Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  But his time at the NCIS was cut short when Carron let a boy die, after losing control of his emotions again, and there was nothing the Webb family, or anyone else, could do to save his career once he’d slaughtered Leopold Lutz on a vengeance burn.

  The most they were able to do after his latest discharge from yet another government post, was to get him on with the City of Phoenix, have eyes put on him and fast-track him into a shield.

  He had a knack for homicide, so he got noticed, not without some help though. Calls and contributions, from higher up the food chain.

  Now he was resorting to old habits and risking getting a third strike, and a discharge that would effectively end his service to the country.

  “Fuck it,” he whispers with a sigh as he interlaces the remaining fingers on his partial left hand with their whole counterpart, working the digits together to force the nitrile gloves into the deep webbing of his hands.

  Gloves wedged in tightly, his small Maglite appears in his gnarled but capable left hand and pours light into the dark apartment. Carron quickly but meticulously surveys the landscape in the manner only a career law-man, or career criminal—in his case perhaps an amalgamation of the two—can do.

  At the desk, the paper is turned to the obituaries. He isn’t at all stunned when the name circled in red pen, Jiménez, leaps out at him. He moves farther into the unit, past the large floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass door, which leads to a comfortable but small patio overlooking downtown. He can see the lights of the city below the balcony shimmering like jewels in an obsidian ocean of onyx.

  Moving into the bedroom he steps over a corona bottle on the carpet instinctually, again, he has the grace of his feline friend, but his grace has been earned in the field. Molly’s attributes are remnants of a history of breeding and former greatness passed down from the Egyptian Serval cats that were worshipped and touted as gods.

  He flips on the light in the master bathroom and drops his Maglite into his open jacket pocket. The hand then reappears, bearing a small evidence bag; quick as magic.

  Now you see me.

  He is looking for something to tie Foster to the Diaz murder, or a clue to support his wild hunch that he is responsible for Evie’s disappearance.

  Now you don’t.

  The light spilling into the bedroom reveals a scrapbook jutting out from beneath a pillow. He picks it up and thumbs through the pages, stopping at a newspaper clipping with a headline concerning the unveiling of a then-new building designed by Harold Dean, Architect.

  He fails to notice the pile of journals on the opposite side of the mattress, because he is rapt by the volume currently in his hands. There are many other clippings, all of which seem innocuous, and each of which about the same architect, some with juvenile captions, written in a child’s unmistakable scrawl.

  Guy has a hard on for this architect, he thinks.

  Before he can stumble upon the disturbing handwritten volumes of Dennis’s sickening teenaged thoughts poured out on paper, his phone bursts forth with Eleman’s words, which are broken by background noises and static. He clearly hears the words “getting in” and “elevator” among the jumbled nonsense and that is all he needs to hear.

  He drops the scrapbook onto the mattress and dives towards the door, no longer utilizing his previous stealth and grace. His foot lands awkwardly upon the smooth bottle, wedging the glass cylinder in the crevice between the boot’s heel and the sole. His foot slides from under him irrespective of his attempts to keep it planted on the plush carpeting.

  Though in great shape for a man in his forties, the sudden stretching of his groin and the consequent impact with the floor—unforgiving reinforced concrete under the thin layer of damp carpeting—deal quite the damning blow to his ball-bag and back. His head smacks onto the floor hard enough to give him the heavy thick sound of a concussion, in his head.

  The sound that really isn’t a sound, but instead is a dampening of sound caused by your brain trying to figure out what the fuck has just happened.

  He struggles to make it to his feet, his wind knocked out; he is surging forth on adrenaline, fearing the consequences of being found here, like this. The consequences to his career notwithstanding, he was only truly concerned with letting the bastard get away, or being told to back off.

  He is scared because he can’t help but love Evie, and fears the consequences.

  Presently his touch-to-talk burps again, and he snaps it silent before his position is betrayed. He knows he has just over a minute of elevator time to recover and “get out of Dodge” before Foster could be at the door.

  He finally reaches the doorknob, wraps his gloved hand around it, and hears muffled voices approaching on the other side. As the voices begin to fill the hallway more closely to his position, he is certain The Kid has let him down and he is seconds away from a defining moment.

  He is at war with himself; does he clobber Foster as he enters the room, and saunter away as if nothing has happened?

  But what about the girl? he thinks.

  He can faintly tell that the voices are a man and woman, though they are twice muted—once from the expensive security door, and twice by his ringing skull—and he doesn’t want to pummel the skanky flash-dancer.

  He will if he has to, but his first option is retreat.

  He takes long backward strides towards the sliding door, nearly toppled by his treasonous right groin, and hunkers down on his haunches behind the curtains.

  Just as he is certain the voices have passed and that his coast is cleared, he steps out from the corner and the veil of the drapes, when the door opens and light ruptures the darkness once more.

  Dennis Falls To Pieces

  Dennis and Libby are in the front seat of the Suburban, while Jiménez is taking up the entire bench seat in the back. Dennis isn’t driving, though he normally would’ve opted to be behind the wheel. Today—right now at least—he is preoccupied with both his ethereal partner barking into his ear—in an endless succession—the manner in which he should dispose of Libby.

  “Now is not the time,” he says.

  In addition, his mind is overcome with his high-strung writer’s imagination twittering new ideas and concepts to him with every turn. For all his years of incessant journaling and imagining the kill, he finally has something worth writing down, something that calls for some speculation and investigation.

  He wonders how much the great killers he studied liked to re-live the brutal moment of sin in their heads.

  Though Dennis was captivated last night by the possibilities of their deadly sexy exploits, he is now waging a campaign against Jiménez to end Libby in the high desert. He has taken note of her unfastened belt, and the shallow ravine below. He is angry with her for the surprise visit, and for taking him away from his young temptress strapped to an army surplus cot in his storm cellar.

  He is confident that, should he jerk the wheel hard and to the right at the precise moment, he could roll the vehicle into the shrubs, crags, and rubble below.

  He is but little concerned with his own health for some reason as yet unfathomable by Jiménez, whose now full-time job is to protect the inept Dennis from his own impetuous desires.

  The killer within him imagines, in full glory, like a tiny cinema playing only for him, the sounds that would fill the cab of the SUV. He can feel the truck roll as the windshield spider-webs with the impact, and see hunks of dirt, bits of sand, and knuckles of wild grass erupting in a plume, covering the fractured sections of glass. He can see her seductive whore’s body flung into the ceiling as he remains strapped to the plush velour, her head impacting the liner, the door frame, the windshield, the steering column.

  He drinks in the ecstasy of her would-be death as the vehicle tumbles to the depth of the shallow culverted ditch.

  Jiménez shouts to him, seeing what he is seeing, privy to the private screening as if he were the projectionist.

  “How are you going to explain this to the cops?” he s
ays. “Did you think of that? You just were going to fucking hitchhike out of here and hope that no one sees the toppled Suburban?”

  He can tell that nothing he has said is seeping into the dense helmet of lust. That Dennis may well have been on another planet. A planet on which there wasn’t a good enough reason to spare Libby. A reason to get away with murder.

  He changes the subject.

  “Do you know what the Eskimos do to keep wolves away, to kill them?” he asks.

  “I think they prefer to be called Inuit,” Dennis mutters more audibly than he’d expected.

  Libby’s confusion is evident, but she doesn’t interject and conjecture.

  “I don’t care if you call them ‘Snow Niggers;’ that’s not the point. In the winter, the Inuit, they have to protect their livestock from predators who are hungrier and more desperate than normal. They have to worry about predators traveling farther inland from their normal hunting grounds, you see. And it’s cold, man. I mean, really fucking cold out there.”

  While Libby is distracted by the road in front of her, rambling something meaningless in his other ear, and speculating that Dennis may be having some kind of psychotic break, Dennis says, quite loudly this time, “Get to the fucking point.”

  Libby looks shocked, but goes right on telling her pointless, audience-less, tale. Jiménez picks back up, as well.

  “The point is that instead of posting guards, the make a sacrifice. They kill one of the livestock right off, as soon as the first good snow, and they drain out the blood into a big-ass bowl, or something. They take a sharp-ass knife, ice cold. And dip it into the big-ass bowl, then into the snow, then over to the blood again, and so on, and so forth until the knife is just a bright red popsicle. They would make up a handful of these blood-blades and set up a perimeter around the land, burying the handle into the snow, all the way to the hilt.

  “And then along comes a starving dog with a keen sense of smell and they would start licking. The ice melts slow, and it numbs the wolves’ tongues, but they keep going because they are hungry. They get through the ice, and start licking the razor-honed blade, but they are numb to the slices it makes in their mouths. On their lips. The blood is warmer and more plentiful now, so they keep going, more feverishly now. The dog gets weak, it thinks maybe blood will give it strength so it keeps on slurping up until it fucking bleeds out and dies.

  “My point, mijo, and I really hope you will start listening, is that you can’t be this bloodthirsty, if you want to live. So Fucking cut it out!”

  Dennis shoots a quick scowl into the back seat, which seems to say, “You made your point, so shut the fuck up,” and thus effectively ends story time.

  Jiménez is silent now, knowing that Dennis is just as likely to wreck himself in the desert as he is to walk into Detective Sergeant Staley’s office and turn himself in.

  Just as likely to have fought the giant brick of a man at the bar last night.

  Just as likely to stand up to the biker who spat his tobacco on Dennis’s face.

  He isn’t going to do shit, other than spin his mind up to a million miles an hour and then chicken out.

  He isn’t there yet. He hasn’t achieved his goal. He hasn’t broken her. Not Libby or the salty redhead. And until he does, he won’t kill either one.

  Jiménez, suddenly aware of the magnitude of commitment it would take on Dennis’s part, and always looking for a good time, tries to push Dennis over the top.

  “Ok, just do it then, you fucking pussy!” he shouts into Dennis’s ear, “Lets fucking roll!”

  Libby is yammering on about something in his other ear, too, and the pressure is mounting on his brain. The once-cacophonous car ride silences after he finally boils over.

  “Just shut the fuck up and let me think!” he shouts, startling Libby.

  Jiménez just smiles and leans back into the ample seating, knowing he’s done his job in calling Dennis out on his shit. That he’s wound him up to the point of rupturing, like a pressure cooker bomb.

  “Saahhahhree,” she says in a smart-assed, sarcastic tone, which is very subdued in spite of her mockery, and much sedated compared to her normal petulant reactions. She looks back to the road, slightly nibbling on her lower lip, which is still split and swollen from the night before.

  The only partially tangible trio rides mostly in silence back to the city. Dennis retires his designs of derailing the journey into the quagmire.

  The silence is finally broken when Libby says, “Hey, I almost forgot to tell you, but I burned this CD for you.” She produces a paper sleeve he recognizes from his desk drawer.

  Through the circular cellophane window, he reads “Vayden” in her bubbly teen handwriting. Handwriting not yet burdened by deadlines and the weight of the world.

  He remembers the reason he chose to be with her instead of someone his own age, and sacrifice the hopes of a meaningful future, her innocence and naivety.

  That choice, seemingly a lifetime ago, is only nine months past. And, had he known more of her, then perhaps the whatever-they-are-doing could blossom into a real relationship. He regrets not being straight with her sooner. In some small way the things he was afraid would scare her—the parts of himself he sought to protect her from—are the very aspects that are binding them together today. He wonders, silently of course, if killing her will truly be necessary. He starts to love her again. The simple gesture of bringing him music from his favorite band—a band she cares little about, but about which he rambles on incessantly—softens him to her company again.

  “You’re so pathetic and wishy-washy,” Jiménez says, rolling his eyes. “You literally don’t stand for a fucking thing.”

  Dennis ignores him; he is locked onto Libby like a child who’s missed his mommy, and his eyes show the gratitude he feels in this moment as she pulls the disc free and glides it into the player of her obnoxious aftermarket stereo.

  “The quality isn’t that good, prob’ly, because I had to record it off YouTube, but I don’t think you’ve heard these yet . . . it’s all, like, old cover songs, redid by them . . . it’s cool. They called it ‘Couch Concerts’ or something.”

  She is truly happy in telling him and genuinely excited to have done something nice for him. He has been abusive, verbally and sexually. He has shown her his darkest behaviors, and her youthful exuberance—a hint of innocence marred by her avarice for revenge and control—still shines through. Her silent pleas for acceptance are palpable; this is the most childlike quality she bears. He is going to enjoy her as long as he can, preserving her innocence just to make it that much more sacred when he finally crushes it. He’s glad he didn’t waste the torturing of her innocence and rob her life with a car crash.

  She deserves better.

  He deserves better.

  She has to be possessed; consumed.

  “This song is my favorite one,” she says giddily, skipping forward to track five.

  The song is a very beautiful and different version of a Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.”

  He listens to it stoically, unsure if he has heard this song, in any version, since he was a child. His hand is suddenly in his coat pocket, tracing the edges of his father’s old pearl-handled razor. He can feel the intricate designs carved into the casing. He feels the cool steel of the tang protruding past the pivot into his thumb. His index finger runs along the spine. His body goes numb.

  Suddenly, he is back to his tenth birthday.

  His father had normally been absent from his life: off on build sites, watching his erections—monuments to human accomplishment—forming from the iron and steel and clay, shaping the land and the cities that sat on the land. He was busy “redesigning God’s creation in his own image,” he’d once said. He was transforming the land into icons of humanity.

  That’s what he called them. And that the men who could build were the ones who’d gotten a real handle on things. There were two kinds of men: great men, and everyone else.

  He would travel
the country, sometimes farther, to see his buildings from start to finish. Nevertheless, today he was at Dennis’s school.

  He was there with a giant balloon and without warning.

  He was there to pick up Dennis from class and excused him through his teacher.

  “I’m taking my boy for a special day,” he’d claimed.

  The pair, having arrived at his father’s humble apartment, discussed the activities he’d planned for the night.

  Harold discussed, and Dennis listened, as was the normal flow of conversations with Harold Dean.

  “We will go to dinner at the China House—your favorite—and you can get a Pu-Pu-Platter all to yourself, if you want. Then Mom and I will get all the waiters and waitresses to sing to you, and then we will blow out the candles and—did I tell you about the cake?—well, I got you a Batman Cake, and you can have as much cake and ice-cream as you want—”

  The telephone rang, and his father ran over to pick up the receiver.

  “Hello. . . . Yeah he’s with me, I was just telling him about—I did tell you that I was going to get him today . . . Carla, can you just calm down?”

  Unintelligible screaming on the other end—

  “Carla, baby, can’t we just please move past this and. . . . Can we just have a family outing for his fucking birthday?”

  —

  “No, absolutely not. . . . You aren’t taking him to a baseball game with Rick! Fuck Rick, he’s our son!”

  —

  “But Carla, he’s my son . . . Hello? Hello!”

  His father didn’t say anything else, but his demeanor changed. The gaiety he’d exuded in Dennis’s class had faded into a dull, defeated sadness. Harold Dean was not a man who wore defeat well.