Darkness
of the Soul
Kaine Andrews
iUniverse, Inc.
Bloomington
Darkness of the Soul
Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Kaine Andrews.
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ISBN: 978-1-4620-5233-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5234-9 (ebk)
iUniverse rev. date: 06/22/2012
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Chapter 1
7:45 pm, December 23, 1996
Michael Drakanis is whistling to himself—“We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” of all things—on the crowded drive through the Reno streets as he heads home for his first real Christmas vacation since his school days.
He’s whistling, and why not? Things are good at the Drakanis household. Gina’s family has opted not to come down this year—weather’s too bad, or so they say—and his own family never bothers. So this year, he has all the time he wants to spend with the two people who matter the most, Gina and Joey—just the three of them, together for Christmas.
His whistling slows and then stops as he gets to his street. He feels something inside him twitch, like when Gina was having Joey and the doctor said there might be complications; some black premonition comes over him, provoked only by that single guttering flash of blue over red he sees three blocks ahead and down the hill, which happens to be exactly where his comfortable little house stands.
His foot turns to lead at the same time an iron ball drops into the pit of his stomach and shoves the pedal down, hard, sending him rocketing forward down the street. Good thing the weather looks like it’s going to turn south, because at this moment, Drakanis is not worried about some little kid with a ball; he’s worried about seeing what he thinks he saw. The tires spin against the thin coating of ice and slush that’s built up over the afternoon, and the car isn’t totally under his command as he crests the hill and sees what there is to see, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is getting there, making sure he was wrong.
Unfortunately for him, he isn’t wrong; there they are, three black-and-whites with a handful of cops he doesn’t know, rookies most likely, milling about and shaking their heads. One of them sees his car coming and steps forward, shouting something as he raises his hand, “Slow down!” being the most likely option, but whatever it is, it is most certainly not “Merry Christmas!” which fazes Michael Drakanis not at all.
He does hit the brakes, though, and swerves around the cop. It almost doesn’t help, and only the as-yet-unidentified officer’s quick reflexes stop him from being crushed by Drakanis’s unmarked Impala. As it is, the slush fights with him, sending the car into a spin that only stops when he plows into the side of Unit 78, crushing the door and rippling the hood of the Impala back to meet him.
The airbag deploys with an annoyed explosive sound, and Drakanis’ head jounces against it, hard; blood is running down his face from a split lip and a bloodied nose, but he doesn’t pay it any mind as he dives out of the car and runs up the driveway screaming questions to which, in his heart, he already knows the answers.
“What happened?” he asks of nobody in particular. “Where are they? What happened? Where are they?” The two questions circle around and around, no end to them, even when the cop he nearly ran over tries to block his path—and Drakanis now recognizes this one at least. Perez, his name is Perez, hired two weeks ago and still doing ride-alongs, but a good kid, a good cop in the making. He’s shouting that he doesn’t want to go in there, that it’s better if he doesn’t.
Drakanis gives very little thought to what Perez thinks is a good idea, and his fist moves of its own accord, pistoning out with all his power and shattering Perez’s nose, driving him to his knees. Drakanis marches right past him. The remaining boys in blue scatter before him, not sure how to react, frozen in place by the brutality of what they’ve seen tonight and the madness gleaming in the detective’s eyes.
The smell of blood is thick on the air as Drakanis comes up the sidewalk and toward the porch steps, but other than that, it seems like any other neat little home in a smallish city—it has a nice lawn, buried under a blanket of white, where Gina’s roses and tulips would line the edge of the house once warmer weather arrived. The house itself sits facing the street, with only four windows and the garage for people to look into, but it’s nice and cozy just the same, with its sensible blue trim and white paint. As he comes up the walk, he can see Joey’s latest masterpiece: a crude but still recognizable watercolor of Santa Claus coming down the chimney of their place, cartoon balloon reading, “Ho ho ho!”—And damn if that kid isn’t going to be the next Rembrandt, Drakanis thinks to himself with pride. It is hanging in the window like an invitation to the jolly fat man that he somehow managed to continue to believe in, despite being eight already and with most of his classmates already convinced of the horrible, inevitable truth we all must find out one day: that Santa Claus is really one’s parents.
He can hear footsteps crunching in the snow behind him and figures Perez has gotten up and the others are following him, but that registers only distantly as something to think about some other day when he’s better equipped for such mundane thoughts. Now he can see the porch clearly and where that smell is coming from. He can see it very well, and even though he
wants to close his eyes, he can’t. An inarticulate sound escapes his lips, and then he rushes past what he’s seen. He shoves through the front door and into the living room, where it will only get worse.
Perez has managed to gain his feet and is using a handful of snow to pack against his nose, shaking his head at the other three officers as they make as if to go after him. His voice is muffled by the snow and distorted by the broken nose, but Officers Tarson, Woods, and Mendoza understand him well enough, and though Mendoza’s been with the force longer, he figures the rookie’s got a point.
“Let ’im alone; he won’t screw anything up, except more of our noses. He knows anyway.”
The others all nod in unison but follow him up the walk a little ways anyway, just to be sure Drakanis won’t do anything stupid.
They needn’t worry; Drakanis, though already entering the beginning stages of his grieving, still has the instincts and the soul of a cop, and he knows better than to touch anything. Even when he slams through the door, he does it with his elbows. Once inside, he just freezes, as he takes in what’s waiting for him there.
Mendoza sighs, shakes his head, and backs up a step. The Drakanis that will exist, the one who’s dreaming this moment three years from now, sees this; the Drakanis that does exist, the one who’s living this for the first time, doesn’t.
The living room looks like it always does; the same leather couch is just inside the door with the stairwell and the new big-screen TV—it had cost a fortune, but Gina’d had a run of luck that week and they’d been on sale. Michael had never been able to deny her anything, and they’d had the money. Little clay figures that Joey’d been making in art class are sitting on top.
One thing is missing from the room, but it isn’t until later that Drakanis will think of it, and by then, the moment to know why has passed. All he can see is the blood. The carpet, which used to be a thick powder blue, installed only six months earlier, is now a sodden red from wall to wall. The television screen looks like some bad play on a blonde joke, with blood instead of whiteout.
Drakanis takes all this in, seeing the lump in the middle of the floor, lying against the back of the couch, but not processing it. His eye runs up to the stairwell, following the trail of bloody progress marked on the rail. Obvious handprints are dragged down it as if someone had been leaning on it for support while bleeding badly, probably from a hand or chest wound. He sees this and can picture it clearly in his mind’s eye: Gina running down the stairs, blood running out of her at a rate that would render any concept of help worthless, Joey screaming in the crook of her arm, and some as-yet-unnamed and unseen assailant coming down the stairs after her, taking them two at a time, the gleam of a knife in his hand.
That’s the point at which he looks at the lump and really sees it. It’s also the point when Perez comes up behind him and lays a hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t want to see this, Detective. Please, come outside. We’ll get you some coffee. Parker’s on his way.”
Drakanis can see the shape his wife’s body makes. The formerly glorious black hair, always waist length and shining like a piece of jet, is slicked into a tangled mane of blood and less easily identified fluids and clots. Drakanis can’t see her face, and that is a mercy; later, when he does, he will scream—he won’t be able to help himself—but for now, he’s spared that experience.
He can see the way her body is twisted in the middle, and the part of him that was trained to really see a crime scene, not just to look at it but really to see it for everything that it was, could be, and hadn’t been, could tell from the shape that her spine had been broken.
He could see the tiny hand, still pristine but too white, clutching at a scrap of Gina’s sweater, and that’s when Drakanis could see no more. Later, he’ll be able to face his son, look at the mangled remains that had once been his boy, the Rembrandt in training, and he’ll manage to say good-bye, but for now, it’s all too much. There’re no more guts left in him. He’ll labor along for another year, pretending that he’ll be okay, that there’s still some of the steel left, but here and now, he knows that it’s gone. The life he’s led up to today is over, and there’s no going back.
When he falls to his knees, Perez’s hand stays with him. When he begins to shake and scream, it’s Perez who gets him to the ambulance and makes sure he’s taken care of as best they can.
Drakanis will remember, later, that a rookie whose nose he’d just broken was the only one out of that group to bother trying to help him. Mendoza, Tarson, and Woods just stand there watching and then go on about their business as soon as he’s out of the way, and Drakanis will remember that too.
But all that is later. In the present, Michael Drakanis has just been made a widower for a reason he cannot guess, and as he floats into the pleasant space opened by the gateway called Valium, a single thought, more true than he may now know, follows him down.
I knew that fucking painting was trouble.
Chapter 2
8:30 am, December 8, 1999
At first, Drakanis didn’t even realize the sound wasn’t part of the dream; he figured the racket was just another new addition to the same nightmare he’d been having for years, like when he actually remembered breaking Perez’s nose (not that he’d ever doubted it, but he hadn’t really remembered doing that until recently). He thought this too was just some new thing remembered or some new twist added for his amusement.
It took him several moments of blinking and staring around the room before he developed a sense of place. The carpet was the easiest thing to focus on, the easiest detail to use to differentiate dream from reality. It was now a solemn brown. The blue had been ruined, and the brown was the easiest and cheapest option to replace it, once he had been sane enough to even contemplate such mundane things. The lack of hominess in the room in general helped as well; with Joey and Gina gone, Drakanis had not been much for interior decorating, and the knickknacks and sculptures had all been shuffled off to the attic where they were less prone to bring on a crying jag or fit of destructive rage. With the exception of the dilapidated chair he sat in and the television, the room might have been a sample used to showcase new apartment housing, but that very plainness allowed him to remember where he was, the building he lived in—though he no longer really considered it home—and what he was doing, which was nothing at all, really, at least not since his psych leave had kicked in.
Drakanis tried to stand but discovered that at some point during the nightmare, he’d shifted into the wrong position, and now his legs were almost totally useless. With an explosion of pins and needles, he dropped back into the chair, knocking over the chipped coffee cup from the arm and slopping the contents all over his crotch. Not that it matters; isn’t like company’s coming, he thought, while considering the virtues of actually trying to stand and clean up the mess.
So thinking, he sat there in the easy chair, with a lapful of cold coffee. The television was now displaying pictures of some new movie he really didn’t give much of a shit about. A perky blonde and some old man tried to look convincing while they flirted with the most recent of the movie bimbo squad. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that the sound was actually real and not just some other fragment of the dream that shoved him out of sleep so often of late; the concept that the sound was the impatient slamming of flesh on wood, perpetrated by someone who knew he was home and would answer eventually, was not yet clear in his head.
The sound continued for a while. Outside, Parker finally lowered his hand, sighing and letting his cigarette smolder in the corner of his mouth for a moment. Standing there on the stoop, head down against the wind that wanted to put his smoke out—or take half of it for itself—he looked like some strange mourner at a giant’s funeral.
Towering at over six and a half feet, Sergeant Vincent Parker was nearly as wide as he was tall. This led many people to believe he was also slow and stu
pid, and Parker never saw much reason to disabuse them of the notion. Only a rare few ever realized the feral intelligence that gleamed in his eyes; fewer still had ever seen him move at his best, and they knew enough to keep quiet about it. His other traits didn’t help to banish that image either, though he tried to look as respectable as he could. Still, with his shaggy blond hair, which he chopped low every other week because it fought any attempt to style it, thick unibrow, and scrunched blue eyes, the marks of his Viking heritage, he looked less like a cop and more like a berserker who had washed ashore and stolen someone’s dress blues.
When he raised his ham-sized fists to bang on the door, one might have expected the whole house to shudder from the impact. Belying his size and stature, though, Parker rapped politely once more, the knock of an Avon lady or the mailman. Though Parker was certainly capable of shaking the house, of knocking through the door like it was tissue paper, he simply chose not to. Besides, he knew where the key was.
“Mikey!” Parker’s voice fit his body perfectly. It was a bass rumble that would cause children’s ears to bleed and animals to flee if raised to full volume. When breathing or holding a normal conversation, his voice was somewhere around the volume of a diesel on idle, as it was now; he spoke loudly enough for Mike to hear, if he was there, though Parker wouldn’t bet on him answering the door.
Sighing again, Parker gave him a ten-count. He waited long enough to finish his cigarette and drop it in the decrepit Maxwell House can sitting next to the stoop and then reached up over the eaves.
For a cop, you’re not very imaginative with where you hide your keys, Mikey my man.
It took him a couple of minutes of fumbling—not because the key was particularly well hidden, but just because his fingers were a little too big to really fit in there with any ease—but he finally came up with the key. A moment later, he was in the house, letting his voice out at full volume this time. “Mikey! Wake the fuck up, you dumb bastard!”
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