The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 12
Pitiful. Thomas looks pitiful. No child should have to be exposed to this kind of raw-nerve horror. Kids have two things in early life: Mom and Dad. People fail their children in ways that should never be. People expect their children to endure things they would never put themselves through. Just look around.
Jefferson has decided to make his boy sit in a front row seat while he puts on the failure show of his lifetime.
I continue: “You see your problem pattern? Yes? Then why are you making it your boy’s?”
“What?”
“Your boy stands by you, Jefferson. Even now he is respectful, obedient. With your gun to his head he’s in his dad’s arms. What do you think about that?”
“He’s my boy,” Jefferson says. “I raised him to be this way.”
“Right. And now you’re going to kill him because you and pussy mix about as well as a pissed off bull and an anal probe.”
“What?”
“Yeah. You know I’m right. Think about it. In the end there’s just a huge fight and shit everywhere.”
Jefferson looks at me. His grip on the kid has let up some. Some. In these situations infinitesimally small concessions like that are to be counted as blessings. They wear down. Drop their guard. Then come in with the haymaker. I can see the calculations going on in those drained, beady eyes.
“I want to help you here, Jefferson. That’s why I came,” I say, taking a minute step forward. This has to work just so. “The kid? The kid is scared and hurt and he’s on autopilot. Believe me, I’ve been a cop a long time and I know how kids are in bad situations. Would you agree this is a bad situation for the boy?”
He slowly nods yes. Slowly.
“Yes, women fuck up everything. Yes, women are all around us. Yes, women are the reason why any man will do anything. Women are the fuel in our engines. But let the boy get old enough to make his own problems with women. Don’t shove your burden on him.” Twist that rapport knife. This is what crisis-intervention folks will tell people not to do.
Build it; don’t use it to agitate. But I’m old school. The old school guys say I have enough of the war in me to not be their type of old school. Maybe I’m just something else altogether. So be it.
Jefferson’s face scrunches and fights crying. His eyes redden and squint, his lips purse and then—just nothing. Blank. The calculations stop. Here we go. Suicides come in two categories: the ones who think they want it but are still working up to do it, and the ones who have already found their peace with it.
Stoke looks down to his scared, battered child and says: “Hey, kiddo. Want to go see your mom outside?” He says this with a bit of a smile, fawning eyes and he sniffs back a tear. Too late I realize Jefferson Stoke asks this question because he wants to hear his boy say no, he wants to stay with his daddy.
But instead Thomas does not hesitate to say, “Yes, Daddy. I want to go outside with Mommy.”
In the blink of an eye. These things take the blink of an eye. Fawning smile to roaring, contorted mask of contempt and bitter jealousy. Thomas is thrown, shotgun leveled. Why he didn’t pull the trigger with it next to his head God only knows. I think Jefferson wanted one last expression of fury before he cleaved his boy in two with buckshot. I jump, snatch the shotgun, turn it. The blast is deafening. The drywall reduces to a cloud of shards and choking dust. I move, lose my footing. A single hot shotgun shell ejects from the port and hits me in the face. Jesus Christ, this fucker can re-rack a shell before I can regret showing up. One hand shoves the firearm somewhere else besides the boy’s general direction. The other hand finds the boy and I shove him towards Clevenger, towards the door. “GO!” I shout. I slip. Jefferson slips. Knee to my gut. Drywall dust in my eyes. Aggression pulses and I throw my body at him. The second shot sprays across the living room and I hear the boy scream. I see Clevenger cover the child with his own body and nosedive out the front door. One hand to the shotgun barrel. The other to the pistol grip. Jefferson’s drained beady eyes an inch from my own. I slam my head into his like we are rams competing for a mate and I intend to win. Blood. Stars behind my eyelids. Another knee. Another head-butt. He screams. Sirens outside. Clevenger shouting. We collapse in a heap. Stoke on bottom. One solid heave and the barrel stabs him in the mouth. Blood made watery with his saliva cuts a river path down the steel. In an instant he has slobber-coated his peace of mind; a tube filled with violence to end his suffering. I wrangle one of my feet up to my chest and step on the gun, all my weight holding the shotgun to his head. Blood drizzles from my face down to him. My suit is ruined.
There was a day when tuning up some asshole was the correct way to fix the problem. The best way to teach a child abuser to stop abusing is not counseling.
It is not therapy.
It is a mouth full of broken teeth.
And worse.
Bold. Bold now because that is what is required. I free one hand and rack a round. Business time. I grab his hand, put it to the pistol grip.
I never pass up an opportunity to become a fearful memory in the mind of a man big enough to hurt a child. His guardian angel with razored feathers for wings, ready to aid him to the Promised Land the only way I know how.
I look him in the eye, calm: “Here is your Number One Problem Solver, Jefferson Stoke. Take care of business.”
He knows the fight is over. Time to be a man. I stand up as he makes his call.
The blast goes off just as the SRT fellas breech the front door. Everyone saw something different; it’s how I got to keep my job.
It is also how I was ruined.
Now, after all the fires and Derne’s sobbing, I leave before the sun breaks over the world.
No new snow yet but it’s coming. Thick stretches of pregnant, angry clouds are amassing on the eastern horizon. A tide of frost. The Rail station isn’t far. I walk. Enjoy the bitter breeze. Bitter as I am becoming.
A word on the Rail: the Rail, as it is commonly referred to, is actually the Dual Community Rail Transit System. It was a pet project back in the ’80s between Saint Ansgar and Three Mile High and their mayors. In the ’70s Saint Ansgar was trying as hard as it could be to be the most ultra-liberal city in America. In some respects it succeeded. Any of those triumphs took very little time to become curses on the city.
One such success was the city’s stance on criminal rights. The ’70s were very gentle towards criminals. That’s why movies like Dirty Harry were created back in that decade. That’s also why guys like Dirty Harry were so popular. Citizens and safety took a back seat to the every imaginable right of a criminal.
Eventually in the early ’80s Saint Ansgar became swamped with lawsuits placed against them by the families of all the victims who, because of a slight, minute, worthless technicality, received no justice. The city did what it could to swim under these lawsuits but in the end they were effectively ruined.
New political blood began pumping up from everywhere, and the mayor’s office, the sheriff’s office, the city council and beyond were swept away and replaced by folks who spoke highly of reinventing the city. Ideas were vast and as different as any ideas could be, but there were a lot to choose from.
One thing everyone wanted to do was install a rail system. During the ’70s the criminal friendliness became such a plague that a good amount of Saint Ansgar’s taxpayer income got up and moved. No one—especially those people who made higher salaries and therefore paid more taxes—were going to sit through nearly a decade of the city government making it less and less safe to live within its walls.
So they moved out. And the people who were left were light on cash. No cash equals no cars. They wanted some incentive to stay before they pulled up chalks and left also. So a rail system it was.
Meanwhile, all those years ago Three Mile High was struggling burg nestled up to the mountain range on Saint Ansgar’s east side. Theirs was a nice place to visit but as far as being a fulltime, growing community Three Mile High was a failure. A lot of Saint Ansgar’s upper crust relocated there because they could still conduct business in Saint Ansgar without the pain of residing in a city overrun with scum.
When they heard the ruined Saint Ansgar was looking to finance a public transportation system, ideas sprang up there as well. Three Mile High jumped right in and they got things worked out in such a way to connect the rails to each city, thereby creating a lifeline between to the two. Each city knew the other had less than selfless reasons but who cares? Politics might have been founded on the idea of noble prosperity but it runs off of selfish interests and the backs of others.
The rail opened the doors to Three Mile High for Saint Ansgar’s commerce, travel, vacation and business. It was no longer a three-hour drive through winding roads and tunnels excavated during The Great Depression to transverse between cities. It was a one-hour train ride. People can live in one town and work in the other if they want. Feasibility had a new face.
There is only one rail line going each way, to and from each, and with very good reason.
Three Mile High was clean then and still mostly clean now; Saint Ansgar has never been clean. Three Mile’s city government knew they would be installing a revolving door for their neighboring town’s trash to commute back and forth, committing crimes and scumming up the place as they went. But they did it smartly.
Three Mile High put the incoming rail station platform inside a newly constructed complex that just happened to have a police station inside it. The whole thing resembles the vast underground subway stations of New York City and wherever else. Vaulted ceilings, arches, everything tiled and decorated, newsstands and small food vendors. And cops right there, walking a beat and eyeballing everybody. They’d put plain-clothes officers on board the Rail who would ferret out potential jail candidates and radio ahead. Some days I heard it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Drug mules and common thugs learned very quickly that when they got off the Rail the first thing they encountered were the hungriest, cockiest motherfuckers in law enforcement.
To this day Three Mile High has done a remarkably good job keeping themselves connected to us while not contracting Saint Ansgar’s prevalent and vicious diseases. Of course the Big Fry made it there; it made it everywhere. But, overall, it’s a better place to be.
The rail station I wait at is empty save for the homeless guy passed out in the corner. The platform smells like stale beer and urine, and the housekeeping crew hasn’t been here to tidy up since the Clinton administration.
Standing on the platform tasting the Siberian tinge to the coming morning, I go over the facts again: Abigail can’t recall anything about their attacker. Said it was a frenzy; pitch black. Fear scrambled her brains. She was trying to protect the little girl. Her husband got a few good punches in, put the guy through the drywall. Football tackle. Said the attacker took that one pretty hard but in the end he clubbed Tyler. Then went right for her. She said she took the blow cradling the baby; shielding the girl with her body.
Darla Boothe was at work. Came home and her place was already being tended to by the FD. Investigator Rudd filled her in on the sketchy details. The front door was kicked in. Various misogynistic phrases were spray painted on the walls. It seemed the intruder graffitied the place and then used rubbing alcohol to soak a pile of bed sheets. Only half the place had been eaten alive by the time the FD started fighting. So far, Clevenger said no prints. Rudd is checking ex-boyfriends, guys Darla thinks she might have given the wrong impression to.
Apparently Benjamin Boothe just got out of stir. He took a beef for rape. Date rape. Drunk and on drugs, he said she was cool with it and she said she wasn’t. The sentencing judge was compassionate with him.
Maybe Ben Boothe is tearing through his old hit list. Wife, daughter, Derne: man who took his place. I wonder who the rape complainant was. If it is Ben Boothe doing this, she’s got to have it coming. If she hasn’t bitten it already. Clevenger said he heard from Investigator Rudd that Boothe’s old cellmate was a firebug.
I need to talk to Ben Boothe. I’d like to talk to the rape victim.
Finally the train comes rolling along, its metal-on-metal screeching a mating call in the ice-crusted night. It stops and the doors open but no one steps off. No one wants to come here. I step on in the first car and the doors shut me inside.
A homeless woman sits propped up in a corner snoring so loud I have to get three cars away from her before the sound ceases. Two punks are huddled together a few cars back but neither takes notice of me as I pass by. The population is sparse and bleak. I ease myself into a seat and shift the weight of my revolver.
The snow has been falling heavier in the last few hours. I settle in for the ride. The cocooning white-out dances about, a ravenously hungry thing opening its mouth for us at the final train whistle.
28
With a ghostly hum of metal on metal, the Rail meets Three Mile High and stops.
I’ve spent the ride drawing lines along the case, which is quickly becoming something much bigger than Derne hiring me to find one little lost lamb.
The brakes squeal as we slow. I start to get up and notice a runner of color streak down my vision. I sit back down. Easy. Another runner drips across the world. My heart gallops. I hate it when this happens and I’m in public. You never know the intentions of those walking past you. One might get an idea. Hand on my iron and then the world floods with the numbing effects of the Big Fry.
Blooms of cancerous color explode before me. My damaged brain fires off in flourishes of hot pigments before they transubstantiate into gentler, colder hues. Drizzles of that sickly vividness paint my internal everything and then, one by one, slowly erase as if all my mind needed to do was misfire for a moment before it simply reset.
I think one woman was startled by me. As I come back around she’s staring at me and nearly trips as she exits the train. I clear my throat, check to make sure I haven’t pissed myself, get up, get off the train.
The usual: throngs of morning commuters bustling this way and that. I break the underground’s threshold and the crisp mountain air tastes positively delicious.
Three Mile High in all its glory. A clean landscape of an ice blue metropolis. Tones of cobalt, azure, glacial sapphires and diamonds fill my world. This town is the ski resort polar opposite of Saint Ansgar. About the only thing they have in common is Three Mile High got the snow also. Blankets on the city.
My phone starts rattling. Clevenger.
“Hey, buddy.”
Clevenger snorts. Then, “Just thought you’d want to know that Pierce White’s wife said he went missing.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“Hmmm...”
“Not a missing persons report or anything, just he’s left and not returned. Nothing special to report other than I know you’ve had an eye on him.”
“Yeah. He was an old boyfriend of Delilah Boothe’s. Got shit-canned over their affair. Divorced, too. Admitted that a few months back right before she disappeared he was sleeping with her again. He seemed to think she gave him an STD.”
“You think he took off looking for her?”
“Don’t know. He already railroaded himself once over her. His entire life went tits up. Maybe I shouldn’t have teased him with Delilah.”
“Yeah. But it could just be that his new wife is a huge bitch or he’s tired of the ghosts he’s got in this town. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Thanks. I’m in Three Mile High. Looking up the other boyfriend Boothe got fired. This one should be more fun. He’s a hophead.”
“You and drug addicts. This should end poorly.”
“One can only hope,” I say.
“Be careful up there in that quiet mountain vacation spot. Word is the Freaky Frigid Flasher is back at the ski resort. He struck again last night. I also hear they raised their court fees so don’t get pulled over. And some thief is vandalizing ATMs. Hit a string of them in the past two months.”
“If only the most horrible crime we came up with in Saint Ansgar was ATM robbers,” I say, looking around. “If the Freaky Frigid Flasher runs up to me, opens his coat and shows me his cold, shrunken package, I’ll throw a hot cup of coffee on his nude pieces.”
“And that’s why you’re my favorite guy, Richard,” Clevenger says. “Because I know you’ll do it.”
He knows I’ll do it because I’ve done it before. He and I were canvassing a bayside shopping strip for a crime we caught the week before. It was getting pretty cold so the homeless were starting to do things that would get them arrested.
Any given homeless guy carried a warrant or two with him wherever he went. They were like an insurance policy. Homeless would dodge the cops in all the seasons except winter. Then they’d do some stupid shit right in front of someone, get arrested and the warrant would be revealed on a records check. The bum was essentially cashing in that insurance policy.
It paid off. A warm bed, three meals a day. A sentence that would last them until spring.
Anyways, Clevenger and I were canvassing. It was cold out. I had my large, black coffee. The lid was off to cool it down enough to drink instead of sip. I hate sipping. Sipping is for fags. Some homeless guy pops up, yells “Hey fuzz!” and exposes his entire chest and groin to us. A white belly like a dead fish. Large, ungainly nipples separated by a patch of wiry hair. Ribs protruding like they were the most important detail in the picture.
He just wanted to get arrested. What he got instead was my whole cup of steaming coffee flung at his gut. The dead fish white belly went angry red as it splashed up and down him. He screamed, threw his jacket back in place and ran. Clevenger kept saying “No one saw, no one saw, no one saw, no one saw...” as we continued on canvassing like nothing happened.
So he knows I’ll do it.
I say goodbye and I take a look around. Across the street is a breakfast joint. I make my way over.
