R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

“Who then?” Molly cried.

“Someone who thinks he’s selling out.”

That’s the thing about power: it ropes in rationalizations the way shit draws flies. And Albert himself had said white supremacist types had a weakness for whacking each other…

“Caleb?” I asked. Poor bastard. He was one of those guys: no matter where you aimed, you could be sure as shit that he would come stumbling into your sights. I thought of his daughter squirming and kicking in the pool. I thought of the Bonjours’ daughter doing the same in the open air…

“Caleb?” I repeated.

He just stood there, terror in uniform. Molly, who had been aghast moments earlier, now had a covert, concentrated look, like the bitch who had won bingo yet again but was too wary of resentment to openly celebrate.

“I know what we need to fight these guys,” she said in response to my questioning gaze.

“And what’s that?” Nolen asked in a voice that was more than a little panicked. Was he thinking about his daughter swimming beneath Reverend Nill and his crazed eyes? To this day, I wonder.

“Publicity,” she said, and I could see the triumph shining bright in the cracks of her sombre expression. She had found her break and she knew it. Poor Dead Jennifer.

“The national spotlight.” Even for a cynic like me, that was a new one. The National Spotlight. A phrase from salacious crime shows and pompous cultural studies seminars come to the real world-and sounding almost normal.

What a rich and absurd life I lead. Chock full of nuts.

Molly said this and poof, the tension was gone. It’s funny how it works, the way we think in stories even when we find ourselves beyond the narrative pale. Complication had piled onto complication, and we had climbed the crisis summit. Here we were, stranded in the dead of night with assorted body parts in the wrecked heart of an old foundry, and suddenly it all seemed downhill. If it hadn’t been for Nolen and his uniform, I probably would have sparked a joint.

The only wrinkle remaining was that we had accompanied Nolen on this little adventure.

“It would be better,” he said with the blank face of a brain running successive worst-case scenarios, “if you two, ah… let me handle this.”

He was speaking the international language of in-over-their-head amateurs now, a lingo I had learned from my commanding officers during the war.

“Yeah,” I said with a sage nod. “It would probably be better if you discovered this after you dropped us off at the motel.”

Molly had that squint women get when they smell masculine-scented bullshit. Motes of dust settled through the random wag of our flashlight beams. “What are you saying?”

We all get pinched by circumstances like this, times when saving face and necessity collide. Me? I embrace the embarrassment. Say Yeah, so I’m a dickhead-tell me something new. But Nolen was one of those guys who lived in perpetual terror of his weaknesses. The most he could do was stare at Molly with a kind of chagrined helplessness, as if wanting to point out that he was the one dispensing favours here… at first… but…

I decided to spare myself the spectacle. “This Scooby-Doo stuff isn’t what you would call standard operating procedure, Molls. Caleb did us a solid, so now we’re going to do a solid for him in return.”

Nolen shot me a gratified glance.

“But I get to write about this, right?” She had aimed her light directly at Nolen as she said this. Skewered the poor guy.

“Of course, Molls. Only this time you’ll be the anonymous source you quote.”

I knew she would warm to this, and by all appearances she was. The wheels were turning, anyway… maybe a little too much.

We began picking our way back across the factory floor, each of us mortified in our own way, not simply by what we had seen but by how the competing demands of our lives had, well, clouded things. Jennifer Bonjour was dead, for sure this time, and here we stood, negotiating self-promoting details.

Truth be told, I really didn’t have a problem with this. People die. It sucks. It hurts like all hell. And sometimes, when you’re a cop or a journalist or a private dick, it helps. Profiteering is just the nature of the beast.

Life.

We picked our way through dark industrial cavities, each of us muzzled by our own petty concerns. Then something, a sound, scraped out in the blackness. Our heads jerked toward the sound-off to our right. A shadow lurched. Our flashlights caught the rim of some ragged human form…

And Nolen’s automatic cracked through the hollows.

Or something like that happened. Even though I pretty much remember everything I experience of the events I participate in, the truth is, my mind wanders sometimes. If my attention is sketchy, then my memory is sketchy as well.

Fact is, I was wondering whether I could lure Molly away from her laptop and into my bed. I wish I could say I was pondering the origin of multicellular organisms or the tragedy of the atom bomb, but no, it was Molly’s ass, plain and simple.

“No!” Nolen cried out in bad-acid-trip tones. “No-no-no-no-”

I stumbled forward, searching for the source of the rattle and gurgle in the dark before me. My shadow danced in the erratic light thrown by Nolen’s flashlight. My own light swayed and dipped, painting distant brick walls in dim watercolours, striking the jumbled confusion of the floor with electric detail. For some reason I remember the blood as black. I mean, I know it was red-the way blood should be-but I remember it as black.

The guy was laid out on his back doing a kind of tap dance across an ethereal floor. I understood instantly that it had been a head shot, that the poor bastard was dead, and that Chief Caleb Nolen was fucked-not murder fucked, but manslaughter fucked…

Fucked enough.

I knelt into the old bum’s smell. He had one of those faces you’ve seen a thousand times, on street corners, staring out sidelong from alleys, asking for change, pinched around the light of a shining cigarette butt. Except that his left eye socket kept spilling blood.

With our flashlights converged, the bum glowed like an angel in the dark. We all gaped at him, stupefied. He was dead, as dead as dead can be. His body just needed some time to come to grips with the proposition.

“He had a gun!” Nolen shrieked from my side. He was the marksman. He knew his target was doomed. “Look for it! It’s gotta be here somewhere!”

Somebody always chokes in cases like this. Better the home team.

I stood and turned to Molly, who was little more than an apparition beyond the glare of her flashlight. I wondered what I must look like, frozen against the contrast of my shadow. Pale as an escaped con, I supposed. Blank as a bereaved comedian. I thought of all the others who had seen me in similar light.

Nolen was tripping and scrambling, searching for his magical gun. He had the look of a man stumped down to his bones. I almost laughed. And here he’d thought Jennifer was a mystery.

“C’mon,” I said to Molly as I walked toward her. “I’ll call us a cab.”

“You g-guys saw it, didn’t you?” Nolen cried. He was bawling now- pretty much. Weeping. Sobbing. It was all gone. He had trusted to his hopes, and instead his worst fears had come crashing through… I’m innocent! his expression cried. Apparently innocents didn’t kill innocents.

Molly simply gazed up at me in numb horror. “Disciple… You gotta do something!”

I looked at her and shrugged. It was way past my bedtime. Track Eleven

Things were getting weird.

Sometimes working a case is like being the parent of a large family: controlling the direction of the avalanche is the most you can hope for. Well, the avalanche had started, and things weren’t looking so good. If the Dead Jennifer Case had been a family, Junior would be smoking crack, Missy would be shooting amateur porno, and little Bobby would have been busted shoplifting panties at Walmart.