by Andrew Post
As the sickness finally drifted away and his mouth tasted less like bile with each burning swallow, he felt the need to know come onto him. He thought about Thorp, about Nectar with her spiky hair, just a kid with a rebellious streak. If it was her, then it was a lead. As grim as that was to think about, it could be progress in the waiting. It was murder and well beyond a woman simply out soul-searching.
But in order to know, Brody knew he’d have to scan the decapitated woman’s fingerprints.
16
Treading through the neighborhood out of the safety of the car, Brody couldn’t help but compare the area to the one in Minneapolis that housed the community center. All of it seemed familiar, if structurally different. The faces were there. The conglomeration of homeless, the bearded men in their found clothes, hanging out in packs all shushing each other as Brody approached. He smiled and nodded at them but knew with his coat and his bloodshot eyes, he undoubtedly looked like just another yuppie junkie who was only on this side of the tracks to sniff out his next hit.
He pulled his coat tighter and wished that the empty space between his black button-up and the satin liner of his peacoat could be filled with military-grade body armor. There were times when he confronted a wife beater in a bar that he wished he had been permitted to take his dinged-up service armor home with him. There was a certain mental comfort in wearing it; he knew he could take even a .44 caliber slug to the chest right over the heart at point-blank range and survive, if a little bruised.
Brody considered an anonymous call to Detective Pierce instead of breaking into a shitty nightclub and scanning a dead body for prints. The anonymous tip was sadly a thing of the past, especially with pay phones. Making a call on one of those, one might as well state his name and address before discussing whatever nefarious thing he was up to; save the cops time. Brody decided against it. If and when it came to that, he’d find a way to carefully toss what he knew over the fence, so to speak, and scram before anyone knew it was him. As long as it wasn’t Nectar.
This is what he prayed for as he passed the free clinic and hesitated a second time at the darkened maw of the alleyway. As nonchalantly as he could he looked up the street and all around. “Please don’t be her,” he muttered. “Please.”
00:45:59.
He’d have to make it quick.
Brody went down the alleyway and examined the padlock. He gave it another couple of tugs with his bare hands and received nothing but dirtied fingers. He patted himself down for something hard to smash the lock off with.
He thought of all those guns in Thorp’s basement. One bullet and the lock could be off in a flash. But the notion of having a gun’s weight in his hand, the coldness of the metal, the texture of the grip needling against his palm—no. It wouldn’t be necessary. Not here, not ever. He brushed the idea aside.
Brody took out his knuckleduster and slipped it onto his fingers. He tried to size up how he’d hit the padlock, since a miscalculation could result in a skinned knuckle. He gave it an awkward punch and did just that. He glared at the scaled-back flesh on his middle digit. Not bleeding but still annoying. He mused about the free clinic up the way and if they offered tetanus shots.
The only other thing of remote solidarity on his person was his sonar case made of high-grade plastic. He removed the sonar so as not to damage it and brought the case down on the head of the lock. It swung around on the handle noisily but stubbornly held tight. He hit it again and again and finally it gave. He took the lock off and cast it into the clutter and trash of the alley.
He stepped inside to total darkness and left the meat locker door open to allow light in. All over the entryway was a dizzying mishmash of colors and varying artistry of clashing, innumerable styles. A theme sprang forth: sharp tribal designs overlapping portraits of faces in agony, smiling horned demons with blank, red eyes.
Brody pulled out his cell and selected the flashlight. He closed the door behind him and saw there was no way to lock it from the inside. He was only going to be a minute, he reminded himself, and walked through the doorway into the open nightclub. Now he could see The Glower painted on the dance floor in scrawled letters meant to look like they were etched with fingernails into the floor. He walked among the empty chairs and tables, careful not to disturb anything. The flashlight’s beam from his phone, as weak as it was, provided sufficient light.
He went to the bar, looked at the empty shelves, the cash register drawer hanging open and cleared of cash. The club’s nautilus, much like the one the Automat used, stood under a patina of dust with the receipt tape band pulled out, all physical record of tabs gone.
Brody realized he was dragging his feet. It was true; he didn’t want to go upstairs. Even from the bar’s ground floor, he could smell the corpse. The putrid, bitter stink of rot emanating from the narrow staircase made his stomach—despite its emptiness—turn.
He took a deep breath and mounted the steps. The walls upstairs weren’t like the entryway and the bar itself. There were no leering demons and fanged vampire mouths painted on the walls. Here, decorative floral wallpaper had been painstakingly applied to match at the edges perfectly. It would be unnoticeable that it wasn’t cut from one giant sheet if the edges weren’t curling up from water damage.
At the open doorway to the upstairs bedroom where he knew the body to be, Brody had to latch his arm over his face because the smell was so powerful. He ran the flashlight over the dresser with the ashtray and cigarettes. Over to the bed, which was covered in a white down comforter soggy and heavy with blood that had dried to a rusty brown. He turned the flashlight beam to the floor and noticed the plain black-and-white checkerboard floor was also covered in streaks and long wipes of dried blood. He stepped toward the bathroom, the smell finding its way around the wool of his coat, despite him clamping his arm around his face so hard he thought he might break his nose. He gritted his teeth, fought the persisting urge to gag.
There she was, one leg up on the rim of the tub like she was just lounging in a hot bath. He looked in the toilet, in the sink: more dried blood.
He took three deep breaths with his eyes closed and forced himself to turn and look at the remaindered trunk of the woman’s neck. The cutting had been slow and tedious. The cut wasn’t smooth but jagged and messy, and flaps of tissue hung off to the side looking torn, as if the killer had gotten most of the way through and ripped the final portion out of impatience. The wound didn’t look remotely fresh; the bruising and the severity of how shrunken and dried it appeared indicated decomposition steadily taking its toll. The woman’s chest, as well as the rest of her, was washed in flaking, dried blood.
The sight disturbed him more than anything he had seen in the service. There it was gunshot wounds that pumped thick deluges of blood, the occasional shattered limb from a bomb or a land mine, maybe a head half-emptied from an expertly aimed shot—nothing this barbaric.
Brody cursed, muffled through the sleeve of his coat. He knelt down without letting his knee touch the bloody floor. He looked at the screen of his cell. He couldn’t have both the fingerprint scanner and the flashlight going at the same time—it would kill the battery instantly. He’d have to operate in the darkness, nothing he was unaccustomed to, but a necessity he didn’t wish to perform while in the same room as a dead body.
He turned the flashlight off and selected the fingerprint scanner. He reached out for the woman’s wrist, touched the cold flesh, and a sick wave pulsed through him. Bringing the phone to the woman’s limp fingers, he pressed the scan button.
The room was awash for a moment with red light. The scanner track passed back and forth over the woman’s hand. Looking down, he watched the light slipping out between her fingers, as if she were an oracle, spinning a spell from beyond the grave using her corpse as some kind of conduit.
The scanner track leapt forward, a series of rays cutting out from between her limp, lifeless digits and slowly reeling back.
Brody waited, all the while breathing through hi
s mouth.
The cell beeped. The hourglass appeared, draining from top to bottom. He’d let it do its calculations and search the databases on his way out. With care he lowered the woman’s wrist to rest on the bathtub rim and stuffed the phone back into his pocket.
In the darkness, he fumbled through the bathroom door, across the bedroom, and out into the hall. He nearly fell down the stairs and had to grip the railing to keep from tumbling the rest of the way.
It was at this moment a notion hit him. During the whole time he was on a journey for fingerprints he had been leaving his own. On the padlock in the alley, now on the railing. Around the dead woman’s wrist for Christ’s sake.
At the bottom of the stairs he inventoried everything he’d handled since coming in. He removed the tie from his pocket and used it to wipe down the railing as he went back up. He switched the flashlight on while crossing into the bathroom. He looped the tie around the woman’s wrist and ran the silk band back and forth the way one would shine a shoe.
The dreadful job done, Brody turned away from the body for what he hoped would be the last time and went downstairs. Halfway across the empty dance floor, each footfall making a deep, resonating clack, he stopped as he heard something—a sound, a murmur, a constant buzzing thrum beyond the walls of the nightclub.
It was a sound that summoned so many memories for him of breathless thankfulness but now only fear. It was the beating wings of a Darter. He knew all the Darters had sat in various military bases around the country for close to five years following the end of the war. But due to budgetary reasons, certain big city police departments gave them a new paint job and used them to easily move a lot of police officers at once. He recalled the first time he had seen a Darter in police use. Hovering, giant, like the extinct insect it had been named after, looming with a pregnant belly full of armored special tactics police officers over the rooftop of a building known to house several drug labs. Repurposed.
Brody took another few steps across the dance floor, hoping the Darter was in the neighborhood innocuously to hover over the rooftop of the adjacent free clinic for surveillance reasons, but he knew better.
He got to the front door and edged it open with his foot. The alleyway was empty, but the squawk of police walkie-talkies and the terrible droning of the Darter were audible. He snatched up the broken padlock from the alley debris and deposited it into his pocket. Using his hand with the tie wrapped around the fingers, he shut the door and hesitated, remembering that there was no way to lock the door from the inside.
He darted across the dance floor to the stairs. He went into each room in search of an escape route. One opened into an office area, with a desk and a filing cabinet, a screen affixed to the wall with its glass panel shattered. A small narrow window was located up toward the ceiling. He climbed atop the filing cabinet, pushed and tugged on the window. The glass was frosted over, just the midday light shone through gloomily into the room, filtering through the stifling dust.
Brody’s heart thundered in his chest, sweat pushed through his forehead, and his headache returned. Without shame, he felt the urge to piss his pants. He knew this was the flight-or-fight instinct tipping the scales in favor of flight. He took out the sonar case and beat at the painted-over lock on the window to get it open.
The Darter was moving, the buzz rising into a brighter yet thicker tone. They had dropped off their passengers and were going to lift up a good fifty yards off to keep a bird’s-eye view on things.
Brody slammed the sonar once more and was rewarded with an audible crack when the thick layer of paint broke away from the lock. He opened the window and realized it came out on the roof of the free clinic.
Directly in front of him were police officers dressed head to toe in heavy riot gear.
Brody stared momentarily as they took their gun stocks to shoulders before he withdrew from the window. He dropped off the filing cabinet just as glass exploded into the office with a clatter of gunfire.
Without a doubt a setup, he deduced. No two ways about it.
He stuffed his tie and sonar case into his pocket and ran into the hallway. There was shouting all around, and on the roof he could hear the steady tramp of boots. He looked down the stairs and on the dance floor noticed a triangle of light cutting inward from the alleyway entrance.
He rushed to the end of the hall. The last door that might yield a possible way out, the only one he hadn’t yet checked. Careful not to touch anything, Brody charged into the room and aimed his flashlight at its contents. A countertop that ran the length of three walls, a display of knives and cutlery on pins. He considered what he had at his disposal. Cabinets, a basin sink, a few plastic aprons—The Glower, it seemed, was an operating front for a rich sociopath who liked to watch from the top of his stairs and handpick his victims from the club’s attendees below.
Brody’s mind raced. He was trapped. The Chicago PD had a shoot-first rule; he would be displayed on the news being carted out of The Glower on a gurney, peppered with holes, using the photo from his jigsaw to show the citizens of Chicago the face of the infamous Titian Shandorf. Justice unquestionably served, all tidied and under the rug. Brody pictured Lady Justice, blindfold and all, clapping her hands of his dirt in contented completion.
He looked to the one wall of the room that didn’t have a counter on it. A blank wall, with that same flowery wallpaper—orchids and their stems, in a crisscrossing pattern of freeze-framed growth. Here, far worse than in the hallway, the wallpaper was curled at the edges. Moisture. Mold. It weakened drywall, made a house or building’s construction crumbly and dangerous.
Brody decided to take a chance, knowing that running full bore at a wall could result in one of two things: crashing through to whatever hazards lay beyond or slamming into the brick wall underneath. For a second, he thought about the Automat server, seemingly never even aware that those kitchen doors lay ahead of her as she charged through them with her ever-present smile.
Brody backed up until his heel banged into the cabinet behind him. He bolted forward, threw his arms out in front of him, and crashed through the wall. He tumbled into the next room, which upon standing and wiping the black, moldy drywall from his eyes, he saw was the attic above the free clinic. He steered around air-conditioning units and ducked bands of wires, treading only on the beams and not on the insulation between. He made his way past a complicated twist of ducting, then dodged another mass of cables.
He could hear people beneath him asking: “What is that?”
He came to a wall and found himself teetering on the narrow metal beam. He glanced at the wall he had crashed through. On the hanging cutlery he glimpsed flashes of white light—the cops were storming The Glower now.
Brody looked all around him. It was the end of the free clinic’s attic. There were no more walls to charge through; everything around him was unpainted cinder block and ducting. He looked down at the fluffy cotton candy of the pink insulation. Before he could talk himself out of it, he stepped forward and let gravity pull him down through the ceiling of the free clinic. More dust, more clatter and noise. People screaming.
He landed on an exam room table just eight feet down from the ceiling. Covered in dust and clumps of black mold stuck in his hair and on the forearms of his peacoat, he jumped off the table and opened the door to the waiting room.
People jumped up and screamed. The poor and the despondent—they didn’t deserve a fright like this when bringing their sick kids to get a checkup and a flu shot.
He moved through the hacking crowd of startled people to the front door and was back on the sidewalk. He ran as fast as he could.
The engine and blurred-with-motion fiberglass wings of the Darter above were never that far away. It was a block or more over, and due to the height of the buildings he ran along the face of, they couldn’t see him unless they hovered directly over the street he was on.
He turned the corner, checked the sky for the Darter. Traffic and people on the street stopped to
gawk at this dust-covered man running around visibly panicked. He cut across the street before the light changed, a car nearly clipping his heels, then returned to where he had left the Fairlane. He slipped on the ice that the snow had become since the sun had gone down, struggled back into the stolen car.
Brody pulled into traffic, where he tried to drive slow. His mind was spinning, various parts of himself hurt, and he felt something wet on the inside of his right thigh. He had either actually gone and pissed himself or he had cut himself somewhere in the scuffle. He obeyed the rules of the road, made frequent turns, and took stretches of road that had few traffic lights, all in an attempt to put as much distance between him and the police, with the most crooked line, as possible. His heart continued to pound so hard that when he came to a stoplight he could actually see the rhythmic throb in the veins on the back of his hands gripping the steering wheel.
He didn’t know where to go, so he left town on the first on-ramp to the interstate he came across. He looped around the city on the expressway, where he could see the street where The Glower was based, the free clinic, and the tobacco shop. The Darter, hovering and monitoring resolutely, shoved the falling snow away from it in dusty, ringing waves.
Brody drove until he saw the exit to head toward Thorp’s place. His lenses flashed: ten minutes. He drove as far as he could see, finally having to pull over nearly exactly where he had to when driving out to the farm with Paige yesterday.
He parked along the field and sat there for a long time, just breathing—the penumbras shouldering their way in before his eyes took over and everything developed a gray cast over it. Nothing had focus. The last ten seconds on the lenses ticked away.
The radio was on but he didn’t hear it. The blood rushed in his ears louder than he had ever heard it. The faraway whine of the gunshots and the alarmed shrieks of those people in the free clinic echoed in his mind. Brody felt parts of him regain feeling as the adrenaline sapped out of his bloodstream—his legs, especially his ankles, his forearms, his face, and his chest. He tightened his grip on the wheel to fight the shakiness. His head spun; he felt both ill and anguished.