Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “They went down into the dark.” Izzie raised her head and opened her eyes. “And the dark came back with them.”

  The other two turned to her.

  “Was that … ?” Joyce began, but Patrick remained silent, studying Izzie’s face while his own expression remained closed and unreadable.

  “Something that Fuller said, right before the end.” Izzie took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nostrils. “He wasn’t simply targeting former colleagues over some workplace grievance. Each of them fit some particular criteria.”

  She pointed at the spread of MRI printouts.

  “These … these things aren’t unrelated to the cause of death.” She picked up the newest printout and jabbed a finger at the riot of shadows riddling the dead man’s brain. “He targeted them because they had these … these …”

  “Vacuoles,” Joyce offered.

  “These shadows in their heads.” Izzie realized that she was on the ragged edge of shouting, and didn’t care.

  Patrick pointed to the printout that she held. “But that’s not the brain of one of Nicholas Fuller’s victims. That’s the brain of a drug dealer who died the day before yesterday. And so far as I know, Tyler Campbell was a high school dropout who never stepped foot on the Ross University campus, much less climbed a mile down an old mine shaft up in the hills.”

  “So perhaps the condition is transmittable after all?” Joyce scratched the short stubble at the side of her head beneath the undercut bob. “If something down in the mine shaft causes the degradation, but this subject never went down into the mine shaft, what other explanation could there be?”

  Patrick looked back to Izzie, waiting for her to answer, clearly having come to a conclusion of his own already.

  “It means …” Izzie took another deep breath, steadying herself. “It means that it isn’t over.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The night was fully dark by the time Izzie and Patrick returned to the car. Clouds overhead threatened rain, but for the moment the air was dry and cool. Traffic on the streets had lightened, and the work crews on the roadworks had gone home for the day.

  Izzie’s hands twitched at her sides, and she found herself craving a cigarette, though she hadn’t smoked since college. Her thoughts were racing, running in tight circles around big ideas that fit uncomfortably inside her head.

  “You hungry?” Patrick jiggled his keys. “I’m guessing you haven’t eaten since you got to town.”

  It took Izzie a moment. “I haven’t eaten since eight o’clock this morning, Eastern time. And that was just an airport bagel.”

  Patrick pocketed the keys and took hold of Izzie’s elbow, steering her away from the car. “Come on, there’s a decent Thai place a couple of blocks from here. We’ll walk.”

  As they crossed the street at the light, Patrick pulled the neck chain over his head and tucked his badge in an inner pocket of his suit coat.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t prepare you for that when we talked on the phone,” he said, “but I wanted you to see it for yourself before you made up your mind.”

  Izzie’s stomach growled, as if the thought of eating had awakened her sleeping appetite. She shook her head. “No. Food first. Then questions.” She paused, and then added, “Many questions.”

  He nodded, his expression sympathetic, and they walked the rest of the way in silence.

  Izzie devoured her chicken Pad Thai without once looking up from the plate, and then finished off half of the Laab Nua that proved too spicy for Patrick’s taste. It was nothing compared to the eye-watering jambalaya that her grandmother used to make, but Izzie was too preoccupied to mock Patrick’s delicate palate.

  “Better?” he asked when she put down her fork and raised her eyes from the table.

  Izzie quaffed the rest of her glass of water in one big swig, holding up an index finger to request a moment. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and nodded. “Yes. Much. I was clearly hungrier than I thought.”

  “Obviously. Trips to the morgue don’t normally do much for one’s appetite. Not accounting for Joyce, of course. I went down there once and found her eating a ham sandwich with one hand while dissecting a body with the other.” He shuddered. “Anyway … questions?”

  “Plenty.” Izzie pushed her plate away and leaned her elbows on the table. “Let’s start with a simple one. Why call me in on this?” She paused. “I mean, I understand why you’d want to request Bureau assistance, but why me specifically?”

  Patrick gave her a sidelong glance. “You know why.”

  “I think I do. But I want to hear you say it.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it without speaking, considering his words. “Because you’re the only one who would understand.”

  “Understand what?” Izzie knew, but made him say it anyway.

  Patrick sighed. He leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “It’s like I said on the phone. That night in the lighthouse, when it was just you and me waiting for the EMTs to arrive? The things we talked about … ?”

  Izzie sat back from the table, defensively. “I was half out of my mind from blood loss, hallucinating and talking nonsense.”

  He shook his head. “That’s what I thought at the time, too. I figured you were in shock, and I needed to keep you talking. But when Joyce told me about Campbell, I kept going back to what you’d said about your grandmother—”

  “It’s just a bunch of silly superstitions,” Izzie interrupted.

  “—what you said about your grandmother,” Patrick repeated, with emphasis. “And what I told you about my great-uncle. The symbols Fuller had drawn on the floor and the walls. The things we found in his apartment.”

  Izzie felt as though, were she to close her eyes, she would be back in that lantern room still, hearing the rain pelt on the metal floor through the broken window, Patrick crouched beside her holding her hand, the two of them sharing the things they’d been taught as children.

  But her eyes were open.

  “Nicholas Fuller was a drug addict who’d had a psychotic break, Patrick. He cobbled together a jumbled mishmash of nonsense to prop up his delusional belief system, and used it to justify killing a dozen of his former colleagues in bloodthirsty rituals. The fact that he borrowed a few tidbits that my superstitious grandmother happened to believe is immaterial.”

  “And from my great-uncle’s beliefs too, don’t forget.”

  “Your superstitious great-uncle.”

  “Well …” Patrick paused, titling his head to one side. “Maybe they weren’t just superstitions.”

  Izzie’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Like hell I can’t.” He pulled out his wallet and dropped a few bills on the table. Then he pushed back his chair, standing. “Come on, there’s something else I want to show you.”

  They drove out of City Center, headed west through Ross Village past the coffee shops, boutiques, and bookstores that crowded around the university, then turned south on Mission Avenue towards the Oceanview neighborhood. The narrow isthmus was just a dozen blocks across at its widest, bound by Bayfront Drive on the east and Shoreline Boulevard on the west, both streets angling slightly inwards as they traveled south until finally they met just above Ivory Point where the old lighthouse still stood.

  Izzie felt a cold ache in the pit of her stomach.

  “Where are we going, exactly?” she asked, impatiently.

  “Almost there.”

  Izzie looked out the window at the taquerias and dive bars that were still serving, the storefront churches and shops that had closed for the night. She wondered if the dance club they passed was the one that Agent Richards had told her about, and whether Daphne might be there right now, shimmying to a cumbia beat. Izzie hadn’t gone out dancing herself since she left college. There just didn’t seem to be a space for that kind of thing in her life these days. And of course, dancing was always more fun if you had someone to dance with, and Izzie hadn’t be
en on a date in years.

  Unless visiting a city morgue with a cop counted as a date, which she didn’t think it did. Especially a cop who might just be losing his grip on reality. Besides, he wasn’t exactly her type.

  “Okay, we’re here.”

  Patrick angled the car into a spot near the corner of Almeria and Mission, not far from the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony. It was quieter here than the busier blocks with the nightlife they’d passed. Izzie supposed it might have been due to the cemetery that stretched behind the church. There were more dead residents than living ones near here.

  “You feeling religious?” Izzie nodded towards the church as she climbed out of the car. “Or is it bingo night?”

  “Neither,” Patrick said, heading in the other direction. “What I want to show you is over here.”

  He pointed towards the mouth of an alleyway across the street that ran between two Victorian row houses. Lights shone in the upper windows on either side, but at street level the alleyway itself was wreathed in dark shadows. Izzie shrugged and followed Patrick until he was halfway down the alley and stopped.

  “Here.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, tapped on the flashlight app, and bright light bathed the brick side of one of the houses. With his free hand, Patrick indicated a spot just overhead.

  Izzie saw an intricate design etched into the brick itself, spirals and whorls that looped and curved back on themselves almost like a fingerprint, but with mathematical precision, all bound in a precise circle. It reminded her somewhat of tattoos she’d seen on men and women of Polynesian descent who lived in Recondito. She wondered if Patrick had one himself, hidden beneath his suit coat.

  “My great-uncle Alf Tevake carved that for a family that moved here from Kensington Island back in the seventies.” He turned, and the light from his phone shone on the opposite wall, revealing another etched design on the next house, as well. “He carved that for a family of islanders that moved in next door when I was eight years old. All of them etched into the brick, and then filled with white paint mixed with sea salt.”

  “Some kind of blessing, then?” Izzie thought of steps scrubbed with the dust of shattered red bricks, and holy water sprinkled on hardwood floors. “Or protection?”

  Patrick nodded. “Like I told you five years ago, my great-uncle was a kind of spiritual leader back on Kensington Island. And he did the same thing for the islanders who moved here.” He pointed up at the symbol. “He believed that symbol would act as a ward, a barrier to keep unseen evils at bay.”

  He lowered the phone, switched off the light, and started to walk back towards the street.

  “The first families who came to Recondito from the island settled here in the Oceanview. And so the others who came later tended to move here, as well. Used to be a predominantly Latino neighborhood, and Irish before that, but since before I was born the southwestern corner of the neighborhood has been a Te’Maroan enclave.”

  “Te’Maroan?” Izzie asked.

  “Our name for ourselves. British sailors in the South Pacific gave it the name Kensington Island back during the Napoleonic wars, but to us it was always Kovoko-ko-Te’Maroa.” Patrick gestured to the buildings around them. “They used to call this part of the Oceanview ‘Little Kovoko.’ I’d bet that nearly three out of every five houses on these blocks has one of those symbols carved somewhere on its walls. And I should know.” He pointed down a side street. “I grew up just a few doors down that way with my cousins, and my great-uncle used to put us all to work on weekends, making sure that his marks were clean and vines or moss hadn’t grown over any parts of them. Paid us a quarter for every one that we cleaned.”

  “My grandmother had me scrub red brick dust into the wood of her house’s front steps. Was supposed to protect against unwanted intruders, humans and spirits alike,” Izzie said, and rubbed the back of her neck. She remembered the muggy afternoons on her hands and knees, the grit of the dust rasping against her skin. “She didn’t pay me anything, though. You were lucky.”

  Patrick shrugged. “To be honest, I would have probably done it for free. I think I just liked feeling useful.”

  “Speaking of useful … why are you showing me this, again?”

  He tapped at his phone’s screen, bringing up a photo gallery. He swiped through until he found the one he was looking for, and then showed it to Izzie. It was a map of Recondito with red and blue dots scattered throughout.

  “The red dots are locations where we’ve verified that Ink deals have gone down. The blue dots are where we’ve picked up people who we believe were on Ink at the time.”

  There were dots of both colors all over the map, in Ross Village near the university, in Oceanview near the docks, from the high rises of the Financial District to the municipal buildings of City Center, from the middle class neighborhoods like Hyde Park to the mini-mansions that sprawled up the hills of Northside.

  But there was a gap in the coverage that was impossible to miss.

  “That’s where we are right now.” Patrick pointed at the southwestern end of the Oceanview isthmus, which was completely free of dots of either hue. “There hasn’t been a single instance of Ink use or sale in a six block radius of this spot.”

  “Nice neighborhood?”

  “Better than some, worse than others.” A look flickered in Patrick’s face, then faded. “But it’s not as if there aren’t other narcotics-related arrests that happen here. They do, with alarming regularity. I picked up a couple of meth heads a hundred feet from this spot just last week. People here consume illicit drugs at roughly the same rate as they do everywhere else in the city.” He paused. “But not Ink.”

  “Maybe it’s a question of territory? Or supply?”

  Patrick shook his head. “We’ve arrested people who lived here who had taken Ink, but they didn’t take it here. One straight-A high school student from the neighborhood was given a dose by a friend at a party up in Northside, and she never came home. Picked her up sleeping in a park two weeks later. Her parents thought she’d been kidnapped. My partner thought she’d just run away. But it didn’t seem right to me. So I did some checking into the other arrests we’ve made. Turns out that there have been any number of people from this neighborhood who we’ve arrested for using the stuff, but every one of them was in a different part of the city, and didn’t come back here after they started using.”

  Izzie narrowed her eyes with suspicion. “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying …” He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I think that they can’t use it here. I think that my great-uncle Alfred’s wards are keeping it away somehow.”

  He stopped, searching her face for any reaction.

  “You know how crazy that sounds, right?” she finally said.

  He flung his hands in the air and paced a few steps away and then back. “Of course I know how crazy it sounds. That’s why I called you in.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Izzie rolled her eyes.

  “Not because you’re crazy, but because I’m not. If I went into my captain’s office and told him I thought that magic symbols drawn decades ago by an old man were keeping Ink traffic out of the neighborhood I grew up …”

  “The psych evals would never end.”

  “Exactly. But considering what we know about Fuller’s victims, and the state of Campbell’s brain, and now this …” He gestured to the buildings around them. “I think it’s all connected. It all means something.”

  Izzie crossed her arms. “So a sword-wielding psycho killer hacks up the bodies of people who already had holes in their brains, and a guy dealing this new street drug has the same kinds of holes in his brain, and the one area of town where people aren’t buying or using that street drug is covered with magic symbols a Polynesian witch doctor drew years and years ago. And all of that somehow means something?”

  “Tohuna,” Patrick corrected. “Shaman, basically, or priest. Not witch doctor. But yeah, otherwise that’s it entirely.” He paused,
catching her eye. “And as for what it means, well … I figured as the granddaughter of a … what did you call it? A voodoo priestess, right?”

  “Mambo,” Izzie supplied.

  “A mambo’s granddaughter might be the only one who could help a tohuna’s nephew figure out just what was going on. We were both taught how to protect against spirits and stuff like that when we were kids, so maybe—”

  “Jesus, Patrick, are you hearing yourself?!” Now it was Izzie’s turn to flap her arms and pace back and forth. “Spirits and demons, hexes and hoodoo … it’s all fairy tales. There’s no such thing as magic.”

  “I didn’t say that there was. But maybe … maybe there’s something else. Maybe the things that my great-uncle said he believed, the things that your grandmother believed … maybe they were just different ways of understanding something that was too big and too weird for them to fit into words otherwise.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, gathering himself. “Look, I’m a complete agnostic, okay. I don’t believe in their god”—he gestured at the cross atop the church spire behind them—“and I don’t believe in the Great God Te’a either, or Capten Kole the Sky Navigator for that matter. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “‘Sky Navigator,’” Izzie interrupted, quirking an eyebrow.

  “Cargo cult on Kensington Island after World War II. Never had more than a dozen followers, but there are still one or two of them around. Nutty belief system, lovely people. But that’s beside the point. The point is that just because I don’t believe in a magic Santa in the sky who throws lightning bolts down at the unbelievers, doesn’t mean that I think I know everything about everything. Just because I can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I don’t understand quantum physics but that doesn’t keep it from being real, does it?”

  Izzie scratched the back of her hand, absently.

  “But I do believe that something really is going on here. Maybe those symbols that my great-uncle carved on all those walls actually do something, and maybe it has something to do with whatever is causing holes to form in people’s heads, and maybe that has something to do with this new street drug.”