This Darkness Got To Give

by Dave Housley

  A steak, medium well, with Montreal seasoning. A potato with sour cream and chives. Broccoli. A Caesar salad. They had done their homework. A card was folded next to the cheesecake dessert: “Congratulations on your graduation. Welcome to the team? Invasive Species Division.”

  He cut a piece of steak, put it in his mouth. It had been far too long since he’d been able to afford steak. He had been meaning to go out, treat himself for graduation, but all of this had happened so fast he hadn’t even had a chance. He cut another piece. It was the best steak he’d ever had. For the first time, he understood what they meant when they said steak melted in your mouth. He leaned back in the king-sized bed and chewed.

  Could it get better than this? He wondered if he could fit the whole steak in his mouth, what Nutter would say when they found him in the morning. He would cut it into two pieces, stuff the first piece in his mouth and start chewing. Then he would crawl under the bed as far as he could go, get right up against the wall so he was bordered in on three sides. Then he’d pull all the papers and binders and the tapes and the CD player up under the bed. He’d put the second piece of steak in his mouth and push with a pencil, until it was all there, lodged, stuck. He’d let the juices run down his chin, or his throat. He would become short of breath, would stifle the panic, fight the urge to claw out from under the bed, to pull the meat from his throat. He would sleep.

  But then he thought about Nutter, about how sure he was that Pete was the right man for this job. Invasive Species Division. He chewed and swallowed, put some salt on the potato. He noticed the carton of orange juice sitting off to the side. Tropicana. They knew things about him. The entire time he had been slogging through it all, high school and college and graduate school, through every prom he missed or night he spent alone in the library or the coffee shop, every Christmas spent watching the Yule log and trying to get gravy going from a single baked chicken breast, through each and every day, he had assumed he was alone. But he had been wrong all along. They were there, with him, a silent passenger as he made his way through high school and college and graduate school and now this, whatever this was. They had been there all along.

  He rooted through the paperwork and found the contract. He had read it earlier, a lot of language he didn’t understand and a few ominous passages about what would happen if he were “killed or transitioned to a permanent and separate state of being.” He found the line for “Employee.” He signed it.

  Chapter 12

  June 29, 1995. Northern Virginia

  Jenkins just wanted to get out the door. “We’re gonna be late!” he shouted up toward the bathroom. Silence. It had been three years since he’d shared a house full-time with the boy, three years since the divorce and Kathleen’s move to Chicago, and every time he had David for more than a day, it was a constant string of surprises. “David!” he shouted. “We’re going to be late for Aunt Jenny’s. I have a briefing at eight! I have to run a briefing! About a murder. In…” he trailed off. There was no way the kid could hear him over the roar of the hair dryer.

  This was a new thing: the hair.

  Jenkins remembered what it was like. Around the same age, he had attempted to fashion a “feathered” look that certain kids in the grade above him had perfected. He had also tried the hair dryer route, along with mousse and the unconventional method of wetting his hair and then going to sleep with a ski hat carefully positioned to keep it in place. None of it worked, of course, and now he’d passed that same hair—chestnut and thick, chunked into unruly waves, impossible to tame—on to his only son.

  The hair dryer turned off and then turned on again. He checked his watch: they still had plenty of time, as long as they didn’t run into traffic, but even in Manassas, traffic was getting worse every day. When they had first moved here, when the agency had finally decided to get real about the issue and set up the Partners Program, the area had been an outpost, a small town. There were still farms then, a dairy where you could buy milk in those thick glass bottles. The commute had taken twenty minutes. Now it was a half hour, forty or forty-five if there was even so much as a blip on the beltway. There was always a blip.

  He sat down and opened up his briefcase. The junkie thing was something. That he knew. Now he just had to look at the data, make the right connections. The most frustrating thing was that he knew he would do it—he would take the available information and figure out what it was telling him. The hardest part was the waiting. He needed more data. If he could fast forward, make whatever was going to happen just happen already, give him the data he needed, then he’d be able to put a dent in this thing, set Crabtree on his path and let him hunt under enough branches and rocks and run through enough doors to bring this case home.

  And what would happen then, he wondered. More junkies alive in the world, following some hippie band from stadium to stadium? No, that wasn’t what ate at him about this case. It was the incongruity of the whole thing. They just didn’t act like this. Sure, there were unregistereds. There always would be. And that wasn’t what was bothering him. Unregistereds? He couldn’t give a shit. He wasn’t a form-checker, or some kind of paranormal bouncer, looking at IDs and giving approvals, filling file cabinets with paper. But this one was not acting in the usual way. It was, he realized, acting in the natural way, the way they must have acted centuries ago. But it was flouting the law, the agreement that had been reached between the two sides long ago. If they all acted like that…the idea was too much to even entertain.

  The hair dryer stopped and the door opened. David came hurrying down the stairs, shaking his head, his brow creased in a way that Jenkins recognized immediately as his own. The boy sighed, a disgusted sigh, and Jenkins flashed on his own father, distant and disappointed.

  David hadn’t had any more luck than Jenkins had had with the knit cap and his own attempts at feathering. “It’s pretty shitty hair,” he said. He noticed the boy jump, and then smile at the swear. He was overcome with an immediate and sharp affection for his son. He was so young. He should be carefree and happy. He should, but he couldn’t. It was the same weight his father carried, the weight Jenkins carried. The people at the retirement community had started calling it depression when his father had really started to go off the deep end, but Jenkins saw it for what it was: realism, self-awareness, intelligence.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get going. It won’t make anything any better to be late.”

  Chapter 13

  June 30, 1995. Aberdeen, MD.

  The place looked like any other place. It could have been student apartments in a college town, a retirement home, low-income housing. It reminded Jenkins of the apartment he’d lived in after active duty, when he was doing intelligence training for enlisted men in Dover. Low, sand-colored buildings, three levels, six units a floor, eighteen young men trying to adjust to civilian life by drinking too much, chasing women around the Delaware beach bars, driving fast and experimenting with whatever the world had come up with in the time they’d been away.

  He pulled up to the guard’s checkpoint and got in line behind the resident shuttle and a few sedans that looked like official vehicles. There really weren’t many differences, he told himself, between his own experience in Dover and what the old man was living with today. Both were semi-restricted, controlled environments. Both were self-elected. Both were…but that’s where the similarities ended and the differences began.

  He got closer and could see a few residents milling in the moonlight, standing idly as if they had just woken from a bout of sleepwalking and were still trying to figure out if this was the dream or real life. He showed the guard his badge and the guy, a young kid who couldn’t have been too far past legal drinking age, scanned it like a box of fish sticks in the super market and watched what came up on his screen.

  “Pickup or delivery?” the kid said.

  “Excuse me?” Jenkins said.

  “You’re federal,” he said. “Assuming you’re picking up or dropping off.”

>   “Well,” Jenkins said, surprised to find himself overcome with anger. “As you can see there’s nobody in the car with me here.” The kid looked at his computer and nodded. “And, again, as you can see, there’s no requisition request in your little machine there.”

  The kid typed something into his computer and waited while a little ball swirled. Jenkins watched. “Hangs every night around this time,” the kid said.

  Jenkins wondered what would happen if the stragglers by the fence tried to walk through the gate, if the kid would notice. “They’re not necessarily cured,” he said, nodding at the first row of apartments. “You know that, right?” The kid typed something and waited while the little ball spun. “You know that to even be considered for this facility, they necessarily had to have committed a violent act. Right? You know that? And ‘violent act’ for these people, you know what that means?”

  “What? Yes,” the kid said.

  “You ever seen a violent act? Their kind of violent act?” Jenkins asked. He didn’t know exactly why he was pushing the kid. Maybe seeing the walls around this place made him feel sorry for the old man all over again. Maybe he was getting impatient about so many bodies and so few leads. Maybe he just needed a good night’s sleep.

  The kid stuck his head out his window and looked at the entrance. He seemed disappointed to not see any traffic behind Jenkins. “I gotta…” he started.

  “Going to see Tibor Havranek,” Jenkins said. “Personal visit. I’ll punch in when I get there, punch out when I leave. I know that our visit will be monitored, that there will be an armed guard at the door, that the man I’m going to visit has placed himself in this situation of his own accord blah blah… Anything else you need me to say?”

  The kid turned back to his computer. “Whatever,” he said.

  Jenkins thought about pulling the kid out of his kiosk by the tie, about smashing his head right into that computer. He drove through the gate and parked in a corner, front facing the parking lot. Quick getaways. They were a hard habit to break, even here with a complex full of residents, each of them not only registered but willingly restricted, monitored, drugged into something less than a housecat. In the corner of the lawn, a young man stood watching him. Jenkins nodded and the kid drifted away, staring up at the moon. He was a shell, a former human in every sense of the word. It was a shame, Jenkins thought. Then he flashed on what he’d seen the previous night—that healthy young kid, a second-grade teacher, they’d learned, drained of every last drop in his body—and corrected himself: it was almost a shame.

  He paused on the lawn and looked up to Tibor’s window. He would have gotten the call by now, the official notice that he was receiving a guest, that one armed guard would be stationed at the door for the duration of the visit. Jenkins waited, watching the black curtain and the slim white slice of light between. He turned over his wallet in his pocket, thought about the data. It didn’t match up. Something was wrong.

  Finally, the curtain parted and a hand appeared in the doorway. A peace sign. Jenkins laughed. Fucking Tibor.

  He made his way up the stairs and nodded at the guard standing by Tibor’s door. “We’ll be about a half hour,” Jenkins said. He flashed his badge. “Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee?”

  The guard looked at him. He was middle-aged, had the look of a cop about him—that carriage, like he was just waiting to see what was going to go wrong next.

  “You DC?” Jenkins asked. “Virginia?”

  “I’m going to go get that coffee,” the guy said. “You armed, I suppose?”

  “What you think?” Jenkins said, but the guy was already halfway down the hall.

  The door opened and there was Tibor. Jenkins was always a little taken aback at how they didn’t age, a little self-conscious of the lines on his face, his belly pushing up against his suit pants. Tibor could have walked right out of 1980. He was tall and lean, with the same close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair he’d had walking a beat, with thick lips and blue eyes that for some reason reminded Jenkins of the old country. The nickname “Old Man” had started as a joke and become less funny with each gray hair, added pound, ache or pain that Jenkins accrued.

  “Hey,” Tibor said, his old-world accent putting a quick bruise on the word. “You look fucking terrible, man.” He stood, as always, straight and tall, held his hand out to shake, a gesture that seemed oddly formal, old-fashioned, to Jenkins. As always, he didn’t realize how much things had changed in the world until he spoke with somebody for whom they hadn’t. Crabtree would as soon hug you as say hello, had recently updated his greeting to a high five, so it seemed always like somebody had just completed an alley-oop or hit a home run when all they’d done was stumble hungover into the break room.

  “Welcome,” Tibor said. He settled into a recliner. A coffee mug steamed on an end table, a series of folded up newspaper sections nearby.

  “How’d you do today?” Jenkins asked. He settled into a chair and regarded the apartment. Same as it ever was.

  “Times was easy. Post was…there are some things in here that maybe I should ask you?” he said, his voice rising with a question, teasing Jenkins, who had proved himself useless at crosswords back when they were still working cases together.

  “Hit me,” Jenkins said.

  “Singer David of the stars. Five letters. Last letter may be…E,” he said.

  “Bowie. David Bowie.”

  “Ah fuck. David Bowie,” Tibor said. Of course. Ziggy…”

  “Stardust,” Jenkins said.

  “Ziggy Fucking Stardust,” Tibor said. “Of course.”

  “And his Spiders from Mars,” Jenkins said.

  Tibor raised his eyebrows. This had been a running joke. Everything getting more and more silly. Tibor had lived through the first six decades of the century with only mild annoyance, but the sixties and the amazing Technicolor fluidity of that era had driven him crazy. “Hundreds of years things are pretty much the same,” he would say, “and then all of a sudden…” and he would wave his hands around and make silly noises, the only way he could think to indicate the depths to which society had sunk.

  Like most of his species, Tibor kept no photographs, no souvenirs, the slow march of history having worn down any sense of nostalgia that may have lingered. Jenkins always thought of him as belonging to the industrial revolution, or maybe the time just before, the last time, maybe, when a cop on a beat required no technology save a nightstick to do his job, no more special training than the streets would have provided an observant and willful boy before he was out of high school.

  “So,” Tibor began, “how is David? He must be, what, fifteen?”

  “He’s fine,” Jenkins said.

  “And no wedding ring,” Tibor said.

  Jenkins held his hands up in a useless gesture.

  “It happens,” Tibor said. “And you haven’t slept much in the past few nights.” He said it flat, no judgment. A cop’s habit, if anything.

  “Got something that doesn’t add up,” Jenkins said.

  Tibor nodded, sipped at his cup. Jenkins wondered whether it was coffee or Plasmatrol. He remembered the old man drinking the two together, the way other cops might throw a splash of whiskey into a coffee, when it had first come out.

  “Unregistered. Feeding every other night. On the Grateful Dead tour.”

  “They are still around,” Tibor said it flat, again just notching an observation, adding data to the equation that Jenkins knew was building in his head. “The fucking Grateful fucking Dead.”

  “Not exactly your thing, I know,” Jenkins said. Tibor shook his head, waved his hands in the air in what Jenkins knew was as far as he would come to a ridiculous gesture.

  “I had this girl down there, hippie girl, say the most amazing thing to me the other day. Down there at the crime scene. Which reminds me: so the thing is, this unregistered seems to be on the tour. They do that still, tour around with the band, go to all the shows—”

  “Still?” Tibor said. “St
ill with that same band? Maybe it’s true what they said about…whatshisname?…Garcia?”

  “He ages, though,” Jenkins said. He had heard this theory before, more than once over the past week. “He’s aged. Gray and fat, same as the rest of us.” Tibor nodded, a concession. “So anyway, whoever this is, they’re killing junkies, people nobody will miss. Not much of a trail, you know.”

  “Taste is awful,” Tibor said. He took a sip of his drink and then placed it back on the table.

  Jenkins paused and regarded his friend. There were aspects of Tibor’s life, what it really meant to go through the change, to live that way, that Jenkins would never understand.

  “Regardless. This last one. It fits the MO right up to the victim. This one was young. Fucking second-grade teacher, believe it or not. A regular citizen. And there’s still people around, just off this main part of the parking lot where they buy…I don’t know, this isn’t going to make any sense at all, like grilled cheeses and T-shirts and shit.”

  Tibor sat up. Jenkins could see his wheels turning, the old cop comparing one data point against the others. “Can you get me the file?” he asked.

  Jenkins pulled the binder from his bag, dropped a copy on the table next to the crosswords. “A new riddle for you to figure out,” he said.

  “So you never finished your story,” Tibor said.

  “What? The ending is he killed the guy and we can’t find him.”

  “No,” Tibor shook his head, smiled an indulgent smile. “About the girl from the concert. She said something amazing to you?”

  Jenkins stood. “Be who you are,” he said.

  “Be who you are,” Tibor said.