Darkness Descending

by Penny Mickelbury

  “I’ve got to pee if that’s all right with you,” Tosh said, brushing past the women and into a stall.

  “Fine by me,” one of them said. The same one who’d asked the question, a cute little butch in tight jeans, a tight tee shirt, and some low cut, suede Kenneth Cole mocs with the wavy crepe soles Tosh liked. And the kind of haircut Tosh was considering—damn near bald. Too bad she had on that ugly ass, tacky waist-pouch. Nobody wore that shit any more.

  A whoosh of blaring sound followed by instant silence told Tosh the women had left the bathroom and she was glad. Alone was good for right now. She wished she were home alone. There was no point in staying here if going home with Lili wasn’t an option. And truth be told, no, she didn’t really care about the dancers, and quite frankly, didn’t understand the fascination with them. After the first time, what was there to see? Sure, they were beautiful, but it was the same women performing the same routines, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. And some of the same people showed up to watch them every Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

  She sat on the toilet much longer than necessary, then, finally, washed and dried her hands and left the peaceful silence of the bathroom for the whooping and hollering that meant the first set was reaching its climax. Literally. She stopped and watched the crowd watch the dancers, their eyes bright and their mouths slack and wet, looking it at them like it was a good damn thing the dancers were up on that bar, out of reach. Maybe, Tosh thought as she watched the watchers, she didn’t have a well-enough developed fantasy life. On the other hand, she really was fucking one of the dancers and didn’t need to fantasize about it. She thought about her Lili, a Halle Berry look-alike, and the routine she did with a white girl who was a dead ringer for Angelina Jolie. Damn! Yeah, that was enough to make the Trees of the world talk crazy.

  She pushed her way through the crowd, to the door, and out into the night. The dense, muggy air slapped her, making her realize how cool it actually was inside the club. OK, so maybe air con-D wasn’t such a big problem. This shitty neighborhood was, though. She looked up and down the block. Carload of fucking gang bangers cruising by, but no taxi cruising for a fare, not here, like there would be outside that trendy dyke bar across town. She could eat dinner there, and get a taxi. Hell, she wouldn’t need a taxi over there! She could have parked her car over there!

  “Hey! I said, where you goin’?”

  Tosh looked around. Darlene was talking to her. “Home,” she said, and started walking toward the subway, giving a backward wave of her hand to Darlene’s admonition to watch her back. She was so tired that lifting her feet to walk was an effort. Fuckin’ heavy ass shoes. She wished right then that she had on those low cut Kenneth Coles. She kicked an empty 40 ounce bottle and it sailed, crashed and shattered, the sound following her as she loped across the street. As soon as she stepped up on the sidewalk she remembered that she’d planned not to cross the street until the next block because this one smelled like a piss factory. Every drunk mother fucker in town must come to this block just to piss on the sidewalk. Damn, men were disgusting. Pull it out and piss any damn where.

  Suddenly she was on her knees. There was pain! In her back! But she couldn’t fall on this piss-nasty sidewalk! She put out her hands to catch herself. Broken glass down there. Then—more pain! Burning. Hot. All the way down she went, sprawled on the pissy sidewalk. Vomit. Hers. More piss. Hers. Get up! God, she hated being dirty. Worse than just about anything, she hated being dirty. But she was so very tired. Go to sleep. Sleep. Sleep’s good.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “How about a change of scenery?” Mike Reese suggested to her two best friends. She

  stood between them, her arms draped around their shoulders, the three of them standing as close physically as they were in spirit, their heads almost touching as they struggled to communicate over the noise. They should have remained in the bathroom where it was quite for this discussion.

  “What’ve you got in mind?” Cassie asked, knowing the answer: Mike wanted to go to the Bayou; had preferred the Bayou over The Snatch from the beginning, but Marti had wanted to catch the first set. She still couldn’t believe that women danced naked on the bar in a club called The Snatch, owned and operated by women, but mostly she couldn’t believe that part of her liked what she saw. Though they all were D.C. natives, had grown up and gone to school together, Marti lived and worked a hundred miles to the south, in Richmond, Virginia, and no longer spent as much time with her friends as she’d like, and Mike was in the Army.

  Marti answered for Mike. “I’ve scratched my itch, so I suppose it’s your turn. Besides, a catfish Po’ Boy would go down nicely right about now.”

  “I know that sex makes some people hungry,” Cassie said, “but I didn’t know that watching naked women makes people hungry.”

  “Unless watching naked women is as close as you’ve been to sex recently,” Mike said, and backed quickly out of their tight little circle to avoid the smack Marti aimed at the side of her head.

  “It’s as close as any of us have been to sex lately and there’s no point in pretending otherwise,” Cassie said as they inched their way through the boisterous crowd toward the front door.

  “Speak for yourself, Ali,” Mike said smugly.

  “She means sex with a real, live woman,” Marti said, and they all giggled at the memory of Mike’s explorations with some products brought back from her most recent overseas posting. “The kind where you’re in the same bed at the same time and you do her and then she does you. Remember that?”

  They followed a crowd out of the front door into the muggy night and right away Cassandra Ali knew something was wrong. Shouts from up the block confirmed the feeling. She pushed through the crowd, toward the commotion. She saw a knot of people a in the next block. Then someone screamed. Cassie took off running. Marti and Mike followed.

  “OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod,” Cassie heard someone moan as she approached the group, and when she broke through the crowd, she saw why.

  “Fuck a duck,” she muttered in perfect imitation of her boss, looking down on what she was certain was the dead body of the very alive person she’d talked to in the restroom not twenty minutes ago.

  “Isn’t that...” Marti began.

  “Sure as shit is,” Mike finished. “Damn!”

  “Did somebody call the police?” Cassie asked.

  “What the fuck good are they?” somebody in the crowd responded, which started an ugly buzz that made Cassie more than a little nervous. “Ambulance?” she asked, and got no response. She unzipped her waist pouch and took out her cell phone.

  “You think ain’t nobody got no sense but you?” an angry voice queried, and Cassie shut her phone and stuck it into her pocket, the tightness of the jeans leaving little room, even for the tiny phone.

  Mike leaned over the body, extended two fingers, and probed the victim’s neck. Then she straightened up, looked at Cassie, and shook her head.

  “Who the fuck you ‘sposed to be?” demanded an angry voice.

  “She’s a medic,” somebody else replied, obviously someone acquainted enough with the military to recognize the insignia on Mike’s hat and shirt

  “That right?” asked the angry voice, still angry.

  “That’s right,” Mike answered.

  “Here they come,” somebody said at the same moment Cassie heard the sirens. Cops and EMTs. She sighed her relief and backed out of the crowd so she could see and hear without being seen and heard. She’d already snapped a mental picture of the body on the ground, the blood pooled beneath and around it and soaking the pale blue Wizards jersey, the bloody footprint beside the body. She’d remember the faces of the people closest to the body, especially the two who had spoken. And certainly she’d remember the anti-police sentiment that rippled through the crowd at the mere mention of the word. This obviously was not the time or place to announce herself as a member of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Hate Crimes Unit.

  The sirens screamed
the arrival of officialdom. Three squads rolled to a stop a foot from the sidewalk where the body lay, and the paramedics rumbled their bus right up on to the sidewalk, scattering the crowd. They jumped out, two men, a salt-and-pepper team, fortyish, world weary, bags in hand. They knelt on either side of the body, both checking for a pulse. They looked at each other, then up at the cops who had formed a semi-circle around them

  “Call the ME. You don’t need us,” the Black one said, standing up.

  “But it was supposed to be a female,” the white one said

  “What?” said one of the cops, the sergeant.

  “That’s right, Sarge,” said another of the cops. “The call came that a female was shot and laying on the sidewalk, and that ain’t no female.”

  “Yes the fuck it is!” someone from the crowd shouted, and the ugly energy that had just been hanging in the heavy night air surged forward like a living thing. The cops felt it and moved back a step.

  The Black paramedic pulled on a pair of latex gloves and knelt back down beside the body. He looked up at the faces looking down on him. “How ‘bout everybody moves back?” he asked politely.

  “You heard the man,” the sergeant said. “Back! Back up! Everybody move on back!” He gestured to the other officers and they formed a blue line behind which the crowd now stood, too far back to witness the examination of the victim, but not so far back that they couldn’t tell that something more than death afflicted the body on the ground.

  “Goddamn! Look at this shit!” the EMT said. His partner and the police sergeant bent down over the body, and both backed up quickly.

  “The detective ought to be here any minute,” the sergeant said, and, on cue, the unmarked rolled up, lights flashing, siren silent. The sergeant hurried over to meet the person who’d be responsible for this mess and the two huddled for several seconds, long enough for Cassie to make her way around the periphery of the crowd, to rear of the squad cars. She was looking for a familiar face while still debating with herself about the advisability of remaining undercover until she found out what was going on, since it was obvious that there definitely was something going on, something more than a DB on the sidewalk. Her decision was made for her when the detective spied her. His eyes held recognition and he walked toward her.

  Cassie watched him approach. She didn’t know him, didn’t know how or why he thought he knew her. “Officer Ali,” he said quietly. “If I’m blowing your cover, I can fix it by ordering you and your friends to move back out of the way.”

  “Will it help you if I move back out of the way?”

  “It’ll probably help your boss,” he said. And almost under his breath, added, “You better call her, get her over here, and fast. Tell her Jim Dudley said so.” Then, like a shape shifter, he morphed. “Get back over there! Sergeant, get these people outta here!”

  Cassie, Marti and Mike hustled themselves away from the cops but not all the way back into the crowd of spectators, which had grown to several dozen, most of them probably Snatch patrons. Dee wouldn’t be pleased, Cassie thought, looking at her watch. “You all should go,” she told her pals. “I’m probably going to be here for the duration.”

  “We’ll keep you company until your boss gets here,” Mike said.

  “Yeah,” Marti added. “I wouldn’t mind a glimpse of her. I swear, you two make me sick!”

  “What did we do?” Mike asked.

  “You’ve got that fine colonel for a boss is what, and Cassie’s got that fine lieutenant for a boss, and what have I got for a boss? A bald, fat Arab who hates women and dykes and Black people and is convinced the government’s spying on him because his last name is Hussein.”

  “He’s probably right,” Cassie said, passing up the opportunity to comment on her boss’s physical attributes.

  “I’m sure my fine colonel is in bed with the fine head nurse,” Mike said wistfully. “I wonder if your fine lieutenant is in bed with her fine reporter?”

  Lieutenant Gianna Maglione, head of the D.C. Police Department’s Hate Crimes Unit, was not in bed with her reporter, which she very much regretted. Mimi Patterson was on the red eye, on her way back to D.C. from a three-week assignment in California. So, in bed alone, Lt. Maglione had read herself to sleep before eleven o’clock. When the phone rang a few minutes before two, she awoke immediately and fully, a habit honed by a twenty-year career as a cop. In all those years on the job, a middle-of-the-night phone call had never been a wrong number.

  “This is Cassie, Boss. I’m sorry to wake you.

  Gianna sat up and switched on the light. “What is it, Cassie?”

  “I’m on the scene of what appears to be a homicide. The detective in charge, a guy named Jim Dudley, told me call you and tell you to get over here.”

  Gianna already was out of bed and halfway to the bathroom when she said, “Get over where?”

  She was vaguely familiar with the general area of the address Cassie gave her. Shitty neighborhood, as she recalled. “Are you all right, Cassie?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I’m fine.”

  “Then I’ll see you in twenty minutes.” Gianna tossed the phone on to the bed, turned on the shower, and stepped in. She’d perfected the art of the two minute shower. The hot, stinging spray would finish waking her up and wash away any residual sleepiness fogging her brain. She needed a clear head to process the fact of Cassie’s presence at the scene of a homicide in the middle of the night in one of D.C.’s worst neighborhoods, a homicide that a detective she trusted thought belonged to her Hate Crimes Unit.

  She had underestimated the drive time to the scene. Despite the hour, there was plenty of traffic, especially on the major thoroughfares. She remembered when D.C. was practically a ghost town at this time of night. Now it was like New York or Los Angeles—people out and about at all hours. No doubt good for the restaurant and night club business, nothing but trouble for the cops. The fact that she was heading across town at two in the morning was proof of that. And what about Cassie? She was a good cop, one of the best, but she also was excitable and, recently, hell bent on proving her job worthiness following a medical leave of absence. Here she was on the scene of a homicide in a very iffy part of town, in the middle of the night. She had sounded... urgent. Not quite panicked and not exactly frightened, but it was clear that she wanted her boss on the scene ASAP. Gianna used the solitude to indulge the weak spot she had for Cassandra Ali, the youngest member of the Hate Crimes Unit and the one Gianna thought of as most like herself at that age. A year ago, Cassie had suffered a brutal beating at the hands of neo-Nazi skinheads, angered because a Black female cop put a stop to their harassment of an elderly Holocaust survivor. The beating severely damaged her eye and caused severe emotional and psychological trauma, but Cassie had fought back, rehabilitated herself, and proved herself worthy of a return to full time active duty. Proved herself over and over again, at every opportunity.

  Gianna knew she’d arrived at the crime scene as soon as she turned the corner. The area was lit up like a Hollywood movie set and half a dozen squad cars, lights flashing, parked at crazy angles in the middle of the street. An EMT bus was on the sidewalk. Several dozen people shifted and shuffled behind yellow crime scene tape, enough of them familiar with the appearance of an unmarked that the crowd parted as Gianna drove closer. She hung her ID on her jacket pocket as she climbed out of her car. Her hazel eyes scanned the scene, taking in as much as possible while looking for Cassie and Jim Dudley. Many pairs of eyes scanned her, some of them wary, many of them appreciative. At five-seven, lean and physically fit, and dressed in the black jeans, cowboy boots and silk shirt that had become her uniform, she made an appealing sight, even at a murder scene in the middle of the night. Her thick, dark mane of hair was corralled in a pony tail and brushed her shoulders as she walked.

  “Am I glad to see you,” she heard from behind her, and turned to find Dudley grinning at her.

  “Jim. How’ve you been?” Her greeting was as warm as his had been.


  “No worse for the wear.”

  She backed up a step and scrutinized him. “You’ve lost weight, bulked up some, let your hair grow longer.”

  He gave her one of those head-shakes that didn’t need words but he said them anyway: “I don’t ever intend to let you meet my wife. You might decide to teach her some of the finer points of observation and then I’d be in deep kimchee.”

  “Um, ‘morning, Boss.”

  Gianna stepped away from Jim Dudley, noticing the look Cassie gave him and the look Dudley was flashing her—a warning. He took her arm and there was real pressure in his grip. “Looks like you might have a first class mess on your hands here, Maglione,” he said, and led Gianna toward the crime scene.

  She followed, instantly and acutely aware of the reason for his warning, and grateful. Dudley was the lead investigator in the assault on Cassie, who still had no memory of that event or its immediate aftermath. She didn’t know Jim Dudley from Adam and certainly wouldn’t know that the credit for the collar in that case went to him. She looked over at Cassie who was walking beside her, and noticed how she was dressed. Then she turned her full attention to the crime scene. She recognized one of the paramedics, two of the crime scene investigators, and the assistant medical examiner, and raised her hand in greeting to all of them. The MEs eyes met hers and Gianna’s stomach jumped. She’d shared enough looks with MEs to understand the telegraphed message: What was waiting for her was more than just a dead body.

  As she reached the make-shift barrier the ME had constructed around the body—as much to protect the crime scene as keep the victim from being a public spectacle—Gianna inhaled deeply, then looked down. She closed her eyes briefly, opened them, and looked again. Before she could fully process all she saw, Cassie leaned in close and whispered, “She’s a girl, Boss.”

  “What?”

  “The vic,” Cassie said. “She’s a girl.”

  Gianna was looking at a young male dressed in Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers attire—Allen Iverson’s jersey number— and a pair of those too expensive high top sneakers. He wore a gold watch and ring on his left hand. His hair was corn-rowed. His eyes and mouth were open. The teeth were white and perfect. Gianna looked at Cassie, who was watching her closely. Then Cassie looked at Jim Dudley, who also was watching Gianna. He looked at the people nearest him— cops, paramedics, the medical examiner— and waved his hand at them, making a circle. And that’s what they did— made a circle around Gianna, Jim, Cassie and the vic, making sure nobody could see that they saw. Then Dudley knelt down and raised the Sixers jersey. The first thing Gianna registered was that the torso had been cut—hacked to shreds. Then the real horror registered: this boy had breasts, small ones, and they’d been all but excised from the torso. “Good God!”