Dark Web

by T. J. Brearton

  “Are you his wife, ma’am?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m afraid I have some sad news. I’d like to be able to deliver it to both of you, if possible. Is he in?”

  The woman continued to glare down at him, and now she seemed to calculate something. “What’s the news?”

  “Like I said, ma’am, it concerns both of you and I’d like to be able to come in and speak with the two of you together if he’s in.”

  “Well, he’s not in at the moment, so I guess you’re going to have to tell me.”

  “I would really prefer to speak to you together. Any idea when he’ll be back?”

  She turned away from him, and glanced at the van in the driveway. To Cohen’s surprise, she started clucking her tongue. Like she was taking her time to think about something, deciding what her next step was.

  Cohen felt a distant tingling sensation in his fingertips. She’s stalling me, he thought. But at first he couldn’t understand why.

  The woman’s head swiveled back around and she looked down at Cohen again. “He’s, well, you know how men are,” she said, suddenly playful, almost flirtatious.

  She’s taken a different tack. Now she’s going to try to charm me while she continues to stall.

  “I’m not sure I understand, ma’am.”

  “You send them to the grocery store and they’re completely clueless.” And she smiled, revealing a glimpse of her teeth.

  Cohen’s tingling fingers touched the holster strap at his side. His thumb and forefinger pinched the strap and unsnapped it. Fear and excitement rode in waves through his muscles and nerves. You had teeth like that when you smoked crystal meth, Cohen knew. He’d seen enough addicts come through the jail, more of them all the time as the drug snaked its way into the North Country. This was a pretty girl, could have been an actress or a model. But he realized her hair was pinned up because it was dirty, and her teeth were stained and rotting because she was a user.

  “Ma’am,” said Cohen, edging forward a little, “on second thought, maybe I will come in and just talk to you alone. How would that be?”

  His heart was beating hard against his ribcage. So hard it made it difficult to hear his own voice. Go back to the car, said an inner advisor. Go back and wait for Trainer.

  Another voice countermanded. She’s stalling because he’s back there in the house, McAfferty, right now, cleaning up signs of smoking or cooking the shit, that’s what she’s doing. You wait for back up or go in later and it’s all going to be long gone.

  Her expression changed as her smile faded and she seemed to fill the doorway with her body, blocking his path. “I’m sorry; I lied,” she said.

  Cohen’s fingertips trembled against the cold grip of the gun on his hip. He raised his eyebrows and waited.

  “He’s not out. He’s sick. He’s in the house but he’s real sick. We both are. The flu, you know? Both of us puking our guts out. It’s disgusting, and I wouldn’t want to get you sick. So let me just go get him, okay? If he can walk, I mean.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” said Cohen, acting fast against her attempts to dissuade him. “I’ve had my flu shot.”

  The woman openly grimaced. No poker-player here, Cohen thought; her face was a jangle of nerves, twitching as she ran the gamut of fear, contempt, and hatred.

  Cohen started up the steps, his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. In the back of his mind, jurisprudence stood watch. He was already preparing a justification, a probable cause for his actions. The woman was clearly lying, the van in the driveway was registered to McAfferty, had his business information on it, the woman said he was out at the grocery store then changed her story again. And she looked like an addict. It would have to be enough.

  As he climbed towards her, he asked her to push back inside. Up close, he could smell perspiration and unwashed clothes. And the house behind her emanated further smells of unhygienic things, stale cigarette smoke, moldering food. But cutting through all these in sharp contrast was the smell of recently-smoked methamphetamine, a distinctly chemical, cleansing smell, like cleaning products or sanitary napkins.

  Now he had every ounce of probable cause he required.

  “Step aside, please, ma’am.”

  The woman suddenly lashed out with her hands and raked her fingernails down his arm. It was such a surprising, yet ineffectual gesture that it took him a few seconds to react. By that time, the woman had already darted deeper into the house. Cohen pulled his gun out.

  * * *

  There was a small untidy porch, the width of the small house but only a few feet deep, and then a doorway. There was no door, but Cohen saw hinges mounted to the casing. Someone probably kicked it down. McAfferty’s license had run clean, aside from a few speeding tickets and a DWI from seven years previous.

  “Sheriff’s Department,” Cohen called out. “Tori McAfferty, please come out with your hands where I can see them.”

  The smell was even stronger here, the air stale and full of old cooking smells, food smells, and unwashed body smells. The windows likely hadn’t been opened in a long time. Directly ahead of Cohen was the living room. A flat screen TV sat in the corner to his right, its dark surface streaked with greasy fingerprints. There was a couch that had seen better days cocked at an angle to face it. The carpet was stained in various places. There was junk everywhere — magazines, food boxes, articles of clothing. A few framed pictures adorned the walls, one of them had fallen at some point and was leaning against the baseboard with a chunk of the glass missing. It was a shot of Jimi Hendrix on stage.

  Go back outside now, the advisor in Cohen’s mind said. Go and wait for Trainer. Don’t proceed any further.

  “McAfferty,” he barked. “Come out here where I can see you, hands out in front of you.”

  The living room, which spanned from one side of the house to the other, fed into three doorways at the back. The one on the far left had light coming through, and Cohen could make out part of a sink. That was the kitchen. Two dark doorways sat closer together in the middle. Maybe one a bedroom, one a bathroom. The house had looked small from the outside, but it could have gone back a ways deeper than he’d first noticed — there might have been more rooms beyond those adjoining the living room.

  He aimed his weapon at those dark doors in front of him.

  He started walking deeper into the living room. He bet the place had a basement, too. He could be standing over a cooking operation, which would be a huge bust. It wasn’t easy to tear down a cooking operation, they were complex and full of different burners and containers and precursor chemicals. Still, enough of it could be disposed of in a short period of time, enough to weaken the strength of the prosecution.

  Cohen felt the nerves at the base of his spine jangle when his foot kicked something on the ground. He glanced down and saw a video game controller. He took a moment to consciously slow his breathing and heart rate. If he could just get McAfferty to show himself. For God’s sake, he just needed to talk to the guy, be the one to deliver some pretty horrible news, and now look how things had suddenly turned. You never knew what you were walking into. You just never knew.

  Something caught his attention and he swiveled around, face to face with a window. Through it he could see the top of the van, and beyond it, the street. He’d seen a car approach in his peripheral vision — another Sheriff’s Department vehicle. The car parked and Deputy Trainer stepped out.

  Cohen felt the release of the tension in his chest. His back-up was here and everything was going to be alright. They were going to pull this tick out of the dark and he was going to turn out to be the one who’d murdered that poor kid in New Brighton. Cohen was sure of it.

  He watched until Deputy Trainer passed out of sight. He would walk up the path and be at the door in just a few seconds. For now, Cohen stayed where he was, keeping his gun aimed at the back rooms, and the darkness there. It was only the second time in his career that he’d had to pull his service weapon and —

>   The ground heaved beneath Deputy Alan Cohen’s feet. He felt a tremendous heat rising, and for a split second pictured in his mind’s eye some enormous, fetid bubble swelling up from beneath him, inside it a raging and roiling furnace of blue fire. Then it released in a tremendous crescendo, and Cohen and the room and everything in it vanished in a deafening explosion.

  PART THREE

  THE GAME

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Callie opened her eyes.

  There was a blackness, thick as tar, closing off the passageways of her mind. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know what time it was, the day, the week, the month.

  There was only one place in all the darkness that showed any light, only one clear feeling; a tear in the black. It took her a moment to understand what it was, and then she remembered.

  Braxton was gone.

  Once this fact had fully formed, a cascade of others poured through that slice in the darkness. She didn’t know where her girls were either. Fear and anger flooded her, and she tried to get up.

  It was as if she’d been filled with lead. Her limbs were thick and heavy, nearly unresponsive. Her mouth was dry, her tongue felt as though it was thick with liquor. The inky darkness lingered all around her, along the edges of her vision, obscuring her thoughts, trying to draw her back into its viscous fold. She tried harder, and the muscles in her stomach burned and ached as she sat up.

  At first she could barely make sense of the room. Everything was sterile and white; an alien place, as though she’d been abducted and taken to some other world without color, without emotion, feeling.

  She realized she was in a hospital. Then Mike appeared in the doorway, and came rushing to her side. He threw his arms around her.

  She tried to push past him for a moment, her useless arms flailing about as he enveloped her body and squeezed. She clenched her buttocks and dug her heels into the bed and tried to slip past him, to leave this place immediately and return to her son, and to her girls.

  You could always go back. A soft voice.

  I could?

  Just go back. Back to sleep. Back into that darkness. There is no pain there, no memory. Just fall back into it.

  She considered this for a moment. “Mike,” she said, through waxen lips, her cottony mouth.

  He held her even tighter, and she struggled against him. She saw her son again as he sat in the car beside her on the morning ride to school. She saw him hunched over his desk as he pecked at the keyboard of his laptop, and standing on Flagler Beach, now a pre-teen with the wind blowing his hair across his face, and as a toddler, getting his leg over the red tricycle for the first time. And then he was a baby, he was in her arms, and she knew that life was going to be hard for him, because he was going to be different, he was going to get his heart broken, he was going to believe the world was kind and just and fair. The world that was going to subdue him, to press him into rank and file, to corrupt him with its culture industry, its competitive wiles, its insatiable appetite.

  Her baby, soft in her arms, looking up at her.

  Callie could feel the pulse in Mike’s neck against her cheek as he held her, the warmth of his blood, the strength of his arms. And she gave into it.

  But there were no tears this time.

  Callie watched over Mike’s shoulder as the last of the day’s light drained from the single window. She could hear the sounds of nurses talking and the distant beeping of monitors outside, down the hallway. Dimly, she thought she smelled cigarette smoke.

  Mike pulled back from her at last and his eyes were red, his face a mask of suffering. But his lips curled into a smile.

  “How are you feeling?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Heavy.”

  He nodded, and glanced away, out the window to where the dusk settled.

  She licked her lips. She needed water.

  “Where are the girls?”

  He looked at her again, and she saw he sought her approval. “I called Sarah.”

  “Oh. Good. They’re okay?”

  “They’re okay.”

  She glanced down for a moment. The patient ID fastened to her wrist.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said that you got sick. You went outside into the cold and got sick.”

  She nodded. Callie knew she could be tough to deal with. She’d been edgy all through the past Christmas, for one thing. Lying about Santa Claus was something she found pointless, and she had been annoyed with Mike for perpetuating some stupid myth.

  Such concerns seemed trivial but also profound to her now. “I did get sick,” she said quietly.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  She could tell he was treading lightly. Perhaps he’d been advised to do so, in case it set her off again. The thought made her feel lonely.

  She often felt alone. Even after eight years married to Mike. Even with three children. Her own family was large but not close, her friends far flung. Mike once told her that she distanced herself. He said she needed to do so in order to create, and that he understood. At that moment she knew she would be with him for the rest of her life.

  Besides, there was nobody else. Not her father and his new family in California, and all of their blond Jesuit prep-school kids, not her mother, mistress of the desert in New Mexico with her dopey, common law husband with his long hair and Miller Lite paunch. They seemed farther from her now than they ever had.

  “I remember . . .” she began, and didn’t finish. She remembered, alright. She remembered knowing that, as she sat here, her son was being cut open, his organs removed and weighed; his body systematically taken apart like a car in a garage.

  She looked at her husband coolly. The sadness was settling within her, surf calm at sunset. Who knew what would happen later, what the tide would bring? Braxton walked along the water’s edge, always away from her.

  “What’s happening with funeral arrangements?”

  Mike swallowed. “Nothing, until after the autopsy. I mean, I’ve spoken with the funeral home in New Brighton. They’ve given me their available times but I can’t really select one until the detective speaks to the pathologist and they decide what’s next.”

  “Can you get me some water?”

  “Sure.” He looked around, walked into the small bathroom, and she heard him filling a cup. He came back and handed it to her. It was cold and good, and she drank it down.

  “Good?”

  “More, please.”

  He refilled the cup and she drank half this time, and then set it down beside her. As he moved about she caught another whiff of cigarettes. “Thank you.”

  She noticed him staring at the cup after she’d placed it on the bedside table. Something seemed wrong. She reached over and took his hand.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You won’t believe it.”

  “What do you mean? Mike, what? You’re scaring me a little.”

  He was shaking his head. “Something else I have to tell you. Something just . . . man.”

  “What is it? Spit it out.”

  “Okay. It’s pretty major. They told me that I needed to be careful what I said to you.”

  Callie glanced at the door. Mike had left it open. She wondered if he’d been asked to do so, in case anything happened, and he needed help with her. She felt a pinch of embarrassment at the idea, and some resentment. It was time to focus. Her girls would need her. Mike would need her too — he had a way of dealing with things that was . . . different.

  She kept her voice level. “Mike. I’m fine. I went a little bit . . .”

  “Honey, no one is asking you to apologize. There’s no . . . we have no idea how to do this. You can’t prepare for this. Everything you do, everything we do, is exactly as it should be. Okay?”

  She nodded. He was being a champ, and she loved him for it. There was always more to Mike than met the eye, and that was part of why she’d fallen in love with him. She might have wondered why a man already in h
is thirties had never married, never settled down — sometimes that was a red flag. But then she learned where he’d come from, and what he’d learned growing up. It hadn’t been pretty. He understood the wreck of her family; she understood the absence of his.

  He was watching her, appraising. Then he came out with it.

  “Tori has been living in South Plattsburgh.”

  She swallowed. Her throat was dry again. “What?”

  He looked down.

  “Mike? What are you talking about?”

  “He contacted Braxton. Started sending him emails. Trying to convince Brax to come live with him.”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t . . . he’s living up here? I thought he left here a long time ago.”

  Mike looked at her. “I told the cops about the emails. I thought maybe it could have something to do with what happened.”

  She felt sick. Like she might throw up. The whole thing made her head spin. How could Mike have kept this from her? All the conversations they’d had over the years about open communication, and especially about the kids. How it never helped to keep something from the other parent, even if you were trying to spare them. It always backfired.

  Mike looked away. He appeared hurt, and she squeezed his arm, perhaps harder than she should have. “Mike?”

  “I threatened him. Callie, I threatened Tori’s life.”

  She swallowed and found she had no saliva. Anger, fear, a sense of betrayal. But at the same time she realized now was not the time to chastise Mike — for his lack of trust in her — it would only make things worse. She eased her grip on his arm, and took a deep breath. She spoke softly.

  “You did what you felt you had to do.”

  He looked at her again, unmistakable relief in his eyes. But then they darkened in self-recrimination. “What I had to do? I don’t know. It was bad, Cal. It was a bad example for Braxton, for one, and it was stupid. It could have . . .”

  Suddenly she shushed him and raised her hand to his mouth. “No. Mike, you were trying to do the right thing. What exactly did you say to him?”