Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  Bait & Tackle was a squat brick place set off to the side of a strip mall, the storefronts of which were all vacant save for a Big Lots. Brody parked in the lot and looked over the restaurant’s aesthetic. The front was made to look like the open toothless mouth of a fish. The bar and grill’s trademarked logo featured bobbers and hooks melded into the name.

  It seemed ostentatious and overly themed but appropriate given that this appeared to be a section of the north side where a lot of tourists would be funneled in, clear by the number of hotels, department stores, and faded signs suggesting a bus or boat tour would be a great way to see the city. Now, in the off-season, the area brought to mind images of closed amusement parks, bankrupted roller rinks with nothing but weeds populating their parking lots, and probably all that remained of those boat tours now were blurry photos on an ordi monitor’s screen saver.

  Brody stepped through the front doors. There was a young lady in tight pants and a polo shirt with a menu ready, asking if he wanted a table for one or if he wanted to sit at the bar. A couple of admonitory beeps sounded from a device hanging on her belt loop.

  He explained before she could begin her prepared speech. “Wait, I know I’m broke, but I just want to ask some questions is all. A friend of mine apparently made a fuss here a while ago, and I was wondering if you knew what it was about.”

  The girl looked new. She held an unbendable smile that hadn’t wavered even when her hip-mounted jigsaw reader alerted her to the staggering bum standing before her looking for a handout. “Would you like to speak to the manager?” she asked brightly, another thing she had obviously been trained to say.

  Brody agreed to speak with the manager.

  The girl led him into the kitchen that threw off a fishy aroma of stuff that wasn’t fresh but would smell a whole lot better once battered and fried. The employees all talked at once in a rabble of Spanish and Russian. They got to an office area that doubled as a storeroom, the shelves overloaded with giant jars of mayonnaise and cocktail sauce. The girl knocked on the doorframe, and a man looked up with a phone wedged between his shoulder and ear. He raised his index finger, turned in his office chair, and finished his conversation.

  The hostess left Brody there in the heat and noise.

  Brody heard the plastic clack of the phone being slammed, the squeak of the office chair as the man got up. He was tall and muscular with an ill-fitting shirt complete with screaming buttons. Brody couldn’t decide if the sheen on his forehead was brought on by the heated conversation he had just gone through or having to work in such close proximity to the kitchen. “Mickey Wright.” He stuck out a hand.

  Brody introduced himself and they shook, the man’s grip firm.

  “Come on in.” Mickey waved him in and remained standing, crossing his arms across his barrel chest and giving Brody the inquisitive eye, his patience visibly short.

  Brody closed the door behind him and said before his hand was off the knob, “I’m looking for someone.”

  “All my employees have their immigration papers up to date.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for someone who made a scene here. Nectar Ashbury, midtwenties, reddish blonde. I don’t know the specifics of what happened, but apparently your establishment pressed charges against her.”

  “Oh, that.” Mickey smiled. “That shit happens from time to time. See, we’re one of the few places in the area that features real fish anymore, and the vegetarian groups get a bug up their ass when we put out a new commercial advertising it. They picket and tell us that fish have feelings and all that bullshit. We wanted it to stop because naturally it hurts our business, and we wanted to make an example of them. Worked. Hasn’t happened since.”

  “So there were others arrested at the same time as her?”

  “Yeah, four or five.”

  “Is this restaurant locally owned or is it part of a chain?”

  “My dad opened it twenty years ago.”

  “So it’s the only one? You don’t answer to corporate?”

  “Unless you call the bank corporate, then no. What’s all this about?” Mickey asked.

  “Okay, forgive me if it comes off as intrusive, but do you have a contract with Probitas Security?”

  Mickey laughed. “Three words: yeah, fucking right.”

  “Why not?”

  “Probitas is expensive as hell. Only the muck-a-mucks high-rise caviar-and-champagne crowd can afford that. We’re more of the fish sticks and pale ale sort, if you catch my drift. Two for one bottles on Tuesday nights, by the way.”

  Brody regarded his cell. Scrolling down, he came to the tab Nectar owed in her pending file. “Do you happen to know the owner of The Glower?”

  Mickey’s demeanor shifted drastically. He raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, pal. You want to know anything about that place, you’re asking the wrong fella.” He tittered. “Can’t help you out there.”

  “Why? What’s the story?”

  “The apparent owner—Titian Shandorf, keep in mind—doesn’t give a shit and drugs are okay and bringing in your own booze is okay and there’s prostitution and porno swaps, gun sellers in one of the basement rooms and … It’s just one rough joint.”

  “Titian Shandorf?”

  “What, are you not from around here?” Mickey asked.

  Brody shook his head.

  Mickey cleared his throat and said, “Titian Shandorf is this sick fuck—pardon my French—that the cops have been trying to catch for years. The guy’s a murderer and a rapist. Why are you asking, anyway? You a private eye or something like that?”

  Brody smirked. “Something like that. Do you know where The Glower is?”

  “Down on Dunmore. I’ll offer you some advice, okay? That area isn’t exactly somewhere you’d want to go walking around with anything in your pockets. I can see you’re a good, clean guy and you probably don’t want to start any shit with anyone, but if you go there, you’ll encounter a healthy dose of it regardless.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.” He turned to leave.

  “Hey, you come back on Thursday. We got karaoke and all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp that night. I’ll set you up real good, okay?”

  Brody smiled, waved, walked back through the kitchen.

  A rat-faced kid, wan and bent as a warped broom handle, glared at Brody and slid a tattooed hand into his pocket.

  Brody returned the glare.

  The kid removed a red onion he was in the middle of reducing to dice and went back to work.

  Brody eyed the kid’s nametag: Rice. “Ain’t going to deport you,” he said, again dusting off his Russian.

  Rice nodded as if being deported was of no consequence to him.

  In the dining area, Brody thanked the hostess and set back out into the cold.

  As Brody made his way downtown toward Dunmore Avenue, he couldn’t help but admit that the train station looked inviting. As the Fairlane thundered past it, he saw a train was leaving the station heading west. He wished he could be on it. The light turned green and he pulled ahead, shifting the rearview mirror with the dangling testicles up and away, so he wouldn’t have to see that passenger train bullet out of the station. He tugged at the collar of his shirt again, unthinkingly.

  He drove another few blocks and found himself in the part of town where most shops had a fiber-optic sign in the window, inviting patrons in iridescent squiggles to get their checks cashed as well as assuring them there would be no questions asked when hocking a valuable or lien. Soon there were liquor stores and head shops, tattoo parlors, and the like. This, he figured, was the neighborhood Mickey was referring to, just as he saw the dented street sign for Dunmore Avenue.

  He took a few corners, circled the block to dive back in through the particularly grimy collection of storefronts, and slowed at an alleyway. On either side stood a free clinic and a tobacco and pipe shop. He could see all the way to the end of the alley, where there was a large steel door that looked like it belonged in a butcher shop.


  On the street corner, a very poor holo of Santa Claus with only about a hundred frames of animation to him and a tinny and out-of-sync loop of the bell he rang stood next to a Salvation Army collection bucket. Viewed from a certain perspective, the street corner scene painted Santa as an asshole—only ringing his bell to draw attention to the fact that his bucket didn’t contain donations but a small smoldering trash fire, something which he clearly felt was ho-ho-ho-larious.

  Someone behind him honked, and he moved along, drove into a parking garage, and took note of the sign: Under 15 Minutes—No Charge.

  I won’t even be that long.

  Brody left the Fairlane in a cramped spot, not bothering to lock the doors, and went down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and his chin tucked into the collar of his buttoned-up coat. The wind was in his face, snow cutting at his eyes.

  He passed the free clinic and stood at the mouth of the alleyway, looking down the narrow brick passage to the end where the meat locker door stood. The odds were slim that the nightclub would be behind that door, but Brody knew there were strange nightclubs springing up all over the Twin Cities, even some located in the boiler room of a wastewater treatment facility and the basement of a closed elementary school.

  Brody glanced around to make sure no one was waiting for a chance to bottleneck him in and approached the door. Looped through its massive handle was a rusted padlock. He yanked on the lock, and despite it being crumby with a layer of rust, it held secure. He searched for some sort of coded message, maybe The Glower spelled backward or upside down in chalk.

  On the ground he spotted trampled cigarette butts, broken syringes with bent needles, and a shattered glass pipe, mossy resin still clinging to its winking shards. A small envelope fluttered, nestled among the trash. Brody followed the source of the breeze causing it to shimmy like that. He knelt down and felt warm air coming out from underneath the large door.

  Someone had a heater going.

  He considered latching on the sonar and prying the rubber tracking along the bottom of the door out so he could reach in there with the sonar’s signal, but after touching the bottom of the door he didn’t want to risk jamming his fingers into his eyes to remove his lenses.

  Seeing inside the club was vital, but he didn’t want to risk getting caught breaking in—or worse, shot, if the owner was as dastardly as Mickey had made him out to be—if there was actually nothing worthy of the effort inside. He had probably already burned up five of his fifteen minutes on the parking garage’s clock standing here in the grip of indecision. Think, he told himself. Think.

  It came to him, something he had once considered but up to this point had put out of his mind when he’d read the warning the sonar came packaged with. It read in bold that anyone who still had the ability to see or wore carotene lenses should not put on the sonar for fear of irrevocable brain damage, death, stroke, death, blindness, and death. He looked at his filthy hands in the suffused sunlight that managed to eke through the gray clouds above. Too little time to go and wash them, too much potentially here worth investigating. Worth the risk?

  He undid the knot in his tie and yanked it out from around his neck with a zip. He tied it over his eyes like a blindfold and waved his hand in front of his face to make sure he could see absolutely nothing. He pinched his eyes shut as tightly as he could and reached into his pocket for the sonar. He felt the momentary conflict with his optic nerves. Unable to decide which incoming information to take, they issued Brody a roaring headache, ringing ears, a runny nose, and a tacky and dry throat—all at once.

  Brody worked quickly with his head viciously throbbing. He could feel his pulse gushing one thud after another in his temples, in the crooks of his elbows—sluicing like a pretempest tide in his ears. He put both hands under the rubber tracking of the door and pulled upward as hard as he could. The sonar’s next ping reached under the door and spread out into the room beyond.

  In white wire frame inside the theater of Brody’s mind: an entryway, a barred window, a hanging sign he couldn’t read. Next to the barred window another doorway with a half door beyond where he found several coat hangers on a metal bar. Backing up, he felt around the floor. Dried mud, more trampled cigarette butts. A band, like the one received during a stay in the hospital. Possibly they had to be worn when you entered the club.

  He came to another room, this one much, much larger. All empty, no movement save for a couple of scampering rats and cockroaches represented to him in the sonar’s ping as scattering cubes. Chairs, tables, a stage. A dance floor littered with garbage and more discarded wristbands. Mounted lights, a smoke machine.

  Scratches in the varnish of the bar. Repeating, angled columns. It took Brody a moment to realize they were barstools flipped up and lining the bar like stoic pedestals displaying a thousand, tiny nothings. Behind the bar the sonar ping found the cash register, its till open like a tongue ready for the placement of a pill or communion wafer. Shelves for liquor bottles, all empty.

  He backed up and found a doorway, open with a rubber stopper. Stalls, sink, tiled floor. Bathroom.

  Then stairs. An upstairs hallway. A series of doors, all closed. Brody was unable to feel around them, and there were no keyholes to slide through. One door, the last one at the end on the right, open. Inside, a bed. Nightstand. Lamp with a broken glass shade. Dresser. On the dresser: a cheap assembly-line aluminum ashtray, a pack of cigarettes.

  Moving on. Doorway next to the bed. Bathroom. Shower curtain. Bathtub. Foot?

  He focused even harder, even though the echolocation ping was getting weak at that distance. A foot, a leg. A thigh. A patch of neatly trimmed pubic hair. A flat stomach, ample breasts, shoulders, neck … No head.

  Brody stifled a gasp but forced himself to focus. One last push. The neck, ragged, as if the head had been sawn off. He felt around for any distinguishing markings or jewelry. The body was naked save for a band around one wrist. Fingernails were fake; he could feel the layer of glue rising up around the edges.

  In the alley, he knelt and felt the soft, warm splat of a droplet of blood escaping his nostril and landing on the back of his hand still gripping the rubber gasket surrounding the door. “Just a little farther.” He squeezed his eyes tighter behind his silk blindfold and pressed on.

  He felt around the floor of the bathroom for the head, the tool which was used to remove it. No dice. As far as he could tell, the floor was clean. He imagined it was covered in blood, though, something he couldn’t detect with the sonar. He backed up, then all at once let the stretching, whisper-thin signal collapse. He pictured it like a tentacle, an ethereal boneless finger ceasing its reach, becoming solid, and shattering like glass. This image was defeated by the onslaught of his headache doubling, then tripling, in severity.

  He ripped the sonar from his forehead and gripped his temples, falling to his hands and knees. If he had woken up with this degree of a headache, he would swear someone had just driven a railroad tack through the back of his head. He loosened the silk tie from around his eyes but found even the overcast sun cutting through the snow clouds to be too much. He wrapped the tie around his head again. He kept it on for a moment to let everything settle.

  Remembering the grace period at the parking garage, he decided to tough it out and pulled the tie from his eyes. He exited the alleyway and walked as quickly as he could, each step sending a vibration up his spine and into his brain that made him want to scream. He slapped himself down for a cigarette, found none, swore.

  He stuffed the coiled tie back in his pocket and opened his eyes. Everything was bleary, overly bright as if captured before him by a camera with a broken shutter. He blinked a few times, and the striped crosswalk in front of him cleared up. For a second he thought the snowflakes falling in front of him were new debris floating around inside the orbit of his eyes, a promise of an oncoming seizure, coma, death.

  He found Seb’s car and got in and gave the attendant his ticket just as fourteen and a half minutes passed on
the meter.

  He barely managed to turn a corner, pull the car alongside the curb, and open the door before emptying his stomach into the snow. A majority of the fast onslaught of nausea had been the result of attempting to use the sonar while he had the lenses in, but it was also seeing a corpse up close. Certainly, he had been almost a full city block away in person, but with the sonar it was like being there, seeing and feeling. It was an altogether unique sense, somewhere between touch, sound, and sight—a comingling of the three made palatable to his mind, with all the awfulness and unflinching detail in whatever he desired to aim it upon. Even without color and definite shape, the horror was evident.

  Brody hadn’t seen a dead body since the service, and the jagged wound, the ripped neck muscles, and the serrated edge of skin around the exterior trunk of the neck were beyond disquieting. His mind swam. Even when he closed the car door and dropped his head to stare at the carpeted ceiling of Seb’s car, dotted with cigarette burns, everything still felt like he was at sea on choppy waters. He breathed in and out, trying to distance himself.

  The mounting possibility that it was Nectar in the bathtub rapped on the door of his mind, but he needed a second to let the splitting headache subside before he could deal with it. His throat was raw and greased with acidic coffee puke, and he just wanted to wash out his mouth. He reached under the seats and found an empty beer can and nothing else.

  He tossed the can into the backseat where it bounced off the lid of Nectar’s files. The desire to rinse out his mouth vanished when he was reminded of the plastic tote. He ransacked the container to find the expired jigsaw he had scanned at the AFA. He scanned it a second time to get Nectar’s files that were considered pending. He reread what she owed The Glower and thought it was pretty unlikely the owner would take a steak knife to her neck for only ninety-eight credits and some change, even if he was the scourge Titian Shandorf.

  Nonetheless, he wanted to know who the body in the bathtub was. He clicked out of his jigsawscanning program and started another very small app that coordinated with the former by way of lifting fingerprints and pinpointing them to the owner in the legislative files.