The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 24
“He threatened my life. Said he’d do anything. I know he meant it. He called me his ‘little queen’ and said he would put me in my throne one day. He just started spouting all this bizarre, creepy, threatening stuff. I was so scared. I ran. And I haven’t been back since.”
Flashback: Dr. Windslow.
“...I need you to find a certain young lady for me.”
“Your daughter?”
“Absolutely not. As it were she was a...mistress.”
Somewhere in the corners of my mind dots start to come together and, once again in my life, I become rather disappointed with myself. Sometimes I can see it all, sometimes I miss so much.
“Anyways, Delilah became like she was my own little girl...”
“I don’t remember the first time I had sex with my father.”
“Well, why do you need a private detective to find a woman who you think will still want to be with you? If she’s that in to you she shouldn’t be hard to find.”
I should kill him now and spare her the looming threat.
I should kill Elam now and spare Delilah the looming threat.
“I do not hunt women for angry, jealous men.” I say this and I mean it.
I do not hunt women for angry, jealous men. I say this and I do it.
I do not hunt women for angry, jealous men. I say this and I must un-do it.
I have hunted a woman for an angry, jealous man.
Damn you, Richard. Damn you.
I stand up.
Delilah looks at me and says: “I guess I’m done.”
I’m not sure how loud I say, “I’m not trying to interrupt your life story.” But I say it. Maybe just to myself. Maybe I want her to read it in my eyes. Either way I hope she can hear me.
The group leader eyeballs me for a moment and then begins the closing prayer. I head to the stairs. Maybe I can head off Derne and take care of this quietly.
Maybe not.
65
A cacophony of women start at the top of the stairs as I’m getting to the bottom.
Something hangs over me. Ominous. It feels like a death shawl. Find the edge of it, the corner and throw it off like a child does when they get lost underneath a sheet they’ve been playing with.
This thing hanging over me is pushing in my chest, telling me this thing is getting ugly. Unseen until now. This will end poorly. I have to do something to get out from underneath it; a storm cloud roiling with lightning getting ready to strike Delilah. I did this. I need to undo it.
How could I not see that Elam Derne was asking me to hunt down his victim?
The women’s noise follows me. Tide. Flood. Now that the confessing is over the loud, pop culture and baking talk has begun.
“Oh no, honey. Use egg wash so that doesn’t happen—”
“She was married twice before they got together when they were filming...oh my, I forgot already but they were co-stars—”
“Yes. Divide them in the spring or after they bloom or else—”
“This sounds terrible but it works: use hemorrhoid cream for the wrinkles under your eyes—”
I thrust through the front doors and eyeball the street, hoping to clear my skull and get a deep breath of crisp winter air. Things have gotten dark. Bleak. As if the situation has drained the atmosphere here of anything resembling hope.
These are the times I call upon my gun or my fists or my gut instincts to take the wheel. Autopilot. If I can just get my sights on the problem I can beat it to death. Primal. Final.
The snow piled in dirty frozen lumps up and down the road. Each one spilling a shadow that looks like a rock mason who should be wiring me my blood money. The arc sodium lamps buzz like flies getting ready to die and my breath has become a blinding cloud of opaque white before me.
I can’t think straight. My heart is rumbling, off-time and deafening. Detonating. So enraged at my own shortcoming it is hard to concentrate on anything else.
This is what blowing up in your face feels like.
This is what they mean when they say “screwing the pooch.”
Make it right. Make it right. Make it right.
I need to find Derne before he shows up here. I turn in a circle and realize if I can’t find Derne I can find Boothe. Fucking idiot. She was right there a second ago. I’ve walked halfway down the sidewalk when the thought hits me but I do an about face and double time it. Sometimes I can see it all, sometimes I miss so much.
Every car that rushes by I look for his face behind the wheel. Fifties. Thick glasses. Coarse beard the color of bleached sand. Hefty build. Thick. Stocky. He could have been saddled and pulled a cart in his youth. Maybe even now.
Slush and dirt spray up in plumes under tires. The sound is discordant and so loud it fills my entire head. The Doppler effect of engines roaring, each carrying on them the haunted ululating of incoming artillery. I tell myself this all gets fixed with one shot.
I’m only a door away from the Incest Survivor’s Anonymous building and I draw out my phone. Dial Derne. I’ll head him off, tell him I lost her. She went to the bathroom, whatever. Never came back. Call him in fifteen minutes and say I picked her scent back up. Have him meet me in some alley. Blip him. Send his face through the back of his skull. Go home. Maybe have some meatloaf.
She’ll never have to know. She’ll never have to know I hunted her down for her demon.
I dial. It rings. Each one slows my heart rate but tightens the tensions of this piano wire I walk out on.
In the background I hear a phone ring. In time. Coincidence. Has to be.
It’s not.
I hear the phone removed from a pocket and silenced. Same time I get connected to voice mail. I drop my phone into a pocket, scramble. Race. Scan. Detect. Infuriated. Used. The sound was coming from—
“Delilah!”
The sound comes from where that voice comes from.
I look. Derne, cautiously approaching his life-long victim. She freezes. The look on her face is the exact look a deer had once when I accidently stepped on a dry patch of leaves and alerted it to me. But the deer knew better than to think its life extended out any further. Alerted only to death.
I’m not trying to interrupt your life story.
“Delilah, I—”
She starts to back up. She’s crying. Other women look concerned. I draw the .44. Start to move faster. I look where to put my sights. I’ve always shot better at night. All the women know and no one has done anything to clue them in. Prey can smell this coming on the wind. Alerted only to death.
Derne says through his own tears and clenched teeth: “Delilah, I’ve always loved you, my sweet, sweet baby. My little queen.”
And then he shoots her in the face.
66
The .44 Magnum roars to life.
Before Delilah hits the ground, cold and dead as the world around her, I’ve got three hunks of lead on fire and flying at Derne.
Miss, miss, graze. He bares his teeth in a hiss of fury and malady. Grabs his thigh. My first two rounds zing off into the night. The brick edifice of the buildings across the street harmlessly absorbs them. Thank God. Each round fired in public that misses is a million dollar bullet. I’m moving.
Women scream. The cacophony goes from cooking tips and gossip to lives being shattered. A berserk nympholepsy swarms through the crowd. Frenzied, violent emotion for the one thing they can’t have: safety.
Derne turns. Blood soaking his pant leg but it doesn’t seem to bother him. Gun in a shaky hand. Determined to ruin everything on his own terms. I make a target of myself. Keep away from the innocents. This is my doing. He fires. Miss me, miss me, miss me.
He sinks those rounds deep into the crowd.
The first woman Derne accidently plugs collapses beside me and I trip on her. Swerve. Eat concrete and dirty slush. The second woman screams on and on forever and while she is filling the world with her sufferings I take a shot and miss and Derne tries to throw a woman out of her open driver’s side door and he is trying to get into an idling car but she gnashes her teeth at him and hammers down on the gas and he throws himself onto the sidewalk to avoid her squealing tires. He gets up in a mad dash and empties his gun and chunks of the road kick up and I can feel my face bleeding but no lead in my body I hear the dry click of an empty weapon trying to cough out more than what its belly was full of and I fire one more time and a street lamp goes out I assume I did that now I’m up and I slip I’m not sure if it is slush or blood feels tacky no time he’s running limping but making good distance the bastard he’s running like a fucking dog who knows what is behind it will set it straight and I don’t think I can track him by any blood droplets because the night has settled down and blood looks black at night and the night is black too so it doesn’t matter I am running and that woman is still screaming as if as long as she holds that note she will somehow stay on this side of the big white curtain and I know that’s not true I’ve heard that note before and I almost want her to just die because that note is in my head caterwauling now I run past Delilah Boothe and she is just a white female black and blue thin and busty missing her beauty because it’s sprayed all over the sidewalk and we’re going down the street Derne turns a corner and crosses over into a parking lot and fuck me this is the Starlight Theatre he runs and is swallowed by rows of snow the trucks have plowed up into hedges and before I can gather my thoughts and reload and find where he is in this maze of night and ruined promises I hear metal clink so hollow and cavernous and I know what he’s done.
He’s gone into the underground runoff system.
I leap to the same manhole and I’ll be damned but the first runner of smearing color traces itself down my vision. I scream, “NO,” to the Heavens but that call of indignation just spills ten more runners one hundred more runners a thousand a billion down over me and all I see is defiled traces of snow white and death black and Delilah’s red mixing as they race through my ruined brain and streamers of my seething rabidity soak the runners in volcano crimson. Snow white gives way to a shiny black and the black gives way to another shiny black and the red of Delilah’s poor ending gives way to the shiny black but my tempest stays.
I fall over onto the parking lot. Guns clatters away. Stomach turns, from the smear or the outcome I don’t know. I cough, vomit. Grab my head, shake it out. At some point the smear goes. On my feet. Armed.
The manhole cover is hastily put back in place. Askew. I move it, drop in. No hesitation, no fear. On the ladder, three rungs at a time, flying down. If he’s lying in wait at the bottom he’ll realize it is the biggest mistake of his life. I get on solid ground, scan while moving. He’s not waiting. He’s running. I’ll find him.
This is what fury leading up to brutal revenge tastes like.
67
First leg of the hunt is a feeder line to the main artery.
Inky black darkness layers this place. Sac cloth draped over these brick and concrete burrows. Every edge of brick, every crack in the concrete, every imperfect corner interrupts the solid caliginous surface. This tunnel is bone-dry except for the thin trickle of moisture running down the center. Round concrete conduits, eight-foot diameter, around one hundred years old.
The place is a labyrinth. Any sound is a ghost, playing with echoes. I stand silent. Listen. Spectres run their fingers through the liquid shadows down here, pooling in the corners and giving off faint susurrations. I hear something: heavy breathing distorted by the plumbing we are inside. Maybe something bigger has already eaten him.
Come spring the mountain runoff will flash flood these tunnels and the water will be scraping the ceiling. These eight-foot feeder tunnels lead into the twelve-foot diameter arteries, pour out into the river somewhere.
Here and there a body will wash up miles away. Homeless, mostly. Vagrants camping out because the place is better than a cardboard hovel in the snow. Kids playing down here will sometimes get lost. It’s sad when they wash out.
But this spring it will be an incestual child molester.
Teasers of arc sodium light spill down through the manhole covers; next to nothing. Something moves. Quick. Scratching noises. Feet hammering down. I fire, twice. Double tap. Deafening. Move. Gun empty. Spent brass in my palm then to my pocket. Speed loader on the move. New rounds in. Ready to perforate. Flashes of manhole light almost make things worse. I stop. Hold my breath. Hear someone groaning through clenched teeth. Movement. Metal crashes to the ground. Dropped gun. His. I run to the sound, open fire. Boom boomboomBOOMBOOMBOOM! Muzzle flash gives me glimpses like the flash of a camera in a haunted house. Each expulsion and Derne is still, caught in flight. The next he is positioned differently. Chunks of the tunnel exploding from the wall. Even after the gun blasts stop echoing the sound of pebbled concrete settling continue. Reload again. Stop. Listen for anything louder than the ringing in my ears. Like being in the war all over again. Shadows get deeper and then thin out, formless objects crawling on the walls and floor and ceiling all around us. The trickle of water thickens, widens, no light from a manhole. My heart has stopped beating. My lungs do not work. All I smell is gun powder. No blood. All I see are shades of night hiding my prey. My skin buzzes with electricity. I stalk. One hand on the wall. I lean down, hand to the floor, palm out. I find the trickle, move away from it. Feel for splashes. This goes on. I find one. I explore, find warm and tacky splatterings. He’s losing blood. I follow it, one hand with the gun forward but tucked in close, one palm reading his bleak future on the tunnel. Small tunnel, six-foot diameter. We go. Him not too far ahead, a game of silence and distance now. He must not know I am following but he must think I am close. He’s moving. He slips. I almost shoot. Somewhere in the absolute darkness ahead of us he is faltering. I creep closer. He regains his feet, moves ahead. Straight lines. We go. Ahead, light filters in from above like spears of angels coming down from the heavens. He pauses. So do I. Bathed in the gloom, my eyes adjust enough and I squat down into the black embrace. Umbrage, a camouflage in this cavernous hunting ground. I can start to make out the weak, watery light playing small twinkles on his glasses. He is afraid to move even though every instinct in his bones and muscles and heart are screaming run motherfucker run up that ladder and back onto the street run but he stays still. See if I am on his tail. Make a mistake. We wait so long, measuring each inhale and exhale to hide them from the other that by the time he makes his move I am calm as a clam in clear blue water. He cautiously rises and limps to the ladder.
Climbs it painfully.
Reaches for the manhole.
“Derne,” I say.
So startled, he falls. Regains his feet and starts to bolt away deeper in the runoff system.
My cylinder has six fresh shots. All I need is one. Raise the gun. Deep breath. Hold it. Let half out. Relax the grip. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, surprise. The barrel barks.
Direct hit.
Derne goes down, his right foot missing at the ankle.
I never said it would be a headshot. Not this one.
68
I don’t think I hear the gun fall from my clenching fists and strike the bone-dry concrete because of the shot echoing in here.
“I don’t remember the first time I had sex with my father.” Playing over and over in my mind. The tear falling to the table.
Every bad decision has a birthplace. This man coils and slithers around in the sewer, writhing. Grabbing. Soiled in blood. Squealing through clenched teeth.
I grab a handful of the tight, curled weave of hair resting on the back of his skull. Clench. Raise. Swing. His face becomes a battering ram into the tunnel wall. The concrete gets a load of Derne’s facial bones and tissues.
All I can really see is Delilah, a year from now, holding her baby. Her smile fulfilled and beaming down, her fingers splayed open and her child’s miniature hand reaching up to palm its mother’s. The small, perfect affectations of innocent life towards their parents.
Delilah smiling, her face flashing back and forth between her youthful beauty and a hollow cavern of splattered brain matter and cartilage. At some point I see her dead body go limp like a marionette with its strings cut and the baby falls, and ash pours out of the empty blanket swaddling the child.
Every terrible thing in this world has a birthplace.
My shoulder is tired from swinging but I do it anyways. A chunk from the tunnel corner breaks loose and rolls off into the pooling shadows, leaving small blood-prints like a rubber stamp gone haywire as it tumbles and rolls.
I see Delilah, Darla and Belinda wearing their matching sweaters on Christmas. Three women trying to recover from an unfair position in life. I see Delilah losing her virginity to a boy who said he loved her as a way to get into her pants and I see her praying he means it because that is all she needs. I see a young girl looking at herself in the mirror every morning and asking herself why her daddy left her and why her new one won’t. I see her watching her own lips move as she mouths the question was it something I did? I see the tears fall in response.
I see the seeds of spiritual cancer planted and sown in the life of this woman. This soon-to-be-mother, now faceless and soaking wet, lying in the red snow of some foreign city surrounded by people who will treat her clinically as they scoop her up and take her somewhere where they can refrigerate her and dissect her before exclaiming to the world she died from being shot through her beauty.
I stop swinging when the bones in my fingers hit the corner.
Between my fingers, clenching and pulsing with unsatiated rage, remains small tufts of what used to be hair, now matted and tacky-wet. A fragment of the back of Derne’s skull the size of my palm.
