by Knight, Dirk
Sitting anywhere.
He was not made to sit. He was an investigator. It was unfair to him. She was pushing him and holding him to her own standards of what it meant to be Carron Staley, not what he needed. She didn’t care that he needed to heal. She was too busy judging him.
She was too ashamed of herself, for what she hadn’t done.
The truth was that she’d always admired him for what he’d done to Lutz. She didn’t feel he had the right to regret his decision. Carron wanted someone to tell him he was wrong, that his behavior was inexcusable. Even McKenna wouldn’t do that. He had to suspend him, but Carron left out of his shame.
Coward.
He questioned how she could have forgiven him when he couldn’t forgive himself. She never answered him. She never reminded him that she was the first to say that Lutz had to die, and Carron never brought it up. He would never blame anyone else for his actions. She never reiterated that the only suitable justice for a man like Lutz was execution and the subsequent judgment of the creator. She never pointed out that he had done what she didn’t have the courage to do. She never told him that he was her hero.
To tell a man like Carron things like this would be to insult him. He didn’t like to be pandered to.
So, of course she pushed him to keep working, to keep hunting, and to find another case, another win, that would pull him out of the quagmire. He was too damn gifted to throw it away. He wasn’t allowed to be a coward, to hold back his gift, and rob the world of the ability God had bestowed upon him.
He’d done nothing wrong, no matter what the brass had said.
When he quit the Bureau, it wasn’t her prodding that had pulled him back. It was him. His itch. The inner workings of Carron had finally driven him mad enough to pick up the four hundred pound phone, and get back to the work God had designed him to do.
Hunting.
Deep down she’d known he wouldn’t change. That he didn’t know how to quit. His doctrine was too ingrained. He was too loyal to Karl.
And to the gas station girl he refused to speak of.
And, now, to Heath Brannan too.
This was the same reason she knew she was going to have to follow him. He was never going to call for backup, and she wouldn’t dare betray his trust by calling it in for him.
She wouldn’t risk losing Evie any more than he would, and if she phoned Jeff Parker, the Sherriff’s office would be blazing up the highway with sirens blaring and bullhorns full of feedback, thinking they had gotten the scent of a good bust.
She let him get a head start, even though she was positive he wouldn’t lay eyes on the rearview mirror. Not that she could keep up with him if she had tried.
The miles melted away with him just a blip far ahead, ever cresting the horizon.
Abigail quietly exits her car, draws her weapon, and carefully approaches the dilapidated hulk. Mold and lichens cling to the rocky exterior, while the wooden banisters and steps have succumbed to dry rot. It is impossible to move through the yard quietly. The leaves are a patchwork quilt a decade in the making. Beneath the dry top layer are strata of increasingly wet and decomposed compost.
The screen door is rusted and torn, and the unmistakable smell of gun smoke is seeping through the mesh in thick tendrils. She can smell the blood before she sees it, and steps over the crumpled body at the foot of the stairs without stopping to check for a pulse. The stench of death is already on her, like bad cologne.
At the top of the stairs, she sees the legs of another body, and rushes over. Her eyes immediately flick to the ring finger of the twisted body; the tarnished gold band encircling the half finger on the left hand; blue and red stones glinting.
She yelps, and slaps a hand to her face to stifle the sobs and screams.
Abigail falls to her knees next to Carron’s limp frame. His mangled face is covered in blood and bits of bone.
Hot tears are carving down her cheeks when she reaches out and touches his neck, praying for a heartbeat.
Why did she let him go by himself?
“You’re so fucking stupid, Carron. Goddamnit, why are you so fucking stupid?”
Carron coughs raggedly to her touch and she jumps back in momentary fright.
“Oh God, Carr, you’re gonna be all right. Just hang on—”
Muted gun blasts echo from the far end of the house. Carron raises his diminished hand, pointing towards the eruptions. He chokes out a word that could only have been “girl,” through the bloody mess of his face.
Abigail runs out with reckless abandon. She keeps her pistol leveled as she turns each corner. Bloody smudges and footprints lead her through the kitchen.
She follows.
She is at the top of the cellar stairs amidst the screaming and instigating cries. Evie is hovering over the ruined remnant of Dennis Foster as he struggles to reload.
She knows what comes next. She can see the tape through the end. Evie at war, doesn’t know how to let the man live. Doesn’t know how to live if he is still on this planet either, but she still can’t kill him.
Abigail had been in this position once. She’d had her pistol trained on an evil scourge to humanity. Everything inside her, everything that she was, screaming pull the trigger, but she couldn’t. Even after what she had seen and what she could never un-know, she was still supposed to be one of the good guys. She wasn’t sure if it had been innocence or naiveté, but she was stymied.
Carron hadn’t wavered though. He had saved her the torture of squeezing the trigger and the hell of letting him live.
Abigail snaps off four rounds, slowly, precisely.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, into the head and chest of Dennis Foster.
Remembering the deliberate and wrathful cadence as Carron ended Leopold Lutz in that musty barn.
Three one-thousand, chest.
Four one-thousand, balls.
The muzzle fire fills the dim dungeon with brilliant flashes of light.
Evie jumps, dropping the rusted weapon, and then runs to Abigail when the familiarity registers.
The chopper comes for Evie before she says anything. Abigail doesn’t mind. She doesn’t know what to say anyway. She is more concerned with Carron, praying against her certainty that he’s not going to pull through. She cries unabashedly as the two-man team carries the bright yellow Ferno Scoop stretcher he’s strapped to out to the Medevac Chopper.
Evie is also loaded on before they liftoff.
Whop-whop-whop, and her hair is tussled in the rotor-wash.
Carron’s Room
Carron wakes up in a hospital bed in a bleached white room in Phoenix. He has no idea how long he has been there, how long he was asleep, or what has happened to Evie. As the curtain of dense fog lifts from his brain, he starts to make out words.
“He’s awake, he’s awake, hey everybody, he’s awake!” It is the unmistakable voice of his exuberant partner, Eleman Rodriguez.
“Man, you are one tough son of a bitch, Staley!” he says with passion and his voice hints at tears in his eyes.
As his eyes regain their focus and pan around the tiny room filled with people, he wonders if he is in heaven. Everything is white and noisy.
An eternity with this Kid, he thinks, smiling at Eleman.
Evie is in an uncomfortable-looking chair in the corner, next to Connie. Evie is pretty banged up, but she is smiling. Her sunshine eyes creasing the purplish yellow oil slick beneath her brow. Her lips scabbed and cracked, but smiling.
He tells himself that it is okay to cry now, and he feels the stain of his own, streaking down his face, enough to fill buckets.
Eleman is still talking, but for once, Staley is happy to hear it.
“You got shot in the head, you mean old bastard; I can’t believe how hard headed you are…”
“Oh, you have no idea,” says Abigail, and that’s when he sees her.
She’s crying too, and it might be the first time they have cried together. Carron’s smile threatens to tear the s
titching on his face, but he can’t stop.
“They had to keep you in a coma until the swelling in your brain went down,” Eleman continues with no indication of stopping.
Abigail smiles back to him and raises her hand, showing him the glint of her stones as the wedding band twinkles under the harsh fluorescent lighting.
She is wearing hers again, too.
Evie After
Evie wakes with a start, as she so often does now, on a cold December morning in her postmodern Tempe apartment, just off campus. She is in a cold sweat, also nothing new, and her heart is thudding into her throat. She reaches out blindly for the glass of tepid water near her alarm clock. After a deliberate swig, she sits and lights a smoke. She looks to the clock, it’s 3:19 AM, later than her usual waking time from the night terrors. Evie rubs her palms into her eyes fiercely and swings her feet onto the cold concrete floor below.
Her ankle pops and cracks as she applies her sparse weight and skitters into the den, so as not to wake Jarrod. Not that he would wake up anyhow. For a few months, he had been the caring and accommodating boyfriend, but she had urged him to stop. She told him that the gesture was enough and that she didn’t want to be held. He hadn’t listened at first, but eventually she had shoved him off the bed and screamed for him to leave her alone.
She needed space.
She is all too aware of her increasing anxiety and claustrophobia, and his nagging and smothering caretaking was only adding to it all by making it harder to ignore. She didn’t want to bathe in her fear, and he was asking her to do just that, though he probably didn’t realize it. She was somewhat relieved when he finally took her at her word that she was fine on her own, and had begun to ignore her outbursts. Another part of her wished he would have more balls and take her by the wrists and make her lie there and face it all. Chances are she would have bitten his lips right off his face, though, if he had tried that.
The street below is a-bustle with drunken students and townies. Everything is as awake and chaotic as her. She prefers to be awake at night, but not for the same reasons as before. She no longer wants to party, or get loaded, in fact, she still has bouts of nausea and flashbacks from all the shit the kidnapper dosed her with. She vowed never to lose control of her senses willingly again; never to offer herself up as a victim. She no longer cares what everyone else is doing. She’d rather be alone, and with Jarrod living there offering little more than someone to help with the dishes, she almost feels as if she were. Funny thing about loving someone and enduring a tragedy . . . you never quite know where you will end up afterward. Evie is not sure if Jarrod continues to see her out of pity, or duty, or if he expects that what happened will just go away after a time. His patience with her, sexually, has become thin. Her patience with his presence, thinner.
Evie thinks of a story she heard: a woman was diagnosed with terminal cancer; her husband was faithful and loyal and did everything right. He loved her and comforted her, and didn’t become bitter or angry, just loved her. Out of nowhere, the cancer went into remission and she made a full recovery, but once she was back on her feet again, she decided that she had given too much of her life to her husband, and although he was a marvelous husband, she was no longer interested in the marriage. She packed a single bag, flew to a different city, and lived out her days independent of anyone else.
Evie wonders what would have happened if things were slightly different. Perhaps the woman debated about leaving, but remained loyal and stayed with her longtime partner. And perhaps, then, the husband reached the end of his wits and called for a divorce. Was he only so good at her bedside and such a sacrificing caregiver because he was glad to see her go? Had he already started planning his life without her, and somewhere along the line it became so much more appealing than his real life that he decided to gamble his future?
On the other hand, what if the wife had flown to another city so she could die in peace; her way of putting herself on an ice floe and then pushing out into the Arctic Ocean.
That was what Evie wanted: to die in peace, alone. Part of her anyway. The other part was a fighter and couldn’t just accept the way things had been dealt. Either way she couldn’t talk to Jarrod about any of it, so he annoyed her by trying to help. She could only talk to her Uncle Carron.
She had decided to stay in the city, gave up the idea of going to school up north, and not because of the reasons everyone thought. Her dad assumed it was because of his increasing demands and her mother’s concern for her safety. Jarrod assumed it was because she wanted to spend more time with him and because she was afraid to get behind the wheel of a car. In fact, she stayed behind because she felt at ease around but one person.
Suddenly she was more connected to him than she would have ever imagined possible. She speaks to Carron every day, without fail. She sat with him in the hospital while his wounds knitted new scar tissue. He and she healed together, best they could. She talks to him about nothing, sometimes, but she also screams, cries, and says whatever she needs to, in order to drain the infection from her mind. She knows he can take it; that he’s the only person like her, the only person she can turn to when her self-loathing is too great to bear and she wants to hitch a ride on that ice floe. Fractured, dented, and scarred, but her wounds are only visible to a few; those who knew her before. She has the limp, though. That much they have in common, now.
Carron tells her that his scars made him prettier, and that she didn’t need any, so that’s why she was spared. Evie begins to examine her own battle wounds, tracing the extra lines of her palm with her fingertips. The scar tissue is without sensation and it feels like she’s caressing someone else’s palm. She likes to wonder what a palm reader would make of these extra creases and folds. Are they devoid of meaning as well as feeling?
She has class tomorrow. She is majoring in Criminal Justice and taking some psychology courses. Sometimes the lessons and stories told by the instructors make her uncomfortable, and she has to walk out of class and light up. Sometimes she calls Carron. He is a good study partner; she is doing well in her classes. Her piss and vinegar has returned, if ever it had left, and she is proving to be every bit as indestructible as the Staley side of the family.
Jarrod is snoring. She can’t help but think that he’s there only because she hasn’t found a good enough reason for him to be gone. Evidently he hasn’t found a better route to take, either. She doesn’t care one way or the other. She did at first. She had been genuinely grateful for him; he had been the catalyst in her rescue and he had been the agent in her slow rebuilding of confidence. She wouldn’t be able to walk down the street after dark if it hadn’t been for his patience and nurturing, but the previous winter’s events haven’t been erased. They’re buried in a landfill of her mind and there they fester and become consumed by maggots and mold. She feels that she is on the verge of detonation. The only element of her former self that remains is that she is still hungry for justice. She is determined to fight for what she believes in, and now she has something worth fighting for. She says and does what is unpopular, she holds her convictions, and more than anything she uses her hatred, fear, and loathing to impel her onward.
It wasn’t until she had spent a hundred hours in a therapist’s chair that she realized she was only getting better from speaking with Carron, and she dropped the appointments. She knows that he has the same affliction. He fears, loathes, regrets, and evaluates all of the decisions and happenings of his past, and like a shark, he has to keep swimming in order not to drown in them. She is learning to do the same. She is already speaking with scouts for the Bureau, studying Quantico, Virginia on the map, so she will not be lost when she gets there, and perhaps most importantly, she is becoming a crack shot with Carron’s assortment of firearms.
Though she isn’t sure if she is ready to work in the field, and face another indoctrinated killer so soon, she is following what the tingling in her gut tells her to do.
And when you are a detective, sometimes all you have
is your gut.
Final Thoughts:
This book took a great deal of patience and tolerance on my part. Tumblers didn’t fall as I thought they should, and the editing process is almost enough to make me want to give it all up and go live on a beach somewhere. However, I cannot fish, don’t surf, and hate sand in my shoes, so I guess I muddle through.
It will be a while, I think, but I would very much like to bring the character of Heavy Evie back in another book.
In the meantime, read on for an excerpt from my next thriller, The Girls
The Girls
A Novel
Dirk Knight
The young lady had no idea what she was getting into when she opened the green metal ammo canister and leafed through the man’s journal.
The can squealed loudly and warned her away. The air within the canister was stale and rusty and spat dust in her face, but still her curiosity was paramount.
She thumbed through the pages and felt the weight of the paper and smelled the years of the pages, the rust and the dust, as she turned. Through her reading, she would come to know the man as Cirril, and he would haunt her dreams for nearly a decade.
Though she never actually met him, she had developed an understanding of what Cirril would look like, simply by reading his psychotic handwritten notes. She knew this much the same way you might have pictured a business associate on the phone, or a client that you’d yet to meet, although in those instances the client or associate’s face was never what you’d expected. This was not the case with the man who’d written the journal, she was sure of it.
He was ugly, first and foremost. Acne pockmarks littered his greasy face and marked him as though he had been present on the lunar surface some millions of years past for the furious raining down of meteors and meteorites, as well as more than a couple rouge comets.