Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

The pool cue shattered Agent Foster’s Kabuki grin. She collapsed on the hardwood floor. Shutterbug was on top of her in an instant, trapping her arms under his knees. She screamed. Something round and black was in his hand. He slammed it against her face and shattered her front teeth, grinding it into her mouth. She didn’t scream anymore.

And then he was off her, gone, just as quietly as he’d come. But she heard him. In the kitchen. Gentle metallic sounds, rustling tableware.

He was selecting a knife.

She wanted the thing out of her mouth. But it was big; she couldn’t open her jaw another millimeter. She couldn’t spit it out. She couldn’t breathe around it. She wanted to breathe, needed to breathe, but the cue stick had broken her nose. She couldn’t fill her lungs. She was panting, her nose was swelling closed, her nose was bleeding.

She didn’t have much time.

She had broken her right wrist in the fall, but she managed to toss open her coat.

Her service revolver was gone.

No. There it was. Over there by the drapes. He’d pulled it from her holster, and he’d thrown it over there because shooting her would make a lot of noise.

And this slime didn’t like noise. He could move without making a sound.

She rolled onto her side. Started to crawl, drawing shallow breaths through her nose. Crawling quietly.

In the kitchen, the subtle music of sharp knives.

Her fingers closed around her service revolver.

She steadied the weapon, steadied it. He didn’t even see her. His back was turned. He was playing with his knives.

She never got the chance to put a bullet in his back.

The bricks that shattered the window-and the Molotov cocktails that followed them-saw to that.

After the pool players cleared out of the bar with their maiden-in-distress in tow, Steve had another beer and thought about portents.

The doves and the dog, Homer Price, had been portents of his dream. The screaming girl in his basement was a portent of April’s nightmare. Those signs seemed plain enough, but there were other portents that he couldn’t decipher. The tightness in his gut when he saw Royce Lewis lying there in a hospital bed. The shaky feeling of pain and anger that surged through him when he noticed the blonde girl’s swollen eye.

Perhaps these were nothing more than reactions. Emotions he hadn’t previously experienced, except when it came to April. Simple responses which he had studied, year after year, but never duplicated before now.

And here they were, surging inside him. A riot of strange feelings, breaking through the robot precision of his thoughts. Maybe they were portents of the dream, too. Steve tipped back the glass, and the last gulp of beer slid down his throat while the last curl of foam tickled his lip.

Portents. They were lining up in his favor. The dream was a little closer with every passing moment. And the nightmare, buttoned up in his pocket, was wasting away to nothing. Suddenly he wanted rid of it. He wanted to drown it in the black waves outside.

No. He would take the film home to April. He would destroy it before her eyes, proving to her that it was nothing anymore.

That would be a portent of their future.

That would stop her screaming.

Steve paid his bill, leaving a sizable tip for the waitress. She looked like she needed the money.

Reactions. Damn. Even a little thing like leaving a big tip stirred new feelings inside him. He stepped outside. The night air was turning crisp. The white scent of salt rode the ocean breeze, mingled with another scent that Steve recognized instantly.

The black stink of smoke.

Salt air and smoke burned Steve’s eyes.

An unfamiliar shiver tickled over his scalp, sinking its fangs at the base of his skull.

Steve’s old Dodge complained as he drove through Marvis’s neighborhood. He paused at a red light, skipped it because traffic was light and he was in a hurry.

Before today, this neighborhood hadn’t existed for him. It wasn’t on his beat. But he had come here before his trip to the camera shop, searching for Marvis Hanks. At the time he hadn’t noticed anything besides the simple fact that Marvis wasn’t at home. But he had been another man then, more machine than human. Now he recognized how lifeless and depressing these streets were.

The Dodge’s muffler rattled as he came around the corner. Just ahead, lights flashed on the roofs of police cars and fire trucks, and Steve’s pupils shut down. The emergency vehicles were parked in front the third house on the left side of the street. Marvis Hanks’s house.

Steve pulled to the curb. Thin curls of smoke rose from the roof line. The firemen ignored them, busily connecting their hoses from a fire hydrant near the house. Their work was finished. Maybe Marvis Hanks was finished, too. Steve found himself hoping that were the case. He wasn’t ashamed of the thought. He had felt something for Marvis’s father, not Marvis. It would suit him fine if every bit of April’s nightmare was transformed into charred rubble this very night. The larger of the two fire trucks pulled away. A couple of firemen sagged on the rear bumper of the other, talking and sharing a cigarette, while two others entered the house with flashlights and axes. Steve turned his attention from the fire crew to the policemen. Three cars were on the scene, but it was a little hard to see what his brother officers were up to because everyone who lived on the street was in the street, watching the action. He picked out a uniform who was standing on a small rectangular lawn across the street from Hanks’s house. A heavyset black man was talking to the cop. The man held a baseball bat in his right hand. The cop took the bat away from him. The black guy pointed across the street, and Steve glanced over. As people moved away from the fire truck, and Steve saw another cop talking to a kid in a black leather jacket.

The kid from the bar. Steve was out of his car in an instant, skirting the big black guy and the cop holding the ball bat. “Damn right, I hit him,” the black guy said. “I’m sitting in my living room, and I see this guy and a couple of other…maybe three others…run up and throw bricks through my neighbor’s window. And then I saw that one of ’em had some bottles that was burning, and he tossed them through the window before I could even blink.” He shook his head. “Explosion came too fast. Screams didn’t even last a second. But those boys didn’t get away fast. They stood there watching the damn fire like they was proud of what they’d done, and I was all over one of ’em…the one you got over there. I would have had the others but…”

Steve walked away, not wanting to hear the rest of it. He crossed the street, avoiding the kid in the leather jacket. He didn’t want the kid to point him out, or mention anything about the offer he’d made in the bar.

He wanted to find out about Marvis Hanks.

Christ. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Hanks was playing around with the pretty young thing that came to the bar. He got too rough with her. Maybe he always did that, or maybe he’d had a particularly bad day.

Steve smiled sourly. Another emotion added to his repertoire. Welcome, compassion. He pushed the feeling away. Even though he was a rookie in matters of emotion, he knew that his compassion, in this case, was badly misplaced.

Okay, Hanks had a bad day. Well, he was probably due more than a couple. And then he made the mistake of taking his bad temper out on someone who knew how to play rough.