Darkness of the Soul

by Kaine Andrews

  Drakanis started at that, woke up—really woke up—and managed to slop the rest of his coffee in his lap. The part of him that had been born and bred to be a cop and that always would be, regardless of what happened to the rest of him, had his hand instinctively reaching to his hip for the familiar comforting feel of steel, before dropping once more as reality finally asserted itself fully and he recognized the voice as belonging to Parker, who was giving off his usual—and occasionally annoying—bravado.

  “I’m in here, Vince.”

  Drakanis’s voice was weary and still thick, blurred with the remnants of sleep, but Parker’s banging and hollering stopped at hearing it regardless. Parker crept into the little niche off of the living room. Drakanis had left that room mostly alone since Gina’s death except for removing some of the decorations and getting the carpeting done. He had set up a much smaller television and chair in what used to be a walk-in closet and did most of his pretending in there. Parker took a good look at the haggard face before slumping to the floor.

  “What’s up, Mikey? Feel like giving an old pal a help, eh?”

  Drakanis leaned back in the chair, setting the empty cup on the rummage-sale end table next to him and giving an appraising glance at the bigger man.

  “What do you want, Vince?”

  Parker snorted, raking a hand through his hair in an unsuccessful attempt to smooth back the mop. Drakanis’s instincts were dulled from the time away, probably purposefully so; but they were still good enough to recognize the aura of tension around his former partner, conveyed by the giant’s body language and facial tics. I need your help, those things said, but Drakanis was not at all sure he was ready to give any.

  Parker cracked his neck, staying quiet for a long moment before looking up again; when he did, his eyes were hard to read, like a shroud had been draped over them. His voice had lost most of its gusto, dropping to a funeral parlor whisper.

  “Somebody’s dead, Mikey. I think it might… well…”

  He fidgeted for a minute, and Drakanis really didn’t care to see this. Normally, Parker was like a rock, unperturbed by anything short of being shot at—and even that usually served to piss him off more than it actually got him worried—but something in his nervous posture and the quick downward cast of his eyes was ringing alarm bells in the back of Drakanis’s head. He was about to speak, when Parker finally continued, looking back up again.

  “I think it might have something to do with Gina and Joey. There’s… a few similarities.”

  Drakanis had been spending a great deal of time alone since his quaintly termed “retirement,” and while he was the number-one champ at hiding things from himself, that solitude did nothing for covering his emotions to others. Parker could read the shock and grief painted on the other man’s face with ease and would have been able to see it even if he wasn’t his childhood friend and former partner. That look spoke volumes about Drakanis’s life of late, and Parker found himself glad he’d come over, even if it had hurt. At least the man was feeling something now.

  “Same MO, same thing stolen—exact same thing, Mikey—and the same sanitized crime scene. I need you to help me, to see things the way you do. I think we can get ’em this time, Mike. I really do. But I need you to help me do it.”

  Drakanis got out of his chair. He moved too quickly and jarred the table, sending the coffee cup off to an important meeting with the floor. Parker saw it coming, and his right hand flipped out with lightning speed, catching the cup before it had an opportunity to turn the carpet an even uglier shade of brown, and set it back in place. He did it without even looking, quick as you please, all the while keeping his eyes focused on Drakanis, watching and waiting for the other man’s reaction.

  Drakanis shook his head. “I don’t do that anymore. I’m retired, remember?” He pushed his way past Parker’s stone idol body, moved back into the kitchen, and called out, “You want coffee, asshole? Since you’re going to tell me anyway.” There was a note of resignation in his voice, and Parker knew that he’d get his help; the only question was if it would do any good or if he was hurting his old friend more than he was helping by coming to him with this.

  “Yeah, I want coffee, dickhead.” Parker’s lips spread in a bit of a smile. At least Drakanis was well enough to fall into their old patter. That had to count for something. How much, Parker would find out, he guessed. Pulling himself up from his position on the floor, he winced and grunted. One hand went to his back and rubbed at it while he lurched into the kitchen and let himself fall into one of the crappy little chairs surrounding the crappy little card table. His eyes were bright as he watched Drakanis go through the motions of prepping the coffeepot, again apparently, since what had been in there that morning was now barbecued black sludge at the bottom of the pot. He had a deep look of concentration on his face as he reset the timer on it.

  Drakanis, for all his other talents, was not a particularly technical person; and he’d always been of the opinion that a coffeepot didn’t need more switches than his goddamn PC, but he’d also been too lazy to go buy a cheap replacement. Once he’d finished fussing with the coffeemaker, he settled into a chair across from Parker and glared at the man.

  “Quit looking at me like that, man. Like I said, I’m fucking retired; didn’t you get the memo?”

  He shook his head and then buried his face in his hands, groaning. Parker watched him with a look composed of equal parts contempt and concern and blew his nose between his fingers, giving it a good scrub before speaking.

  “Yeah, I got that fucking memo, Mikey, and I didn’t fucking care for it either.” Though the tone was conversational, Drakanis could hear the undercurrent of irritation in it and knew that there were storm clouds brewing in Parker’s brain, ready to unload on the first thing that pushed him too far.

  “But,” he continued, “memo or no, you and I both know you’ve got this thing going on, that way of tapping in. I need that. Ain’t no other way this is gonna get resolved, and you know it.” He spread his hands and managed half a grin, displaying his crooked teeth. He then glanced around, hooked a dirty saucer from the microwave stand, and started rummaging in his pocket for the pack of Salems.

  “Do you have to do that in here?”

  “What? Blow my nose? Fuck you. It’s stuffy in here, Mikey.”

  Drakanis lifted his head back up. He arched a brow and tried to summon a glare but failed miserably. He had to admit, having Vince around did feel better than sitting there talking to himself all day, and except for the fact he was wearing blues instead of a suit—And what’s up with that anyway? He get demoted again, or is he just playing at being a beat cop today? his mind asked—it was almost like old times. It just lacked the yelling kid and the exasperated wife.

  Parker’s only response to the glare was to flick a match against the table, put the fire to one of the few battered survivors of the pack—he’d had to dig around in the cruiser’s glove box to find this one, and God only knew how long it had been there—take in a deep drag, and just watch Drakanis through the smoke. Finally, he broke, as Parker had known he would.

  “Oh, fuck it. Gimmie one of those.”

  Parker nodded and shot the pack across the table. “Where’s my coffee then?”

  “Screw coffee. I need the nicotine. So tell me.” Drakanis rocked the chair back, propped himself against the table with one knee, and watched as the smoke curled between the two of them, trying to ignore the faces he swore he could see blooming in it.

  “Screw the coffee? C’mon, man, I come all the way out here, all dressed up—”

  “Yeah, what’s up with that anyway?”

  Parker muttered to himself, ashing into the saucer and shaking his head. “Tony’s got a stick up his ass again, decided to push me down when I nagged him a little too hard about something. I’m riding with Perez this week. He says, ‘Hi,’ by the by.”
>
  “Awww. How sweet.” Drakanis’s vision was becoming slightly blurred, and his head had gone nice and swimmy; it was almost worth quitting smoking just to get the buzz back when you started again, in his opinion.

  “Yeah, yeah, sweet as sugar and as lickable as your mother, Mikey. Anyway, I came out here special just for you. Least you can do is get me a damn cup of coffee. I gave you my last smoke even! So, coffee first, then I talk. Maybe.”

  Parker gave him a serene smile, while he sat there still trying to glare and letting ash fall on the floor to join the rest of the crap. Gina’d been a neat freak, but he himself wasn’t much in the cleaning department since those days. He finally got up and filled a pair of cups, looking sullen and petulant. He could feel things sharpening in his mind, old tools gone to rot that were now eager to be put to use again, no matter his apparent feelings and attitude.

  “There. Coffee. Talk.”

  Parker took his time about it, sniffing at it in his best impersonation of a wine connoisseur and then sipping it daintily, pinky thrust out and all. Finally, he set the cup down and sighed.

  “It’s been three years, man. You need to—”

  “Don’t tell me what I do or don’t need, Vince. Get to it. I’m in. You’ve got me. I want it. Whatever you want to hear, just don’t give me a goddamn lecture. Get on with it.”

  Shaking his head and snuffing the cigarette in a puddle of slopped coffee, Parker let the matter drop. For now, he reminded himself. It ain’t healthy the way he lives, and you know it. He did indeed, but he also felt like there wasn’t much he could do for the man; Mikey’d either snap out of it, or he wouldn’t. Maybe giving him something to do, something tied to that old mess, would help. That was the idea anyway.

  “All right, check it out. Two weeks ago, couple of old fags—s’ what I think they were anyway, and who gives a shit, they’re dead anyway and I ain’t hurting their feelings none—Nathaniel Boris and Roget Deway—and with names like that? I mean, seriously—stop in this little pawnshop and find this picture they just gotta have. So they dicker, they deal, they whine, they cream themselves and pay full price anyway, they want it that bad. With me so far?”

  Drakanis felt his chest tightening and tried to convince himself it was due to the smoke and the effort not to cough, but he knew better. Parker had already told him what was stolen from the death scene, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but how the old guys—fags or not—had managed to get their hands on it bothered him, because it was basically the same way Gina’d ended up with it.

  If he tells me what I think he’s going to, I’m going to go insane. No other option really. I don’t want to hear this, don’t want to know this, and I don’t have to if I don’t want to. Part of him decided to prove it was being helpful by pointing out that most people thought he was pretty much insane anyway, but Drakanis shoved it down. It was no time to listen to drivel like that and better to put the brain to work on the problem at hand, whether or not it was the kind that’d force him to act on such a promise. He just nodded at Parker and then got back up from the table. He started banging cabinets and shoving odds and ends aside.

  “Keep talking. I need something.”

  “All right. So they take it home, hang it up, fuck for celebration, I dunno. Doesn’t matter. Week goes by, maybe two—the codgers paid cash and got it down at Eddie’s, and you know that bastard doesn’t bother with little things like receipts, not with half the shit he’s got in there, so we’re not entirely sure on the time line—they think it’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, best piece of shit artwork they’ve had in the house for decades. Then, two nights ago, boom. The maid shows up, finds ’em in the living room, painting gone, along with a few choice pieces of the old farts’ anatomy.”

  Drakanis returned to the table, dropped an unopened pair of cigarette packs along with a lighter on top, and then ripped into one. He watched Parker through the haze of smoke.

  “I thought you quit.”

  “I did. Seems like a good time to start again. Help yourself.”

  Parker shrugged and did as he was told. After giving himself a moment to savor the smoke, he rolled his shoulders and got on with it.

  “All right, so there we are. We’ve got two old codgers, all cut up—one missing his dick, his left ear, and his right eye; the other with his hands gone and his spine split right up the middle. One wall that had such a lovely picture hanging on it just yesterday, the maid assures us, is now bare, with a bloody handprint where the damned thing used to hang.”

  Parker saw Drakanis take in a breath, as if about to speak up, and raised one hand in a “hang on” gesture.

  “Not the perp’s. One of the fogies. Found him slumped under that spot; the shrinks think he was trying to stop the shithead from taking his pretty little painting.” He blew out a disgusted note and then muttered under his breath. “Fucking fags.”

  Drakanis blew smoke out in a hacking cough, managing to sneak words in between the wheezes. “Doesn’t matter… and you know it. They were dead anyway, if it is the same guys.”

  Parker shrugged. “Prob’ly, yeah. Doesn’t mean the old fuck shoulda tried to stop ’em. It’s just a painting, and a god-awful ugly one at that.”

  Drakanis returned the shrug with one of his own and got up to refill the cups with more sludge. Parker stifled a wince; he loved the man to death, but his coffee was only slightly better than the mud and bird shit they had back at the station. Still, at least Drakanis was doing something besides sitting and grieving, which had to be considered something of an improvement. Drakanis returned, sat down, and resumed his former attentive pose, actually looking as though a bit of the old interest was back.

  “Anyway. So that’s our starting point. We got two corpses, no blood except in that room, a missing painting that we can verify is the same one stolen from your place, nothing else missing, no motive, no enemies, no nothing. Both corpses mutilated. Nobody saw anything; nobody heard anything.”

  Drakanis cracked his neck and slumped in his chair as he sipped his coffee. He sat that way for a while, and Parker let him, giving him time to digest the story and to ask the question Parker was certain he would ask. His patience was rewarded.

  “How sure are you it’s the same one?”

  Parker grinned, not disappointed at all, and reached into his pocket. He flicked a Polaroid across the table and then finished smoking his cigarette while Drakanis studied it.

  Still the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, Drakanis thought. And it was; to Drakanis, the thing had always just looked like a bunch of red and brown lines, radiating out from a central blackness. He’d never really cared for black canvas work, and black canvases with nothing but crappy lines on them didn’t really improve that opinion any. The one look was enough, but he still stared at it for several minutes, searching for some small difference, some sign that this wasn’t Gina’s painting, that this was some other piece of shit art, a knockoff, a lithograph, something that didn’t tie this crime to his own loss.

  If there was a difference, he wasn’t seeing it. Finally, he dropped the photo back to the table, where it seemed to glare at him like some monster’s eye, the fucking Eye of Sauron staring at him. After a minute of that, he turned it over and then turned his gaze back to Parker.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Toldja, they were a couple of art fags or some shit. They’ve got piles of photos like that, piles more of hand-drawn copies, and a vault somewhere with artist’s representations of their collection. They didn’t have it long enough to get it into the other records, but there’s like eight Polaroids of the damn thing in their desk.”

  “And that doesn’t strike you as odd? The asshole took the receipt—went through Gina’s purse and took the damn receipt for the thing—making it like it didn’t even exist in the first place, when he hit us.”

  “Maybe he didn�
�t have time, or maybe he didn’t care.”

  Drakanis could tell there was something else Parker was holding back, some little detail that he wasn’t sharing for whatever reason, but he didn’t really feel like pushing it yet. He would, but that was for later, and he was sure that his friend would have a good reason for keeping the information back. He sighed again and snuffed the cigarette, trying to ignore the smell. He’d looked too long at the photo, and the filter was burning. Then he leaned back in his chair again.

  “All right. Honesty time, old pal. You really think we can do something about this? You really think this is the same guy that did for Gina, and you really think anything we do is gonna stick? Don’t lie; I’ll fucking know if you lie. Just tell me straight.”

  Parker crossed his arms in front of his chest and dropped his head. Some might have thought he was sleeping, but he was actually thinking, and thinking hard. He felt his friend deserved at least that much, that he give his simple questions quite possibly the most thought he’d ever given anything in his life.

  Do I think so? Do I really? Or am I grasping at straws?

  Parker was pretty sure he wasn’t, but pretty sure wasn’t going to cut it this time. In the end, it was the painting that did it. He’d known it was trouble—what his mother would have called a bad juju—since the first time he laid eyes on it. It was like one of those portraits that followed you around with its eyes except that it didn’t have eyes. Creepy paintings like that quit being creepy when you were out of the room, but not this one. The one time Parker had been over when the painting had been there, he had felt an unpleasant thrumming, the kind you got when you stood too close to a live wire, running through his whole body, no matter where he’d been in the house. He got the same vibe from the Polaroid and a tinge of it from the old farts’ house. That was what finally pushed him over, that sense of evil and dread. He rocked forward again, lowered his arms, and nodded.