by Luis Samways
***
I reached across for the ashtray and tapped the end of my cigarette a few times. I watched as some specks of ash fell into the darkened and tarred glass tray. I watched as the fizzle died out on my smoke, pulling on it once again for the orange tinge to return to the tip. I glanced through the smoke and saw an intrigued Dr. Martins staring through the abyss. He was waiting for me to start off my story. I wanted him to wait. I wanted him to anticipate the worst, so I dragged the whole ordeal out a little as I licked my lips dry and went for another pull.
“You see, it started off when I joined homicide from patrol. I was twenty-three, still fresh out of the academy and fresher out of the squad car. I still had my cocky ways about me, but back then my ego wasn’t nearly as big as it is now,” I said, puffing on my cigarette for effect.
“Go on,” Martins interjected.
So I did; I went on.
“I was young and brash. I had a good record, and people liked me. I didn’t fear anything or anybody. I was king hot-shit around the precinct. Everybody appreciated me. And then on my first night as a detective, I saw the unthinkable,” I said, once again puffing on my cigarette.
“What did you see?” Martins asked with bated breath.
I went on to tell him what I had seen. More importantly, I went on to tell him why I was the way I was.
Why I am the way I am.
Ten Years Ago
May 28th, 2003
I walked into the precinct feeling like I was made out of gold. Golden Boy McKenzie. That’s who I wanted to be. It was 9 p.m. when I got the call that would set the bar for the rest of my career.
“Hey, McKenzie, nice hit on the field last Saturday. I thought that sucker was going to hit the Russian space station. You hit like a pro — why didn’t you play in college?” a young guy by the name of Santiago asked me as I poured myself a coffee.
“I didn’t turn pro because of one thing, my friend,” I replied.
Santiago just looked at me in anticipation. “What? Why didn’t you turn pro?” he asked.
I paused for effect and winked at him. “Your mom never let me get to practice. That woman tired me out some!” I said, cracking up in hysterics.
Santiago found it marginally funny. We had met in the academy and became close friends, but I knew what I could say and what I couldn’t. To this day, he and I are buddies. The only difference between us then and us now is that we’ve seen a whole lot more of a whole lot of shit. So much so that neither of us jokes around like that anymore. We know what is important now. Back then we were just kids. Stupid dumb kids who didn’t know the meaning of life and what we were heading to. Dumb enough to think we could make it as homicide detectives. Ten years later, we are still “making it” as detectives — partners, in fact. But we are missing the one thing we had when we entered the game. We are missing our humanity. That got taken away from us that day. I still remember the call as if it were yesterday.
“Santiago, McKenzie, you two join Shaw down Firbank’s. We have a homicide call. Get there now,” our station leader at the time called out to us from afar. He was halfway across the room but didn’t bother walking up to deliver the news. He was always a loudmouth, that guy. Didn’t last too long. The alcohol got him in the end. He died on my twenty-fifth birthday. Shaw took over after that. Been there ever since. At that time, however, he was lead detective. Senior of thirteen years in the business, and we were supposed to meet up with him down Firbank’s. I didn’t know where that was exactly, but police dispatch would help a bundle.
“Firbank’s?” I said out loud.
Santiago nodded his head. “Nice neighborhood. I got an aunt down there. She’s dead now,” he said.
“So how you ‘got’ an aunt down there if she’s dead?” I asked, knowingly trying to annoy my partner.
“Shut up, man, you know what I mean. She’s always in my heart!”
With that both of us walked out of the precinct and into our car. At the time it was a real banger. An old Ford of some sorts. Now, however we roll in a newer Ford. Not much of an upgrade, but it did us fine nonetheless. We didn’t have an inkling of what we were about to see. It was our first night as paid homicide detectives. We’d seen dead bodies before. Years on patrol will do that to you. You see all sorts. Dead gangbangers. Dead shopkeepers. Dead mothers. Dead hookers. Dead pimps. Gunshot wounds. Stab wounds. Brick to the head wounds. Knife to the neck wounds. All sorts.
We just didn’t expect to see anything like we were about to see. To this day, I haven’t seen much worse. I’ve seen equal, but not much worse. I’m sure there are plenty of days left on my clock for me to see worse. I just hope it’s sooner rather than later. The anticipation is killing me. But back to the story.
So we were in the car, still feeling jovial. Sure, we knew we were heading to a crime scene, but I think that our collective way to deal with nerves and the unknown was to act like nothing fazed us. That was our big mistake, you see. Something did faze us. It always does. No matter how much you resist, something will always faze you.
“You reckon your wife will mind you staying up late all the time? I heard it can be a grind on these shifts. Murders don’t wait for nobody’s nap time. It’s all go from now on,” Santiago said as he took a corner.
“I don’t know how she’ll react. She’ll just have to get used to it. I can’t help my work hours. She knows the deal, anyway. She married a cop, for Christ’s sake,” I said.
“A soon-to-be-divorced homicide detective if you’re not careful, dude,” Santiago replied.
“Nah, she won’t divorce me. She’d be crazy to!” I joked. Inside I knew Santiago was right, and now that I know the things I know, I should have put a lot more effort into my relationship. A little too late now.
The jokes stopped when we pulled onto Firbank’s Road. Our house we were after was on the entrance to the street, just to the right, and on the lawn were two bodies lying face down. They stuck out like sore thumbs. Sore red and bloody thumbs. San hit the brakes in the car and rode up the curb. We bounced a few times and came to a stop. I was stunned by what I saw on the lawn in front of us. A few uniforms were looking on in horror as well. I turned my head to see Santiago’s expression and wasn’t surprised to see he had a look of complete disgust on his face.
“Fucking…hell,” he said, taking breaths between both words.
I reached for the door handle and missed on account of my shock. I grabbed it a second time and managed to open the car door. I was out of the car quicker than I would have liked. Seeing what I saw from inside the car was bad enough, but seeing it from the outside made everything worse. It made me sick.
San remained in the car as I slowly walked up to the attending uniform standing near the two bodies.
“Goddamn it,” I said under my breath.
The uniformed officer turned his head to face me. He was fresh-faced and looked like he was close to passing out. “It’s a mess, Detective. Careful where you tread. There’s brains everywhere,” he said in his raspy voice. I could tell he was struggling for air, as if he were drowning in the decay of the scene that lay in front of us.
With that I looked down to my left and saw the first girl lying on the grass. She was about seven years old. I knew she was a girl because of the red summer dress she was wearing. It was nighttime now, but the sun was setting late. It was summer, so the sky was a mixture of dark colors and yellows. It was a red sky. It matched the crime scene. The seven-year-old had her head split into two. Fragments of skull caked the ground, and blood poured out of her head. The second girl next to her was older. Maybe ten, maybe twelve. She had her arm around the other face-down girl like she was trying to protect her. It hadn’t worked. She, too, had half her head missing.
“This is goddamn surreal,” I said to myself.
“It’s worse inside,” the uniformed guy said to me in haste.
I was careful not to step on any blood or brains as I walked up the garden path toward the doorway to the house. I turne
d back to see Santiago still sitting in the car. He hadn’t moved. He still had that look of disgust on his face. I wasn’t going to make him come out of the car. He’d have to do that for himself.
I walked up the two little steps just outside the house and peeked into the hallway. The front door had bullet holes in it. Half the plywood had been blasted off. The hallway was covered in blood, and in the middle of the narrow hallway was a woman in a dress. She, too, was dead. She also had half her head missing, along with extensive gunshot wounds to the abdomen. I could nearly see straight through her wounds, they were that big. It was harder not to step on the blood, as there was so much, but I saw Shaw at the end of the hallway. He was signaling me in. I hesitated and walked in. The hallway smelt of fresh biscuits and gunpowder. I could tell a shotgun had been used. There were plenty of shells on the floor. I approached Shaw.
“What a goddamn mess,” he said.
“I guess – I mean – wow, I don’t know what to say, sir. This is too much,” I replied.
“Just know this, son — it gets worse. It gets way worse,” he said.
I just stood there in shock, wondering how much worse it could get. I hadn’t seen the upstairs yet, but I would.
“Follow me upstairs. We have two more victims. One human – one dog,” he said.
“Dog?” I said to myself.
I followed Shaw up the stairs. The stairs made a squeaky sound that seemed to be a mixture of bad floorboards and caked blood. The whole house was covered in it. We got to the top. On the landing there was an excessive amount of blood that had sprayed the walls. I followed the trail as Shaw ushered me into the bathroom. In the bath there was a dog. He was some sort of Alsatian. He had his fur matted in blood and had been gutted. His innards were lying in the bath next to him. Someone had taken the dog’s eyes out.
“Fuck,” I said.
Shaw gave me the same look he’d given me downstairs. It said that there was more. Much more.
We walked out of the bathroom, and on the right we went into another blood-soaked room. This room was a small boy’s room. In it, a little boy was dead. This was the worst one of all. To this day I haven’t seen anything that matches the evil that transpired in that room, and quite frankly I find it hard to recollect. But I will.
The boy was stripped naked and also gutted. The difference was, he’d been nailed to the wall in his room. He had more than thirty nine-inch nails put through his body, and it took a whole lot of man hours to take the poor guy down. He was nearly hollowed out. Somebody had gone to great lengths to take out every organ in his body. What frightened me was the fact that the only victims to have been hollowed out at that crime scene were the little boy and the dog. The other thing that scared me about the house was that we never found out who did it. The father had been dead for six years, and the family had no known associates in Boston. What scares me even more is knowing that the person who did it is still out there. Fortunately, they haven’t hollowed anyone else out. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that with every call I get, and every murder I attend, I’m not hoping that person strikes again. Just so I can hollow them out and be done with tormenting myself.
Back in Dr. Martins’ Office
Dr. Martins just looked at me in awe. He didn’t have much more to say to me. He put his pen back down and blinked a few times.
“That’s quite a story, Frank. Shocking events that happened in that house, wouldn’t you say?” he asked in a sincere voice.
“As shocking as any murder, but yes – that one took the wind out of me, that’s for sure.”
Martins stood up and patted me on the shoulder. “That’s all we have time for today, Frank. I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this session tomorrow,” he said, still gripping my shoulder with his free hand.
“So that’s it?” I said in frustration. “I pour my heart out, and it’s time to go home? The state hasn’t got another damn three hundred dollars to line your pockets for more tragic tales from a burnt-out cop?”
Martins just looked at me and shook his head. “No, Frank, it’s nothing to do with my pay. We could be here all day and all night, talking about the horrible things that you have witnessed, but I just don’t see that as a productive thing to do at this moment in time. You need to rest up and take some time out. Talking is only half the cure, you see. Time out is the other half,” he said to me as he backed away and walked up toward the door to his office.
I looked at him and got the message loud and clear. Play time was over. I was on my own once again for another twenty-four hours before I had to relive my nightmares all over again. “Fine. I guess I’ll go for a drink, then,” I said, standing up.
“I’m not the boss of you, Frank, but you know that drinking won’t help you any in this situation,” he said to me as I reached for the door handle.
“Well, that’s just fine by me, because it seems like no one is helping me at all,” I said, walking out of his office, leaving for my car.
Seven
I pulled into the downtown “Musty Joes” bar just off 8th. I was a regular back in the day. I used to go down there on my patrol days. The boys and I would play pool, drink lots of beer, and chat up loads of ladies. That was before my wife and I met. Maybe I chatted to a few women when we started dating. Nothing serious, though. You know how it is when you’re young. There’s a reason the saying starts off like that and ends with “and full of” - you know what.
I got out of my car and had a few hard pulls on my cigarette. I threw it onto the ground and walked up toward the bar. Outside were a few men resting on the wall, puffing away on what I knew wasn’t a cigarette. The dark clouds in the Boston sky hid the moon from sight. Only a few specks of white light made it through the darkened clouds, illuminating the ground I walked on. I could see the light glisten off the slightly damp concrete as I got closer to the door, the neon light hitting my shoes and making its way up to my chest. I could hear the rock ‘n’ roll music playing from inside. It was loud enough for me to be able to feel the vibrations as I walked up to the door and nodded at the two men smoking weed. A bouncer stepped aside and let me in. I had no idea whether or not the bouncer was anything but a pissed-off regular. When I used to frequent Musty Joes, they didn’t have bouncers or any type of security. If shit went down, it usually got settled without the cops. Even though I was a cop and still am, I never let that get in the way of me having a good time. When I entered any bar off duty, I wasn’t no damn cop. I was just Frank. Just me.
I walked into the bar through some wavy bead things over the doorway. I couldn’t believe they still had those horrible beads. It was so seventies it was disturbing, in fact. Maybe they put those beads there so people could hear when somebody new entered the bar. It worked because when I came through those beads that nearly tangled my neck up, I saw everybody divert their attention to me. It didn’t bother me because I knew I was safe in that establishment. I hadn’t frequented it in a few years, but I knew people who still worked there. And, to no surprise of mine, I got a few happy faces at the sight of me entering the bar.
“Hey, Frank! You son of a bitch! You’re actually here for a change,” a guy I knew by the name of Simons welcomed me with a fist bump to the ribs. “I ain’t seen your ugly mug in a long time. Must be pretty busy down at the station for you to not say hello to your old pal, Simons!” I nodded my head at him and made my way to the bar, which was situated in the far right of the building.
I had to wade through a few tables occupied by some heavily tattooed men wearing sleeveless shirts and great big beards. I could feel Simons tailing behind me.
“Can I get you a drink, old boy?” he said as we reached the bar.
“Whatever you’re having, and make it a double,” I replied.
Simons paid the guy behind the bar a ten, and in exchange we received two pint glasses of beer and a shot glass of Jack. I thanked Simons, and he showed me to a table that faced the exit. I liked having my back to the wall, and it was nice that Simons still reme
mbered that. It’s an old army thing, you see. Always cover the exits. I never was in the Army, but I learned a lot about being a man from my uncle, who served six tours in Bosnia and the Middle East.
We sat down and started on our drinks.
“So, how’s the police business treating you, Frank? Still catching killers and rapists?” Simons asked, starting on his Jack before anything else.
“You know, same old same old,” I said, keeping my answers reserved. I didn’t like talking about my work, especially to people down the drinking hole.
We stayed quiet for a while longer as we turned our attentions to washing down our troubles with hard liquor and small talk. We talked about a lot of things. The playoffs was one of them. The World Series was another. The relationship status of some of our favorite movie actresses. It was all pretty benign in the first place. Just small talk to match small minds, if you will. I wasn’t really in the mood to go into huge debates with Simons; I just wanted to relax and have a few drinks. And then my night turned for the worst, as it usually did. An hour into my not-so-interesting encounter with Simons, the beads at the entrance to the bar moved, and four big men entered. Simons looked at me as if to say he was sorry. I didn’t clock on at first, but then I saw what he had on his lap just under the table. His cell phone light died down, but I had put two and two together fast enough to realize what was going on.