The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T. J. Martinson

  “So what happened to the perpetrator?” There was a naked, sheared Barbie doll buried in the dirt to her neck. Stetson fought the inexplicable impulse to pull it from the ground and instead stepped over it.

  “Perpetrator? My God. Well, the perpetrator gets charged, but the shit-for-brains judge lets the scum pay bail. Of course, he doesn’t show up to his hearing. All the while, I’ve been reaching out to his family. They want to see him behind bars more than I do, but they have no clue where he is. So I get a call tonight from the guy’s mother. I can’t understand a single fucking word she’s trying to say, she’s crying so much. Finally, she makes out something about how her son is at her house, so I’m thinking, ‘OK, the dumb fuck came back home.’ I haul ass down here, ready to call for backup and put the guy in cuffs, and then the mom comes running outside and points me right over here.”

  Wroblewski reached out and pointed at a shadowy mass in the middle of the alley. Its edges undefined, refusing to sharpen into focus even as Stetson stood over it. It was only when he knelt down that he could make out the texture of skin, a shining pool of stagnant blood.

  Stetson had seen dead bodies. Two or three. Gunshot victims, all of them. But the body before him now was not a dead body as he had known them. It was a tangle of vaguely human elements arranged into an unholy creation. Legs, arms, head, neck. Twisted and broken and reassembled. If God created humankind, He Himself would not have recognized this as His own.

  “Don’t touch him,” Wroblewski said behind him and Stetson wondered why the hell he would even think to touch it. Or him. Or whatever the hell this was he was looking at.

  And then, without warning, Stetson felt himself retch. Vomit shot from his stomach like a bullet. He tried to hide it with a cough, but this sped the inevitable collapse. He fell onto his hands and turned inside out. After the contents of his stomach passed his lips, embarrassment followed.

  But Wroblewski didn’t seem to notice or care about Stetson’s vomiting. He was staring fixedly at the thing before him.

  “I’m glad you see it, too, Mr. Officer.” Wroblewski’s voice was quiet. “Thought I’d lost my goddamned mind.” His lit cigarette fell from his open lips and smoldered there between his shoes. Half-smoked. “It just doesn’t make any fucking sense. Never seen anything quite like it.”

  And later that night, which was actually early morning, Officer Gregory Stetson arrived home to his empty apartment, changed into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, said a prayer, and then fell asleep in his twin-sized bed and dreamt of hell and the secrets that escape it.

  8 PETER RICHARDS

  IT WAS MIDMORNING, nearly noon, but it already felt like midnight. Marcus boiled water in the kitchen, brewed a cup of coffee in his French press, and lowered himself and a coffee mug slowly, slowly into his recliner.

  He’d written the names down for Jeremiah on a napkin, the same way Walter Williams had written down the names of the other two for Marcus those years ago. It felt appropriate, dragging the pen across the delicate fabric in long and careful cursive.

  And now the situation was out of his hands. He had done all that he could do and then some.

  Marcus had purchased tomato seeds yesterday to plant in his garden today, but that would require energy he couldn’t muster. Instead, he drank his coffee and opened the day’s Inquisitor. The paper had clearly gone to the printers before the video had been released. The headline—HUNDREDS PROTEST STATE BUDGET CUTS TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS—felt pleasantly innocuous, given the world that had erupted in the hours since the printers ran. He turned to the crossword puzzle at the back of the paper and withdrew a pencil from the breast pocket of his shirt. He had never done crossword puzzles prior to retirement, but since that day, he had completed each of the Inquisitor’s crossword puzzles as best he could.

  He considered crossword puzzles to be a sort of exit exam, a probing into the insignificant events that crop up in the span of sixty, seventy, eighty years of rambling along the surface of earth. Names of dead or dying celebrities, breeds of dogs, songs you used to sing over the roaring engine of a car they now call classic.

  His cell phone began ringing in his pocket. He withdrew it warily. The caller ID simply read: New York, NY.

  “Hello, Mr. Waters. First, let me begin by saying I’m an enormous admirer of yours.”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Jack Thomas with the New York Times, and I’m just calling in regards to the video that was recently uploaded to the internet. Are you aware of it?”

  He mumbled a quick goodbye and hung up the phone. Then the dam broke. The little device began to convulse endlessly in the palm of his hand. The caller ID identified the area codes as the phone calls piled up: Los Angeles, California; Washington, D.C.; St. Louis, Missouri. He watched them with numb interest as the words and locations piled atop each other in the digital display. One obsequious voice message after another.

  News vans, jockeying for position, rolled up and down his street and Marcus watched them from behind the curtain. Reporters hung out of passenger-side windows, squinting at the squat suburban home, microphones protruding from their manicured hands. Jeremiah stood in the driveway, warding off these unwanted guests, flapping his hand at the passing vans as though shooing fruit flies from a bowl of two-week-old oranges.

  Marcus sat at the window for a while, unblinking, and stared into the street where the vans kept coming, an endless procession. He just hoped the passing news crews wouldn’t air any footage of his home. His verbenas hadn’t bloomed the way the way he’d hoped they would. Half-closed bulbs sprouted atop bent stems. He feared that this made his entire home—limestone, vines crawling along the corners—look vaguely Gothic, a midsummer’s haunted house.

  His cell phone continued to ring unceasingly. He turned it off.

  And then his landline phone rang on the wall. He thought at first that it was just another journalist who had been clever enough to check the white pages, but this seemed highly unlikely, seeing as how none of this new generation of bushy-tailed reporters seemed to know that landlines had ever existed. Then he thought, with some panic, that it could be one of his children who hadn’t been able to reach him on his cell.

  He rose slowly from the recliner and picked it up.

  “Hello?” he asked cautiously.

  “Hello?” A morose voice wandered from the phone as though it were lost, surprised to find a voice on the other end. “Marcus?”

  “Speaking. Who is this?”

  “Oh, good.” A heavy sigh. “Marcus, it’s Peter. Peter Richards.” And then he added, in an almost cheery inflection, “Do you remember me?”

  “Peter?” He laughed, equal parts disbelief and relief—his landline was safe for the time being. “My God. Of course I remember you.”

  “Good. That’s good. What are you doing right now?”

  Marcus looked down at the crossword puzzle in his other hand. “Why?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  * * *

  Several months into his coverage of the Kingfisher, Marcus had written almost a dozen articles. Every single one had headlined. And each headline seemed to grow in size until nearly the entire front page consisted of bold, elongated letters you could read from across the street.

  The newspapers were so ubiquitous that Marcus gradually forgot that the name on every front page—the Kingfisher—was a name Marcus had created for the man. After all, it wasn’t as though the Kingfisher had ever called himself by this name. Based on his conversations with criminals who had survived their encounters with the man, the Kingfisher didn’t say much at all, if anything. When Marcus wrote his first story on the mystery vigilante of Chicago, his editor demanded he have a name. “This isn’t just some backstreet do-gooder vigilante you’re describing,” his editor said—an overweight man with perpetual sweat lining his lips that he licked after each utterance. “This guy is something else. Give him a name, Marcus. Something sexy. Something dark. Yeah. Sexy and dark. And mysterious, too. S
exy and dark and mysterious.”

  Marcus had half an hour before deadline, a half hour to name the vigilante whom he knew almost nothing about. Witnesses were few and described little more than a shape swooping down from the dark to grab criminals like unsuspecting prey. He remembered his stepfather, Corn Wallace—tenured philosophy professor and part-time amateur ornithologist—who obsessed over kingfishers, birds native to Southeast Asia. The image of the kingfisher itself was neither sexy nor dark nor mysterious. It was brightly colored, small, fragile in appearance. But its beauty was deceptive. The kingfisher was quick, reclusive, fiercely territorial, and a dangerously efficient hunter. Not to mention that the name kingfisher itself sounded royal, stately, and above all, superlative. The king of fishers. Deadline approached, and Marcus defined his career in a few strokes of his typewriter. The next day, the Kingfisher was a name passing through the city’s collective lips.

  Call it sensationalism. The Inquisitor’s competitors sure did. But Marcus never felt the sting of this accusation. The articles he wrote were written with care, skill, integrity, devotion, and attention to detail. So what if Marcus gave the vigilante a colorful name? And so what if his editor added a few exclamation marks to the headline?

  He began to notice the newspapers everywhere he went. The obvious places, sure—the newsstands, the gutters, and folded on café tables and bathroom stalls. But at other times, he saw them floating like tumbleweed down the street, sometimes never quite touching the ground, but simply gliding as though possessing a mind of their own—a sense of direction, a desire for destination.

  Inevitably, a fraction of the enthusiastic attention directed toward the Kingfisher was redirected toward himself. Whereas the Kingfisher existed solely in the shadows, a peripheral figure of the imagination, Marcus Waters was a concrete presence—a man in a coffee shop, walking the sidewalks, dropping a dollar for a trombone player on Michigan Avenue. He received calls throughout the day from other newspapers for verification and quotes. He received notification of his nomination to journalism prizes that he hadn’t ever heard of before. He was invited to talk shows and charity dinners hosted by the Chicago elite. The mayor invited him to play golf and Marcus accepted, only to wish he hadn’t. He hated golf almost as much as he hated the mayor.

  He received hundreds of letters each week from the public, their tone ranging from racist to elegiac to profane to prophetic. “I know who the Kingfisher is,” wrote one, “because he is all of us as one central body, one life force raised to the physical dimension. He is God come to earth in all of our blood.”

  It was around this time of public attention that Marcus Waters first met Peter Richards, who arrived unannounced at Marcus’s office one morning, not bothering to knock. When Peter closed the office door behind him, Marcus first noticed the starchy hue of his skin, the reddish shock of hair left unkempt, dangling to his eyebrows. Behind it all, a trace of refinement. Boarding-school posture. He stared at his feet, and Marcus followed his gaze to a worn, dirty pair of Converse shoes.

  He spoke in a scratchy whisper. “Mr. Waters, my name is Peter Richards, and I have something you need to see.”

  Marcus opened his mouth to ask him, as kindly as he could, to get out of his office.

  “I only ask that you take a look at it,” Peter interrupted preemptively. “If you aren’t interested in what I have to show you, I’ll leave. I don’t mean to bother you. I know I showed up out of nowhere. But I tried calling, and you didn’t answer. So here I am.”

  Everything about this kid was strangely incongruous. His voice wavered between audible and inaudible. His build suggested he was a teenager, but the corners of his eyes sprouted wrinkles. He carried himself with a pained self-awareness, as though always silently apologizing for the space he occupied at any given moment. He was endearing in some inexplicable way.

  Peter set the box on Marcus’s desk, knocking off a miniature grandfather clock in doing so. It chimed when it hit the floor. Peter apologized under his breath, reaching into the box with nervous hands. He withdrew what appeared to be a sculpture of some sort, oblong and amorphous. He handed it to Marcus gently. It was made of plaster. That was the only observation Marcus could make. He turned it over in his hands curiously.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It’s a mold.”

  “Of what?”

  “A footprint,” Peter said, reaching out and turning the mold over in Marcus’s hands. He pointed to a deep impression, filled with crisscrossing lines. “That’s the Kingfisher’s footprint.”

  The print itself was large, perhaps a size fifteen. At the bottom, there were treads, those of a boot. Marcus traced them with a finger and then looked at Peter, meeting his insistent, unyieldingly sincere gaze.

  “Sure it’s not Bigfoot’s?” Marcus asked.

  Peter’s already diminutive posture grew somehow smaller. A wheezing breath through his nose, as if Marcus had not said a word and instead had punched him in the stomach. His face darkened from pale white to sickly gray. “I’m sorry, I thought you might be interested in viewing it,” he said, reaching sheepishly to take back the mold.

  But Marcus didn’t let go. “Where did you say you got this?”

  Peter explained that he lived on 33rd Street where, two weeks before, the police had found yet another wanted criminal beaten, bound, and barely alive. Marcus remembered reporting on it: a man with a warrant for killing a rival gang member was found in critical condition. Peter continued to explain that he had watched the police from his window and after they left he went down to the street with an idea. Earlier in the evening, a construction crew had poured concrete in the adjacent alley. Sure enough, he found three footprints leading into the alleyway. Two were partials, one was complete.

  “So you made this yourself?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Peter shrugged. “I wanted to show it to you.”

  Marcus brought the mold closer and studied every contour, looking for any indication that it was not real, but it appeared to be a legitimate print. That it was the Kingfisher’s print, he remained highly doubtful.

  “How would you even know this is his? It’s not like you saw him stepping into the alley, right?”

  Peter mumbled something softly and then, louder, said, “Whose else could it be? It’s huge. It was in the exact alley the cops found the criminal.”

  “I can’t do anything with this.” Marcus shrugged, handing it back to him. “That’s not to say I don’t believe what you’re saying. It’s just unverifiable. That’s all.”

  A few days after his discovery of the footprint, Peter bought a police scanner and a Polaroid camera. On nights when he didn’t have anything better to do, which was every night, he listened to the transmissions. Whenever a call came through that someone had reported a person bound on the sidewalk, he raced there on his bike. On the rare occasion that he beat the police to the scene, he began taking photographs of the criminal lying crippled and unconscious on the sidewalk. Sometimes, he later confessed to Marcus, they would come to consciousness while he was hovering over them, camera flashing. He said they would scream or cry at him to help them—they would threaten to kill him or they would tell him they had a family, a daughter, a son. They would stare into his eyes, hopeful for some small mercy. He said he ignored them, all of them. No matter what they said, no matter how they plead, no matter how they begged, he only took their picture and left before the cops descended on the site.

  Marcus struggled to imagine it—this reticent, shame-faced kid who couldn’t even meet Marcus’s gaze somehow finding the brazen nerve to ignore sirens roaring down the street while he framed a bloodied face in a viewfinder. In fact, he wouldn’t have believed it if Peter hadn’t dropped by his office, wordlessly laying on the desk an arrangement of glossy photographs. They were actually incredible. Breathtaking in the literal sense of the word. The lighting was often naturally stark and dramatic, like a still from a film noir. Peter’s fr
aming was bizarre—sometimes the criminal was positioned on a diagonal vector, surrounded by negative space. Marcus wasn’t sure in which direction the photographs were meant to be regarded, or if it even mattered.

  He arranged with his editor at the Inquisitor to pay Peter on a photo-by-photo basis. When Marcus began running his stories alongside the photographs, paper sales skyrocketed even further. Even so, Peter never once shopped his photographs to the many competing newspapers, any of which would have offered him more money than the Inquisitor could afford. Marcus brought this up with Peter once out of curiosity.

  “Why are you bringing these to me and not someone else? You’re not stupid. You could get double what we’re paying you from the Tribune. So why not go there?”

  “Because you don’t work at the Tribune.”

  “Then why me?”

  “The Kingfisher trusts you to tell his story.” Peter smiled. “I want to help you do that.”

  “And how do you know the Kingfisher trusts me? I’ve never so much as seen him.”

  He shrugged. “Because he hasn’t stopped you.”

  9 OCCURRENCE

  THE CHECK ENGINE LIGHT was on in Tillman’s SUV, the glowing orange outline of an engine in some begging despair. She ignored it just as she had for the past month.

  At all times, she kept it unlocked and parked outside her apartment, a purgatory of residential parking, in the hopes that some hurried thief would steal it. Insurance money was better than a busted-up vehicle she hardly ever drove anyway.

  She opened the GPS on her phone and input the nearest of the two addresses Jeremiah had sent her. It was just a couple of miles south. The other one was in South Bend, Indiana, and she figured it would be wise to see if the car could make it three miles before she took it across state lines.

  The car broke from the curb with a scraping yawn. An unshod horse whining across the road.