by Knight, Dirk
Dennis looks up and meets the clerk’s stare once more; the clerk’s prying eyes make him uncomfortable, so Dennis puts the small car into drive and peels away from the pumps. He is no more than a half mile down the road when his eyes dart to the rearview mirror for one last glance at the filling station, to get one more savory vision of that transformative parking lot where he found his manhood. This is when he sees the sunlight glinting off the slick bald head of a man in his back seat, and loses control of his car.
Detectives Rodriguez And Staley
“I got a funny vibe from that Foster case,” Staley says to Eleman.
According to his most recent evaluation, and the buzz of his peers, Carron Staley is the most accomplished and driven investigator in Phoenix Homicide. He is also the strangest and least personable. It was evaluations and reports like these that had gained the attention of the young and hungry Eleman Rodriguez, who had practically begged the captain to be considered when Staley’s partner of seven years was forced into early retirement.
Eleman looked up to Staley before he ever met the man, only having heard his name and read his case files. Now, working side by side with him he sees that something he’d seen mentioned in the evals. Staley was a lock-jaw who never let even the simplest “ground ball” of a case pass through his meticulous attention to detail. His follow up to the families was thorough and showed that he truly enjoyed bringing justice to the survivors of the deceased.
Still, sometimes Eleman had to roll his eyes. “Dude, when do you not have a ‘funny vibe’?”
Though Eleman considered himself a young but seasoned detective with a penchant for meticulous detail work, and an intelligent man, there weren’t many instances in which he could offer Staley more than conversation. To Eleman, watching Staley work a case was akin to hearing Beethoven for the first time. Trying to solve a case like his partner would be like hearing “Moonlight Sonata” and knowing what Beethoven was thinking while he was sitting in the Brunswick Estate in Hungary.
Better yet, knowing what he was hearing in his decaying auditory nerves as the tinnitus combined with vibrations from the chords and emulsified into sound in his brain.
Staley always seemed to know more than the evidence would suggest, which was confounding to Eleman, who though only a handful of years Staley’s junior, felt as though they were separated by no less than a decade. Though Eleman turned over every stone and was methodical and precise, Staley just knew, and this pissed Eleman off. He’d hoped to learn from Staley, but what Staley had couldn’t be taught.
When Eleman had questioned this sixth sense in the past, he always got the same nonsensical answer: “When you’re a detective, sometimes all you’ve got is your gut.”
He can practically hear Staley thinking it—and Hell, he’s probably right—but Eleman presses on anyway. “That guy’s clean. No record, no motive; clearly he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The shooter was on a drunken rampage, probably headed into his office to kill the boss. If anything, you should be thanking Foster for saving you a long weekend and a press nightmare, over another office shooting. Guy’s my fucking hero! Close the case log and let’s go get a couple dogs before you’re due in court. Then afterwards I got a lead I wanna follow on the Parker case.”
Staley’s hard features glare into Eleman, features carved and weathered by time and pain. His skin is scarred and there are divots in his face from an entry wound. His thick, full hair is grey at the temples and generally disheveled. His broad, dense chest supports arms like branches of a looming oak that has grown too tall and heavy to cut. Though his eyes are a piercing blue, when Eleman is caught in them he doesn’t feel warm, he feels meaningless. The eyes frost Eleman like tundra and look to the room behind him as if he were mere vapor on the morning highway.
There must have been quite a lot that happened to him in those few years, he thinks.
He’s already pulled Carron’s file and done as much digging as he felt comfortable doing on his fellow officer, especially on a dick the caliber of Staley. Each time he goes down to pull records he gets paranoid that Staley knows. Every time he does an internet search, he peers over his shoulder to make sure he isn’t being searched himself, even before he was assigned to Staley and formally introduced to his eerie awareness. Eleman hopes that Staley will fill in the gritty details. He pokes repeatedly, to the point of visibly annoying Carron, but the man is a mausoleum. Over the past six months, he’s added very little that wasn’t already in his file.
What he has told Eleman only makes him want to know more. He saw combat in Iraq, and earned a purple heart. No surprise there, he wears the bullet wounds in plain sight. When Eleman asked about his tours and discharge, (the file said dishonorably), Staley only stated that he had let his temper get the better of him.
He refuses to speak of his time with the FBI, and clamps down harder still on the drum of his past.
“It wasn’t the right fit for me, is all. Now if you don’t mind, I really don’t see the point in talking about my resume,” he had said.
But Eleman still presses on. “One day, amigo, you are going to have to open up to me and let me in on what makes you tick. You know I won’t let it go, either. I may not be Carron Staley, but I am a pretty good detective.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one, Rodriguez,” Carron says.
Carron reaches into the wastebasket and pulls out a wad of papers that Eleman just tossed into the bin. He knows this will piss off Eleman, but he has to see something again. Eleman rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head and revealing dark circles under his arms. “Are you going through my fucking garbage, bro? Seriously?”
“I’m just double checking one quick thing, and then we can get out of here,” Staley says. The kid was always on him like this. He missed Bill. Bill never asked dumbass questions about his inner child. He worked, he drank, and he made jokes. This kid wasn’t even a kid, but Carron couldn’t think of any other way to describe his gung ho, impetuous behavior.
Staley understood how his past had shaped him; he didn’t need to be psychoanalyzed. But every time “The Kid” started asking questions, he couldn’t help running the tape through. Rewind to the defining moments and see if there was something he was missing. This is what made Carron, Carron; he never took anything at face value.
He knew why he did what he did. It was Karl. He owed it to Karl to be thorough.
“Are you ever going to just trust me and let it go?”
“I do trust you, Rodriguez, this isn’t about you. I just need to see something one more time. It’s part of—”
“It’s part of your process. . . . I know. Well, hurry up, I’m getting hungry and we got court in an hour and a half.”
Carron was a drifter early in life. He did poorly in school, not because he was stupid—quite the contrary, he was too smart for his own good. He got bored easily and spent the rest of his energies trying to undermine the system—any system—no matter its value. He had gotten in with a couple other kids who were too smart for their own good and started scheming. He had found easy ways to make money and have fun, get girls. He fought often. He saw many of his friends’ lives destroyed by prison. He attended many funerals for gang related shootings.
He joined the military because he had to. He didn’t want to be there, until he met Karl. Karl changed everything for Carron, put life into a different perspective. He gave him hope and purpose.
His CO in Iraq had forcibly dragged Carron out of the line of fire during an ambush, saving his ass, but that wasn’t the way he had seen it. Carron had been trying to save his partner, his only friend, Karl Webb, who lay dying in the dusty streets of Nasiriya. Karl was pinned down by gunfire, and shot to hell. He was doomed, but Carron couldn’t leave him behind. He knew Karl would have tried to save him. Carron punched and kicked his way back into the street, time and again, but he was dragged back by the man he called “Sir.” Before he could break free again, his Lieutenant s
howed him the butt of his rifle and he woke up in a medical tent somewhere off the frontlines.
Karl was also from Phoenix, but they would never have run in the same circles in civilian life. Karl had college acceptance letters with his name on them. He had a position with his father’s business; the desk already had his nameplate engraved. He was in Iraq because he wanted to be. Because of Jenny, because he hadn’t saved her, Carron had nowhere else to turn. While Karl wanted to do something that mattered, Carron wanted to punish himself, to pay penance and to die fighting, rather than live as the coward he had been.
He had once asked Karl what brought him into the military. He’d been curious because Karl’s family was well off, and well known, too. They were connected.
“Many people will kill for what they believe in, but it takes something more to be willing to die for a belief.” Karl had replied nonchalantly, and then added, “These A—Rhabs are believers. They are dangerous and feel justified about it. They feel righteous. But I’m a believer too, and my God has better guns!”
Then, realizing he sounded arrogant and smug, he added, “God has a purpose for bringing us all together. My purpose is greater than this war, and the war is greater than Saddam. I am here because God needs me here. And God needs you here, too.”
“If God needs me here, he hired the wrong guy, because I don’t work for him. No offense, Karl. I’m glad you like God and all, but fuck him. That’s what I think. Fuck him.”
“He will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged him, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting people may know there is none besides him.
“Carron, ‘He is the Lord, and there is no other.’ That’s from the book of Isaiah. So even if you don’t like what he has to say, he’s talking to you.”
That’s the kind of guy Karl was.
The war changed Carron. It changed all of them, and he came home on a noisy C-130 with a group of other changed men who had given far more than he had: limbs, eyes, even their lives. He felt as if he had let his friend down, and his country. After Karl’s death, a passion ignited within him beyond anything he had known before.
Even beyond what he had felt for Jenny Massey, who had convinced him to go to Iraq in the first place. She didn’t know that she convinced him, of course. If she had known anything, Carron might still be in her store, fighting off sleep. But she had no say in the matter. Dead women rarely do.
His debt to Karl had influenced his choice of career in law enforcement as well. He attended the funeral services as a civilian, and shed his first tears for the man’s death when the Honor Guard presented Karl’s mother a folded flag and spouted words—revered by soldiers, and dreaded by mothers—declaring the debt of gratitude by his country. He would not insult Karl by shedding any tears for him, who had perished for something he believed in and fought for, but he had to cry for his mother.
It has been said that the only thing harder than being a soldier is loving one. Carron was lucky in the sense that no one loved him when he was a soldier.
Carron was oddly capable as a murder investigator and had climbed the ranks, from patrolman to Homicide, all the way to detective, in a few short years. His ability to divorce himself from emotion, a skill that he had employed with growing frequency since his anger had cost him a chance to serve the country he loved, and again caused him to be dismissed from his position in the Bureau, lent itself to remaining objective and paying particular attention to details. Staley also dismissed all the people in his life—his sister, wives, parents—for what he considered the greater good. Carron was a machine, consumed fully by his work. He couldn’t help himself: he felt as if he were repaying his debt to his country now.
The caseload was incessant. Carron vowed he would never cry for these victims, either. Many of them deserved what they got: the dealers, pimps, adulterers, and gang-bangers were just another piece of shit on the boot heel of this city. Good riddance. They were not believers; Karl would have said their crimes served no purpose but self-fulfillment. Those cases were groundballs, no mystery.
There was a second class of killer that Carron had dealt with comprised of rapists and home invaders. The latter group—hopped up on bath salts, or meth, or whatever new drug hit the streets that month—was his least pleasant job. There was always a ton of evidence: the scenes littered with DNA and prints; the murders so gruesome, yet so accidental; the invaders always having a remorseful story during interrogation, signing confessions to horrors like the slaying of elderly persons in their beds for no purpose, with no goal, no forethought. Just disjointed malice. Carron often had to think of Karl’s words when he faced that kind of brutality.
Then there was the final group, the sick fucks that kept him up at night. Artfully well-planned murders, seemingly random, with calmly prepared scenes posed to look like paintings. The kind of murder that spoke to you internally, on a visceral level, to let you know these cold bastards were following a doctrine that only they could read. What made them even more dangerous was that they were incorruptible, believed what they were doing was just, good, and necessary. He had only met a couple of true believers since his time in Iraq, and only once was he able to look into his eyes as he still drew breath. He felt as if he were looking into a hollow forest at sunset—simple, calm, controlled, but when the sun set on the woods, the wolves would be lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce on the lost hiker and rip her limb from limb.
He thinks he saw that look on the man from yesterday. The road-rage guy made him uneasy, and he just can’t shake the feeling. Carron works off instinct and cunning; he too is a believer, and incorruptible. He got that from Karl. The bullets that tore through his friend had solidified not only Karl’s destiny as a believer, but also infused Carron’s heart in his own, new faith. The power of this conviction seeped into him through the blood that stained Karl’s flak jacket.
Staley still can’t shake the vibe, wondering if this is an emotion or an instinct. The lawyer, Whesker, is a dirty son-of-a-bitch, he thinks, but says, “Okay, so why the lawyer?”
“What?” says Eleman, obviously itching to go.
“Why would he have Whesker?”
“Why wouldn’t he? The guy’s rich, he thinks he’s going to go to jail for murder, and Whesker’s pudgy face has been all over the front page for weeks.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re ri—”
“Did you expect a suit like that, in a car like his, to go with the cheese-dick ambulance chaser from a bus bench ad?”
“Nah, you’re right, let’s eat. . . . You drive?”
But before the men can enjoy their lunch, Staley fields a call from Khamal Penn, the attendant and franchise owner from the Circle K shooting. As a detective his schedule is always fluid; he is always going where the work takes him, when the work takes him, and now the work, and his incorruptible gut are taking him back to the Circle K. The fine hairs on his neck are not convinced by Eleman’s explanation.
Carlos Diaz
Sunlight trickles down through the trees and pools onto the pile of earth directly behind the casket. There is a worn and threadbare length of indoor/outdoor carpet, which was once the color of turf, draped over the mound. The weather is cold enough to see the breath escaping from the mouths of mourners as they expel sobs into their interlaced fingers and gloved hands. The subtle grave-marker will be delivered next week and placed next to that of his daughter. Her headstone is marble with intricate carvings and cherubs and scripture verses, but a small granite and brass placard was all that Carlos could afford to provide for Hector’s eternal internment. The money has run out.
The headstones to the left of his marker are those of Carlos’s daughter and grandson; Hector Jiménez’s wife and child. Both had been lost to a drunk driver two Thanksgivings ago. A man was angry with his wife and barreling down the road in an argument when he lost control of his vehicle and slammed into the SUV that Hector was driving. Rosa and Alex, who were in the back seat, weren’t strapped in. Both ejected fr
om the vehicle as it began to roll at 80 miles per hour. Hector had shattered his collarbone, while Carlos, who sat shotgun for this ride, broke his pelvis in three places.
Hector has not, to Carlos’s knowledge, been back to the gravesite since the day of their funeral, until today, when he will be joined with them in burial. Carlos does not believe they will be joined in Heaven. Carlos has feared for Hector since the rollover. His drinking and his violence had affected his performance at work. He was fired for coming to work drunk, which he had done repeatedly, and had gotten physical with his supervisor, Rick Sawyer, who was one of the few people there today, and had known Hector for many years. He also remembered the Hector who was once good.
Before the crash, Hector had been a family man, a terrific father, a reliable employee, a thoughtful husband. He had withered into nothingness over the past twenty-four months. Constantly blaming himself for not making sure they were strapped in, especially on the holiday weekend.
Carlos had some idea that Hector was planning to do something dastardly that day when he left the house. He was already drunk when he left home at 8:00 am. He’d grabbed and loaded a pistol in front of Carlos, as if he wanted his father-in-law to stop him, but Carlos had tasted the back of Hector’s hand a few times and wanted no more. This much he had shared with the police, nothing specific, but they were detectives after all and had figured it out after a few more questions. Carlos had asked them not to make note of it in the public record, and the officers had obliged him.