Black Beast: A Clan of MacAulay Novel

by R. S. Guthrie

  Lucinda Durning kept her eyes averted to the cold copper-colored tile at her feet, heavy from the shame of the cataclysm her brother had forged.

  At eight-fifty we were escorted through the sterile administrative corridors to the witness viewing room: a small, nondescript, concrete hut painted off-white. Straight-back wooden chairs were arranged to face a glass window with curtains closed.

  Lucinda was crying softly and squeezing my hand. She was trembling and I put my arm around her frail, slumped shoulders.

  At one minute until nine, the curtains opened to reveal Durning in green uniform pants, a green button-down, short-sleeved shirt, strapped to a gurney. The I.V. lines snaked from his left arm. The Warden had already read the death warrant to the condemned man and announced there would be no final statement.

  Ming Huai’s family was typically stoic. Lucinda burst into open sobs as Durning turned and gazed at her. He looked so weak, more so even than when I had seen him in the cell.

  But then he moved his head, straining a bit to look directly at me. At first I thought I caught a flicker of relief as he focused on me—but then he did the strangest thing:

  He grinned.

  Immediately and without warning, a loud clacking filled the room. The first of the syringes, a saline push to clean the lines. The second release—sodium pentothal—and Durning began to lose consciousness. One pump fired after the other and as the pancuronium bromide interrupted his breathing, Durning’s body began to quake slightly. His hands involuntarily opened and closed. Finally, the potassium chloride stopped his heart and it was over.

  The entire process took just over two minutes. The coroner entered the execution chamber and pronounced the death of Ebony Durning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DAVID PELLA lit a joint, took a nice long pull, and scuffed his feet in the dirt impatiently. The night was uncomfortably still.

  Where the hell is Marty, he thought.

  The meeting was important. The two of them had been skimming ounces off the top of multi-pound pot deliveries for over a year and selling dime bags in back alleys, parks, schoolyards—anywhere they would avoid being recognized by larger, more organized dealers.

  But now David was concerned their bosses were getting wise to the whole scam. He’d seen people around corners. His stereo had begun making strange noises—he feared his apartment was bugged.

  And if his apartment was bugged, for all he knew Marty had three or four snitches sitting right there in his living room, hand-scribing everything he said or did.

  Marty.

  The oblivious one.

  He was no secret agent. Hell, he was hardly a criminal. The guy could barely figure out if his socks matched. And Marty Dolan was the poster boy for why someone had to come up with the slogan: don’t get high on your own supply.

  All of which of course begged the question: why in the fuck did David ever trust that moron to be his confederate in this scam?

  Marty was always doing this to David. Always high, always late.

  They’d been working together for two years. Second layer distributers for Calypso. Marty and David handled transport. There were smaller full-scale dealers all over Denver—including more than two dozen illegitimate medical marijuana stores that ran without license and catered to anyone, prescription or no. The explosion of the market made the ferreting out of violators nearly impossible for an underfunded police department and a DEA with bigger game to hunt.

  It was Pella’s idea to start scraping off the top. The average delivery week for the two of them sometimes counted upward of a few hundred pounds. And these large quantities weren’t yet broken down into saleable units—that, David had convinced Marty, was the key:

  Score some shake from the larger volumes.

  How hard could it be for the two of them to pinch an eighth of an ounce here, a quarter ounce there?

  It wasn’t difficult. Not at all. But of course, the eighths turned into quarters and the quarters turned into ounces.

  Shit, Pella thought. This is no time to be late.

  David had a lot he wanted to talk to Marty about, beginning with how the fuck did these goons find out??

  The park wasn’t far from the hotel, and was the best place Pella could think of to be able to take a long walk—away from listening ears—and discuss what was happening.

  They needed a solution.

  Maybe if they stopped. Better yet, slowed down. If they stopped too quickly, it might be obvious. They could slowly drop back to a few quarters a week, then eighths—by the end of the summer they would be free and clear.

  And alive.

  David took another drag on the joint. He was no one’s optimist. He knew how the world worked. Sometimes you stepped in the dog shit, and when you did, it was almost impossible to completely get that smell to go away, even after you thought you cleaned the bottom of your sneakers.

  Pella took a third long toke. He’d been smoking way too much weed the past couple of days, but he just couldn’t help it. There was smoking to get high and there was smoking to calm the nerves. His nerves were so frazzled he could have easily have gotten a prescription for the pot.

  He pushed the light on his watch.

  12:30 AM.

  Marty was now thirty minutes late. Pella could not believe it. A cogent possibility slowly crept into his mind:

  What if Marty had been snatched up? What if the goons had already got to him?

  Pella prayed silently that the thought was just him being paranoid. Marty was habitually tardy, but he…

  Pella heard movement near the trail, a hundred feet away. A scuffling sound in the bushes.

  “Marty,” David whispered. “Damn it, Marty. Get over here if it’s you.”

  No answer.

  “Stop messing around,” Pella said, louder this time. Trying to display a confidence he didn’t feel.

  Still nothing.

  Now David was starting to get a little scared.

  No. It was more like petrified.

  Don’t let the paranoia creep in, he thought. That’s ALL you need at this point.

  Then Marty’s head popped up over a far bush!

  David could barely make out his face and the bulbous shape of his melon head in the dark.

  He really is an ugly man, Pella thought inadvertently.

  He waved Marty over, but Marty just stood there in the bushes, head and shoulders poking above the shrubbery. His Charlie Brown head was angled in that stupid way he always tilted it when he didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

  “Get over here!” Pella yelled.

  Marty suddenly popped down, completely gone from view. Then he popped back up, and did a one-eighty. Then back down again.

  He was acting like a puppet!

  How high IS he, David wondered incredulously.

  “Not funny,” Pella said.

  Apparently not loud enough for Marty—who was mute as well as deaf—to hear, because he kept popping down and popping up and half-spinning this way and that.

  It was ridiculous. And it was so Marty.

  Not mysterious.

  Not funny.

  Just fucking loopy.

  Suddenly, Marty stopped his puppet show. He just stood there again, only visible from the chest up. And then he executed a full three hundred and sixty degree turn.

  Then he did a second.

  Impossible, David thought. That’s not even possible…

  Pella’s partner in crime then started whirling in circles like a top. It looked as if someone were spinning a basketball on their finger, only it wasn’t a basketball at all.

  It was Marty Dolan.

  The spinning also suddenly stopped.

  Marty disappeared again from view.

  Pella could hear terrible sounds coming from the bushes. Now, it seemed, Marty was throwing up—it sounded disgusting, whatever it was he was doing.

  Then Marty Dolan rose into the air, the top of his head climbing to a full nine feet tall.

  Good Go
d, Pella thought incredulously. He’s riding on top of someone’s shoulders, bobbing and weaving and still looking as stupid as ever.

  Pella’s brain was still trying to comprehend the circus act he was witnessing. It was difficult to put two and two together; at least when he knew the answer should be four.

  Someone was carrying Marty.

  He could see that now.

  But whoever was carrying David’s friend was very, very tall himself—at least seven feet. He was also, apparently, strong as an ox. As they came closer, Pella could see that the stranger was loping along on two feet, with ease—fluid, like a horse in a smooth gallop. He could see that Marty was hoisted up on one arm and shoulder and the stranger was not inhibited at all by the man riding there; no more than a full-size horse was burdened by a small child in the saddle.

  It was difficult to see more detail in the dimness, but when the pair entered a swath of lamplight about thirty feet away, Pella noticed that there was something in the stranger’s other hand—something large and square-shaped, flailing and moving up and down as he ran.

  Pella’s face screwed up with the horror of realization and he fell to his knees, throwing up the night’s dinner on the dry earth.

  The “something” the stranger was carrying was Marty Dolan’s lower torso.

  “Oh my God,” Pella said as he realized the stranger wasn’t a man at all.

  The call came at four-forty, pulling me from a thick, exhausting sleep. Greer reached blindly for the receiver and passed it straight to me. Her lithe, sun-browned body pivoted on its axis with that tousled, fire-red hair never leaving the pillow.

  For Dr. Greer Foster, a fourth-year professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver, calls prior to dawn were not the norm.

  They were mine.

  “Macaulay,” I croaked, clacking a dry tongue, scorched from too many melon margaritas and incredible, midnight lovemaking with my girlfriend.

  At forty-five, I was toeing the fine line between “hanging in there for my age” and an obit reading:

  Old, one-legged cop shacks up with young, nubile, spitfire and dies.

  Greer was thirty-four—not insanely young, but a lot can happen to a person in the decade between mid-thirties and mid-forties.

  “We caught a double-homicide in your backyard, sport.”

  That was Ned Burke, my partner of just over eleven years.

  “Yeah, okay.” The haze was slow to clear, like fog off deep water before a cold autumn sunrise.

  As the senses became more acute, I could make out Burke chomping on fried dough and chasing it with black coffee, two sugars. He had already visited 7-Eleven.

  “Two stiffs in the bushes at Sloan’s Lake, south side, by the bathrooms. Apparently there’s some heavy mutilation. Two males—who knows, maybe a couple of fags—whatever…they got torn apart pretty good, I’m told. Field day for the press, this one.”

  I loved Burke, but he wasn’t in danger of winning the Denver Metropolitan Man of the Year award.

  He was, however, one a hell of a cop. And a great partner.

  “Forensics is already on the way,” he said. “Patrol cruiser responded to the nine-one-one call.”

  My smallish, two-bedroom brownstone was a block over and one down from the Sheridan entrance to the park. There were many Denver cops in the neighborhoods surrounding Sloan’s Lake.

  “Five minutes,” I managed.

  “Beat you there,” Burke said, and disconnected.

  Greer turned over and draped herself across my chest, her breath sweet, like the nectar of a pomegranate, her hair silky and wild with the faint smell of tropical shampoo. The furnace of her long, naked body consumed me and I began combusting, like so much flash paper.

  The way she adapted to my shape always felt explicable and natural. Preordained. Two pieces cracked from the same mold and returned.

  My hand roamed the flawless skin of her shoulders, caressing her gently. I toyed briefly with the idea of bringing her fully awake and making the five minutes twenty.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “Is everything okay?”

  Greer was every ounce her own woman. Had no desire to be anywhere near a wedding chapel, either. But damn if she didn’t have the “worried wife” lingo licked.

  Mostly it was to humor me.

  “It’s a homicide in the park,” I said. “I gotta go.”

  “Our park?” she asked, more coherent now. The playfulness was suddenly gone, and I found the choice of words strangely comforting.

  It was already an old struggle:

  I wanted her to move in. Greer was resistant to the idea.

  I knew her reasons, though they didn’t fit the image of the life I was whittling and polishing from the substance of our five years together. As I saw it, there was no time like the present.

  Greer lived near the campus in a one bedroom loft with her black lab Charlie. She strolled alone at night; she asked for no quarter from the predominantly male faculty; she chose her own paths.

  Professor Greer Foster cleaved to her sovereignty—a thirty-four year old, post-modernist believer in self-destiny—a tough-as-nails woman who, as a child, had survived being knocked from a horse at full gallop by a tree branch to the middle of the chest.

  That accident would have killed ninety-nine out of one hundred children. And yet she survived it.

  Like everything in her life.

  She was proud of the scar. It was proof of her invincibility.

  I, too, felt invincible much of the time. I also liked to think I was in control of my own destiny—but to Greer Foster, independence was a duty.

  Ironically, her very individuality—or at least her desire to protect it—shackled her. It was a like a bodysuit forged of chain mail that forever weighed her down, affecting each of her wants and needs and choices.

  Of course, she didn’t see it that way.

  “Yep, our park. Sloan’s Lake,” I confirmed.

  I kissed her lightly on the forehead as she gently and reluctantly untangled herself from me. The separation was like a strong Arctic wind, penetrating and palpable, chilling the very marrow of my bones.

  “Be careful, Bobby Mac.” she offered, already slipping back beneath the thick comforter, returning to unconscious bliss, a place where dead bodies never surfaced and where the Arctic winds never blew.

  “I love you,” she added.

  It was something she didn’t offer indiscriminately or all that often, so it was consequently something I never tired of hearing. I smiled sheepishly; just a dumb, love-struck, big-toothed boy.

  I attached the new microprocessor-controlled leg by Otto Bock that I’d received from my prosthetist—one he’d ordered custom for me last month. I dressed in jeans, forest-green polo, a lightweight tan sport coat, and a pair of Rockports Greer bought for my birthday.

  To hell with the tie, I thought. It was Saturday.

  My mouth felt swollen and rubbery. I gargled some mouthwash before a cursory, hastened brush.

  The room was dark and comfortable and I stood still, listening to the hushed, content flow of Greer’s breathing. The smell of her ensnared me in the memory of last night: the tawny tapestry of her skin, the mutual, agreeable burden of pleasing, the meshing of two souls into one, the heaving release as she surrendered to her desires.

  Greer stirred quietly, as if my thoughts had wantonly breached her subconscious. I reached out and trailed a soft circle on the top of her foot with my forefinger and she moved almost imperceptibly.

  I felt that oblong throe in my guts, the spontaneous horror of the possibility of losing her to the world she was hammering out for herself. We would cross that bridge, I knew. It was out there, around some blind turn in the foot trail.

  But at this moment, she loved me, and that would have to be enough.

  I took my badge and gun and left her to the enveloping warmth of weekend sleep.

  The recent evolution of the C-Leg had further renewed the hope of a final rehabilitation; a re
acquiring of the old Bobby Macaulay: athlete, sure-footed and not simply in control of his physical surroundings but fast, agile, and formidable.

  It hadn’t been an easy twelve years. In the early years there was the ethereal “phantom limb” pain, as mentally debilitating as physical.

  For a long, long time I felt crippled; left wanting in the face of things long since taken for granted:

  Balance.

  Gait.

  Sheer equilibrium.

  Hell, carrying the groceries from the car across an uneven surface at first presented myriad challenges.

  But things were improving. Each year now saw marked changes and this new technology had my spirits up.

  Dr. Hines had tasked me with putting the contraption to the test. The industry scoop was that this could be the best answer to the questions of the active AK amputee:

  Cops, firemen, military in the field—all high marks.

  The leg had a core CPU that took fifty samplings per second from a number of strategically-placed sensors. The microprocessor actually anticipated a person’s next move, keeping him or her as stable as a real knee whether putting weight on it, walking in free-swing, or even for a person who had stumbled.

  The thing was truly amazing and I felt more like my old self than I had since the accident.

  One leg or two, old prosthetic or new, Greer could not care less. In truth, she rarely talked about it at all, as if she was genuinely naive to the whole business; as if my missing leg was a common inconvenience like a sprained ankle or ingrown toenail.

  She assisted me when necessary but there was never a mention of it, save for the perfunctory questions about a new prosthetic or other technical trivia.

  I was “Bobby Mac” to her, a big strong lug who filled a vacancy in her life, bought her unexpected gifts, shared her bed, and made a fool of myself just often enough to keep her entertained.

  The mechanical leg was merely happenstance.

  Sloan’s Lake Park is one of the largest in metro Denver. There are many undocumented stories surrounding the creation of the lake, the most elaborate being that Thomas F. Sloan, the cattle baron who built an ice house next to the water to stipend Denver’s summer cooling needs, tried to plant potatoes or dig a well over a high water table and inadvertently created the lake.