Desperate Souls

by Gregory Lamberson

  “Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?”

  GQ sighed. “Would you mind telling me what I did wrong?”

  Gary remained deliberately impassive. “Get out of the car, GQ.”

  Weary anger flushed the drug dealer’s eyes. “Man …”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” GQ opened the door and got out. He stood six feet two, just like his license said, and wore a sky blue muscle shirt.

  “Turn around.”

  “For what?”

  Frank circled the front of the Jeep. “For dropping off that package back there.”

  GQ sucked his teeth. “Man, I didn’t drop off nothing.”

  “Our video camera begs to differ.”

  “How do you know what was in that package? Maybe it was just some Betty Crocker cake mix.”

  Frank stepped forward and took out his handcuffs. He looked comically small next to GQ, Gary thought. “Turn around so we can put these on, or we’ll make you put them on yourself the hard way.”

  Shaking his head, GQ turned around. “This is bullshit.”

  Frank snapped on the cuffs.

  “I know you guys. I’ve seen you around. I know your rep. How much to let me walk?”

  Setting one hand on GQ’s right shoulder and guiding him toward the unmarked car, Gary said, “Not today, Leon. This is city business.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  They took him to the same decrepit house.

  “I don’t see no precinct house,” GQ said.

  “You aren’t going to, either,” Frank said, leering into the backseat.

  They guided him inside the house.

  “Oh, man …”

  In the basement, Gary saw GQ stiffen at the sight of the inanimate kid on the floor.

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Don’t pay him any mind,” Gary said.

  They led GQ to the other side of the basement, and Frank leveled his Glock at the man.

  GQ closed his eyes, possibly in prayer.

  “Yeah, this is not your lucky day,” Frank said.

  Gary unlocked the handcuffs. GQ gave him no trouble as he threaded the cuffs over a ceiling pipe and secured the captive’s hands above his head.

  “No begging,” Gary said. “I like that.”

  “Oh, he’ll beg,” Frank said, holstering his weapon.

  GQ regarded them with his eyes surrounded by white. “What do you want?”

  Gary raised one finger to his lips. “Shhh …”

  Frank picked up the shovel from the floor. “Don’t say anything yet.”

  Sweat beaded on GQ’s forehead and trickled down into his wincing eyes. “Oh, fuck …”

  Frank swung the shovel sideways, like a baseball bat. The blade bit deep into GQ’s left knee, shattering ligaments, cartilage, and bone.

  GQ let out an agonized wail absorbed by the basement walls.

  “This one bleeds,” Frank said.

  TWELVE

  Although both the morphine and the sedative had worn off by the time Jake’s train pulled into Penn Station and the crippling pain had returned to his back, he felt better just being in Manhattan. Limping through the enormous train terminal, he could not wait to reach the Seventh Avenue sidewalk, which faced Thirty-fourth Street. In the shadow of Madison Square Garden, he inhaled the rancid odors of garbage bags piled to a ridiculous height at the curb—the result of a sanitation workers’ strike, now in its second week—and took out his cell phone. Men clad in rags surrounded him with outstretched hands, and he turned his back on them.

  “Hello?” Larry answered on the second ring.

  “What the hell was in that shot you gave me?” Jake said through clenched teeth.

  “Morphine. Just like I told you. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I had hallucinations you wouldn’t believe inside that MRI machine.”

  “People sometimes react badly to those. I thought you were made of tougher stuff, though.”

  “I didn’t have an emotional reaction to the machine, you son of a bitch. Something was in that shot. The same thing happened on the LIRR on the trip home.”

  Silence on the phone for a moment. “Did they give you anything at the clinic?”

  “Yeah, a sedative of some kind.”

  “Pill or injection?”

  “Another shot.”

  “Well, there you go. What did they give you?”

  A wave of pain radiated from Jake’s left hip. “I don’t know. I didn’t write it down.”

  “They must have given you paperwork.”

  “It wasn’t the medication, Larry. They gave me that shot after I got out of the MRI. It couldn’t have been a contributing factor to what happened inside the machine.”

  “Were the hallucinations the same in both instances?”

  Jake bit his lip. Damn it. “No.”

  “Then your theory doesn’t hold much water, does it? Let me ask you something: did you ever drop acid during your wilder, crazier days?”

  Jake ran one hand over his sweaty face. “No. I never got high before I joined Homicide, and you know I was strictly into blow. I’m not suffering LSD flashbacks.”

  “What did the MRI show?”

  Jake’s stomach tightened. He didn’t want to say. “The pictures were inconclusive.”

  “What do you mean? They either showed spinal injury or they didn’t.”

  “They didn’t show anything.”

  “So you made me drive you out to the island practically at gunpoint, where you suffered some hallucinations, it turns out there’s nothing wrong with you, and this is somehow my fault? I’m not in the habit of spiking my patients’ treats. It’s too expensive, for one thing. For another, despite the occupations of many of my patients, I do have ethics.”

  Jake took a deep breath and let out a slow sigh. “I have to get going. It’s killing me to stand out here.”

  “Call me tomorrow.”

  “Right.” Shutting down his phone, Jake limped between homeless people to the street corner and raised one hand in the air. “Taxi!”

  A yellow cab materialized in front of him, followed by another. These days, few people could afford private transportation. He eased himself into the backseat of the sedan and swiped his credit card through the slot.

  “Where to, mon?” a man with a Jamaican accent said.

  Jake gave him the address, then turned on the TV recessed in the back of the front seat. Soap operas, game shows, and doom and gloom financial forecasts. On New York One News, an update on the Black Magic epidemic.

  Dark days, he thought, holding back tears of pain as he bounced around inside the cab.

  Staring out the window, sunlight highlighting the dirt on the glass, he felt alone. He had been alone since before Sheryl’s murder. As desperate as he had been on the morning when he had inserted the barrel of his Glock inside his mouth, threatening to blow out his brains as his father had, he felt worse now. Because now he was afraid to die. Now he believed in some form of afterlife, and he feared the revenge that the demon Cain would take on his soul … forever. The angelic Abel had told his brother that Sheryl had purged Jake’s energy of his sins, but Jake felt in no hurry to prove him right.

  How had he landed in another fantastic situation? Seeing the scarecrows haunting the sidewalks, he knew the truth: he hadn’t become embroiled in the situation; it was all around him in every neighborhood and on every street corner, like a plague.

  Who could he turn to for help? Who would believe the unbelievable tale he had to tell?

  No one.

  Edgar parked in front of a Brooklyn apartment house in the middle of the block. A working-class neighborhood, feeling the pain of an uncaring economy. Groups of young men—he hesitated to call them boys; they hadn’t known boyhood innocence for who knew how long— gathered at all four corners. Garbage stained the sidewalks, and potholes scarred the street.

  “You okay?” Maria said.

  “Yeah. I grew up around here. The place has
changed a lot. I thought it would get better, but it’s way worse than I remember.”

  “Brooklyn boy, huh? I had you pegged for the Bronx, like me.”

  “I spent some time on the Grand Concourse, but this was definitely my turf.”

  Getting out, he surveyed the houses on each side of the street. All of them looked the same to him: peeling paint, siding in need of repair, chipped concrete steps, graffiti scrawled on the walls facing driveways. Even the sky seemed gray here. They passed two RPM cars, an unmarked squad car, and a coroner’s van. The mainstays of any homicide scene.

  A PO holding a clipboard stood in an open doorway.

  They showed their shields to him. “Detectives Hopkins and Vasquez,” Edgar said. “Special Homicide.”

  Nodding, the recorder wrote down their names on his clipboard. “Second floor.”

  Edgar went inside first. He liked to walk through all doorways first, so that if anyone faced unexpected danger, it was him. Maria had complained that she wanted to take her share of risks, but he wouldn’t hear of it. The world had changed for him when the Cipher had murdered Sheryl Helman. He knew Maria could handle herself, but he saw no reason to take unnecessary chances. Against his better instincts, he had grown to think of her almost as a younger sister more than a partner.

  His vision adjusted to the darkness, and he climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the second floor, followed by Maria. They entered the open apartment, nodding to another PO and the pair of Detective Area Task Force detectives inside. He didn’t know either of the men, something that occurred only when he was called to a crime scene outside Manhattan. But he recognized the dark stains on the apartment walls: blood.

  “You Hopkins?” the Chinese man said.

  Edgar nodded. “And Vasquez.”

  The man thumped his chest. “Chang.”

  The heavier set man raised his latex-gloved hands. “Manelli. I’d shake your hands, but…”

  Edgar pulled on his own pair of gloves. “No sweat. What have we got?”

  “Carmen Rodriguez and her grandson Victor. Both vics were dismembered.”

  Edgar swallowed, a rare reaction of discomfort. He took homicides in stride, like a professional. He never allowed them to eat him up inside like Jake had. But Edgar had been raised by his own grandmother, a Baptist, after his teenage mother had run off to L.A., never to be heard from again.

  “Weapons?” Maria said.

  Manelli gestured at a baseball bat. “Looks like they put up a fight. They weren’t shot first; they were just hacked to pieces.”

  “Any drugs?”

  “No. The lady was a churchgoer. The boy stayed out of trouble.”

  Edgar and Maria exchanged knowing glances, reading each other’s mind.

  “Yeah, we know,” Manelli said. “Your Machete Massacres have only involved drug gangs, and these were civilians. But there’s another grandson—Louis. Fifteen, sixteen years old. Corner boy. Landlord downstairs says the boy moved out a month ago, but he’s seen him over on Flatbush Avenue slinging Black Magic.”

  Edgar stepped deeper into the apartment. A heavyset woman lay on the floor, her flabby arms and bifurcated head scattered around her corpse. The corpse of a young boy in pajamas lay a few feet behind her. His torso was riddled with cut wounds, and his head and arms had also been chopped off. The rugs had soaked up blood like a giant tampon.

  Edgar pointed at several fingers on the floor. “The grandmother took a machete in the head and went right down. She must have had the bat, because the boy put up a fight with his bare hands.” Dozens of bloody footprints marred the floor. “Only one set of prints with sneakers. A single perp.”

  “The grandson?” Chang said.

  “I’d look there first.”

  “Then that’s what you should do,” Manelli said.

  Edgar cocked one eyebrow.

  “No disrespect, but we were told to hand this over to you if it looked like your case.”

  “We’re not going to get into jurisdictional shit, are we?”

  “Not at all. Our captain said to give you any assistance we can. Just tell us what you need.”

  “Run this investigation as you would any other. Just keep us in the loop. If not me and Vasquez, then any of the other members of our task force. Go ahead and bring the other grandson in. We don’t care who gets that collar. We’re after whoever gave the order, not the button man.”

  “I’ll call it in,” Chang said, heading for the door.

  “Hang on. I’ll go with you,” Manelli said. “I could use a cigarette.”

  With the DATF detectives gone, Maria started snooping around the apartment. “Think they already called it in before we got here?”

  “Sure,” Edgar said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “You bet.”

  Edgar stared at the dead boy’s head: eyes open and spattered with blood. Almost the same age as Martin. What kind of monster would—? He closed down the thought. Drug dealers committed some of the most heinous murders in the city. Entire families were massacred as payback for theft. The second grandson had probably not committed these murders but had more likely pissed off whoever did.

  “Edgar?”

  He turned toward Maria, who had moved into the living room and stood on the far side of a round coffee table. She held something in her right hand, and her face showed concern.

  Stepping around the blood on the floor, he joined her and looked at the business card in her hand. He had seen it before. Helman Investigations and Security.

  The taxi pulled over to the curb before Jake’s building, and he spilled out of the vehicle, feeling very much like a flesh sack containing bones that no longer fit together. Crying out, he staggered in a half circle. Pedestrians on the sidewalk moved out of his way but continued walking, making no move to help him. Limping toward the front glass doors, he feared he would topple to the sidewalk and be unable to stand again.

  After glancing at the entrance to Laurel Doniger’s parlor, he found himself changing course. He grabbed the brass door handle, then leaned into the door with too much force. The door swung open, and he fell inside, tumbling down the steps. The bells on the door jingled, and a shadow glided into the room.

  “Are you all right?” Laurel said, crossing the parlor.

  He rocked back and forth. “No.”

  She knelt beside him and grasped his left wrist in her right hand. Staring into her bright blue eyes, he couldn’t help but think that she sensed everything he felt at this moment, that she really understood him.

  “Take my arm,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

  Getting to her feet, she helped him to his. Then she led him to the archway in the rear of her parlor. Through it he glimpsed a living room, a kitchen, and a bedroom, but she guided him into a wide bathroom. Hunched over like a cripple, he clutched the sink for support.

  “Take off your clothes,” Laurel said.

  He reached for his shirt button, fumbled with it, then gave up, shaking his head.

  So she undressed him, and minutes later, he stood naked before her, feeling no shame except for the way his spine wrapped around itself. She eased him onto the toilet lid, ran hot water in the tub, then took colored bottles from a shelf and poured oils into the steaming water. Finally, she helped him into the tub, and he gasped as the water scorched his flesh. Crouching beside the tub, she scooped water in her cupped hands and tossed it on his chest. The intense heat distracted him from the pain in his back. He didn’t know why she was helping him, and he didn’t care.

  “This won’t solve your problem,” she said. “But it will relax your muscles, so I can go to work on them. Stay here while I wash these clothes. Meditate, if you know how. Put your mind at ease. You’re safe here.”

  And then she was gone, and so were his clothes. He took several deep breaths. Even that hurt. When the water filled the tub to capacity, he used his feet to twist the knobs controlling the water flow. Sweat beaded his forehead. Steam cleansed his pores. His mind wandered.
/>   Sheryl…

  Laurel helped him, still naked, to the massage table in a side room. Jake needed her help to climb onto the towel-draped table mat. Hot oils splashed his back, and he felt the sensation of her hands working the liquid into his flesh. She kneaded his muscles like dough, and it felt good.

  “You’ve been to a doctor,” she said.

  His eyes widened, and he stared at the cabinet before him. Don’t stop.

  “He found nothing wrong with you. In the strictest medical sense, this is understandable. In that respect, you’re fine.”

  She didn’t seem to require him to say anything, so he allowed her to continue.

  “You’re cursed. I feel it. Someone has put a hex on you. When I’m finished, you’ll be fine, as if nothing had ever been wrong. It doesn’t matter if you believe me now. You will when I’m done.”

  I want to believe you. Just make this pain go away!

  Her fingers dug deep into his muscles. He imagined them piercing his body, as if his skin were nothing but hot water, and applying pressure directly to his muscles. He inhaled her perfume, felt her body heat. Before he knew it, his penis became erect, its head pressing against his stomach. No woman had touched him since Sheryl’s murder. He didn’t want to be touched now, but he needed it. She grasped his buttocks, then rubbed his thighs. He felt his testicles constrict. Then she returned her attention to the small of his back, where he felt her fist pressing into his discs.

  “Roll over,” she whispered.

  Obeying, he felt no pain.

  “Close your eyes.”

  He did, and she closed her hands around the shaft of his cock and stroked it until he came, which didn’t take long. He felt her wiping him down, then heard her step from the room and close the door. He slept.

  “Wake up.”

  Jake’s eyes fluttered open. He saw Laurel standing before him, his clean clothes in her hands. Sitting up, he said, “What time is it?”

  “Just after five.”

  He realized that he had sat up without experiencing pain. Looking down, he saw that she had covered him with a towel in his sleep. He felt fully rested, even though he had slept for only forty minutes. More important, he felt no pain. Glancing at her with bewilderment, he took in her bemused smile.