23.
Where the houses came together, even the moon couldn’t penetrate the darkness. A narrow alleyway separated a boarded-up Victorian from the Craftsman bungalow next door, also boarded up—but the properties weren’t deserted. Up against the wall of the Victorian, three men stood shrouded in black velvet. I blinked and saw a smaller figure, too, a woman. And when I saw the positions they were in, I froze.
Two of the men stood on either side of the woman, who struggled unsuccessfully against the hands pinning her arms against the rotten siding. They’d forced her face-first against the house, the two subduing her while the third, standing behind her, reached around and did something with the front of her pants. He pulled these down, and as he did so her struggle seemed to take on a new intensity. She began to moan no, no, no over and over, gaining in volume until the man who had just pulled her pants down grabbed her by the hair and bounced her face off the side of the house.
“Shut up,” he growled.
The moaning stopped. So did the struggling. The man began to undo his belt buckle.
I knew what I was witnessing, but I couldn’t move. The scene unfolding before me came from another planet, another world whose gravities and atmosphere I couldn’t process—my muscles couldn’t work there, my lungs couldn’t breathe. A cold, slippery feeling writhed in my stomach and I thought that I had never felt so sick in my life.
“Fuck her brains out,” said one of her restrainers.
The woman began to moan again, prompting the third man to take his hands off his belt buckle long enough to smash her face against the wall again. Her knees buckled this time, and she would have fallen but for the two other men pinning her up against the house. His hands returned to his waist. I heard the clink of the buckle, then the snick of his zipper.
Do something, Bobby shouted. Do it now!
And so I did.
“What in the fuck are you clowns doing?” I barked, stepping forward. “Get your hands off that woman right now!”
Mr. Pants Puller jumped about a mile in the air, stumbling backwards so fast that he would have gone sprawling on his backside had the wall of the bungalow next door not stopped him. But it did stop him, and when he hit it he bounced forward just as his partners in crime released the woman and scrambled away from where they’d been holding her for their friend. She collapsed and fell sideways.
“Shit!” One of them exclaimed.
Shit, indeed. Three of them, one of me. Closer in now, I could see that they were all young—the one fiddling to get his pants zippered back up couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two. He had his head down, trying to see his zipper in the dark, but even with this I could tell that he, like his friends, stood taller than me. Three of them, one of me, and while the two restrainers held their hands up, in just about five seconds they would figure out that this newcomer wasn’t anyone to be afraid of and then…
Burn that bridge when we get there, Bobby said.
“Who is you?” Asked the restrainer on the left.
“Detective Bobby Swanson of the Durham Police Department,” I said in my best command voice. “You got five seconds to get your asses out of here!”
Left and Right—the threat-tracking software in my head had assigned them names already—took two hesitant steps backwards, arms still raised in the air. They’re buying it, my heart sang gleefully as they began to turn, it’s working!
But then Pants Puller finished buttoning himself back up and said, “Hold on.”
They stopped. My heart stopped singing in mid-trill. I looked down at the woman on the ground, who hadn’t moved from where she’d collapsed. If I’d hoped for an ally in all this, I wouldn’t find it in her—she appeared either dead or asleep.
Why isn’t she moving? She was moving a second ago, why is she so goddamned still…
And it dawned on me then what I’d walked into here. I blinked at the woman, at Left and Right and Pants Puller. I had thought I was witnessing a gang rape, but in reality…
A setup, Bobby hissed. You’ve been ambushed.
By golems. The Bald Man had set me up, throwing this cast and crew together to draw me into the shadows using the rope of my own good nature—the knowledge that Kevin Swanson couldn’t stand by and let something like this happen. These were golems.
I saw his bald head outlined against the window of his darkened room. His eyes glowed with red malevolence and although I couldn’t see him, I felt him grinning.
Three against one, he chuckled. Let’s see how the Hero of the Month handles this!
“If you a cop,” said Pants Puller, stepping forward towards me, “show me your badge.”
“I don’t have to show you a goddamned thing!” I growled with false confidence. I raised my voice. “You are all under arrest for the crime of attempted rape! Turn around and put your hands on the wall!”
Left and Right didn’t. Their hands began to lower.
“If you a cop,” Pants Puller said again, “show me your gun.”
Which, of course, I couldn’t do. Because I didn’t have one. I had an AK-47, but this was locked up in my gun cabinet in my basement in Burlington.
“Motherfucker!” Exclaimed Left.
“He ain’t no cop!” Declared Right.
Pants Puller grinned now, and I thought in a flash that he might not be a golem at all. This right here was a demon in the flesh, he had a brain and a malevolent soul, I could read it on his young features and see it glowing orange and red in his eyes. He reached inside his jacket pocket and came out with a small automatic pistol. He leveled it at me.
“You in a heap of trouble now, cracker,” he said. “You done fucked with the wrong motherfuckers.”
Bobby? I cried. What do I do now?
Before Bobby could answer, Pants Puller had snatched the front of my London Fog coat and propelled me against the wall of the bungalow. He aimed the gun squarely between my eyes. My eyeballs rotated in on themselves to try to focus on the gun. Unlike the knife in the hands of the man who had tried to mug me in front of my office, the gun didn’t shake.
“You a dead motherfucker,” Pants Puller said in a voice that was half-growl and half-whisper but all grin. “Oh, you is so dead!”
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. My voice sounded amazingly calm and steady. “I don’t know who you are; hell, I can hardly see you. We can all just go ahead on and…”
“Shut the fuck up.”
So I shut the fuck up.
Over his shoulder, he said, “Go ahead. Pick that bitch up and do it.”
Left obeyed. He bent over and hauled the woman to a standing position while Right first stared, then understood what he was supposed to be doing and began unbuckling his pants.
“You think you bad?” Pants Puller asked me. “You ain’t shit!”
Right worked a lot faster than Pants Puller had. His pants came undone with lightning speed, and now his hands went into them to free himself from the constraints of his boxer shorts. He moved forward towards the woman, whose head lolled from one side to the other.
That could be Abby, that could be somebody’s daughter and I’m just going to stand here and…
No.
Before I could launch another thought, my hands shot up and my body shot sideways. My palms connected with Pants Puller’s gun hand and forced it first up and then violently down as they closed around the weapon and twisted his wrist, making it mechanically impossible for him to continue holding it.
His wicked grin disappeared. His eyebrows jumped towards his hairline.
The classic pistol takeaway, as I’d practiced so many years ago with Bobby in aikido class, developed with a perfect choreography. I pulled the pistol towards me grip first. Caught in the trigger guard, his index finger—trigger finger—first hyperextended, then cracked in half, then depressed the trigger that moments ago he had been willing to pull to kill me.
The little semiautomatic fired once, a harsh explosion that bounced off the walls of the Victor
ian and the bungalow and set my ears to ringing, and threw a bullet right through Pants Puller’s left cheekbone. On its way through his skull, it severed the cords to the glowing red lamps in his eyes. The back side of his head exploded and he dropped.
That’s what I’m talking about, Bobby said.
I almost lost the pistol—Pants Puller’s finger was still jammed there in the trigger guard—but I managed to rescue it with a split-second deployment of combat reflexes and I held it out before me as Left and Right dropped the poor woman to the ground for the second time that night. Two sets of hands reached for the sky.
“Don’t move!” I shouted.
Left moved. I don’t know what he was moving to do, but in that instant it didn’t matter; he moved and I shot him once, twice, three times, blood and flesh splattering on the wall of the house behind him. Lighting flashed in the alleyway and for the first time I saw his face and…
He didn’t have one.
What the fuck?
No time to think. Lighting flashed, thunder cracked and while Right may have just been startled by the gunshots and had no intention of giving me the bum’s rush, I saw him move. Automatically, I adjusted my sight picture and fired at him, too—once, twice, three times. Two to the chest, one to the head.
Mozambique drill. Just like Bobby showed me.
Right fell. And just like that, it was over.
I stood in the dark, pistol smoking in my hand. The familiar ammoniac tang of gun smoke reached my nostrils and recalled for me the last time I’d stood in this position—dead bodies bleeding at my feet, my lungs breathing in the sulphur and cordite that Bobby liked to call the “smell of victory.” I looked at the forms laying on the narrow strip of ground in between the two houses—these men who had outnumbered me, outgunned me—and I thought, I’ve killed again.
Good to go, Bobby said.
And despite the blood and bone on the wall, despite the three dead human beings laying right in front of me, I smiled.
“Good to go,” I replied.
24.
Like any good citizen, I called 911 and requested the police and an ambulance—the girl had a pulse, I discovered when I knelt beside her, but she wasn’t moving. I didn’t go to her right away. For a long time, I just stood there and stared at her. Because I honestly believed that the Bald Man could have conjured her just like he conjured these three clowns, and I thought, he has a plan B. And she’s laying right there. Had she gotten up, I may have shot her, too.
But she didn’t get up, and as the seconds ticked by terror melted away from my brain and exposed a modicum of common sense frozen inside of it. I shoved the pistol in my waistband and stepped over the dead men to where she lay on her side, pants down, arms splayed out. I touched her neck, felt the pulse. Understood that while the golems had victimized me, they had victimized her, as well.
Only then did I whip out my phone and dial 911. I gave them my location, the body count and the woman’s approximate description. I gave them the cereal box version of what had just happened, then cut off the phone and called Craig Montero.
“What’s up, man?”
“It happened again.”
“What happened again?”
I looked down at the woman breathing at my feet. I had taken off my trench coat and laid it over the lower half of her body to cover her nakedness there, and now a wind snaked in between the two houses and bit me. I shivered. “I killed somebody. Three this time.”
“You killed three people?”
Not people, Craig, I thought, but golems. The Bald Man sculpted them from plain earth and put his mouth over theirs and into their mouths he breathed life and then he sent them out into the world to do his bidding but it’s okay because I’ve confronted his golems before and right now I’m leading 6 to nothing.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Yes!” I said louder. “I got jumped in Durham.”
“Durham? What the hell are you doing in Durham? Where are you?”
I gave him the address of Ryan’s News & Video and told him to look for the police lights. Neither the Victorian nor its boarded-up Craftsman neighbor still had house numbers.
“Don’t talk to anybody until I get there, okay?”
The police sirens grew louder. “Okay,” I said.
“You have the right to remain silent. I want you to use that—at least until I can get a handle on what happened.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Kevin, no telling stories to the police without me there, you run your mouth and I will kill your ass!”
“Okay,” I said one last time.
Exercising your right to remain silent is a lot harder than it sounds. Craig had a reason for concern; upper middle-class people love to talk to the police, because the police are their friends. Upper middle-class parents teach their kids from a very early age that the police protect them from not-so-upper-middle-class people and are therefore their allies in the struggle between good and evil. The notion that an upper-middle-class person could be a suspect—that the police might actually not be his friends or allies—is a real flying saucer of an idea, because upper-middle-class people don’t do the kind of things that might cause the police to look at them sideways. Except for speeding and drunk driving, and even in these situations your typical divorce lawyer or bank manager or accountant will understand that he’s guilty, that he is very naughty—never evil, just naughty—and that he therefore deserves the scrutiny of the police. Whereupon he will fall all over himself to profess his guilt and demonstrate that he is a member of the upper middle class, that he thinks just like the police do and that he’s really one of them.
When the Durham Police Department cruisers rolled up on the curb in front of the two houses that flanked the crime scene, I reacted with very real, very physical relief. I tried and failed to picture myself saying, I’m not giving a statement until I talk to my lawyer. I could entertain the idea of a prank-calling demon conjuring
building, making
bad guys out of clay and sending them to attack me, but I couldn’t conceive of finding myself on the wrong end of the law.
Because I wasn’t on the wrong end of the law. So as soon as the first officer approached me, I began to talk.
Two officers went in between the houses while two more approached me on the porch and asked me my name, which I gave readily. I informed them that I had called 911; that I, along with the girl I’d covered up with my coat, was a victim.
“Whoa! We got bodies over here!”
“How many?”
“Four!”
Out came the handcuffs.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to turn around and give me your hands.”
And they handcuffed me. I stood on the bottom step and stared at the boarded-up front door of the bungalow and felt the cold metal closing around my wrists. Rough hands pressed against my belt line and felt me all over, frisking me for weapons. Finding, of course, the pistol.
“Gun,” called the officer behind me.
“Sir, you have the right to remain silent…”
My heart stopped for several seconds, then began to race. “Hold on! I called you guys! I’m the one that called! You can’t read me Miranda! You can’t arrest me!”
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You also have the right to an attorney.”
“I am an attorney! What the hell is going on?”
“If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. Do you understand these rights, sir?”
My face burned. My chest thumped. This was insane.
Is it? Asked Bobby. Red and blue lights danced on the plywood sheaths covering the door and windows of the bungalow and twinkled in the broken glass on the porch. Think about it, man. You’re a stone-cold killer. That’s all these guys know right now. You’re a dangerous motherfucker, Kevin, you’re a hard son of a bitch. If I rolled up on you in the ass-crack of Durham at night, I’d
cuff you, too.
Right. I was a stone-cold killer, I was a dangerous motherfucker and I was a hard son of a bitch. These cops saw dead people on the scene and found a gun in my waistband. They sensed the danger emanating from my pores; I was a good guy but a bad ass. They had to cuff me and frisk me for officer safety. They had to Mirandize me in case I made incriminating statements. They had to contain me until they got to the bottom of this.
And when they did get to the bottom of this, they would uncuff me. They would uncuff me quickly.
“Yes,” I said. “I understand. And I wish to give a statement at this time.”
The officer who had cuffed me turned me around. I found myself looking at a black ex-Marine—I could spot them from miles away—with shoulders as wide as I was tall. I squinted in the darkness at his nametag: this was MCADOO. His partner, a white ex-Marine with equally linebacker-ish proportions, stood back and to the side. I couldn’t see his nametag, as he stood too far away. Younger than McAdoo, this one regarded me with a suspicion and wariness that his superior didn’t. He kept his right hand close by the holster of his pistol.
“Girl’s alive,” called an officer around the corner. “She’s coming to.”
“Who are you?” Asked McAdoo.
“Kevin Swanson. Wallet’s in my right pocket. Driver’s license is in the flap.”
McAdoo reached into my pants and fished out my wallet. He removed my driver’s license and handed it to the younger man. “Check him for warrants,” he said.
The younger man—I could see his nametag now and it read BRADSHER—studied my license. Probably trying to figure out how anyone who seemed this dangerous out on the street could look so stupid in front of the DMV camera.
“I said, go check him for warrants,” McAdoo growled.
Bradsher looked up from the license and studied my face. His cold, businesslike expression had vanished, replaced now with a lopsided grin. “Kevin Swanson of Burlington?”
“In the flesh.”
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