This Darkness Got To Give

by Dave Housley

  “What do I do with it?” Pete said.

  “Just wear it, brother,” Spot said. “And I should be able to find you if it comes to that.”

  Pete examined the yin-yang. “What?” he said.

  “Tax dollars at work, my friend,” Spot said. “Your tax dollars at work.”

  * * *

  Sunny was sitting on a dusty Mexican blanket, setting up an array of bracelets on a makeshift stand made up of a few branches and some duct tape. Next to her was an open cooler of Heineken and a sign that read, “one dollar.”

  “More bracelets,” Pete said as he sat down next to her.

  “More?” Sunny said. She handed him a Heineken. “Hey, where’s my Dr. Pepper?” She punched him in the shoulder.

  “Shit, sorry,” he said. “I can…” It had been less than an hour and he had totally forgotten. He wondered if his brain cells were going already, and then wondered why the idea didn’t fill him with dread. Was he already too far gone?

  She reached over and patted him on the arm and then squeezed. “Dude,” was all she said, but there was warmth in her voice and he understood completely.

  He sat back and regarded Sunny’s makeshift store. The bracelets were a step up from the ones Spot had been pretending to sell, but still, he couldn’t really imagine anybody pausing to consider them, much less make a purchase. The beer made more sense. “Where did you get those?” he asked.

  “Bracelets? Traded some tapes, figured maybe I can make a few bucks so you won’t have to…”

  “I don’t mind,” Pete said. He stopped at telling her that he was getting paid to be here, getting a per diem on top of it, and that he was unlikely to ever go over no matter how many grilled cheeses, imported beers, joints and bracelets and vegetarian burritos they bought on Shakedown. He realized in a rush that he would never be able to tell her the truth about any of it.

  “Hey, where’d you get that?” she asked, pointing to the new bracelet. She put a finger on the white stone, pressed at the yin-yang. “That’s pretty nice.”

  Pete wondered if she was accidentally calling headquarters, whoever and whatever that might be. He yanked his hand away and stood up, trying to appear casual as he searched the meandering crowd for Spot or Nutter or a SWAT team. Nothing.

  “Somebody needs to chill,” Sunny said. She laughed and stared at him and shook her head but again, there was no anger in any of it and Pete was embarrassed to be so relieved.

  He sat down. “Sorry. It’s just…nothing. I’m not used to people grabbing me like that.”

  She held up her hands. “No offense, man. No offense.”

  “I’m not used to…” he started, but there were so many endings to that sentence that he didn’t even know where he would start. “I got it from some guy near the bathroom. Just thought it looked kind of cool and the yin-yang was my mother’s favorite symbol, I think, so…”

  “That’s awesome,” Sunny said. “That’s nice. Your mother. She sounds cool.”

  It was an invitation. Pete’s face reddened. He had no idea why he had told this lie and it felt somehow like a validation and a betrayal all at once.

  She stood and took his hands in hers. She looked him in the eye and he looked away. “It’s okay,” she said. “Hey. Whatever it is. It’s okay.”

  He nodded and looked away. He felt the lump forming in his throat. It was the kindest thing anybody had done for him in how long?

  She put her arms around him and hugged. He let himself be drawn in, breathed in her smell—apples and patchouli and smoke and sweat. He wondered how long he would be thinking about this moment. Remember this, he thought.

  “Be who you are,” she whispered.

  He pulled back. “You don’t…you shouldn’t…” he started. He shook his head. He would never be able to tell her the truth. He searched the crowd for any signs that the bracelet had sent out some kind of signal. Could all of this even be real? He felt a tingling in his fingers. On the periphery of the crowd up ahead something caught his attention.

  “It’s okay,” Sunny said, pulling back. There was a catch in her voice that he couldn’t place, not anger or disappointment but a kind of familiarity and resignation. There were things he didn’t know about her, too, things he would probably never find out. She picked up the makeshift bracelet display and waved it around with fake gusto, as if she was trying to convince herself that she was moving on, that what she really wanted to do was sell bracelets.

  In the crowd up ahead, one person stood out, an older man walking slowly toward them with a lopsided smile on his face. The man was short and seemed very out of place, dressed for casual Friday at the office instead of a show. He regarded Pete with open interest, like a scientist looking at a specimen. Pete flashed on an image of the man in a lab coat, his neutral features twisted into a grimace. There was a slight trembling in his legs and his feet felt like they were digging into the gravel. He tried to move as the man got closer but he found himself stationary, rooted into the ground like a statue.

  Pete looked around, expecting to find a crowd gathering, but of course everybody went about their business.

  “Bracelets!” Sunny said. “Heinekens one dollar!”

  As the man got closer, he kept his eyes on Pete. He smiled and nodded. Pete tried to move but he was frozen. He jammed his fluttering hands into his pockets. In his head, a high sound, like static electricity.

  “One dollar,” Sunny sang. She twirled in a circle, already losing interest in her makeshift wares.

  The man continued until he was a few feet away. He nodded at Pete, businesslike, his eyes conveying some message Pete understood as dominance, an alpha dog asserting its place in the order. The man veered toward Sunny and Pete tried again to break whatever spell held him frozen. As the man moved on past them, Pete felt himself pushed backward. He staggered.

  “Dude,” Sunny said. Pete lifted one leg and then the other. The whistling drained from his head. “Did you see that?” Sunny said. “It was like they just popped out of my hand.”

  Pete tested his fingers, his feet, his legs and arms. Everything was okay. But everything was not okay. He had come into contact with something. He was on one side and this man was clearly on another. This is why they had sent him here.

  What else had Spot said? Start getting introduced.

  “You okay?” Sunny asked.

  “You know where we can find anything a little stronger than shrooms?” Pete asked.

  “Dude, it was just some bracelets,” she said.

  “Not because of that,” he said. “You know that.”

  Sunny looked at him strangely. “Do I?” she asked. She seemed to be making some calculation and he watched her eyes flicker with disappointment and then again resignation. “Sure,” she said. “Let me pack up and we’ll go see the man.”

  Chapter 23

  July 5, 1995. Washington, DC.

  “It’s sick,” Jenkins said. He thought of Tibor in his self-imposed exile. A better cop than every person in the room, and he was no doubt sitting in his chair right now, working through the crossword, his detective’s brain wasting away in four walls of government security, reinforced steel, and a team of specially trained U.S. Marines ready to deal with any tenant who changed his or her mind about the arrangement. “He is sick, I mean,” he corrected. He looked to the corner, where Associate Deputy Director Liddington stood at attention. Nobody could know he’d been to see Tibor. Nobody could know he had actually left files with the old man. “I mean, we have profiling that indicates this is likely a male,” he said.

  He moved over to the laptop and clicked to the next screen, a comparison of the first fourteen victims and the past two, the junkies’ data bumped up against the citizens. He looked at the beginning and then the end. The difference was stark: the first two in the series were clinical, careful, bodies drained from two puncture holes in the side of the neck, laid down on the opposite side as if they had passed out or were resting, not so much as a broken branch or footprint on
the crime scene. The last two were destroyed, huge holes torn in the neck and chest region, as if the thing that attacked them simply couldn’t get at their insides, their blood, fast enough.

  He looked at the ten or so officers in front of him, sitting at little desks like schoolchildren, munching donuts and drinking coffee like cops in some situation comedy. Crabtree was picking at his cuticles, staring at a spot just to the left of the three-ring binder Jenkins had prepared for every member of the task force. Jenkins was pretty sure the sports page was folded into a tiny square on Crabtree’s desk, open, no doubt, to some article about the latest machinations of the Redskins. He considering calling on his partner like some vengeful second-grade teacher, but he would need Crabtree eventually and right now, when so much was unknown, when they were just dipping their toes into the work, was just not the time.

  He advanced the slide again and the screen held just one image, a hotel clerk’s broken and torn body lying on a cheap linoleum floor. “He’s sick,” Jenkins said. “And he’s getting worse.”

  “How do you know?” Liddington asked. “My experience, these things are unpredictable. Like wild dogs, you think you have one that’s trained but you can only train so much out of them.”

  “Aren’t those werewolves?” Crabtree said. He made his jokey face, expectant and ready for a backslap or a high five.

  “No, those aren’t fucking werewolves,” Liddington said. Crabtree recoiled as if he’d been struck.

  “Of course, sir,” he said. “Was making a…”

  “Because fucking werewolves don’t fucking exist,” Liddington said.

  Crabtree shook his head. Jenkins stared out the window. Here we go, he thought.

  “What we have here is bad enough,” Liddington said. “But it’s explainable. Evolution is responsible for these creatures, same way it’s responsible for the duck-billed platypus or the polar bear….” He paused and Jenkins knew he was considering whether he should go into his full diatribe on this topic. They had all heard it before. Jenkins didn’t know if he could listen to it again, not so soon after seeing Tibor. It was bad enough that they’d been broken up, that the whole program had been dissolved, but that was as much Tibor’s fault as management’s.

  Liddington caught himself, nodded to Jenkins, and turned for the door. “You all keep on going here. I want this shit stopped before it does any more damage. Before I have reporters knocking down my door.” He turned and clicked toward the exit, then paused in the doorway and faced the room. “And werewolves don’t goddamn exist,” he said.

  Jenkins waited until he no longer heard the sharp click echoing down the hallway. He looked to the room. Nobody cared. Crabtree was picking at his teeth, the rest of them stared vacantly at their notebooks or the screen and the bloody remains of the hotel clerk.

  Jenkins advanced the slide again. “I’m sorry about that,” he said, waving toward the screen. “That poor citizen was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our job is to make sure that doesn’t happen to anybody else.”

  The next slide was a chart, an illustration of the duration between attacks. “This is pretty simple,” Jenkins said, warming to the task, his mind clicking this data back into place. “You can see when this starts, the attacks are three days apart, then two, then lately, one a day.”

  He regarded the room. Most of them were starting at their shoes, doodling, looking out the window. Crabtree got up and waddled toward the exit. “Too much coffee, Boss,” he said. “Be right back.”

  “So as you can see, we’re looking at one attack a day, past three days,” Jenkins said. “We have men out at the concert tonight, law enforcement ready to scramble, to get in touch with us as soon as they see something that might match this pattern.”

  “What if there are more than one?” It was Robertson, a young agent out of Long Island.

  “What?” Jenkins said.

  “These attacks, they’re all up and down the coast, right? Far west as Detroit? Far east as DC?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how do we know it’s not a few of them?”

  “There’s a signature, the puncture mark is ninety percent unique. Not a guarantee that this isn’t more than one, but put that together with the fact that it follows the Grateful Dead tour pretty much exactly, until we get to our friend the hotel clerk, along with that signature puncture, and we’re pretty sure it’s one guy, following the tour.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s what I was saying. They don’t usually do this, obviously. This one seems like it’s sick. It seems like it can’t help itself.”

  Robertson snorted. “Can’t help itself?”

  “The progression of the data I’m looking at would seem to indicate an increasing loss of control.”

  ‘The fuck does that mean?”

  “Like I said when I started,” Jenkins said. “It’s sick.”

  “So that is what I’m doing in here on a Sunday instead of watching the Redskins? What do we do with that?”

  Jenkins knew Robertson was challenging him but he couldn’t withhold his enthusiasm. Finally the data was showing them the way, or at least opening a door. “Where do you want to be when you’re sick?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Home?” Robertson said.

  “Exactly,” Jenkins said.

  “So?”

  “So we’re going back on tour.”

  * * *

  Jenkins looked at himself in the mirror. He adjusted the floppy hat, pulled the patchwork pants up and then down. He yanked at the sleeves of the decimated T-shirt. It was too small, and the pants were too big. He felt naked without his watch. In the hallway, he could hear people talking, and his first impulse was to sneak out the back door.

  He turned sideways, took a few steps, dipping his head like Richard Pryor. But that wasn’t right. How did they walk again? Like normal people. He took two steps back toward the wall, turned, gave his image in the mirror the thumbs-up. The thumbs-up? He had no idea what kind of greetings Deadheads used, but he was pretty sure it was not the thumbs-up.

  There was no way he could pull this off if he didn’t even know if they still did the thumbs-up or not.

  He regarded himself in the mirror again. He looked like a federal agent dressed up like a hippie.

  From the bathroom, whistling. Crabtree getting into character with “Touch of Gray,” the only song he knew. Jenkins had been trying, listening to the cassettes he’d found in the evidence room. That particular part of the room was a wealth of source material—bootlegs and label-issued cassettes, CDs, T-shirts, and various paraphernalia that he imagined was used to ingest drugs of one sort or another. He liked the one cassette, Workingman’s Dead. It wasn’t much different from the country he listened to the in the car or the folk-rock Kathleen had pushed on him when they were dating. It was lazy country-rock, the lyrics obscure folk tales about trains and music and wolves that seemed like they could have been written in any era, could have sprung up out of the ground like oak trees or dandelions.

  “Just a touch of gray, I don’t know who dah dah dah…” Crabtree was singing. He looked completely at ease in his cutoff jean shorts and tie-dyed tank top, his hippie sandals and mandalas jangling on his chest while he swayed rather convincingly back and forth. “Just a touch of a gray, la da da da da da daaaaa…” he sang.

  Jenkins tried bouncing his head to the beat. It felt all wrong and he knew he was trying too hard. He’d seen enough of them to know they weren’t trying at all, that the entire point was a kind of state at which you didn’t have to try, you just swayed in the breeze, blown every which way by the music or the drugs or all of the above.

  He imagined it helped if you were high.

  Crabtree was bouncing around the room convincingly. To be blessed with no self-awareness, Jenkins thought, would be such a blessing. The late-afternoon sun was dipping beneath the buildings, breathing a glow onto the parking lot. Soon the old man would be here, if all went well. He wondered about telling Crabtree. Anyb
ody else, he would have sat them down already, explained exactly what he was doing and why, walked through contingencies and plans A through F. But he knew that Crabtree would just nod, chew his gum, put this latest failing in whatever place he kept his list of Jenkins’ downfalls, and get ready for work.

  “These sandals?” Crabtree said. He sprinted to the back of the room and then back to the front, stopped on a dime. “Pretty fucking good sandals,” he said. “I might need to find a, like, less hippie version of these things.”

  Jenkins adjusted his own boots, tightened the wraparound laces that wound up to just under his knees.

  “I don’t know about this,” he said.

  “Come on, man,” Crabtree said. He swung his head from side to side, moved his arms like a dancing robot. It was, Jenkins had to admit, a very good imitation of how the Deadheads danced.

  Maybe I should just send him, Jenkins thought. Then he pictured what that actually might look like, Crabtree holed up in a VW van with some eighteen-year-old and a cooler full of Coors. Crabtree knocking heads and arresting some hippie for selling nitrous, or soda, or grilled cheese or beers. Leaving him out there with no backup, sending the body in without the head—it was not a good idea.

  “How do I look?” Jenkins asked.

  “Like a Deadhead.”

  He regarded himself in the mirror. He looked like he was dressing for Halloween as a cop trying to impersonate a Deadhead.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “But this is about as good as it’s going to get.”

  Crabtree was packing his bag, putting his gun and beeper into a canvas fanny pack.

  The two had never met, Jenkins realized, and they really couldn’t have been any more different: the old country vampire and the gum-chewing linebacker.

  “Hey,” he said. “There’s something I gotta tell you.”