by Luis Samways
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 turned 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 t
he 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 remembered 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.
He looked at me with an apologetic smile on his face. “I had to, Frank. You know the rules,” he said.
With that, I stood up within half a second and grabbed Simons by the head and pushed his face into the table. A large crack was heard, and I noticed Simons bleeding from his nose. It looked as if the prick was still smiling as I held his head down against the table. The music died down like it did in those movies when somebody did something that caught the attention of the whole bar. And it was true in a sense, because everybody was looking at me, wide-eyed and ready to rumble. Part of me knew it was stupid to come down to the bar that Ricardo had frequented. Part of me knew I was testing the boundaries of fate, like sky-diving into a thousand-foot cave. I knew the dangers of me being there, but it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was ready for whatever was coming my way.
In fact – I wanted it. That’s why I came to the bar where I knew Ricardo had friends. I knew that was the only way to speed up the process that was surely going on in the background, ticking away like a clock on the wall, counting down to the hours that remain until you get what you deserve.
“Let him go, Frank,” one of the big men who’d entered the bar said in a husky voice. I knew that man. He was Ricardo’s uncle. Used to be a Marine, apparently. The other three men were Ricardo’s cousins. All three of them were just as big as their daddy, and they were here to make me smaller. Preferably small enough to fit into a box and ship me off to hell. I wasn’t having any of it, though. I came here to fight. I came here to bust some motherfuckers up.
“I ain’t letting go of nobody. You want me to let go of him, you even up the fight. You tell your boys to fuck off back home, and we do this, man on man. One on one!”
The big uncle gave me a smile as if what I was saying was the funniest thing his mopey face had ever heard. He actually turned to his sons and gave them the “what’s this guy like!” look.
“No, Frank, I’m afraid you came to the wrong bar. It strikes me as stupid that a damn detective wouldn’t know where trouble lurks. You know that you’re not welcome down here, and yet you have the balls, the damn AUDACITY to come down here and show your ugly mug. I’m afraid it’s about to get uglier. I’m gonna break every damn fucking bone in your body, and when I’m done with you, my boys are gonna finish the rest off.”
I knew what I had to do. I was about ten yards from the entrance, right in the corner of the bar. Everybody had stopped what they were doing, and most people had unintentionally laid out the battleground within a circle of humanity. A fighting area had been sanctioned. People were used to this sort of thing in this bar. Like I said before, I wasn’t a cop when I entered this bar. I was a damn victim. And now I had to fight. So I did.
I flung Simons back into his seat. He looked up at me all bloody from his nose and thanked me with his eyes. I wasn’t done with him, though. I gave him a smack on his jaw, and he slumped down onto the table head first, cracking his nose once again. The punch and the knockout gave the on-looking revelers a taste of what was to come. They “oooh’d” and “ahhh’ed” a little. Someone hit the jukebox, and some rock ‘n’ roll music jammed out of it.
That was the cue I was waiting for. I jumped over the table, missing Simons as I did so. I landed feet first on the other side and stood up tall. The four men at the entrance of the bar got themselves ready. I could tell by the way they were standing that they were ready for a tussle. One of them broke away first. Turns out the uncle didn’t want to go straight away. His youngest boy, who was about twenty-three, had run up to me, screaming at the top of his lungs like some warrior on the battlefields of Rome. He had his fists balled up and swung for me. I caught his left and then his right, holding both fists with mine clenched over his. He attempted to overpower me, but I snapped both of his arms forward and swung both hips to the right, turning him inside out. The big bastard landed hard on the ground. He stayed there for a second or two, and I watched as he got back up. He didn’t look like I had hurt him too badly, but I knew that his arms were killing him now. Any punches he landed on me would be significantly less powerful than they would have been before. Naturally I hadn’t taken advantage of him being on the ground a second earlier. I didn’t want to go out like a coward. I wasn’t into kicking people when they were down.
“Get him, Bryan,” someone shouted.
With that, he swung for me again.
I ducked and landed a hard crack into the right side of his neck. I could feel his neck muscles tense up as I fired another hard shot into his neck. He crumbled onto the ground and started to choke on his own saliva. I waited again for him to get up, but he didn’t. I could see he was done for.
“Nice try, Bryan. Go to Daddy now,” I said.
He scurried away from me on all fours up to his dad, who was looking infuriated with the young man.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said, pushing on his next son to go and fight for the family honor.
The boy who came my way wasn’t much of a boy. I figured he was twenty-eight and weighed about three hundred pounds. He was a big fucker. I could literally feel the ground shake as he walked.
The crowd of bar patrons started whistling and jeering. None of them got involved — they just watched in an entertained trance. Some were wolf-whistling, while others were chanting. All of them were making an evening out of it.
“Fuck him up, Frank!” someone shouted. Finally, my first bit of support. I took that opportunity to go for the big guy’s knees. It was dirty, but I knew I had to do it. I extended my leg and buckled his right knee with it. I heard a snap, and the bastard fell like a sack of dirty farm potatoes. The crowd erupted in a huge show of support. Everyone but the boy’s father.
“You fucking no-good cheating bastard!” he shouted. “That’s not a clean fight, Frank. I was being fair on you, but now I’m afraid I’ll have to get tough,” he said, signaling his last son, who stood next to him.
Both he and the last boy came at me at the same time. One on the left and one on the right. I hit the son first with a heavy left, knocking him out pretty fast. The place erupted once again, this time louder. This time the ground did actually shake!
“You think you’re hot shit, don’t you, boy?” he said to me as he grabbed me by the neck. “WELL, YOU AINT!” he shouted, and head-butted me. I fell on my ass and hit my head hard on the floor. The crowd reacted once again, this time with an “ooooh.”