The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 25
It’s all over.
Nothing left to do now except wonder how I will answer for what I have done when asking for admittance at the Pearly Gates. That conversation with Saint Peter will be an uncomfortable one, for sure. At some point my fingers unclench enough for the handful of Derne’s facial remains to fall free. His body slumps. Decapitated. I turn around.
Gun in hip holster.
I leave. Done here.
69
Whiskey washes it all away that night.
The morning brings with it an end. Bathed in sadness, but an end.
EPILOGUE
Delilah’s body had cops crawling all over it before I handled Derne.
They might have heard the gunshots, but we were blocks away and underground. That had to play hell with the sound.
Most of the women in the group had scattered to the wind, besides the dead one and the one still trying to sustain that horrible note to keep her on this side of the curtain. She kept it up for three days before she lost her voice in the hospital.
The one thing about an anonymous group like the Incest Survivors is getting names. Witness lists, accounts of the violence, who did what, where did they go, how did it happen, blah blah blah. Entries on report forms left blank.
A few of the women stayed with the shooting victims or came forward later. As far as I can tell no one brought me up, maybe because I was there to help. In their eyes. I did fight the man murdering one of their own.
None could have known I’d been the one to draw the monster to their front door. Keep it that way.
They did describe Derne.
Forensics and crime labs vary greatly from department to department. Both Saint Ansgar and Three Mile High share a lab, centrally located in Saint Ansgar. It is in the Stone Age. My bullets were either not found or traced to me. I’ll keep holding my breath on that one.
Three Mile High police had traced Derne’s bank account transaction and the phone records to me.
Yes, he hired me to find her.
Yes, I found her.
Yes, I told him.
No, I did not know he intended to murder her.
No, we have not spoken since.
No, I do not know where he is now.
All technically true. The location one I lawyered a little bit. Sure, I know where we disappeared into, but I have no idea where in there we wound up at.
Yes, I do not know where he is now. In Hell.
Then the next question: would I mind coming down for an interview and polygraph? No, I don’t mind.
On the way I call Jeremiah on his personal cell. I ask him a question to which he answers: “Of course the patients here take blood pressure medicine. You name it: Metolazone, Metoprolol Succinate, Lisinopril, Felodipine. I got ’em all.”
“Toss me down some.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t care.”
Ten minutes from the station house I swallow a handful too many of the pills. I don’t check the quantity; I don’t check the medication itself. I’m sure it’s a cocktail of all of them.
Lying is easy. I did it to IA all the time. The polygraph: stare a single dot on the wall, breathe in and out in a measured pace, even voice, chemically assisted heart rate, chemically assisted vasodilators. Set your baseline readings by telling little white lies on simple questions. Creates wiggle room.
Four hours later they give me a pat on the back as I walk out the door. I get home, struggling to hold in the side-effect diarrhea. I finish with that mess right before I vomit from the pills. It’ll take days to realign my system.
Darla and Belinda were crushed. Small parts in both seemed to expect some kind of horrible ending. But to see it arrive on the wings of a family friend, to learn truths too ugly to contemplate...it scars. Darla couldn’t help but have that look in her eye when she saw me last. The this is your fault look. I don’t blame her. Some of it is.
In the wake of the murder, all hell broke loose. Clevenger leads the Saint Ansgar-end of Derne’s investigation. He tied it into Pierce White’s murder.
It didn’t take long.
Derne’s life was flayed open after Delilah’s murder and in Derne’s glove box Clevenger found a tiny receipt for a storage unit outside of town. Paid cash.
Warrant.
The place was small. Six by six. Two cardboard boxes and a wheelchair belonging to Derne’s frail wife. In one box were second-hand nonfiction books about the greatest arsonists of the twentieth century. Fire Science 101. Other evidence that lays all three torchings squarely on Derne’s back and must have sent Riggins, Volksman and Rudd through the roof. Good. Fuck all of them for not listening to a real investigator.
The other box contained self-help materials on things like incest, self-esteem, what one book’s title called “An All-Consuming Crush.” Pyschobabble label for obsession. Stalking. Things to help him temper himself with his feelings for Delilah.
Get out of your own way. Life coaching made easy. Three simple steps to overcoming what you can’t change. Take charge! When a parent’s love goes too far. Surviving the demons of incest.
And then, at the bottom of the box, were fiction books. Far more titles than the self-help books combined. Erotica fiction based on incest. Seedy shit printed in basement presses. Clevenger said the worst was when he leafed through the self-help books they were pristine. No bent corners, no book marks. No notes. But the erotica, they were scribbled to the point where some passages were unreadable.
The wife’s wheel chair: apparently a throne Derne had retro-fitted to put his new wife into. Nails hammered through it so the points would impale when she sat. The title LITTLE QUEEN scrawled across the back. 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. Through the back of the chair, right where her heart would be, the knife he used to carve up White. It was still caked in blood.
Maybe the chair was a fantasy; something he needed to build in order to get it out of his system like those letters people write telling off folks and then they never send them. Obviously Derne was far more disturbed than the world around him knew. I sniffed this guy hard and couldn’t scent this.
Either way, the throne was cast aside for the shoot-her-in-the-face-in-front-of-a-bunch-of-witnesses plan. Good for Delilah.
The dope, just a red herring. The men who ruined their lives for Delilah, a red herring. The drug dealers who took the dump truck load of shit Delilah brought with her when she their lives, red herring. Ben Boothe, red herring. It goes on.
Wrapped up now.
Not the way any fairy tale book would end it, but life chose this one.
I’m not okay with it. But I don’t get to decide.
A month goes by, each second lags like they were stills in the memory of dementia; just snapshots of life, disconnected, lazily passing by the mind’s feebling eye. Another month. More cases come and go. Then one day phone rings.
“Howard, how are you?” I ask.
“Very fine, Richard. I see you’ve been gallivanting, pissing off the locals again.” His voice, charred by years untold of smoking filterless cigarettes, grumbles across the line.
Howard Michigan retired from Saint Ansgar PD a few years after I signed on. He was what went for an FTO when I graduated the academy. Then, seventeen years later when I was labeled “unfit for service” by the PD, he was the private investigator who showed me these ropes.
He still has an office but he barely takes a case. It’s just as well; no one comes to him anymore. They’ve been coming to me for years.
“It was a case. Fuck Derne. He can be upset.”
“Derne? That guy who mowed down some women up in Three Mile High?”
“Yes. Why? Who are you talking about?”
“Windslow. Dr. Marcus Windslow.”
I am Dr. Windslow and I need you to find a certain young lady for me.
Your daughter?
Absolutely not. As it were she was a...mistress.
Why do you want the mistress?
To rekindle, I suppose.
I sit up straighter and lean into the phone. “You know Windslow?”
“Yes. After he hired me to find his ex-girlfriend he cussed you out up one side and down the other. I swear, Richard—”
“How much?” I ask. Fury emanates like heat snakes on a sunbaked road.
“Oh jeez, he went on and on. He hates you—”
“No. How much to find the girl?”
“Why? Jealous?” Howard makes a laughing sound; it is a burble in a backed-up drain.
“How much?”
“Slapped down a cold two grand. Said one grand was for looking into the broad, the other was for keeping his comments about you a secret.” More laughter. “I told ’em no problem. I even called you a cocksucker just to gain his trust. Hope you don’t mind, buddy.”
“No, I don’t mind.”
My revolver comes out, I look at the cylinder. Six fresh ones all packed up and ready with their dance cards.
“I feel like I should toss you a couple Benjamins just for doin’ whatever it was you done to send the poor bastard my way.”
Almost under my breath: “He waited a few months. I wonder if he tried to hire anyone else first, or if he just gave it some time to cool off.”
“What? Who cares? Why’d you turn him down anyways? He try and write you a check?”
Why do you need a private detective to find a woman whom you think will still want to be with you? If she’s that in to you she shouldn’t be hard to find.
Will you take the case or not?
No. I will not take your case. But I will be keeping an eye on you. If Denise Carmine, white female, age thirty-two, brown and blue, five-foot-eight, one hundred and thirtyish, divorced, no children, drives a white Ford sedan turns up beaten or dead, I’ll remember you.
“We had an understanding and he welched on me.”
“What was the deal?” Howard asks.
“The girl. Let me guess: Denise Carmine?”
“That’s her!” Howard says with a chuckle. “Jeez, Richard, I don’t know how you passed on two—Richard? Richard?”
I hear him shouting my name through the phone. I put my overcoat on, close the office door behind me.
This one I can stop.
His door is solid oak. Stained a deep red, almost brown. The knocker is heavy brass; a ring dangling from the mouth of a lion. Bold. Decisive-looking. I like it. I just might take it with me. Four raps with the lion and I hear his voice on the other side.
“Just a moment. Just a moment, please.”
I keep knocking.
The door opens impatiently.
“Mr. Buckner,” he says, surprised. I step inside without an invitation.
I take the knocker with me when I leave.
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POST SCRIPT
I’ve lived with RDB since early 2006 or so. That’s longer than I’ve lived with my children. Not because I’m a deadbeat dad or anything; my kids are just younger than RDB.
I read a book called Shadows Over Baker Street edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan that was a short story collection about what would happen if Sherlock Holmes entered the world of H.P. Lovecraft. Sounded intriguing. I was sold on the concept of Holmes’s superior logic versus the nightmare insanity of Lovecraft’s domain. It was worth the cover price.
A little while later I read Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer. All I could think about was the narrative voice. One of the few times in my life since Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (yeah, I’m one of those guys) where I just gripped a book as hard as I could and knew I needed to write like this. I loved the voice. Loved it. Needed to be like it.
So my plan was to use that voice (at the time I had no concept of noir or hardboiled as terms) and write a story about some gritty, brass-knuckles PI who was thrust into a nightmare world where his police logic didn’t help. Hardboiled detective versus pure evil.
My wife Donna helped me name the man Richard Dean Buckner. We were sitting in a California Pizza Kitchen and mulled it over dinner. My dad told me all about .44 Magnums and how cops worked. I mixed my home town of Kansas City, Missouri, and the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay area for Saint Ansgar.
And then I pitted RDB versus a resurrected demon-thing that was trying to make Earth its new hell.
No one touched it.
No one.
I don’t even think I got the courtesy of a form rejection. I think I just got tossed, un-opened, into the slush pile. Deflated, deterred, upset, I cried into my pillow for weeks. I probably cut myself too. Sure, the book was full of plot holes and inconsistent logic (where were you then, Chuck? Benoit?), but it had a freakin’ .44 Magnum shooting a monster! Rejection to a story so great was tantamount to absolute bullshit from the universe itself.
So I wrote another book about other people doing other things. And then another book, about more people doing other things.
But I never forgot about that dude. The only guy I knew that was badass enough to get swallowed by a hulking, tumorous demon just so he could get close enough to her beating heart to stuff it with dynamite.
And one day, I figured RDB might do better in the real world, so I started writing about that. I wound up writing this book. This was 2009.
Beat to a Pulp published the first chapter of this book as a stand-alone story and I am eternally grateful. I used the pen name Derek Kelly for reasons I can’t really remember now. BTAP editor and founder David Cranmer did for me what no one else had done: given me the deep-seeded satisfaction of making RDB relevant to the crime world. That was such a blast to my waning dream of being published that I kept up the fight. It was rejuvenating. BTAP was nothing to mess with, and if they liked RDB, others might as well.
I did a couple of RDB short stories and was honored by having them published at Crime Factory issue #7 again under the name Derek Kelly and Shotgun Honey under my own name. He’s appeared in Crime Factory #12 and Two Bullets Change Everything, a split I did with Chris Rhatigan and put out through All Due Respect Books.
So, thanks to God.
Thanks to my wife Donna, who, since I first asked her out on a date back in 1995 until right now, has been the sun around which my universe revolves. She has given me the greatest gifts I could ever receive in the form of our little babies and without her, I would be absolutely nothing.
Thanks to Billy Porter and John Regan for being my first readers ever.
To Randy Foster, Mike James, Bob Macon, Jarrod Wood, Mike Aude Alink, Kurt Reinhardt, Edmond Carrillo, Bob Kirk, Travis Marshall, Darlene Santiago, James Gregg and the other cops I’ve worked beside and learned from, thank you for your input and war stories.
To my brothers in Zelmer Pulp. Brian Panowich, Chuck Regan, Issac Kirkman, Chris Leek, Gareth Spark and Benoit Lelievre. We did it, and we keep doing it.
To Craig and Emily McNeely, Andrew Hilbert and the Weekly Weird Monthly gang, Chris Rhatigan and Mike Monson over at ADR Books, Joe Clifford and Tom Pitts (we all know you’re a couple), Ron Earl Philips and the Shotgun Honey lineup, Brian Lindenmuth and the Snubnose Press peoples and everyone else, thank you.
To Eric Campbell and the Down & Out Books crew, like I keep mentioning every chance I get, this is a real honor. Thank you.
To the other writers I have had the pleasure to be published beside and spoken with here and there, I know you all worship me as a living god and follow my every move, so here you go. Chapter One in the Bible of Ryan. You’re welcome.
And to you, loyal reader. Thanks for being interested in a guy I wrote about when I wanted to write about killing a demon. If this book doesn’t catch your fancy, there’s something wrong with you, but just keep buying all my stuff. Eventually you’ll find something that clicks.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book before I became a policeman, so I relied on my father, who stood between society and its underbelly for over thirty years, to answer questions and guide me along as I wrote. I always wanted the book tuned slightly higher than reality—maybe up to 110%, because normal anything isn’t entertaining enough—and I felt comfortable where I landed. It’s exaggerated here and there. Mainly the violence. Whatever is written correctly, my father advised me on. Whatever wouldn’t fly in real life is squarely because of me.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Sayles has over two dozen short stories in print, anthologies and online, including the Anthony-nominated collection Trouble in the Heartland: stories inspired by the music of Bruce Springsteen. He is the author of Subtle Art of Brutality, Warpath, Goldfinches and That Escalated Quickly! He is a founding member of Zelmer Pulp. He was in the military and is currently a police officer. He’s online at https://vitriolandbarbies.wordpress.com/.
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ALSO BY RYAN SAYLES
Richard Dean Buckner Mysteries
The Subtle Art of Brutality
Warpath (*)
Other Works
That Escalated Quickly!
Goldfinches
(*) Coming Soon
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Other Titles from Down and Out Books
See DownAndOutBooks.com for complete list
By Anonymous-9
Bite Harder (TP only)
By J.L. Abramo
Catching Water in a Net
Clutching at Straws
Counting to Infinity
