Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  Carla was a spitfire and a young hotsy-totsy party girl when he was growing up. She had been a flame to many powerful men in her younger years, his father being the last (the last powerful man, but certainly not the last man). Leaving his father, and taking him for everything, as she had done to two other men before, she traveled in a scummy, drug addicted hippie circle out here in Northern Arizona.

  She was set for life. She had the amassed fortunes of three men, but still preferred the powerful barter tool between her legs, to spending the cash in her mattress.

  Now she’s all used up. Still hoping to con people with her looks and the prospect of a wild ride, but the only takers would be half-dead drunks at the local VFW club.

  Dennis likes her better this way. She’s stable, if nothing else.

  “So, you have plans, huh?”

  “I do, and you’re not invited.”

  “I’ve never exactly been invited, now have I you ornery bitch?” he snaps.

  Her lithe face stretches into a smile at this and she softly says, “Sorry, but I have never liked to be around little sissies. I like men. You acted like a faggot when you were a little boy. You haven’t really changed much, either.”

  “I have changed, Goddamn you!”

  “Why, because you killed that spic on the freeway?”

  “Wait, how the hell do you even know about that?”

  “Never you mind how a mother knows her son.”

  “Well, whatever mom. If you know so much about it then you know I took down an armed gunman with a pocketknife. How’s that for being a man?”

  “Please. You got lucky. Just ‘cause he was a bigger pussy than you, that’s the only reason you’re standing in my Goddamn kitchen right now. You little shit.”

  “He’s not the only one, you washed up cunt! I could strangle you right now, and no one would even notice you were gone. You’re nothing but a used up old hooker!”

  “Do it, faggot. Be a man. At least I would be proud of you before I died. Come over here and back that shit talk up. You and I both know you haven’t got the balls to do anything. Just like your sorry-ass father.”

  Enraged, Dennis stands up from the table quickly, causing the chair to skid back and topple. He throws his half-full mug into the sink, splattering coffee up onto the thin drapes that cling to the narrow rod in the window above the drain. The handle of the mug chips off and ricochets onto the floor.

  He’s in her face, fists clenched in anticipation; his labored breathing dampening her brow.

  “You’re gonna clean that shit up too, sissy. And if you’re gonna stay here, you’ll be out in the guesthouse. I don’t wanna hear you and your floozies all night,” and she walks away. Never in the slightest was she afraid of Dennis. She’d predicted his reaction to a tee.

  Nothing.

  Rage brings a speck of a tear to the corner of his eye. He’s embarrassed and belittled. He feels like a seven-year-old boy again. Wiping his eyes, he sees Hector staring at him with a look that says, “thought you were better than that, ese,” or, “you really are a sissy and a fag.”

  The telephone rings just as Carla’s slippers have shuffled the last inches of the hardwood kitchen floor. Dennis hears a whimpering. Jiménez hears it too, for his eyes perk up and he motions to the back door with the hunting knife in his hands. God knows where he got it, or if it’s even real. He’d called it his “wolf knife” when Dennis asked about it, but refused to elaborate any further.

  Mexicans are fucking strange. Even imaginary ones who were clearly a result of his White Anglo-Saxon Protestant self’s mental dilapidation.

  Especially imaginary Mexicans, he thought, bitterly.

  The good drugs are in the bathroom attached to his mother’s quarters, the master bedroom, and he has her to contend with if he attempts to venture upstairs. She is presently on the phone at the base of the stairs, speaking, no doubt, with the “big plans” she has for the holiday. He has to find something to keep his unlucky stowaway from getting too riled up, but he can only take a small dose of Carla at a time, and he’s well over the limit. He opts instead for the insulin he knows to be stored in the butter compartment in the refrigerator door. He’s often given his mother her dose when she was drunk, hungover, or just generally ill.

  Filling a disposable syringe, which he secures from the silverware drawer—this is where Carla likes to keep them so she is reminded to take her shot before a meal—he darts quietly out the back door and into the cellar.

  “I’m not a fag, you old bitch,” he says under his breath as he crosses the threshold, knowing she cannot hear him, but still cautious not to let her.

  Part V:

  “It happened in stages, gradually. My experience with pornography generally, but with pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it—and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction—I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far, you reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it.”

  - Ted Bundy

  “…but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.”

  - Hebrews 13:4

  Evie Wakes Up

  Suddenly awake, her head throbbing, eyelids sticking together, she isn’t sure what’s going on. She cannot breathe well. Her nose is partially stopped from swelling and dried blood. Her hands will not respond though she strains. Neither will her legs, but her ankle responds to her attempts with a screech of agonizing warning. She manages to pry her eyes open to darkness that pools around her, deeper in the corners of the room and under the stairs. She racks her brain to orient herself to the strange surroundings. She flashes on the crash; the man in the black suit.

  All at once, it hits her what has happened.

  The skin on her arms and legs starts tingling, blood rushing to the surface, flooding her cheeks and chest with warmth. She tries to scream, but her cries are stifled against a thick band of duct tape. She can feel the pulse of her laboring heartbeat in her swollen lips, amplified by the tape, she tries to work her jaw open but the adhesive stretches her skin and pulls harder on the cuts on her lips. She whimpers in defeat, realizing she hasn’t the strength to escape.

  Her legs are cold, her snow pants removed; she is lying in the dark, bound to a hard cot in nothing more than her ASU hoodie and a pair of tacky, moist panties. Squeezing her legs together against the chill in the air, she can feel the horrible throbbing reminder aching between her legs. She dimly remembers him trying to mount her.

  Sobs rack her tiny body as she comes to realize she wasn’t able to fend him off. That while she was rendered unconscious he’s had his way with her and left her sore and dirty-wet. Every muscle in her body alive, poised and taught, she presses mightily against the canvas and aluminum prison, digging her shoulder blades into the cot, and straining her fists and feet, until the crunching grinding sickening feeling of her broken ankle nearly makes her vomit from the intensity. Even if her ankle weren’t ruined, the tape is unrelenting and she is able to move nothing.

  Presently her eyes have begun to adjust to the dim lighting and she can scarcely make out the cobblestone rock walls and the hand-carved banister leading up to a storm-shelter-like set of double-doors; angled halfway between horizontal and vertical.

  The doors are a misfit with one another and let in the late afternoon sun in a small sliver, which lands on a pegboard behind her. She can make out the silhouettes of tools: a mallet, some canisters, and a wood saw.

  The thrumming in her ears, the sound of her own heart pounding into her concussed head, is all she can hear for a while. It is akin to listening to the world through a set of noise-dampening headphones, like the ones she wore at the shooting range when her uncle would take her and her brother. She almost doesn’t notice the murmur in the background, but during a break in her sobs, a
shout pierces through her haze.

  She can make out an argument of sorts, through the floorboards above her head. She screams against the tape again, straining her throat, which is already sore from the attacker’s hands.

  The voices cease and fade away as if in accordance with her pleas. She sits in silence for what seems to be an hour, her adrenaline causing her to lay down more intense, sensational memories and thus bending her own little pocket of space-time perception.

  Just as she is ready to give up, a harsh, bleaching light pours through the double doors above, drying up the puddles of darkness that had pooled around the basement. Her eyes shout in response to the flood and her thrumming headache reminds her again of the pistol’s weight against her scalp.

  Heavy footsteps tumble down the wooden stairs faster than she can focus, but she is sure it is the same creepy man who she met at the rest area. Her eyes focus hazily on him as he snatches a rusted machete from the pegboard and briskly closes the gap between her and the workbench. His presence arrests her whimpering and she meets his eyes stone faced, refusing to show him her fear.

  “Hello Tater-Tot. I like Evalyn better, by the way; Tater-Tot sounds fucking stupid. Anyway, Evalyn, here’s the deal. My mother is upstairs right now and although she is deaf and old and can’t hear you down here making all this racket, it makes it really hard to enjoy a cup of coffee and catch up with the old bitch, so I need you to be a little more respectful while you’re a guest in my house. Comprendez-vous?”

  Bewildered and afraid to say anything to set the guy off again, Evie says nothing.

  “It means, do you understand,” he adds and raises the Machete’s honed edge to her jaw line.

  Shying away from the blade, she nods in agreement.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  Evie makes a moaning sort of yes against the restraining layer of tape, causing Dennis to smile.

  Joy fills him in this moment, now with her awake and fully confined and constrained, his little puppet to toy with and dominate. A cloistered china doll.

  He could keep her in the basement, he thinks, for a long time. Years even. Eventually she would forget about her life, her friends, her dreams and decisions. She would grow so lonely and desperate that the sight of Dennis would brighten her day. She would eventually even love him, but like all pets, she had to be broken first. He can smell her in the air, on the cot, where he’d first had her, and in his mind as he remembers filling her narrow void. He is driven to take her again now that she’s awake, and begin the housebreaking process.

  Later, he thinks. Now is a bad time with the old bitch upstairs, scrutinizing his presence in the house.

  He imagines Tater-Tot on her haunches, spraying piss into a sandbox out of her red fuzzy slit.

  Meow.

  “So, let’s make a deal. You like deals, Evalyn?” She nods. “Well how about this; I want you to feel comfortable as a guest here, so, as long as you can shut the fuck up, I promise I won’t shove this rusted machete into your slimy little cunt. Now of course you are a smart girl, you are in college and you don’t need me to tell you what will happen if you do carry on with all the hollerin’ and moanin’. You don’t need me to lay that bag of snakes out for you, do you?”

  She shakes her head, quickly.

  “See, I didn’t think so. I knew you were smart. Now that we got that outta the way . . .” Dennis places the jungle blade onto the counter and joins her side once more. His hands stroke her auburn hair gently, his fingertips dancing in and out of the tangles, careful not to pull even a single strand. The tips of his fingers dive under her neck, caressing her jaw line and tickling her collarbone; she tries not to squirm or whine under his touch.

  She is unable to refrain when his palm begins to stroke her inner thighs, pulsing and rhythmically squeezing her muscular legs. He slides his hand under her weight and forcefully grips her ass in a two-hand vise, raising her pelvis off the canvas bedding and pressing her clammy, elastic-worn and stretched-out panties against his nose—breathing deeply of her.

  Her muscular thighs tighten and press together, but his hands wedge between and his voice warns her to relax. His teeth pull aside the slim band hiding her womanhood, which he buries his face into, licking and tasting her sore and swollen vagina.

  “Young pussy tastes so good,” he mutters half to himself, and half to Jiménez, who is sitting on the steps over his shoulder, watching in anticipation, wistfully hoping for his turn.

  Dennis, hearing a door rattling home in the jamb upstairs, suddenly snaps out of his fantasy and stands upright. He reaches into his back pocket, produces the BD brand disposable hypodermic, and quickly flicks the orange plastic safety cap off with one deft finger.

  “To be continued, Tater-Tot. Now, remember our deal. And it’s not that I don’t trust you, honey, but my momma always told me to buy insurance and I guess it just sunk in,” he says and jabs the half inch steel point into her thigh and depresses the plunger, delivering ten units of Humalog insulin to her.

  “You’re gonna be pretty fucking uncomfortable for a while here, Evalyn. . . . Hell, you might even fuckin’ die, for all I know, I’m not a doctor. But mostly you are just gonna sleep, and wake up hungry as a bear.”

  The needle pricks his finger as he bends over the fine metal spear. He licks the dewdrop of blood as it wells slowly on the pad, enjoying the salty metallic copper twinge, then flicks the plastic tube into the wastebasket and follows Jiménez up the stairs, refilling the room with darkness.

  She hears him engaging the lock, and then silence floods in on the heels of the weighty darkness.

  Within moments, she begins to writhe under the effects of hypoglycemia and mutter unintelligible random phrases to herself. As she begins to lose control of her cognitive abilities and her thoughts are not her own, she thinks, finally, that she’d better keep the noise down, and erupts with laughter.

  Staley and Eleman

  Rodriguez is standing out in front of the house on St. Charles, talking to patrol, when Carron pulls up in his sedan. The front yard is cordoned off with various men, waiting to get into the scene and do their various jobs: blood guys, photographers for the crime lab, coroner, and hazmat; they’re all in queue, waiting for Staley to perform his initial sweep.

  “What do we got here?” He asks Eleman.

  “Hispanic male, seventy-two, apparent bludgeoning and suffocation. A friend of the family, who was concerned, found his body. Apparently, the victim left his son in law’s funeral this morning in a state of emotional distress and this guy . . . uh . . . Rick Sawyer, decided to swing by to check up on him.”

  “Emotionally distressed at his son-in-law’s funeral; you don’t say?”

  “That’s what the guy said, okay?”

  “Okay, let’s go in—”

  “Hold on Carron, that’s not all,” he interrupts, and then after a brief pause: “The funeral was for one Hector Jiménez. The same Jiménez from the Circle K road rage deal this week.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Staley barks, hoping he was.

  “I shit you not; this family is having a bad run. Let’s take a look.”

  Staley is less surprised by the news his partner has just delivered, than by how “on the ball” the kid seems to be tonight. Wise beyond his years, Staley thinks, forgetting again that he is only a few years his senior.

  The house is dark and dreary, even though all the fixtures are plugged in and switched on; the lighting is soft and powerless against the solitude of the home, as if the walls were painted in a special component that absorbs all the light, in a non-obtrusive way. It is a depressing atmosphere. The floor, littered with detritus and rubbish, plastic forks from takeout meals, used napkins and bits of newspaper, is a dystopian landscape of resignation. Business-reply-mail leaflets, which have fallen from various magazines or other periodicals, speckle the panorama. The carpeting itself seems made of this same mishmash of refuse, all of the debris blends together in a thick layer of sadness.

 
; There will be roaches here, he is sure of it.

  Probably rats.

  This residence has filled up with all the filth and squalor from a depressing life. A life lived as though confined to one room. He thinks of an institutionalized ex-con, who still sleeps on the floor. He imagines a man who is so used to confinement that a large home puts him at unease.

  He wouldn’t be surprised to find a coffee can full of piss and shit huddled in the corner near the chair.

  There are no signs of a struggle in the home, other than in the bathroom; nothing to indicate forced entry. Carefully stepping around the puddled shower curtain, and into the lavatory, Staley gets into a crouch and takes a closer look at the victim’s face.

  The smell.

  The unmistakable stench of death has already started to appear in the tiny cramped room, fumigating the atmosphere like a bug bomb and leaving him trapped in the tent. The malodorous scent of imminent decay and ruin, the same smell he came to recognize as a child when his cat birthed a litter and one came out lame. The postpartum feline, Maddie, had consumed the gimpy offspring, crunching through the soft bones and swallowing large swaths of skin and fur, but was unable to consume the head. Maddie Cat, though ferocious, hadn’t been able to unhinge her jaw like a diamondback and, therefore, left a smelling, oozing kitten head fermenting under the bed or in the closet for Carron to discover. The stench would fill his nose as he walked by, causing his curiosity to spike, and leading him to a horrifying surprise.

  He later smelled it—on a much larger scale—in Iraq where bodies would be piled into tents, or abandoned businesses caught in a war zone and left to bake in the Middle Eastern sun. He thought the war might be the worst of it, but he has smelled and seen far worse almost every day since he returned to civilian life. If you can call him a civilian.