by Martin Rose
“Look what the cat dragged in.”
*
“You tell him everything?” I asked Lionel, hooking a thumb in Lafferty’s direction.
Inside the confines of the house, the rifle stowed away in the garage, Lafferty sighed and leaned back in his wheelchair with his hands laced over the back of his neck.
From the kitchen table where we gathered, I wanted to be able to appreciate my return home and celebrate it. After all, six months jammed in tight with a hacker’s farts and a legion of confused potheads put away on possession and the obligatory crew of mafia and gangster types did not a tropical vacation make. Leaving prison to return here gave me the impression I’d stumbled into a different room and, disoriented, it would take time before I realized I could eat when I felt hungry, sleep when I felt tired, or opt for an all-nighter, open the door, and take in the air when I pleased without it all occurring on someone else’s timetable, without McSneer looking over my shoulder. Instead of thugs and prison guards, their faces swapped out with those of Lionel, Elvedina, and Lafferty’s.
Geoff Lafferty of the provincial Pleasant Hills Police Department had once been a go-getter, aiming for detective in a town without need of a detective. After years of hard work, unable to climb higher up the rungs of a smothering, tribalistic police department for whom advancing young officers was anathema, Lafferty fell into trouble. Fate threw a kidney stone at him. To allay the pain, his doctor gave him a muscle relaxant. This suited Lafferty just fine. Heavy drugs suited Lafferty better than fine. He took more and more. He manufactured aches and pains and, when he ran out of good will with his doctor, he ferreted out new supply lines to feed his burgeoning addiction. It wasn’t that Lafferty was a bad guy. It happens to people all the time. Between the inanity of ordinary life and the interminable waiting for something different to happen, killing time in a small town any way you can becomes the only way to survive it.
Lafferty nearly didn’t.
He fell asleep behind the wheel of his cruiser in an ill-fated turn through an intersection. Twisted metal and blown-out headlights. The engine block sitting in his lap with his spine twisted into an emoticon.
He doesn’t sit in a cruiser anymore. He sits in a wheelchair. His spinal injury is inoperable, but had an interesting side effect—it broke him of addiction by no longer being able to provide those pleasurable effects of his drug of choice. In one fell swoop, he lost his ability to walk and shook the monkey from his back.
We knew each other in high school. Ran in the same crowds before life took us in different directions and he went to Police Academy and I went to boot camp. We didn’t talk deep, but shared the odd drink or two in a lousy dive bar on the county line. Kept our talk light and not about the things haunting us. That’s what made our friendship special, by virtue of not being friendly at all.
The police department installed him in the evidence room, where he stowed away bizarre items caught in the scope of burglaries, murders, rapes, and other crimes, many decades old. Mattresses to yield blood for DNA testing, a shoebox filled with human bones of unidentified people, a cast-iron skillet a wife used to kill her husband. Think kindergarten show-and-tell on a grand scale. His evidence room served as the town’s dirty closet and charged him with the task of inventorying every skeleton.
He’d known something was wrong with me in my zombie years. Knew my family was in deep with a thousand dirty secrets. Knew I lived in the shadow of the military and knew I had more than a run-of-the mill medical problem I took pills for. He assigned me customers to keep me afloat and feed my investigation business over the years.
But for all that, I kept my one friend at arm’s length because to know the truth, for him to know I was more dead than alive was more than I could tolerate. In the midst of that much suffering, I didn’t invite others in. Better to deal with it alone than drag them down into the mud.
Now I had to stare him in the face and wonder if he recognized me. Saw the real Vitus through the brand new skin. I had to deal with him in a whole new way and I didn’t like it, didn’t like the sense of shame bolting up through my blood and turning my face brick red. All my dirty secrets spilled at last. Ashamed to wonder what items the police gave him. Had he looked down in the evidence bag, at the trigger where my finger rested that fateful day, on the gun I fired?
“You know, I had this inclination that we were friends for a hot minute, and then, I get this call from some snot-nosed kid. This kid—this kid whose father I’ve known since junior high, whose family I’ve known forever—calls to tell me he’ll explain later, but Vitus needs his help. And could I look after his uncle’s house while he’s in stir on murder one? Next thing I know, I’ve got spooks crawling all over my ass and this old guy with his lady friend shows up at my evidence room, and I come to realize, hey, maybe we’re not friends at all.”
I cleared my throat and looked at my shoes. The floor was clean. I tried to imagine him going through each room in his wheelchair, throwing out my trash with Elvedina behind him and maybe Lionel drinking tea at the counter, poring over documents. All of them, cleaning up my messes, the personal ones and the physical ones.
“You never asked.”
Lafferty burst out laughing. “You know who else has heard that one before? My wife. Soon to be my fucking ex-wife, because Selina packed her shit and left me. Ten years of helping me around the house was one thing, but having black helicopters use my house as a landing pad while Uncle Sam and his minions explain to me that my good buddy has stolen the body of his nephew—”
“It was given,” I gritted through my teeth.
“—yeah, like I ‘give’ taxes every year, too, I’m sure. Either way, you owe me big for the shit I’ve been pulling for you. If it wasn’t for Lionel here, I’d be in deep with the PD. They’d wanna know why a charged criminal is calling me to be his best man. But they blew down like straw men the second Lionel waved his magic government wand.”
Lionel’s hands trembled over the kitchen table as he opened up a file and waited for us to have our argument and be done with it. Elvedina still had yet to move an inch. She was a human sun dial with the shadows growing long at her feet.
“You were always a bastard. Snippy and snarky. It was okay. That’s just what we did, but when you dropped off the radar and then I find out well, shit, you aren’t even really you anymore.”
Lafferty leaned forward to look at me in the light. A lifetime ago, I took every light bulb out of the house so I could wallow in the darkness where no one could see just how deep my rot went; now I squirmed beneath his scrutiny and longed for the darkness once more.
“I know it’s you. It just ain’t your face. Ain’t your body. The closest thing you got that’s recognizable is your fuckin’ eyes, which is really saying something since they weren’t much more than marbles eaten through with battery acid, but the hate, the spite? Yeah, that’s the same.”
“Pack it in, Lafferty. You don’t have to stay here. Thanks for watching the house and don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
Lafferty pursed his lips and leaned forward with his elbows digging into his dead legs.
“I give a fuck, asshole. That’s why I’m not out the door. I get to have some fun through your cloak and dagger friends, here,” Lafferty gestured at Lionel and Elvedina, “I still got my gig with the evidence room, and hey, that’s nice, but I’d like to think that maybe you were my friend during all those years. Was that real or made up in my head?”
Bitterness upwelled in me. What was this? Shame? Pride? I heard a voice eating into my head space, sloppy bites and then my Id muscled in: You’re getting the full spectrum of emotion, eh? Don’t always make you sensitive. Sometimes, it makes you swing in the other direction. He’s the only friend you have, but you can’t say it.
“Was it really worth boosting him from prison?” Lafferty asked Lionel. “Not too late to get a refund and bring h
im back, is it?”
Lionel’s trembling hand ticked out time on the table before he opened his mouth.
“You’ll have many hours to work out the subtleties of relationships, and indeed, Vitus will need a primer on how to be human. For now, we have serious work to do. This house will be our headquarters, our home base. I will be sorting and collating data and assisting on the information level and channeling to our friends in Washington. You will all form a cohesive unit. Every second we waste in idle talk is a second in which Jamie’s secrets threaten discovery or languish to our detriment. Your task, Vitus, is urgent: discover and identify your brother’s monsters.”
While Elvedina did her best imitation of my own life-sized, personal gargoyle and planted herself beside the table, the others fixed their coffee. I hoisted myself up onto the counter and reached on top of the ledge above the cabinets. Lafferty watched me with one raised eyebrow when I brought down a pack of cigarettes and nothing else. A Glock 19 should have been waiting for me there, but all I found was a clean outline in the dust.
Lafferty looked like he wanted to say something about the smokes. He knew all the ins and outs of addictions both big and small. I could have pulled out a crack pipe and he probably wouldn’t have said anything. Lionel was from a different age—the same age my father came from, when they gave you cigarettes for your fifth birthday. And well, Elvedina looked like she ate tobacco when all the hard drugs were used up.
I lit up and tossed the pack on the counter. I wasn’t about to rummage for my gun in front of them, but I wondered if Elvedina would leave me for a spare few seconds to give me the chance. My status as a looked-after government pet was implied: they didn’t trust me. I poured a coffee and breathed smoke and felt a fraction like my old self, but with better skin and less gangrene.
“You really have to do that here?” Lafferty asked and waved the air in front of his face.
“I got a headache.”
“They prescribe cancer sticks for that?”
Lionel pulled a pillbox from his briefcase and then fumbled around inside. Single serving packets of aspirin and then Tylenol spilled out. A bottle of Ben-Gay. A prescription bottle followed suit, fell on its side and rolled for the edge of the table. I snatched it from the air before it hit the floor and glanced down at it in my hand.
Atroxipine.
I froze. Lionel continued to shift through his haphazard papers in search of a medicine that would satisfy me, but I already held it in my hands. Lafferty dug through a drawer for a coffee spoon, turned away. Elvedina’s cold scarecrow eyes distracted elsewhere—staring through the window at the dark shape of the turkey vulture outside.
No one would know if I took it.
I teetered on the brink of decision and desire won out.
I stuffed the pill bottle into my pocket.
Lionel snagged a set of naproxen sodiums and tapped them in front of me with triumph. He began to gather all his medicines and I waited for him to ask, wonder where the Atroxipine was. My sweaty fist locked around the plastic. I couldn’t let it go. My throat gone dry.
“I keep a few painkillers on me, for emergencies. This should set you right.”
I rolled the naproxen pills into my one hand and sat down while Lafferty wheeled over to the kitchen counter and brought the coffee pot over to the table with a set of cups. Lionel’s silver-headed cane leaned against the table and Elvedina had her back to the sink and her arms crossed. The vulture made faces at her through the window. In another world, I had thought my house would be populated by a family. Kids growing up while I grew old. What I had done to deserve this motley crew of fuck-ups eluded me. But with the bottle of my old medication in my pocket, I’d become invincible.
“All right,” I clapped my hands, “what do you have, and what the fuck do you want me to do?”
Lionel cleared his throat. “I was going to outline the terms of our arrangement—”
“Fuck it,” I said. “Skip the legalese and get on with it. What’s the fucking job?”
I got up to lean over the sink and thumb off the cap of Atroxipine. I dropped the generic headache pills where they swirled down the drain, artfully doling Atroxipine into my palm instead and secreting the bottle away again. I knocked the pills into my mouth and washed it down with a swallow of scalding coffee. Two seconds elapsed before the aftertaste swelled through my mouth; I knew that taste. I recognized it with a shiver that turned my arms and legs into rubber and tilted my head back into ecstasy.
Atroxipine. Oh, how I missed you.
“The job,” Lionel said and reshuffled a set of papers, “is clean up.”
And by “clean up,” he’s not referring to the shit you do before you invite the Queen over for tea.
“For things Jamie left behind?”
“Yes.”
“And he didn’t write any of this down? Did he write me down?”
“You were in the black. You were very deep in the black. Until you killed Jamie, anyone who knew about you on our end had been killed.”
I pointed at the stack of papers nesting in Lionel’s briefcase. “Are those case files? Jamie’s things?”
“We’ve had our satellite officers putting together rough outlines. It seems we have a number of things on the loose and out of our control.”
“Jamie was initiating projects without permission?”
“I can only speak for so many agencies. No one wants to fess up to rubber-stamping his actions.”
I thought of my father and said nothing.
I held up a hand with the burning cigarette in it. Hard to get used to the idea of those fingers being mine. Scars missing from the knuckles, from the fights and knives of my youth. I whistled through a haze of smoke. Being able to taste tobacco again was both delightful and disgusting, and I loved every minute of it.
“Pick the first one off the top,” I suggested. “We’ll start there, and work our way through, and find our godforsaken monsters.”
“Not so easy as all that, sonny,” Lionel said, holding up one crooked finger.
“What gives?”
“Is this what passes for the English language these days? What ‘gives,’ as you so eloquently put it, is a long list of monsters awaits us. We can’t simply take them all on at once. This will be done one at a time. We need you to help identify the subject, find the subject, interview them, and at long last, apprehend them.”
“How am I supposed to apprehend people who don’t even exist?”
“You turn them over to the tender embrace of your dear Uncle Sam, boy. We have the experience, and we have the tools to take care of these unfortunates. Of course, that might be in direct proportion to the damage they’ve done or the trouble they’ve gotten themselves into in the course of Jamie’s experiments.”
“So, one at a time it is, then. Who’s our first boogeyman on the Monster Department’s most-wanted list?”
The sun set beyond the vulture, who sunned himself with languid black eyes. I moved out the papers from the uppermost file, set them on the table, and passed them one by one—to Geoff, to the space where Elvedina stared, to Lionel, and myself.
I held up a picture to learn the name of my newest job in the fading light.
“Pleased to meet you, Blake Highsmith.”
*
You wanna believe that all of life’s events come in a series of Cliff’s Notes and sound bytes and two-second tag lines, but in real life, complexity is the order of the day. Investigators and police detectives work within a system that’s rigid and adversarial. The answers aren’t real; they’re merely bureaucratic. You hope the perpetrator you arrest is the guy who did the crime, but even if he isn’t, he’s going to prison. Culpability, not required.
It’s not the fault of the men in blue that this happens; that the wrong people find themselves between a set of prison bars or the overworked and underpaid officer doesn’t notice the second set of suspicious footsteps leading to the dead body he’ll write off as death by misadventure. Before you
catch a criminal, the crime must be recognized—it’s a thin line between what you perceive and what you don’t. This is the dirty underbelly of detection and law enforcement. Just like any complex industry, mistakes happen.
Paperwork filed wrong so John Doe goes to prison instead of John Quincy. The rape kit dropped on the ground or never processed so the perpetrator goes free. The crowded evidence room where files are misplaced and good evidence is thrown out to make room for new cases.
We live in a machine. The only requisite for living in it is to feed anyone who gets in the way into the cogs.
We misfits around a kitchen table, passing flimsy evidence of a secret project that may or may not exist, must now read between the lines. Nothing is linear. It’s all scrambled. The puzzles shaken up and mixed together with pieces missing, and now Lionel is asking me to bring together the whole picture.
We pass the pieces back and forth and we do it in silence. Around the table, Lionel and Lafferty come up with lousy ideas to fit their prejudices and biases and filter it through the answers that comfort them the most. I tried to see it with new eyes. As if for the first time. I tried to think without thinking at all and let the picture emerge. I wanted to let Mr. Blake Highsmith tell me what he did, not through his words, but through his evidence.
And bit by bit, the picture coalesced, the narrative formed.
When the documents had finished being passed around and my cigarette burnt down to the pit, the filter smoldering, I plucked it out of my lips and flipped it into my coffee cup with a sizzle. A scrim of ash floated in the brown. Atroxipine buzzed through my veins with a delicious hyper speed that rendered the world into a funhouse carnival ride, faces distorted into carnival masks.
That’s a new sensation, I thought.
“You ready for this?”
They were ready.
“I got no fucking idea.”
Sighs and groans formed a carousel around the table and after that, we called it a night.
My guests found their places in different corners of the house. Lionel had installed himself in a musty guest bedroom across the hall. Water sang through the pipes as someone ran a shower, Lafferty’s chair squealed as he cussed and chivvied it through a close turn, and then I heard the sound of the pull-out couch opening up where Lafferty would count sheep for the remainder of the night. All the noise subsided and faded into the deepening night—except Elvedina’s footsteps as she moved through the house with no destination and no seeming end. I counted the times she passed by my door and watched her shadow come and go. She made me uneasy, thinking of what her purpose might be and why she was with us.