then wandered out to the gate to sit and watch the sunset, but had fallen asleep instead. He said he woke up a few hours later and thought he heard people screaming inside, but it was hazy in his mind, and anyway he hadn’t paid it any attention when it happened. He’d just rolled over and went back to sleep.
Anderson wondered who he’d heard screaming. There were bodies everywhere inside the plant, and yet only a few of the victims seemed to have put up any struggle at all. Whoever had done the murders had evidently gone systematically through the tangle of rusted catwalks and pipes and machinery and rooted out everybody he could find, almost as if he—Or they, Anderson reminded himself—were clearing the building, exterminating it. He didn’t know if exterminating was the right word to describe what he had seen on the inside, but it sure seemed like it.
“But what did you see?” Anderson said to the man centered in Screen Two. “How did you make it out alive?”
And then, almost as if he were responding to a movie director’s call of Action! David Everett reacted. His eyes had been open the whole time, but suddenly they shot open. They changed in a flash from lifeless black coals to a terrorized, rolling stare. He exploded out of his chair and crashed into the desk, into the wall, into the door. He knocked his chair over and fell over the side of the desk, and as his face splashed across the camera’s view Anderson could see the man’s eyes bulging from his face, like a horse that’s fallen into a bolus of denning rattlesnakes, white flecks of spittle bubbling on his scorched lips.
The man screamed—an unnatural, primal sound so shamelessly naked in its pain that it sent goosebumps down Anderson’s spine.
“What the...?” Levy said.
Anderson ran to Interview Room #2, Levy close on his heels. Three detectives got there ahead of them and charged into the room. David Everett spun around on them right as they entered, grabbed the chair next to him, and smashed it into the chest of the first man through the door. He ran at them, screaming and kicking, not to fight, but to get away from something that seemed to close in on him from all sides at once.
He punched a detective in the jaw. The man grabbed Everett by the hair at the back of his head and spun him around, slamming his face into the wall and then spinning him around again as he forced him down to the carpet. Two other detectives grabbed Everett by his wrists and forced his hands behind his back.
Anderson looked over his shoulder and saw detectives and uniformed officers running their way. He pointed at the closest uniformed officer and said, “Gimme your cuffs! Now!”
The officer slapped the cuffs into Anderson’s palm and Anderson pushed his way between the detectives holding Everett down. He worked one cuff onto the junkie’s left hand, but Everett was fighting hard, and he’d pulled his right hand loose and stuffed it under his body. Two officers were trying to extract it, but he was slippery, and they couldn’t get it.
“Stop fighting!” Anderson yelled at him. “Gimme your hand. Now!”
A uniformed officer knelt down next to Everett’s head and dug his thumb into the mandibular angle where Everett’s bottom jaw hinged with his skull.
“Put your hand behind your back!” he said.
The officer’s hand was turning white from the force he was applying to Everett’s pressure point. It was an old school pain compliance technique they taught at the Academy. Anderson had had it done to him many times during training exercises, but never with the kind of force this officer was applying. Even a little pressure should have been enough to make most people comply, but Everett was clearly in another world, because the pain didn’t seem to touch him.
“No,” Everett said. “No no no no no!”
“Just put your hands behind your back and the pain’ll stop,” Anderson said.
“No,” he said. He was panting, the words barely audible. “No don’t no don’t no don’t. He’ll find me. No...can’t...stop! Stop him...he hurts.” And then he stopped saying words altogether and sank into screaming. Horrible, horrible screaming.
Somebody got leverage and forced Everett’s hand out from under his body. Anderson grabbed it and slapped the cuff on it, then stepped back and threw his hands up, like a calf roper at a rodeo.
Everett went on screaming. It wasn’t the sound of pain though. Not pain of the body anyway. The man’s soul was being shredded like a piece of paper. He screamed and screamed and screamed until there was nothing left inside him but the pain, and then he let his face fall to the carpet and he began to sob.
Some of the officers stepped back, leaving a uniformed officer holding him at each shoulder.
“Sit him there,” Anderson said.
The officers picked him up and sat him in the chair he’d thrown at the first detective to bust through the door.
“What’s your fucking problem?” Levy barked at the man, but Everett had sunk into his comatose state again.
“He wants more dope,” one of the officers said.
“Meth freak,” another said.
Anderson ignored that. Everett wasn’t a meth freak. This was something else. Not the ravings of a drug addict. Not meth. Not heroin. Not cocaine or horse tranquilizers or anything else. That man’s just looked into hell, he thought. Not a hell of his own making, either. Somebody opened the gates and showed it to him. Held his face down into the stink of it and rubbed his nose in it.
Everett’s head lolled on his shoulders, and for a moment, there was something in his eyes, something like a cry for help. Anderson was sure he’d seen it. There was a man inside there, a person, however despicable, but a person nonetheless, being tortured beyond the limits any flesh could endure.
But if the man had been there, he was gone now. All that was left was a burned out shell, breathing raggedly.
“He’s got something on him,” one of the detectives said.
The detective was looking at the palms of his hand with his nose scrunched up in disgust. Anderson looked at his own hands and saw a fine coating of black oily soot there. He ran a finger along his palm and it felt gritty, oily and...nasty.
The two officers holding Everett to the chair recoiled, but kept him at fingertip range, just in case.
“Somebody get a box of gloves,” Levy said.
An evidence technician came forward a moment later with a box of blue latex surgical gloves and passed them out. Levy directed two uniformed officers who had just put on gloves to watch Everett, then directed everybody else to go wash up.
“No telling what he’s got,” he said.
***
Anderson washed his hands in the bathroom sink down the hall. He turned the water on as hot as it could go and scrubbed his hands with soap, but the gritty stuff was slow to come off. It stuck to his skin like grease.
Levy walked in and stood beside him. “You okay?”
“Yeah. It’s coming off.”
“What are your thoughts?”
“We can’t let him go,” Anderson said. “As soon as he walks out that door, we lose him.”
“You think he’ll talk?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Eventually.”
“What was that nonsens
e he was talking about?”
Anderson looked at him in the mirror and shrugged.
“You heard that, right? He sounded deranged.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no way the DA will sign an order to hold him as a material witness based on that. He’s delusional.”
Anderson shut off the water and shook the excess from his hands. Then he pulled a few paper towels down from the dispenser and dried off. He sighed deeply and said, “I don’t know what to tell you, Chuck. But there’s something there. I saw something.”
Levy cocked his head at him. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Anderson said honestly. “I don’t know. Something.”
Levy looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted his collar. Then he said, “I can’t justify holding him.”
“We have to, Chuck.”
“Well, I’m open to suggestions. Give me a reason.”
“What about taking him to a psych hospital? Have him held there for observation?”
“You mean an emergency detention?” Levy considered that for a moment and nodded. “That might work.”
“It’d be good for seventy-two hours at least.”
“Yeah. Okay. Let’s do that. I’ll have a patrolman write up the order. Here’s hoping we’ll get something for our trouble.”
Anderson loo
ked at his hands and frowned.
“What?” Levy asked. “You okay?”
“Yeah. This stuff won’t come off.” He turned the hot water up all the way and got more soap. “Damn it. What is this stuff?”
Chapter 6
Paul awoke from a restless dream he couldn’t quite remember. All that remained of the dream were a few random images. They were vague and disjointed and unsettling. He’d stood on a sun-baked, dusty plain in...had it been Mexico? In the dream he’d been certain, but now all he could remember was the heat of a white sun, bone-colored dust blowing in his eyes. He remembered black, rock-strewn mountains in the distance. A goat stood under a blue sky streaked with fast-moving cirrus clouds. There was an old, leather-skinned Indio woman holding out a live rattlesnake for him to take.
He rolled over onto his side and looked across the open space of the apartment. The dream slipped away and he didn’t bother to pursue it. Shafts of sunlight pierced the yellowed windows on the west wall, filling the room with light. The room felt hot, and his skin was damp.
Rachel was unpacking a box of paperbacks and sorting them onto a bookshelf. He watched her without moving. She wore pajama pants low on her hips and a white camisole top with no bra underneath. He breathed slowly, tracing her curves with his gaze.
He could smell coffee and something cooking, a strong spicy smell of cumin and garlic and chili powder, and it got him out of bed. Rachel’s chili was his favorite. He came up behind her and put his hands on her hips. She eased into him as the tips of his fingers ran lightly along the inside of the waistband of her pajama pants. He felt the warmth of her skin, the smoothness of her belly. He let his hand sink lower.
“Paul,” she said, like she was annoyed, but also amused. She put her hands on top of his, but didn’t push him away.
“Good morning,” he said.
“It’s not morning.”
“Feels like morning,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, and giggled. “I can feel that, too.”
Her breasts rose and fell against his arms. He kissed her neck, tasted the light sheen of sweat on her skin with the tip of his tongue, and she yielded to him with a breathy sigh. Her hair brushed against his cheek and the smell of it, clean and light, pulled him in.
Rachel turned into his arms and kissed him. His arms and his shoulders were massive in her small hands. She touched his chin with her lips, and then his shoulders, and his chest, and then stared up into his eyes, taking in his face.
She frowned gently, backing away without stepping out of his arms. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“What?”
“Your forehead?”
“Does it look bad?”
“It looks gray, almost like ash or something.”
“Ash?”
“Yeah. Does it hurt?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s darker than it was this morning.” She squinted at it. “It’s weird. It almost looks like letters. Are you sure it doesn’t hurt?”
“I don’t feel it at all.” He touched it, pressed it with his fingers. “Don’t feel a thing.”
From the street, brakes squealed. A horn went off. Their rented house was on a main road, and traffic noises were common throughout the day. Paul had already gotten to the point where he could pretty much block it out.
She touched his cheek.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
He moved his hands down to her hips. He picked her up so suddenly, so effortlessly, that she gasped. Then he lowered her back onto the bed with exaggerated ease.
“You bet I am,” he said, and nibbled at her ear as she giggled and writhed in his arms.
***
When Paul went into work later that night he realized he was the only cop in the place without black tape over his badge. He’d seen pictures of officers with their badges blacked out when he was a cadet. Paul knew the officers in the field did this kind of thing, but it never occurred to him to ask where the black tape came from. He’d just assumed…well, he didn’t know what he’d assumed. That someone would just give it to him and tell him how to wear it maybe.
He tried to get Mike’s attention so he could ask where to get some, but Mike was standing with a bunch of other officers, deep in conversation. And then roll call started and Paul found himself sitting through the lieutenant’s briefing feeling conspicuous and stupid. No one said anything to him, no one got on his case about it, but he still felt like people were staring at him, judging him somehow.
There wasn’t time to talk to Mike after roll call either. Sergeant Garwin called the entire Forty-Four Section into the conference room for a meeting. When Garwin entered the room he patted Paul on the shoulder and took up his spot at the head of the table.
“Okay, buds, you guys gather around.” He waited for the stragglers to filter in from the roll call room, and then for the chatter to die down. “Okay, you guys all in?”
They all mumbled “Yes sirs” back at him.
“Okay, buds, you know what happened last night. The Lieutenant wants us to find witnesses. He thinks if that guy we pulled down off the catwalk made it, then maybe somebody else did too and we just don’t know about them yet. What I want you to do is spend all your downtime asking questions. Find the junkies in your districts and ask them if they were there or if somebody they know was there. Okay?”
Collins leaned over to Wes and said, “Yeah, I see that going nowhere fast.”
“That’s the wrong attitude, bud,” Garwin said, looking straight at Collins. “We all got to do what we can in this, and I think we got a good game plan to work with. All we’ve got to do is find that one person who saw something. We’re not gonna do that if we don’t look.”
“Sarge,” Collins said, “I agree we gotta do something. But you know as well as I do that a junkie’s a completely worthless piece of crap. He’ll tell you anything or nothing, whatever he thinks is gonna get rid of you faster. You can’t believe anything they say.”
“We just want you to talk to them, bud. That’s all. We’re not arresting them. If we make that plain to them, then they’ll talk to us.”
“Yeah, but Sarge, that’s my point. They’re not gonna talk to us. Or if they do, whatever they say is gonna be a lie. All we’re gonna end up doing is gathering a bunch of gossip together. And once they figure out what we’re doing, they’re just gonna start having fun with us. We’re gonna end up chasing down a bunch of dead-end leads, and meanwhile the guy who did this is gonna be running straight to Mexico.”
Several of the guys grumbled at this, but Paul couldn’t tell if they were angry at
Collins or if they agreed with him. He suspected it was probably a little of both.
Seles said, “Would you let him finish, please? Christ, what an idiot.”
Collins wheeled on him. “What’d you say? Come down here and say that.”
“Knock it off,” Mike said.
“You heard what he called me.”
“I said, ‘Knock it off.’”
Collins backed off. He didn’t say anything else. No one did.
Mike turned to Garwin and said, “So, Sarge, you want us to talk to every junkie we can find?”
Garwin looked at him, and he seemed uncertain. Paul could see that Mike was giving Garwin a clue to move on, just get the briefing done with, and he was stunned that a patrolman could have so much unofficial influence over the way a unit worked together. There were leaders, he realized, whose power didn’t come with chevrons and brass badges.
Garwin said, “Yeah, that’s right, Mike. Even if you don’t like it, I want you to start talking to your junkies anyway. Don’t make any arrests if you don’t have to. Make it plain we’re just talking to them. Try to get some cooperation.”
He looked around. Nobody spoke.
Garwin dismissed them, and as they were filing out, he stopped Paul and said, “Hey bud, where’s your tape?”
Paul put a hand over his badge.
“I didn’t know where to get it,” he said, which wasn’t really a lie. There hadn’t been a line-of-duty death since he’d joined the Department, and this was all new to him. It was one of those things they don’t really teach at the Academy, the etiquette of death.
Garwin nodded.
“Here,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket and taking out a black felt ribbon with purple at the top and bottom edge. There was phrase stitched into the ribbon with gold thread: NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT. Paul had no idea what it meant, but he fumbled to put it on his badge anyway.
Garwin watched him struggle with it, then said to Mike, “Help him with that, bud. Will you please?”