Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  When he remembered his cell phone was still searching databases, the sickening sensation doubled and the blade sunk in his belly issuing a fast twist. He withdrew his phone from his pocket. With the remaining seconds of carotene concentrate being supplied to his eyes, he saw the top half of the digital hourglass was only halfway drained. Then his eyes went dark. He was still sixteen miles from the farmhouse. His results were in the ether, darkly en route.

  17

  Brody wiped his hands on his pants, took off his coat, and used the satin liner, which felt clean to the touch, to dislodge any grime and mold from his fingers. He removed the lenses from his eyes and reapplied the sonar.

  Just as he had expected, there was no way he could see outside the car, not with all the windows intact. He tried rolling down the driver’s side passenger window, but the ping just shot out the sides of the car—a massive blind spot lay directly in front, which would make driving particularly challenging.

  He was tired and didn’t feel like being out in the cold anymore. Being shot at wasn’t exactly a mood lifter, either.

  Rolling up the window and securing the isolation of the car, the sonar felt out and only found the smooth inside of the Fairlane’s glass.

  He reached down beside the seat and popped the trunk. “Let’s see what ol’ Seb might have.”

  Brody went to the back of the car with the trunk lid flopping in the wind and looked around inside. The sonar felt across the contents of the trunk: some more forsaken empties, the spare, which was flat, a pneumatic jack. No tire iron. He slipped the handle out of the jack and returned to the front of the car and climbed atop the wide hood.

  He hesitated, jack handle in hand, to let the sonar ping up and down the desolate country road. The last thing he needed after barely escaping the cops in their raid of The Glower was for some small-town sheriff to tool along and find him standing on the hood of a stolen car, bashing the windshield out like a lunatic throwing his own one-man riot in the middle of nowhere.

  Satisfied no one was around, he started beating on the glass, digging a series of craters in along the edge. He palmed the glass, tried to shove it down and out of the bracket, but it held firm. He stomped on it, and finally it came loose and fell into the car in a floppy, crackling sheet.

  He slammed the trunk lid, tossed the jack handle into the backseat, shoved the panel of cracked glass aside to ride shotgun for the remainder of the drive. Even going so far as to use his blinker, Brody steered back onto the rural tarmac and continued on. The cold wind tore in over the hood and hit him directly in the face, but he was able to make out the definite shoulders of the road and any oncoming traffic.

  Brody wondered if he had just come upon an unrelated incident, if Nectar’s disappearance had nothing to do with the dead body at the club. How many people visited that club in a month? Hundreds probably, given its size. All those cigarette butts in the alleyway. How many of them had Nectar smoked? If she smoked at all.

  He followed the two-lane road, unable to see anything behind him, and because of that, Brody pictured the Darter—with its shiny new police-issue paint job—following his car on whisper mode. Just as he had done with his unit when they got onto a trail of an individual of interest. For days they followed them through the desert along twisty dirt roads that were barely distinguishable from the countless miles of empty, brown space on either side, across rocky ranges, until they could lead them to a possible headquarters, where they could watch, electronically eavesdropping, creating a measured plan of neutralization.

  Brody ignored this suspicion and lobbed it into the pointless paranoia file and forced his mind to other more productive topics. He adjusted the radio so it could be heard over the gale-force wind roaring through the open cavity where the windshield used to be. He wished he hadn’t smoked that last cigarette, because he could’ve really used it right then, just as his nose began to lose feeling.

  Brody turned into the driveway to find the farm under even more snow. Earlier he could see the individual blades of grass peeking up through the white with the sonar, but now it was smooth, impregnable to the device’s ping. He drove the Fairlane to where he had parked that day and paused. He decided to pull up, to get it out of easy sight from the road. He parked it behind the house, among the decommissioned vehicles. The car looked at home there.

  Thorp was outside before Brody had managed to fetch the plastic bin of files from the backseat. He approached Brody with hesitation, his hand out. He curiously touched Brody’s powdered shoulder and, looking at the white film on his fingertips, mumbled, “Don’t tell me she was involved in cocaine production.”

  “This?” Brody tried to act like he was covered in drywall dust merely for the sheer giddy thrill of it. “This is nothing.” He turned with his arms weighted with the plastic bin, kicking the car door shut.

  Thorp held the back door to the house for him and made doubly sure that it was locked securely after they were both inside, checking the dead bolt twice.

  Brody set the bin down on the cleared kitchen table. “You’re just going to let that be my explanation for why I’m covered in drywall dust?” He peeled off his peacoat, hissing with the painful effort. “No third degree about where I’ve been all day or what I found out?”

  Thorp shrugged. He seemed serene, pleasantly thankful to see Brody was still just continuing to fill his lungs. Brody detected a faint whiff of home brew coming off his friend but said nothing. At least he was mellowed out a little now, something Brody wasn’t about to argue with. Thorp pulled a chair out from the table and stared at it, not bothering to sit. Perching, leaning his upper half over the chair back as if he were confused on how the wooden contraption was supposed to be used.

  Brody let his coat fall to the floor with a wet slap.

  Thorp, bent over the chair, eyed him, a look of tepid, indifferent curiosity on his face. He started at Brody’s head and stopped when he reached the top of his leg. “Looks like you had a close call there.”

  Brody felt the spot and discovered it was tender to the touch. He glared at his fingers, unable to see anything, no color. He smelled them instead. Blood. He paced over to the kitchen sink and ran the water until it got warm.

  “You seem pretty calm,” he said, splashing water on his face after washing his hands, careful not to get any on the sonar.

  “I’ve been drinking since you left.” Thorp sighed, finally taking a seat. He did so slowly, easing himself down like a man twice his age. “Honestly, since you’ve been gone so long, I’ve just been sitting here preparing myself.” He swallowed. A dry chuckle, then, “Preparing myself for you to come back and tell me the worst, that is. I’ve gone through every possibility there is and prepared myself for it. She could be dead, kidnapped, raped and stuck in a drum and dumped somewhere …”

  “It’s probably hard to believe with how I look, but I really didn’t come up with much,” Brody said, ignoring Thorp’s morbid listing. “And no news is good news, right?” He patted his face with a towel. The warmth in his pants was slowly touring its way over the summit of his kneecap. It wasn’t profusely bleeding nor did it hurt all that much; he could tend to it in a minute.

  Once his hands were dry, he stepped over to the container of files and pried the lid off. He turned to Thorp whose interest was already piqued. “Somewhere in there’s a letter from a security firm claiming Nectar had been hassling someone’s employees.”

  Thorp got up and thumbed through the files. “It doesn’t say who?”

  “Not in there but her record lists a few different businesses she had been badgering, the ones that pressed charges anyway.”

  “About what?”

  “Did you—?”

  “Yeah,” Brody cut in. He told him about Mickey at Bait & Tackle but skipped the hubbub at The Glower. He stressed that Probitas’s client had never actually pressed charges since that would’ve shown up on Nectar’s record. And if it wasn’t Bait & Tackle, it had to be someone else.

  Thorp asked why Pr
obitas’s client would want to remain anonymous.

  Brody nodded at the only tenuous thing linking Probitas to Nectar. Or, rather, the thing linking who was speaking through Probitas to Nectar. “Doesn’t say. It just said she should stop being hostile toward their clients. Tell me what you make of them. I’m going to take a look at this.” He pointed at the wound on his thigh.

  “You got it.”

  Brody patiently took the stairs one at a time, making full use of the handrail, and went into the bathroom. He removed the sonar and showered in the balmy darkness, unable to ignore that beyond the smell of soap was the coppery tang of his own blood.

  Over the hiss of the showerhead, Brody could hear his phone on the counter make a bright, declarative beep. Either it had just received a text message from Detective Pierce informing him that, yes, in fact, they had lifted his prints from the free clinic doorknob and they’d be seeing him shortly, or the fingerprint analysis had found who it was in the bathtub.

  He shut off the water and felt where he had been injured. A small slice just right of his scrotum in the tender alcove where his crotch connected with the inside of his leg. He imagined it was from when he dropped through the tiles of the suspended ceiling with the plastic brackets. Brackets that when broken didn’t just snap but shattered into daggerlike shards, like glass. He had a scar on the inside of his left forearm from just such a thing, another on his knee—evidence of a summer spent doing remodeling work for a set of brothers who had discovered flipping houses could be lucrative. After the second altercation that required stitches, Brody was told in stereo not to give up his day job.

  When Brody stepped out of the shower, he felt the hot finger of blood trail down the inside of his leg. Pushing past the pain, he ran his fingers around the wound. It was bleeding but not profusely enough to be his femoral artery. He unrolled some toilet paper and pressed it against the wound.

  He had to sit. His head was swimmy after his terror-filled day, and he realized that taking a shower at the near-scalding temperature he had while still spinning with adrenaline probably wasn’t such a bright idea.

  Wincing, he peeled the mass of bloodied toilet paper away from his wound and saw, nestled in the crook of his inner thigh, a tiny raised thatch of skin. It came alive with pinpricks when the humid air trapped in the bathroom lapped across it. He sucked air through his teeth.

  In the cabinet beneath the sink he found only an economy pack of electrical tape rolls stowed amongst the folded towels. Remembering he was in Thorp’s house, he wasn’t surprised. But with nothing better as an option, Brody looped the tape around his leg to secure the makeshift bandage, contemplating all along that removing it later to change the dressing would prove to be another delightful highlight of his already ruined day.

  Returning downstairs in the remaining set of clean clothes he had packed, a navy gabardine shirt over a long-sleeved thermal and a pair of insulated jeans, Brody stepped into the kitchen to find Thorp diligently studying Nectar’s collection of files. Everything else had been removed from the container, but it was the Probitas letter he had in his hands. Brody could tell what it was just by the way the paper had been folded.

  In his pocket, Brody had his cell phone loaded with the identity of the woman in the tub at The Glower. It sat there against his thigh, heavy. Even the slightest possibility of it being Nectar and not checking was driving into his conscience. If it was Nectar, prolonging the inevitable news to her brother was cruel.

  “What’d you find?” Brody asked, stirring up some conversation just to distract himself. It was unlikely Thorp would find anything in the files he had missed, but he had to direct his thoughts elsewhere. To busy his hands, he went over to the coffeepot. Cold. He poured some into a cup and drank it anyway, his hands shaking.

  “These Probitas people are awfully fucking vague,” Thorp said.

  I found a dead girl in a bathtub. She might be—and probably is—your sister. It was right there, waiting to be said. Something goaded him. Say it. It’s the truth. Tell him. Break him further. The fissures are already there. Split him open the rest of the way. Insanity might be a comfort for him. A place to just fully give up and surrender and be gone from it all.

  Brody interrupted his own plagued thoughts. “She’s an environmentalist,” he said, recalling the closet full of dead saplings. “Maybe we should start calling up the factories and plants in the area that produce chemicals or dump their refuse locally.”

  Again, the cell in Brody’s pocket chirped. Impatiently reminding him that he had important information successfully fetched waiting to be read. He reached into his pocket and thumbed the side of the phone to mute it.

  “We need to find something,” Thorp continued, his voice squeezing to a frustrated whine. “We’re wasting time here. We need results. We need progress.”

  “I’m doing what I can,” Brody said, sipping bitter black coffee. “It’s anybody’s guess what’s going on.”

  Thorp lowered the letter. “So, what, you don’t give a shit anymore? You’re the one who tracks people.” He stood up, nearly overturning his chair.

  Brody put a hand out, halting him. “Don’t start. I didn’t mean anything by that. I’m just expressing that I’m as lost as you are.”

  His phone hadn’t been set to silent; it had been set to vibrate. It hummed a few pulses in close enough proximity to his wound to make it impossible to ignore.

  “You need to bring it down a notch and not take everything I say out of context.”

  Thorp apologized insincerely, found his chair, and read the letter for the umpteenth time. He stared into the page as if the answer were somewhere between the lines.

  Brody retrieved the sodden mess of his peacoat from the floor and wrestled the lens charger from inside the damp wool. “I’m going out to the barn to charge these lenses.” It would be the only way he’d be able to see the screen of his phone—the only way he’d be able to look at the news to know what to tell Thorp. He tried to keep the gravitas from his voice as he said this, but it was impossible.

  Luckily, Thorp was too preoccupied with trying to find the hidden messages in the dead space between the arches and sticks of the Probitas’s choice of font to notice.

  Brody stood in the barn, kicking the generator when the phone vibrated in his pocket. He cast his gaze to the rafters.

  “Yes, yes, in a minute, all right?” Brody gave the generator a final kick, and its engine clattered to life. He plugged in the lens case. He retrieved the phone and stared at the screen displaying the information he could not see.

  There it was, being shown to him—possibly, yes, that Nectar was dead. But to him, in the wire-frame puppet show the sonar gave him as a shitty stand-in for regular sight, the screen of his phone was as blank and smooth as a river stone.

  Disgusted, he shoved the phone into the recesses of his coat pocket. He frisked himself for his cigarettes and remembered once again that he had none left.

  He exited the barn, crossed the lawn, and got in Seb’s car. In the glove box he discovered a wad of carbon copy which Brody took to be more parking tickets, a tin of mints, a replacement taillight still in its blister plastic, and—thank the Lord—a second unopened pack. He ripped the cellophane and fired one up, then sighed blessed tar and nicotine and listened to the silence of the Illinois countryside.

  He was down to the filter when he heard the generator in the barn choke, sputter, and finally die.

  Brody struggled to his feet, the electrical tape giving the hairs in his nether regions a nagging tug, and made the dreadful march through the snow to the barn.

  He couldn’t tell if the charger was complete or not by sight, but when he heard its magical little beep indicating a full charge, he felt a large piece of his reluctance drip away. It was a strange sensation to feel nothing but trepidation toward the results for the entire trek back to the barn, and now here he was seconds away from confirmation, and he felt an entirely unexpected giddiness swell in his chest.

  Un
der the curious stares of the horses, Brody removed the sonar and put his lenses back in and blinked until he could see. Taking a deep breath, he removed the cell from his pocket and looked at the screen that read: complete.

  He pressed his index finger to the screen, and it obediently displayed the photo from the headless woman’s jigsaw.

  It wasn’t Nectar.

  He gasped a breath of relief, letting his head roll back on his shoulders and the gnarl of anxiety in his chest untangle. He shook his head, feeling woozy. He lit another cigarette, needing it.

  Despite the disbanded tension, the impetus in the scare lassoed him again. He felt the pressure returning, building once more. The thought, on autopilot, formed: Okay, so it wasn’t Nectar, but nonetheless, who the hell was she?

  He read on. The body belonged to Abigail Schwartz, a local entrepreneur who owned a gardening shop in Chicago called Mother Nature’s Womb, now defunct following a rash of rubber checks. Recalling Paige mentioning an Abby as well as the The Mothers banner in Nectar’s closet, Brody scrolled down to see that Abigail was also kind of a troublemaker. She had gotten arrested for protesting against animal testing at a medical research lab in northern Illinois. She had gone into a pet shop in St. Charles, Illinois, known to carry genetically altered dogs, while wrapped in a belt of fake bombs. She had been found guilty of tampering with the local wastewater system when maintenance workers discovered her trying to set up electronic feeders for the rats that called the sewers home.

  Brody reached the end of the document where the list of misdemeanors ended and the notes of interest on her permanent record began. Abigail Schwartz had ties with a group of radical environmental activists known as The Mothers. It came as no surprise to Brody, since it didn’t appear to be much of a hidden fact given the name of Abigail’s business. Regardless, the mantra he had been muttering to himself earlier rang even clearer in his short-term memory. Abigail and Nectar had known one another.