Roadrunner

by Michael Lilly

  “Can we read?” I say.

  Todd is the incredibly rare type of person who will sit in a room with another person, each reading their own book, and qualify it as human interaction. Which is fucking great, because so am I.

  As we settle into our individual recliners, the rain starts. It’s only the second one we’ve had since moving, but nature has not withheld its thunderstorms, having regaled us eight times already. Fortunately, I have an affinity, an affection even, for the dark and gloomy.

  Thunder rolls for several minutes, in intervals ranging from three to nine seconds, then is replaced with a more aggressive variety. This thunder cracks and booms rather than rumbling, like Thor has set Mjölnir down to let Zeus drive for a spell.

  Zeus, apparently, is far more wrathful than his Norse counterpart and, even as I’m immersed in Stoker’s Dracula, I find my mind wandering to a heavenly battle arena in which the two are to do combat.

  I look up in response to the most recent, markedly louder crack of thunder and so does Todd. We look at each other, smile like mischievous children, and go back to our books. This night, this weather, and this man are laden with magic.

  In time, my eyes tire. Focusing on a single line of print becomes strenuous, and a paragraph is a chore. This is my opportunity to seize sleep by its ears and wrestle it into submission. Todd shepherds more than guides me to our room, and I hit the pillow with a welcoming ploof. I’m asleep before he’s back from tending to our tea mugs.

  The light of morning stabs into the bedroom, puncturing the magic which I rode into unconsciousness. Todd breathes softly, deeply, and steadily on his side of the bed. Due either to some disturbance I caused or to his sympathetic sixth sense, Todd’s eyes flutter open.

  “Morning, Remy,” he says.

  Mornings with Todd have a way of being charming with or without the permission of surrounding influences. An army of mice could pour from the vents, unleashing untold havoc on the house’s complete inventory and structure, and he’d make an intriguing comment which invites discussion about mice’s cereal preference, and whether they have their individual leanings or decide as a species.

  “Going to the station today?” Todd asks.

  “Yep,” I say. While I know that working for the government again—without changing my name—is near the top of the ‘How to Not be Invisible’ list, I also need to maintain a modicum of sanity—or at least enough to fake it.

  So I need to work. Not so much out of a need to get out of the house, but out of a need to monitor the delicate balance of the world around me. There are only so many vantage points that cater to such an endeavor, and absolutely none more suited than to be the guiding light of the law.

  Beth e-mailed Lt. Damien Husk with a glowing letter of recommendation. A position opened at the Wometzia Police Station when their most seasoned detective, Emerson Sanchez, retired over a month ago. The position hasn’t been filled yet for two reasons: First, because there have been no applicants. Wometzia simply doesn’t raise aspiring detectives, and those who do wish to help out haven’t even touched the necessary training. Second, there is no urgency. Wometzia is a humble town, to put it lightly. Riverdell has a population of 1,764. The town has one stoplight and eleven bars.

  And still, it beats Wometzia by a stoplight (though it ties in bars). Ignoring the numbers, however, Wometzia makes Riverdell seem like a bustling metropolis in comparison. The locals, we’ve learned, call it ‘The Metz,’ not to be confused with the sports team, clearly the inferior of the two. They’re quiet, compassionate people, but certainly not without a youthful sense of adventure and an equally strong one of humor.

  We’re nestled up against the north side of a series of rolling foothills, and most of the homes here have California-Spanish architecture, a small stucco brigade with red-orange helmets.

  When we moved in, there may well have been a line at our front door with new neighbors queueing to offer green chili stew, fry bread, and a strange tea with which Todd and I have since become enamored.

  I used to think there was only the one brand of that Small Town Feel, but now I see that it has at least one cousin, probably more. Possibly many more. Wometzia champions all of the good traits of Small Town Feel, and none of the bad, aside from those which are inevitable with the brand, like shitty Internet.

  Truthfully, I’ve never seen a community so—there’s no better word for it—chill. They get along seamlessly, as though a massive group of friends loaded up their bikes and rode out of Albuquerque, stopping to set up camp as soon as they found a place that would accommodate them all. And we’ve been permitted into the clubhouse. In any other town, people are friendly to their neighbors most often because feuding is slightly more work. They smile and learn each other’s schedules so they know when they can go retrieve the mail without being trapped in obligatory small talk.

  But here, they care, they’re genuine, and the entire town feels like home. Almost as much as my compulsive loyalty to balance, the simple purity of this town compels me to act as its protector. So, again, I work.

  One

  The station is air conditioned, a relief for one whose skin has not yet adapted from the cool, humid air of western Oregon. The crisp current brings with it an awareness that I’ve broken a sweat during the short walk between home and work. We have Todd’s car, but mostly it’s used when we need to go to Albuquerque, which has only been one time so far. The town is small enough that virtually any journey is a short journey on foot.

  I walk to my desk and sink into my office chair. Not five seconds after my ass meets chair, a thick manila folder pums in front of me.

  “Heard you’ve done a couple murders,” says Husk. He stands at a formidable six feet four inches. He has broad shoulders and a skeletal build that suggests that it once housed quite a lot of muscle. Now his whole image seems to droop, from the walrus mustache perched beneath his nose to the elbows that bow outward from his body slightly. He wears a bolo tie with a large turquoise stone in a fading iron setting. He has short black hair which, under certain lighting, doesn’t quite match the color of his mustache. I sometimes wonder whether one or the other is fake, and which. Maybe both.

  The expression on his face, while droopy, is nonetheless stern and commanding. “Let’s get ’em,” he says. And he walks away.

  My surprise at his bluntness is accompanied by a teeming, urgent sense of dread. I breathe deeply, chalk it up to past associations, and open the folder.

  Firenze Pacheco smiles out at me. At least, from the top of the stack of photographs. Through the tricky path of time, the photo aches of melancholy, echoing his absence.

  Firenze was ten years old in the uppermost picture—his school picture from last year—but had turned eleven between then and the photos underneath. He had the dark complexion and prominent cheekbones that I’ve come to know and recognize as the local natives’. I think I recognize him, too, but had not yet been able to become acquainted with him, an opportunity now swallowed by the permanence of death.

  I read into the report. Firenze had been well-liked, but was quiet and mostly kept to himself, according to the unanimous testimonies of others. He’d had a wit about him to rival any adult’s and that far outshone his peers’, but rarely did he put it on display for most people; his was a trust earned only over time, that great bitch of an entity that humankind can’t quite seem to get along with.

  But, once Firenze trusted someone, it seemed, no force of earth could successfully conspire to break it.

  This may have been his downfall; I take mental note of this peculiarity.

  Emerging from my fear of other horrid memories poking into existence, I slide the uppermost picture aside slowly, as though my hesitation will reach through the boundaries of time to prolong his life just those few more seconds.

  Having worked as a detective for several years, I have developed a stomach for gore. While the murder cases back in Riverdell were relatively few, the ones that found their way into my hands were espec
ially flavorful, as if to make up for their infrequency.

  My first ever murder case was an elderly woman by the name of Shirley Bellevue, an old rat of a thing whose senses only functioned enough to yell at her daughter and son-in-law, the Jewkeses, who had moved in some months prior to assist in her daily living. I wonder sometimes whether Milton Jewkes’s bloodlust would ever have borne fruit if he and his wife hadn’t moved in with Monster-in-Law. Simultaneously, it makes me wonder how many of us have the seed of violence sown within us at some depth, waiting for the appropriate sunlight and water to sprout.

  My mind wanders to Stephen King’s Needful Things, in which Castle Rock’s inhabitants are driven to homicidal rage by an implicit demon who manipulates their most intimate desires.

  Jewkes, in a paranoid frenzy, had butchered Ms. (“Mizz, thank you very much,”) Bellevue and left her rotting remains in an old tarp, tied off with rope and deposited haphazardly in one of Riverdell’s plentiful creeks. While he took compulsive care to cut the cadaver into moveable pieces, his frenzy had left with him with an incomplete presence of mind, a crippling which resulted in his leaving the meat cleaver in with the body.

  Most of it was washed clean by the running water, but the creek was too shallow at the time to envelop the heap in its entirety, and a thumbprint was salvageable from the bit of the handle that was left exposed.

  Being an adult male relative with anger issues, he had been marked as a prime suspect anyway, and was thus scrutinized under a microscope, but until that print, all of the evidence we’d had was circumstantial. He’s now on year four of his twenty-to-life sentence.

  At the time, those crime scene photos shocked and appalled me, relatively tame though they were. And even though I came to find that that was only a taste of human cruelty and capacity for gore, the remainder of my career still could not have prepared me for the crime scene stills from Firenze Pacheco’s file.

  Fighting a sudden, thrashing urge to vomit, I focus on keeping my hands steady as I thumb through the photos. He was torn open by an animal. Or, at least, it seems, until I come to the photographs that include the tools employed, lying some ten feet from Firenze, to his left. There is what seems to be an absolute arsenal of tools, maybe pilfered from a surgeon’s office or stolen from a medical supply company or something.

  Surgical tools of all sorts sit neatly in a row. I’m sure they were gleaming before the deed, but now they’re caked over with blood in a thick, dry layer that looks like rust. A pair of shears is bent a little at the handle, and I shudder to think of why.

  Firenze’s torso is bare and (I dry heave once more) hollowed out. Lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, intestines, pancreas—gone. Right through to his spine.

  Beyond that, it’s not simply an incision made to remove his organs; it’s a gaping hole, one achieved by cutting away at the skin. Whoever inflicted this has some serious nerve and an unusual tingle of intimidation electrifies my spine.

  There isn’t much more to the photographs themselves; he lies face-up on a grass surface, though the grass is yellow and looks like it clings to life in the New Mexican desert purely out of stubbornness. The area around the corpse is as bloody as the surgical instruments, indicating that the boy was most likely killed on-site. Might I be in over my head with this case?

  It doesn’t matter one way or another, I decide. Shedding the mantle of a case that’s Too Much would do nothing for the world, for Firenze’s family, for me. This case, no matter the size, has been delivered to me with the expectation of resolution, and I will work it with the meticulous tenacity for which I became known in Riverdell.

  According to the file, Firenze John Pacheco had been out with friends in Wometzia, his hometown, on the night of August eleventh, and did not come home. His mother worried and called around to his friends’ houses in an effort to locate him. There were three others, all of which stated that they had parted ways at 9:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before his curfew. They had been playing at a park, which doubles as the town school’s soccer field. None of the boys had seen/heard anyone nearby, including any vehicles, familiar or otherwise.

  The school, Roadrunner School (it doesn’t have a ‘High’ or an ‘Elementary’ in its name because it’s a K-12 building, serving the whole town’s educational needs with impressive effectiveness) sits on the south side of Redtail Road, which runs east-west, a block south of the town municipal building. Its field (known affectionately by the locals as The Park) hugs the school to the east, on the corner of Redtail and Big Sky Lane.

  It was there that the boys had parted, as the Pacheco residence is southward, down Big Sky Lane, and the other boys lived on either end of Redtail, both of which dead end in cul-de-sacs.

  It’s assumed that the abduction took place on Big Sky Lane, a long, lonely road with a spindly attempt at a forest on the east side and an expanse of dirt and sage brush on the west. Naturally, the areas have been searched and the locals questioned, but they were both unable to yield any useful information. Albert Lawrence, the owner and sole resident of the only non-Pacheco house on the lane, said that he might have heard a car go by at some point maybe, but that was the extent of that wellspring of information.

  Another page of the file brings with it more photographs and suddenly I know where the boy’s organs went.

  Coiled like the disappointing but somehow more disturbing cousin to a snake, Firenze’s intestines (a DNA report from Albuquerque confirmed that they were indeed his) sit atop a small pile of other organs. There are candles, burned almost all the way down, with a gravestone in the immediate background, bearing the name Martin Pacheco Sr. Based on the years carved into the marble, 1931-2008, this is the resting place of Firenze’s grandfather, now defiled by the unholy, ritualistic killing of his only grandson.

  Further reading confirms the relationship.

  This wasn’t a random killing. This was the work of someone with one hell of a grudge and something to prove.

  Underneath the mess of entrails, a black swastika had been spray-painted on the ground.

  I shudder and goosebumps creep up my arm.

  There are few known white supremacist groups around here, and most of them are only active enough to meet once in a while to bitch about Mexicans and tenderize each other’s white meat. Even so … the hatred is real, and though they most often don’t spawn violence, it has been known to happen.

  So, rather than sniffing around behind Aryan lines, the detectives who started the investigation compiled a list of Martin’s known associates, which I’m sure proved difficult after nearly a decade of his being dead.

  Most of his associates—in fact, damn nearly all of them, I notice—are Wometzia residents: the mail lady, the milkman, the chiropractor and her assistants, and a smattering of others, most of whom are at least mostly either indigenous or Mexican. Ignoring the obvious racial implications, I skim the list for any completely white folk, and that criterion, astoundingly, narrows the list to only eight people. Four of these people were well past their seventies when he passed, and two have also joined him in whatever afterlife may exist.

  Of the remaining four, two live out of state and knew him from childhood; they kept in touch via snail mail and neither had any idea that he had even died until the police called.

  One of the last two had been Martin’s preacher, and while that alone is hardly enough to rule him out, the other candidate draws my eyes from him.

  Geoffrey Smith, now living in Phoenix, Arizona, is the chapter president for a small yet prolific white supremacist group called Whitehorse (their website explains, to anyone willing to wade through the mess of typos and misspelled words, that whites are the American workhorse, the driving force of the nation’s success).

  They meet on Sundays and Fridays, refreshments provided. I have an abrupt vision of a circle of rednecks shooting up, one of them stumbling over the punchline of some crude joke riddled with ‘Spick,’ followed by an appreciative roar of laughter from a large guy with a Confederate flag tattooed
on his forearm and a swastika on his ballsack.

  Fridays. Firenze was killed on a Friday. Or, at least, abducted. I consider calling Smith, but I think better of it and decide that a personal visit would be more prudent; certainly he’d be less than willing to talk if it might incriminate one of his Aryan brothers, especially since the victim wasn’t white. Phoenix is just shy of seven hours form here, accounting for bathroom and gas breaks. I tack the trip onto my mental itinerary, underneath the tentative tasks of interviews around town and my own small investigation, particularly because of my severely limited knowledge of the town’s geography, history, and people. I need to learn and familiarize, and fast. The file has notes written only yesterday, but interviews with the three boys have already been conducted, complete with the ever-important guardian consent forms for two of them.

  The third, that of Preston Falric (he goes by Pico, according to the notes), would be inadmissible in court without the consent of his guardian, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use it for the investigation and acquisition of further evidence, which is where it will be more useful anyway. It was just the same as the others’: They were playing, Firenze headed for home. And then he disappeared.

  I load my bag with my usual gear—gloves, pens and pads, tissues—in addition to the station’s camera, a Nikon that I only mostly know how to use. What can I say? I’m no photographer.

  I fill my water bottle at the bubbling dispenser before heading out, flinching as I crash through the barrier of heat that waits at the threshold.

  As the sun bears upon me, I wonder why the investigation is only a day old when the boy has been dead for nearly a week. It may have been that the state had picked it up and only passed it on to us when they were finally able to ID the victim. After all, he was found in a cemetery in Albuquerque. Must be it. Still, though, it strikes me as odd that the state police would pass this brutal of a murder on down to us in the boonies.