by Ray Garton
The pain was far, far worse. It was darker than the blackest shadow and when it engulfed him, as it had so often in the last years of his previous job, nothing else existed.
He'd worked the police beat for The New York Times and had seen the worst of everything. Murders, suicides, murder-suicides, gang-related killings, a few serial killings that included everything from necrophilia to cannibalism, things that stretched the human imagination beyond tolerance and made the mind recoil with revulsion. It didn't take long for him to start thinking of New York City as nothing more than an enormous open grave waiting to be filled, because it was populated by three kinds of people: inhuman monsters, brutalized corpses, and living bodies that were simply standing in line waiting to become brutalized corpses.
When he started the job in 1980, he wasn't quite sure what to expect, but like the others he worked with, he managed to build a shell around himself fairly quickly and learned to look at the horrible things he saw as if they were nothing more than special effects in a movie.
Aside from the usual rapes and shootings and gang violence, which made up a large percentage of the stories he covered, there were other things ... like the things some people, usually drunk or on drugs, did to their children or to the children playing directly in the crossfire when a drug deal went sour. He heard a lot of hateful shouting, pained screaming, and too often saw blood spilled on sidewalks.
But it was his job, and he had the shell he'd developed around him for protection. Then he met Cami.
It was during their courtship that his job became the most tolerable. He was able to look at those horrible sights and block them out with thoughts of Cami: her beautiful smiling face; those sly, intelligent, green eyes; that short auburn hair that bounced ever so slightly when she walked. He knew that it was Cami he would be seeing at the end of the day (or the night, depending on which shift he was working), and not the ugly violence and blood and death he saw on the police beat.
Bent could find nothing about her that was not infinitely lovable. There was a childish innocence about her that mixed with her maturity and intelligence and drove, him wild. She was a photo-journalist who often had to take pictures of the very same sick and horrific things Bent saw in his work day after day. But in spite of that, she had something about her that kept her from being pulled down by what she'd seen. She always told him it was her belief in god that kept her going, her belief in a god who had a reason for everything and who would bring justice to everyone in the end, especially to those responsible for the crimes they saw in their work. While Bent came home angry some nights, wishing he could find the perpetrator of the horrible crimes he'd seen that day and kill him himself with his own bare hands, Cami separated herself from feelings of revenge and hatred, confident that her god would see that justice was done in the end. She attended church every week, but was not self-righteous about her beliefs. She treated everyone equally and did not care in the least whether or not they shared her beliefs. She did not shun anyone due to behavior or lifestyle; she did not cast a disapproving eye on anyone because of words spoken or deeds done. She told Bent again and again that that was not her job; she said that was god's duty alone, and for her to take it upon herself to judge or punish would be to put herself in the place of god, which would be blasphemous.
In Bent's eyes, she was pretty damned near perfect, and he wished more than anything that he could share her feelings. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't. There were times when he wanted to kill the people who created the mayhem he covered every day — times when he thought such actions would be undeniably just — and times when he thought that if he couldn't kill them, then someone should. But Cami remained true to her beliefs. He envied her that, even though he'd seen things that made it very hard to believe in a god who was waiting around for Judgment Day to make things right. Though he didn't understand them, he loved her for her purity and kindness and her ability to forgive and to let go.
But they'd had their arguments over their differences in philosophy. He'd had plenty of questions to throw at her.
Who knows when Judgment Day will be, so what about now? What about right here? Right here in the streets of this city? And so many other cities where people are killed, tortured, and mutilated for no other reason than that some pervert gets his kicks from it?
Cami was never able to answer his questions. She only said, "I can't speak for god. All I know is that when the time comes, He'll make things right."
He admired her faith, but could not — no matter how hard he tried — share it. He had seen too many things that denied the existence of a caring god, too many things that shouted, We 're on our own here, folks! But that could not make a dent in his feelings for Cami. Her undying faith only made him love her more.
They were married by Cami's pastor in his small study. Neither of them had family remotely close to New York, so their marriage was witnessed by a friend of Cami's and a close friend of Bent's from work, Stephen Colloway.
After their marriage, Bent was happier than he'd ever thought possible. Of course, at that time, no one called him Bent. He was Bentley to everyone he knew well.
But that was before his life changed ... before he began to work at a paper that thrived on the stories of the mentally ill and made money from those ignorant enough to believe them.
That was before he came home with flowers one night, after four wonderful years Of marriage, with a smile and a happy, romantic disposition, looking forward to taking his beautiful wife to bed moments after he walked in the door, only to find a nightmare waiting for him ... only to find that someone else had taken her to bed first ...
The front door had been broken open. He found Cami sprawled on the bed naked, stabbed and sliced countless times all over her body, including her face and vagina. Sprawled and dead. For no reason at all.
He'd gone on with his job after a vacation that he had cut short, trying hard to forget about what he'd found in the apartment that day. He changed apartments, too, to avoid seeing that bloody image he saw every time he entered the bedroom; even though it had been cleaned away, it was always there, every time he went in, soaking the sheets and speckling the walls, so he had to move.
But in spite of the move, in spite of how hard he tried to forget, every time he covered a story about a sick and senseless murder, a sliced-up body that obviously had been dwelled upon and enjoyed by the killer, he broke down; he was unable to write an objective piece, unable to cover the story because of the blood that was splattered all over the walls ... so very like what he'd found in his apartment that day he'd come home with flowers ... roses, blood red roses ... so very like what had been done so mercilessly to the flesh of his wife ... to the woman he loved ...
That was about the time he'd started to drink. It helped a lot. It numbed his mind to the things he had to see again and again in his work and muted the feelings that roiled up in him like vomit. But it did something else, too. It made him dependent on alcohol. It wasn't long before he realized that if he didn't drink, he began to shake and quiver and have desperate thoughts that didn't seem to be his own. He began to feel as if his teeth might fall out if he didn't have a drink, as if his very bones would melt and he would suck his own tongue down his throat like a raw oyster unless he had a drink ... right now!
Finally, the drinking began to interfere with his work and it wasn't long before he was fired. After that, he did what he knew best: he drank.
He had an inheritance tucked away. His mother had died when he was a child, but his father, who had been the owner of a chain of fast-food restaurants, had died a couple years before and had left him a good chunk of money. Some of it had been spent while Cami was alive; they'd gone on a couple of trips and bought a few toys. The rest, however, Bent had set aside for a rainy day. Well, it seemed to be raining cats and dogs right then, so Bent lived on that for a while ... or, rather, he drank on that for a while.
Bent slept little during those months; the nightmares were too vivid.
Coll's thin wrinkles and graying hair made him look older than he really was. He was the boss's baby, a hot reporter who cracked open stories with a pad, pen, and tape recorder like a wrecking ball cracked open buildings. He had a deep voice that could be very intimidating; in fact, when Coll got angry, that voice sometimes unsettled Bent, even though the anger wasn't directed at him. Most of the time, though, that resonant voice sounded comforting, as if it were coming from the professor with the most tenure at the most prestigious university in the world.
Coll was kneeling beside the sofa, where Bent was sprawled with an empty vodka bottle lying on his chest. When he opened his eyes, he had to blink them several times to bring the face into focus through the pounding in his head.
"You're killing yourself," Coll said simply in that deep, rich voice. "You'll be dead soon, you don't stop this shit." He nodded toward the bottle.
Bent gave him a crooked smile and slurred, "Really? How soon, you think?"
Coll shook his head. "Uh-uh. I'm not gonna let that happen. Listen. The Times is willing to take you back if you get off the booze. You're good and they know it. They want you, you hear what I'm saying?"
Bent shook his head sloppily. "Can't do it. No more. No more dead bodies ... blood ... cut-up people ... no more a'that ... not after Cami." He looked up at Coll with bleary eyes. "Y-you know what blood smuh-smells like, don't you?" he slurred.
Coll closed his eyes a moment and nodded. He'd covered plenty of those stories, too.
"Well ... do you know how l-luh-long I've had that smell in my nuh-nostrils? J-just stuh-sticking there? Like somebody puh-painted the insides of 'em with it and ... and it just stayed there ... like it w-was always fruh-fresh?"
Coll nodded at the bottle and said, "That's not the way to let go of it, Bentley. I know."
"What, you think I'm tryin' to leggo?" Bent asked with an ugly, wet laugh. "I'm jus' tryin' t'black it out, is all. An' this's workin'. So ... thanks, Coll, thanks for the, y'know, the c'sidera-tion, but ... I'm jus' fine the way I a-am."
"Okay, then." Coll stood. "I'm having you put in a hospital. A place where they'll make you stop this shit whether you like it or not" He still spoke quietly, but very firmly.
Bent struggled into a sitting position. "Whuh-what?"
"I'm gonna make you stop this whether you want to or not."
Bent frowned. "I c'n stop drinkin' anytime I want."
Coll folded his arms, grinned, and laughed. "That's a good one. Listen, there's something you don't know about me. I'm an alcoholic." He said it casually, as if telling Bent what sign he was born under. "And if there's one thing I know in this world, it's this: You can't stop drinking whenever you want! Not once you've gotten to the place you're at. No, sir. Listen, you don't wanna go back to work at the Times, fine. But if you don't stop this shit, you're gonna be out on the street pissing in gutters in six months or less. You'll be eating bland, mushy food in missions and begging strangers for change. Believe me. I know. Now, if you don't wanna go to the hospital, that's okay. But you're gonna stop this. And I'll help you. 'Cause you can't do it alone. Nobody can do it alone. But ... if you don't want me to help you stop, I'll make you stop." Again, he spoke as casually as if he were talking about the latest movie he'd seen. "It won't be easy. In fact, you'll go through hell. But I want you to do it now so you don't go through the hell I did."
And Coll was true to his word. He took time off work so he could stay with Bent through the shakes and the vomiting — and oh, dear god, they were bad, so bad, shaking as if his body were experiencing its own personal earthquake, and projectile vomiting that made The Exorcist look like a training film for expectant mothers. Coll held him when he thought he was going to die if he didn't have a drink right now, when Bent got to the point where he was so sick he began to think it couldn't possibly be withdrawals, it had to something serious, some sickness he'd contracted that would kill him if he didn't get help right away, like maybe he was having a stroke or ... god, AIDS, what if he had AIDS!
Coll had brought with him a sizable bottle of twenty-five-milligram Librium capsules, which he had obtained without the benefit of a prescription, and he gave Bent three or four at a time every three or four hours, sometimes more than that — and more often than that, if necessary. It was often necessary.
The Librium helped a little, but Bent still couldn't hold still for more than a few minutes at a time, his whole body vibrating, couldn't stop breaking into chilled shivers, then into a sweat, then into shivers again, couldn't stop growling profanities at Coll, calling him every obscene name he could think of for putting him through such agony, threatening to kill him when it was all over, kill him with his bare hands for doing it to him.
"Wish I could take the blame for it, friend," Coll always said quietly, unfazed, speaking in that deep, authoritative voice. "Wish I could."
Finally, when it all began to calm down, when the worst part of it was over — "the Lost Weekend part," Bent had always referred to it since — he had Coll to call up on the phone when he got the urge. He went to AA meetings with Coll and had long talks over coffee in smoke-clouded halls with others like him who had spent long nights thinking the world would end if they didn't get their hands on some liquor.
During that time, he and Coll became very close. He'd had no idea that Coll was an alcoholic — not someone as solid and self-assured as he had always seemed — and their shared addiction ended up making them close friends.
Finally, when he was clear enough to decide what to do with himself, Bent decided he not only did not want to work for the Times, he didn't want to work for any paper that might require him to cover a story about a dead, bloated body, about somebody who had eaten part of his victim ... about someone who lay sprawled on a bed, cut and slashed to death for no reason whatsoever other than to satisfy the twisted cravings and urges of some monster in a human disguise.
In fact, Bent decided he'd even rather do something as unethical as making the stories up himself than to have to look at any of those things again.
And that was what had led him to the Global Inquisitor in Los Angeles, a place much brighter and more open than the murky, savage, claustrophobic cage of New York City. Los Angeles had about it an odd unreality that was comforting, that made Bent feel — in spite of the fact that plenty of monsters in human disguise lurked there, too — that he was in a vast, surreal amusement park, a place of fantasy and even safety.
But he kept in touch with Coll, who, not much later, fell upon his star-making story. It was a serial killer who had been dubbed "The Toolbox Killer," after a bad slasher film of the same name, because he'd apparently worked his way into women's apartments in the guise of a handyman, and then had gone about raping, torturing, and killing them with the equipment in his toolbox, and not necessarily in that order.
Coll had been assigned to the story, and he'd been the first reporter to establish a pattern, the only reporter to receive a letter from the killer ... then another, and another ... then a phone call from the killer, and a few after that. And after all the information he'd provided for the police from the things the killer had told him, Coll was the first reporter to get in on the actual capture of "The Toolbox Killer," who turned out to be a small, sweaty, balding man with Coke-bottle glasses and a large, hairy mole on his chin.
After that, Coll began a book about the killer, and when it sold for a six-figure advance, he said so long to The New York Times, and to the city as well, moving to the one place he'd always dreamed of living: San Francisco, California. There, he worked freelance, writing a sequel to his first book — after more in-depth research, he'd discovered that "The Toolbox Killer" actually had been part of a strange cult, a sort of "killers' club" — and others
after that, all of which were drawn to the bestseller list like magnets.
Now and then, Bent spotted him on Oprah or Geraldo, discussing the latest story he'd covered in his latest bestseller for audiences that thrived on snipers, rapists, Satanic cults, and serial killers.
Meanwhile, it was a bit of a compromise for Bent to move to a tabloid; he still had to cover stories, just as before — he didn't exactly make them up himself — but they were the kind of stories he might as well have made up anyway. And, of course, they weren't the respectable stories Coll was turning into best-selling books. They were stories about Elvis sightings and alien abductions and women that gave birth to their own grandfathers and, of course —
— messages from Liberace.
"Well, thanks again, Mr. Nob — I mean, Bent," Kotter said.
Bent realized suddenly, a bit startled, that they had stopped, and when he looked out the window, he saw that they had stopped in front of his building.
Bent blinked his eyes several times and said, "Oh, oh, yes, thank you, too, David, thank you very much." He reached over and shook the man's hand, smiling. "Please give your wife my regards and tell her I'll do my very best to get her story in the paper."
"I really 'preciate it, Bent. Very much. You take care of yourself, okay?"
"I'll do my best, David, my very best."
Once in the building, going up the elevator, he checked his watch. It was a quarter after three. At least he was early, but he wasn't looking forward to what Fleck was going to say about the story ... or, rather, the non-story.
Once upstairs, he headed straight for Fleck's office, sat down before his desk, and told him the whole story.