American Nocturne Page 4

  “Yes.” She rewound farther back, stopped the picture on the head and torso shot he’d seen earlier. “Just look at that. Look. And this time, see it.”

  The face peered back at him, the same one as before. Only this time, it looked different.

  “That’s impossible,” he said, though the words lacked power as they hissed out of his mouth, sliding over his own ears and dissipating like they lacked enough conviction to take hold.

  “Don’t bother fighting it. It’s too late for that.”

  He stared at the image, his own gaze searing back at him. “I... it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Really? Let’s talk about making sense. Who am I?”

  It took several seconds for the question to register. He tore his eyes away from the picture. “What? You’re the woman I’ve been looking for, the one who—”

  “The one who what, Lester? The one who had the answers? Knew where to find what you were looking for? In that case, tell me, what’s my name?”

  “Your name? That’s silly.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Les swallowed. Those gray eyes now brimmed with portent, the shade of thunderclouds. He had to look away.

  “I forgot,” he said, his voice barely escaping his lips.

  “You can’t lie to yourself when you no longer believe what you’re saying. And you’re finally there, so now nothing can stop you from coming the rest of the way. You did this. You killed Tommy Nifong.”

  “No.”

  “You tortured him, beat him to death.”

  “No! The diamonds...”

  “Look at the table, Lester. Look hard. Does that really look like a satchel of diamonds to you?”

  He moved his head slowly, vision panning. The bag of diamonds was right there. Only now it wasn’t a bag. It was like one of those sketches that trick the eye, the type where it’s a rabbit, until you catch a different glimpse, a different set of lines, and realize it’s a woman.

  “It’s—”

  “Heroin,” the woman said. “One kilogram. I believe you refer to it as a brick. A key.”

  Les said nothing. It was obviously a brick. Packed in cellophane, wrapped in layers of tape.

  “You’re still fighting it, that’s why you’re uncertain, why you keep straddling the line.”

  He stared at it. Rabbit, then a woman.

  “Heroin,” he said. There was no doubt that’s what it was. But that didn’t mean she was right. “Tommy must have given it to his brother. To stash.”

  She poked him with a finger. “And Tommy got it from you. Two for you, one for him. To keep his mouth shut.”

  “No.”

  “You duped him.” Another poke. “Shook him down relentlessly, until he came up with a connection you could use. Introductory buy, three kilos. Told him you were going to give him a clean slate, that the department had big reward money. Witness protection. New life. He was just a stupid kid who wanted to believe. A two-time loser, just like you said.”

  “No.”

  “You got your hands on ten thousand dollars out of the evidence locker. Marked bills, due to be sent to the state treasury, sitting in a box awaiting the court’s approval of a guilty plea. You used them to make some phony stacks, planned to return it all right away. After you made the score.”

  “It’s not true!”

  She waved a hand, rolling her eyes. “Now you’re just denying out of habit. Gambling debts. You were into some rough trade for over a hundred grand, take-your-thumbs money. You were desperate.”

  “Stop it!”

  “What year do you think it is, Lester? A projector? Does that really look like a projector to you?”

  Les felt his eyes move to the table again, not wanting them to, but unable to resist. There was the screen with the image, the machine, but the shape was all wrong. It was flat, with a keyboard, the screen hinged to the back of it. His own face still glaring angrily back at him.

  “Desperate,” she repeated.

  His mind began to race, thoughts bumping and ricocheting. Nothing seemed real, yet he felt something wash over his memories, rinsing the scales away. Images sprang up, cascading over one another. Tommy Nifong’s kitchen, the phone on the counter not a rotary two-piece, but a large flat cellphone. The bar where he started the evening, not just empty, but abandoned, laced with cobwebs, the glass he mimed drinking from cracked and caked with dust, the piano broken and leaning, coated over with decay.

  “And then things only grew worse. The money didn’t go unnoticed. Tommy Nifong got cold feet. IA started an investigation. Then he let slip there was a video, his insurance policy. You were almost relieved. It gave you the excuse you were looking for, because he was the one weak link, the one who could sell you out. Only he wouldn’t give it up. No matter how much you punched and kicked and hammered and burned. The weak little loser was stronger than your will. That’s when you knew it was over.”

  He blinked, another memory intruding. A brief look at the woman, then he ran to the bedroom, punching through the door and stopping. His feet felt nailed down, shoes fixed to the spot. Glued, like his eyes.

  “It can’t be,” he said, mumbling the words.

  “But it is.” The woman slipped by, stepping a few feet past him and turning to face him. “You know it is.”

  The man on the bed was in motion, but like the image on the laptop screen he was frozen in place. Only he wasn’t merely a picture. He was wearing a pair of jeans and socks, an old t-shirt with a band logo on it. The barrel of a pistol was in his mouth, the slide almost all the way back. His head was distorted, the crown of his skull elongated. His eyes were rolled back so that the whites were all that could be seen through the narrow slit of his lids.

  “I’m a ghost?”

  “No.” The woman moved closer to the bed, gesturing to its occupant. “You’re not dead yet. I mean, you are, in the sense that it’s a foregone conclusion. Just not quite. Not yet.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re in that moment, that one, never-to-be-repeated moment, that instant of threshold. Using it to try to do what so many attempt to do. Escape. Seizing on that last gasp of comfort, that desire to see yourself as something else, to enter eternity as a different person.”

  Les said nothing. He looked at the thing on the bed as if it were a museum piece, the distorted face, the bulging head ready to explode, about to paint the wall behind it crimson.

  “I’m not a detective,” he said, the words coming out at the same time he thought them.

  “No. Just a dirty street cop with a gambling problem and two ex-wives. A known bad apple and slacker. A union to thank for your continued employment. Like everything else, it was only a matter of time.”

  Something rustled in his head, not quite a memory. His gaze drifted over to the wall, a small flatscreen TV on the dresser. Another frozen image on the screen, this one familiar in a different way. A man in a suit, fedora raked on his head, looking to the side from a staircase.

  “A Bogart marathon,” the woman said. “It just happened to be what was on. The last thing your flailing mind had to cling to.”

  “Everything has stopped,” he said, looking at the television.

  “No, everything has not stopped. You’re traveling through that millisecond, that micro-instant of crossing. It seems like a long time to you, but that’s because you’re holding on to it, clinging to it. I suppose in some ways, it has been long. You must have stood there in that boarded up bar a thousand times, looking over at me. But you could never bring yourself to do it. You’d leave and wander around, seeing the world as you fancied it, a construct you could accept, one just real enough to mesh. One where you were a loner, no better or worse than anyone else. Not a dark soul, just a detective in a dark place, searching for answers. Searching for me.”

  “Who are you?” he said, his eyes drifting over from the screen.

  “That’s the question you were supposed to answer. My job was to make sure you did.”
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br />   Les looked at her, blinking. “Like, a spirit guide?”

  The woman wrinkled her chin, lips tightening and one corner of her mouth curving into an unpleasant expression. “No, Lester. More like a harbinger. You see, you can’t go into the everlasting abyss not accepting your true nature. It’s not allowed. There can be no denial. There can be no sense of unfairness, no mantle of victimhood. Those things breed hope, foster resiliency, allow for illusions of martyrdom. No, you have to know it’s all deserved, that your fate is self-inflicted. And you have to endure what awaits you with full knowledge of who you are, knowledge that will last for an eternity. That’s why you had to see the answer for yourself. Your fate is yours, and yours alone.”

  Les started to speak, uncertain what he was going to say, but stopped. At first he thought the body on the bed – his body – moved, but then he saw that wasn’t the case. A shadow seemed to emerge from it, growing out of it. The shadow rose and he saw it wasn’t a shadow at all, more like a dun shape so dark it blacked out all light. Amorphous, amoeba-like. A molten mass that bloomed and stretched and oozed until tiny cracks appeared like webs, glowing a deep orange. It towered high, expanding, widening, forming a gaping maw.

  “If you think of this as your endless night, Lester, remember me as your nocturne.”

  The darkness swallowed his gaze like a black hole, yet the void showed him things, things he didn’t want to see, things no one dared ever imagine. His eyes found hers and grabbed hold, imploring, beseeching. She stared back, impassive as time itself.

  His scream disappeared without an echo. At the same instant, so did he.

  * * *

  There were parts of her job she didn’t like, but this wasn’t one of them. At the moment, she couldn’t quite get over her luck.

  The woman sat at the table, listening to the saxophone player, watching him lean against the corner of the small stage as the sultry notes breathed out his instrument. His skin was dark and smooth, his hair tight waves of kinky curls. He was the one, no doubt. All she needed was the courage to walk up to him, to speak to him. This was the man she had been waiting so long to find, his music calling out to her.

  She stood, still watching, still listening. The little jazz club practically empty. She knew it had to be an omen. Now was as good a time as any. It couldn’t be later than midnight, and already it was just the two of them.

  Midnight Bogey Blues

  DANIEL STEERED WITH his knee, freeing up his left hand to downshift while his right held on to the freshly severed head by a clutch of stringy hair. The pickup snaked along the stretch of hillside, leaking over the center line. He jerked the wheel to get back into his lane, cursing. There were no other cars around, no oncoming headlights for the prior seven or eight miles, and no reason to expect any. He’d scouted the place well enough to know that. He had other concerns, mostly about blood running over the interior, soaking into the carpet, entrenching itself into the seams of the vinyl. He prayed the thin sheet of plastic covering the seat next to him and the small towel spread over it would be enough.

  He often found himself praying like that, though he was never certain to whom.

  The road began to incline again, and he took the opportunity to let some of the tension in his body dissipate. He could use his right hand to shift again, albeit only if he did it quickly and if he pressed with his palm so as not to get any gore from his fingertips on the shifter knob. Gravity would keep the head in place for that split second. Something to be grateful for, he supposed.

  The head. He glanced down at it, cocking his hand a bit to make the face more visible. The marks were already fading. He didn’t have much time. But he knew that already. The window was always small.

  Another bend in the road, then it sloped downhill again before evening out. Daniel sensed movement next to him and snapped to look. The truck swerved, tires screeching, as he flinched. The bogey was leaning over the middle of the seat, the sharp green visage of its face with its long, hooking nose and pointy chin merely inches away.

  “Jesus!” Daniel said, because it seemed like the kind of thing to say. But the surprise had already passed. Truth was, it had been many years since the bogey’s appearance caused more than a mild start, a modest quickening of his pulse. Too many years.

  The bogey smiled. “Long time since I’ve been mistaken for Him.”

  Daniel cringed. That voice – sounding like a young girl whose vocal chords had been bathed in acid, speaking with razors in her mouth – that was bad enough, but the stench… that was unbearable. Dog shit on a hot summer day, mixed with rotten eggs. The smell of a breath taken in Hell, churned in bowels, exhaled on Earth. A breath now swirling in the extended cab of his newly-acquired F-150.

  The bogey regarded the severed head on the seat below him. “You disappoint me, Danny. I had such high hopes for you.”

  The clock on the dashboard read eleven forty-two. Daniel twisted his wrist to double check it against his watch. He gritted his teeth.

  “You’re early.”

  The bogey ran a crab-leg of a finger down the nose of the head. “Maybe things are just speeding up for you, Danny. Time’s Winged Chariot, and all that.”

  Daniel said nothing. He glanced into the rearview mirror, saw the thing’s true form staring back, mocking him. He averted his eyes in disgust.

  “Why are you so stubborn? Just accept your fate. Embrace it. Think of all the great men in history who have had bogeys. Think of all they’ve achieved. And you know I’m not simply talking about the Hitlers and the Stalins and the Maos.”

  Just ignore him. Daniel knew it was one of those things a person tells himself that didn’t make any sense; banal advice that couldn’t be followed. There was no way to ignore him. Or it. The thing was right next to him, daddy-long-leg arms hanging over the seat, bony, spiked ridges along the back of the forearms flexing open and shut like a cockatoo’s umbrella. Corded muscles undulated beneath the surface of its skin like the ribs of a serpent, causing ripples in the fuzz of black fur over the green, reptilian leather. And above all of it was that face, that disturbing face just a few inches from his, mirroring him. Round, high cheeks beneath large, slanted eyes. Curves and crescents breaking up a head dominated by triangles – a triangular jaw, triangular eyebrows, even a triangular mouth, its acutely puckered lips slanted sharply upward. Ignoring it was never an option. The best he could do was pretend.

  A pair of white orbs emerged from behind a curve ahead. Daniel shifted in his seat, careful to keep the truck steady, and checked the speedometer.

  “Oh, look,” the bogey said. “The local constabulary!”

  Daniel’s hand tightened over the padded steering wheel as he saw the black-and-white cruiser come into view. County sheriff’s department, as best Daniel could tell. He swallowed.

  “Hey!” the bogey shouted. “Over here!” The demon began frantically pointing taloned fingers at Daniel’s head. “Right here! Here’s the one you’re looking for!”

  The bogey pressed his face against the rear driver’s-side window and continued to scream as the vehicle passed. The deputy at the wheel never so much as looked up from the road.

  “Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” the bogey yelled one final time, following the car with his head before bursting into a fit of snorting laughter that died into a groan a few seconds later. “Never around when you need ’em, huh?”

  “You’re not funny,” Daniel said.

  “Given your sense of humor – or lack thereof – I’ll take that as a compliment. We all lighten up with age, you know. I’m proof a millennium in Hell will change your perspective. Don’t you agree?”

  Daniel watched the cruiser’s taillights disappear in the distance behind him, wincing once more at the glimpse of the bogey’s true form in the rearview mirror. He knew the cop had never seen them. The bogey had used that Jedi-mind-trick of his, playing a sick game that came with its own set of inscrutable rules. Still, there was no way Daniel could afford to let his guard down. This state happened to h
ave the death penalty. No telling what perverse set of incentives that might provide a Hell-bound psyche.

  The turn-off appeared in the cone of the truck’s headlights and Daniel slowed almost to a stop, shifting and turning in an awkward combination of moves with his left hand.

  The bogey let out a theatrical sigh. “I’m hurt you won’t let me help. Why don’t I just hold it for you? Free you up to drive.”

  “Leave it alone,” Daniel said. “You can’t interfere. I won’t let you.”

  “I know that, Danny. I can’t do anything. You’re a creature of free will.”

  Daniel let that pass, refusing to take the bait. He negotiated the truck onto the dirt path, saying nothing. The truck bumped along as an occasional branch snapped beneath the tires and pebbles pinged off the undercarriage.

  “Ouch. Wouldn’t want to be an expectant mother riding in the bed of this thing tonight, that’s for sure!”

  Daniel clenched his jaw and continued driving.

  “You know, this isn’t going to help. You’ll never find him. No matter how many times you do it.”

  A whiff of that breath almost made Daniel gag. He glanced at the dashboard clock again. Eleven forty-eight.

  “Shut up.”

  The burned-out husk of the structure appeared on the left in the wash of the truck’s lights. There was a brick chimney and two partial masonry walls still standing, scorched and bare. The tops of walls descended in jagged lines from the corner where they connected, like a half-folded flow chart. Daniel maneuvered the pick-up as close as he could get to the front, forging through bushes and over debris, then stopped in a clearing and shifted the stick out of gear. He engaged the parking brake with a heavy foot.

  “What if those markings you see don’t really exist, Danny? Except in your head, that is. Have you thought about that? What if I don’t really exist?”

  “Shut up.”

  He got out of the cab sideways, sliding the plastic over with him to keep the head from dripping onto the truck’s bench seat. Once clear of the interior, he held the head out by the hair, chest high, his arm extended, and moved a few steps toward the back. He reached his free arm over the sidewall and, groping for it, found the sharpened pole on the bed wedged between the wheel well and the woman.