The 8th Circle

by Sarah Cain

  When Danny pulled into his driveway, it was just growing dark. He glanced at the garage and stopped. In the deepening twilight, the pond looked still and peaceful; the last rays of sun kissed the low hills and winked off the water as a lone duck skimmed its surface. He swallowed when he looked toward the willows. Beowulf’s willows.

  The fence still gaped at him. He’d have to get that hole repaired.

  Danny got out and approached the hole before turning to face the road. Deep ruts still marred the surface of the grass in an almost perfect line. Michael must have come shooting down the road like a rocket. He followed the ruts in the grass to the road. What the hell was Michael doing?

  The path he traced led to the top of the hill. He stood at the edge of the road and looked up. Mrs. Norton’s mailbox stood in his direct line of sight, and he tried to remember if the cops talked about skid marks. There were none. It wasn’t a clear shot to the duck pond, and Michael would have had one hell of a time reaching the box. He couldn’t just lean over, especially not if he were bleeding, and he certainly hadn’t gotten out.

  Where would he put a package? If Michael was afraid, he’d hide it. In a mailbox? That seemed a bit obvious, but Michael was dying. Michael was also a gamer. He liked all that “open this door” and “look in the green box” shit.

  Danny walked to the mailbox and looked inside. Just a few cards. It was not uncommon for him to get Mrs. Norton’s mail and for her to get his. Danny had enjoyed her eccentricity. He had written a column about her as a break from his routine, and it had been a hit, which they’d both enjoyed. She’d feed him apple pie and give him the benefit of her tart tongue, and though he suspected she watched Beth and him with her telescope, she made a good story.

  After the column, Michael had decided to start leaving her presents. Odd, inappropriate gifts: opera glasses, a black nightgown, a sex toy. Danny had managed to intercept the last gift—a large, purple, vibrating dildo. Michael was relentless. He’d started leaving gifts in the tenant’s mailbox too, calling it his drop box.

  If Michael had a package, it wasn’t impossible that he’d put it in the tenant’s box. Danny looked across the street. The tenant’s mailbox stood tilted slightly back. He walked over to it and peered in. Empty. Then he saw what appeared to be a rusty stain rimming the inner edge, almost like bloody fingers had gripped the box.

  Danny stared down the road. From here it was a direct line to the pond. But it made no sense, unless Michael wanted him to find the package later. Michael must have realized he was dying. Maybe he was afraid the cops would grab whatever he was carrying first, and he didn’t want that. Maybe he’d left the package someplace else and had given Danny credit for being smarter than he was. He could only start here and try to think where else Michael would leave something sensitive.

  Mrs. Norton was away until March, and Danny wondered who was picking up her mail. If he wasn’t mistaken, she had a granddaughter or niece who wandered in and out. Danny tried to put a face on her but could only come up with a thin, younger version of Mrs. Norton. He walked up to the house, a smaller version of his own, and knocked on the door. No one home.

  He’d come back.

  *

  In his office, Danny pulled out the notebooks his father kept from his cases over the years from the musty box Kevin had given him. The old man might have been crazy, but he was meticulous about his notes. Danny found his last notebooks near the bottom. They covered the Sandman investigation, but the last two months were missing. Surely Kevin hadn’t taken them. Why the hell would he want the old man’s notebooks?

  At the bottom of the box lay an old newspaper with the headline “Alleged Sandman Kills Philadelphia Detective in Bizarre Interrogation Incident.” Not Danny’s byline. The story was about his brother, Thomas Patrick Ryan Jr., Paulie Ritter’s last victim. The second cop on the scene had pumped fourteen rounds into Paulie. Stan Witkowski, his father’s former partner. No wonder the old man had been so twisted at the funeral. Stan had been there when Junior died.

  They’d closed the investigation after that, and the old man had lived out his days holed up in their row house in South Philly until his heart gave out almost four years later.

  At Junior’s funeral, the old man had stood alone. He was still a big man with powerful hands, but they’d shaken that morning. His skin had a sickly yellow cast, and he’d glared at Danny out of dead eyes with a malevolence deepened and honed by the death of his favorite child.

  God is watching you, boy.

  The old man didn’t have to say the familiar words that day. Danny had heard them often enough. Still, he wished he’d told his father he was sorry, because only now did he understand the depths of his agony.

  Danny stared down at the headlines until they blurred. They’d found evidence at Paulie’s apartment. They’d found the final body there. The murders stopped after Paulie’s death, so why had his father quit the force? Something must have happened. Something must have gone wrong. But it made no sense. If something had gone down, Stan Witkowski would have left the force too. Big Stan always had the old man’s back.

  Still, Junior wasn’t stupid, and he was strong. A god. He would never have let his guard down with Paulie Ritter. Danny knew it in a deep-down, gut-clenching way back then. He was sure now. The big question was why the old man had let it go so easily. Someday, he’d go back and look into the case again. Maybe then those lost girls would rest in peace.

  Danny smoothed out the newspaper and wrapped the notebooks back in it. The old man loved to call him a vulture, so he’d probably find his current situation funny as hell. After all this time, Danny was back to the beginning, picking over dead bones.

  19

  The senator wouldn’t approve of her being at this club, especially looking like she was open for business. The DJ played European techno tonight instead of plain old hip-hop, but it was all the same no matter what night she came. Everybody chased their loneliness with tequila shooters and exotic martinis and then crowded onto the dance floor to shake and grind and pretend it was a good time. Still, there were worse places in the city. Much worse.

  “Here, Kate, you wanna run a tab?”

  Kate Reid pulled out a couple of twenties. “No, it’s fine, Richie. Thanks.”

  She didn’t want to run a tab. It was too easy to get lost in a swirl of drinks, but she took a sip of her vodka martini, let her hips sway to the throbbing beat of the music, and breathed in the clouds of cigarette smoke. Kate didn’t indulge her self-destructive tendencies too often, but some nights, it was the only way to forget.

  Kate gulped the martini and ordered a second. When it came, she took a long swallow. She liked the cool-hot slide of the alcohol down her throat, the way it seeped into her blood, loosened her body. That was better. Now she could enjoy herself, have some fun.

  She wouldn’t pick anyone up. She didn’t do that anymore. No matter how good a man was at night, she always woke up sore and alone in the morning.

  That didn’t mean she liked to drink alone, though. Sometimes she wished it weren’t so easy for her to walk away in the morning. But no one came close to filling up that black hole inside her. Most of the time she felt like an empty bottle tossing about in the vast ocean. Sooner or later, she would smash to pieces, and who would care? The world was a heartless place.

  Kate finished her second martini and turned to scan the club.

  My oh my. There was a prospect now. She wished he’d turn around so she could see if the view from the front was as good as the back. Shit. She almost tripped over her own feet. Danny Ryan. At least she thought it was Ryan, though he looked a lot better than he had at Michael Cohen’s apartment.

  His hair was cut, and the homeless man beard was gone. His black jeans and leather jacket actually fit. But there was something else. He looked sharper somehow. Haggard, but that gave him an edge. Kate appreciated edges. They gave a man character.

  Now she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to meet Ryan in a meat factor
y like this. She tugged at her skirt. It ended three inches below her ass and wasn’t getting any longer.

  Damn her. She’d downed those martinis too fast. Now she felt fuzzy.

  Why the hell did Ryan have to show up here tonight? Michael had once told her that Ryan was straitlaced and “weirdly Irish.”

  “You mean like a missionary position kind of guy?” she’d said.

  “I mean like a ridiculously in love with his wife kind of guy.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Kate had wondered what it would be like to have someone be ridiculously in love with her.

  “Because Bethy is the queen of bitches. Or was.” Michael’s eyes had filled with tears when he talked about Danny Ryan. Kate pitied Michael, but he’d draped himself around her like a thick coat she couldn’t remove.

  Some days, she’d find him waiting for her when she came home from work with a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine and Chinese takeout. If she went to a bar, he’d follow her and buy her round after round of drinks and then make sure she got home. She’d wake to find him camped out on her couch—the new couch he’d bought her when he realized she didn’t have one.

  He’d follow the pattern for weeks and then disappear for a month. She should’ve realized something was wrong that last time he’d showed up because he’d been hysterical.

  “You don’t understand. I know things,” he’d said, grabbing her and pinning her to the wall. “Nobody listens.”

  “You’re hurting me!”

  “Don’t be mad,” he’d said, tears still running down his face, snot bubbling from his nose. “I know secrets. Important secrets.”

  Three hours later, he’d crashed into Ryan’s duck pond with a bullet in his stomach, and Kate wondered now if she’d listened, would Michael’s outcome have been any different? Maybe Michael had been doomed from the day he was born. It was a bleak way to think of things, but she had a bleak Irish heart.

  Well, Ryan looked like he fit in here just fine tonight, and the women who crowded around him seemed to find him interesting as all hell because they kept leaning into him to give him a better view of their cleavage. Kate wanted to gag. Could be Michael was wrong, and Ryan was a barhopping asshole. Michael didn’t know everything.

  She wondered if Ryan was anything like his father. When Thomas had talked about Danny, he always said, “We eat our own, Katie.” He’d fall asleep in his brown corduroy armchair with a picture of his wife in his lap and his volume of Yeats opened to his favorite poem, “A Deep-Sworn Vow.” When he fell ill, he gave her the book. It had belonged to his wife.

  Kate slipped around the bar where she could get close to Ryan without being seen. He was talking to three women on the edge of the dance floor, and he had one terrific smile when he turned it on.

  He hadn’t turned it on for her.

  What did she expect? The lonely, lost boy who’d bared his soul in his copybooks and left them in Thomas’s house? Did she think he’d recognize her as a soul mate?

  Ryan reached into his pocket to pull out what looked like a credit card, and Kate’s stomach constricted enough to send the martinis rushing back into her throat. She pressed her hand against her mouth. She recognized that black-and-white card. Ryan must have gotten it from Michael.

  Kate wanted to rip the card from Ryan’s hands, but she couldn’t move. Everything whirled around her. Her stomach gave a violent lurch, and Kate ran to the bathroom to vomit.

  20

  It was a long time since Danny had done the singles bar scene. It hadn’t changed. The music was still too loud, the dance floors too crowded, and the people too desperate.

  He’d hit eleven bars already and had no luck other than a growing collection of women’s phone numbers and e-mails. When women recognized him, they snapped photos for Facebook or Twitter or WhoGivesAFuck. Nobody recognized the black-and-white card. Nobody had heard of the Inferno or any of the other names on Michael’s list.

  Now he stood on the doorstep of Black Velvet, a club on the edge of Northern Liberties, with his new friend Ivy, a Goth princess in a leather bustier, a skirt of shredded black lace, and a cape that seemed to be made of rat fur. Not his type, but she said she knew Michael.

  “My friend Zach can help you. He knows all the clubs. If he hasn’t heard of it, it doesn’t exist. I can’t believe you knew Michael.” Ivy gave him a sleepy smile and took a step closer. The wind whipped her long, black hair into her pale face. “You have really beautiful eyes. Are you a Scorpio?”

  Danny shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not compatible with Scorpios.”

  She had a stud in her nose, six rings in her left eyebrow, and four studs below her lower lip. A snake tattoo slithered up her neck. Christ knew what other surprises she had on her body. He didn’t want to find out.

  A slim man in a burgundy velvet bodysuit admitted them into a dimly lit corridor that reeked of incense and a thick musk. He beckoned Ivy to come close. She handed him Michael’s card, and the two of them spoke in low tones for a couple of minutes before he turned to Danny.

  “Four hundred,” the man said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Cover charge. Four hundred. Each.” The man’s oily voice was threaded with steel. A black goatee rimmed his pointed chin; all he needed was a bifurcated tongue and horns and he would have made a fine devil.

  “That’s a steep goddamn cover charge,” Danny said.

  The devilman gave Danny a slow smile that didn’t reach his kohl-lined eyes. “I don’t know you, my friend.”

  Danny handed over the cash. He’d come prepared because he figured from the onset that certain kinds of clubs didn’t take American Express. Michael had traveled to the land of white powder and kinky sex. Did Michael really hang out here? It wouldn’t be the kind of place you’d write about in an article on Philly nightlife unless you were into the seriously twisted. Still, Danny couldn’t picture Michael on the dance floor in a normal club. In this bat cave, he’d be right at home.

  We’ve now entered the Twilight Zone.

  He heard voices and music to his right, but the devilman returned the card and then led them down a corridor to the left through a door he was careful to close and lock.

  Pulsating electronic music vibrated from black velvet walls. The musk odor grew stronger until they came to a square room lit by red neon lights shaped like open mouths. Squashy looking couches and tables shaped like scarlet lips surrounded an ebony bar.

  It took Danny a half second to realize that bodies slithering and squirming together filled the couches. It was hard to tell where one body ended and the next began. Men with women. Women with women. Men with men. Combinations of numbers and positions.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Ivy said. “They’re so natural. Just like rabbits.”

  Danny thought he was prepared for the sex club experience. He was wrong.

  “We encourage our guests to use condoms,” the devilman said and slipped back down the corridor.

  Ivy took Danny by the arm. “Zach is over here.” She pointed to the man behind the bar. He wore a black velvet G-string and had a tattoo of a flaming skull on his left shoulder. His light brown skin gleamed like it had been greased.

  “Zach, my friend here needs something,” Ivy said.

  Zach smirked and held up a glass. “A little liquid fortification? It can be a bit overwhelming your first time. Say, that’s a nice jacket. Is it Armani? I’d better get you a locker.”

  “I don’t need a locker,” Danny said.

  “Whatever, blue eyes.” Zach poured tequila into a shaker of crushed ice and followed it with a succession of clear liquors. He shook the mixture, poured it into a tall glass, and added a shot of grenadine that curled down through the alcohol like a bloody worm. “I call it a bloodsucker,” Zach said. He dropped in a maraschino cherry. “It’ll knock you on your sweet ass.”

  Danny shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll pass.”

  “I know you. You’re that reporter dude what us
ed to be such hot shit. You wrote about Huey Newcomber—that kid got killed for stealin’ a pack of dental floss? That was some righteous anger you stirred up, man. What you looking for here?”

  Zach watched with curious eyes as Danny tried to dredge up the story. The memory flickered at the edges of his mind and shut off at once when Ivy leaned over his arm and he realized she had unlaced her bustier. Christ, her nipples were pierced and a chain extended from one to the other. A red crystal heart dangled in the middle.

  “He’s Michael C’s friend, Zach. He’s doing an investigation,” Ivy said.

  “I’m just trying to find out what happened to Michael,” Danny said, and tried to judge Zach’s reaction. There wasn’t one.

  “Michael was a strange dude. He didn’t like to participate. He liked to watch. Is that your scene too? We have some private observation rooms. That’s extra.”

  Danny felt a tiny jolt of unease, though he knew Michael always stood on the sidelines with his camera. Watching.

  “Do you have a lot of watchers?” he said to Zach and looked around. His flesh felt cold and exposed.

  Zach shrugged. “To each his own.”

  “Did Michael ever bring anyone here?”

  “You mean like a date?” Zach laughed. “Michael came by himself to forget his problems. Besides, he was seriously twisted about someone.”

  “He ever say who?”

  Zach shook his head. “No. Might not have even been human. He was always talkin’ bout demons and shit. Creeped me out.”

  That wasn’t what Danny wanted to hear. Who knew what was going on in Michael’s messed-up head? He wanted to tell you. Danny shut off the voice in his own head.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “A week or so back.”

  “Did he seem upset? Worried?”

  “Nope. Just went to his observation room like always. He did leave early though. That was unusual.”

  Danny pulled the black-and-white card out of his pocket. “You ever see one of these before?”