Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

I looked at him. “You ever seen anything that bad?”

He chuckled. “Seen a whole lot worse, Kenzie.”

I turned to Devin. “You?”

“Hell, yes.” He sipped his drink. “Violent world, Patrick. People enjoy killing. It—”

“Empowers them,” Oscar said.

“Exactly,” Devin said. “Some part of it makes you feel pretty god-dammed good. All that power.” He shrugged. “But why’re we telling you? You’d know all about that.”

“Excuse me?”

Oscar put a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt on my shoulder. “Kenzie, everyone knows you did Marion Socia last year. We got you pegged for a couple punks in the projects off the Melnea Cass too.”

“What,” I said, “and you haven’t had me arraigned?”

“Patrick, Patrick, Patrick,” Devin said, slurring just a bit, “it was up to us, you’d get a medal for Socia. Fuck him. Fuck him twice, far as I’m concerned. But,” he said, closing one eye again, “you can’t tell me some part of you didn’t feel real good watching the light go out of his eyes when you popped one through his head.”

I said, “No comment.”

“Kenzie,” Oscar said, “you know he’s right. He’s drunk, but he’s right. You drew on that pile of shit Socia, looked in his eyes, and put his ass down.” He made a pistol with his index finger and thumb, shoved it against my temple. “Bang. Bang. Bang.” He removed the finger. “No more Marion Socia. Kind of feels like being God for a day, don’t it?”

How I felt when I killed Marion Socia under an expressway as trucks hammered the metal extensions overhead was one of the more conflicted set of emotions I’d ever had in my life, and I sure as hell didn’t feel like reminiscing about it in a bar with two homicide detectives when I was half in the bag. Maybe I’m paranoid.

Devin smiled. “Killing someone feels very good, Patrick. Don’t kid yourself.”

Gerry Glynn came down the bar. “Another round, boys?”

Devin nodded. “Hey, Ger.”

Gerry stopped halfway down the bar.

“You ever kill anyone on the Job?”

Gerry looked a bit embarrassed, as if he’d heard the question too many times. “Never even pulled my gun.”

“No,” Oscar said.

Gerry shrugged, his kind eyes completely at odds with the job he’d done for twenty years. He scratched Patton’s abdomen absently. “Those were different days, then. You remember, Dev.”

Devin nodded. “Different days.”

Gerry pulled the tap to fill my beer mug. “Different world, really.”

“Different world,” Devin said.

He brought our fresh drinks down to us. “Wish I could help you out, guys.”

I looked at Devin. “Someone notify Kara’s mother?”

He nodded. “She was passed out in her kitchen, but they woke her up and told her. Someone’s sitting with her now.”

“Kenzie,” Oscar said, “we’re going to get this Micky Doog. It was someone else, a gang, whatever, we’ll get ’em all. In a few hours, we know everyone’s awake, we’re going to recanvass every house and someone probably will have seen something. And we’ll pick the punk motherfucker up and sweat him and mess with his head till he breaks. Won’t bring her back, but maybe we speak for her a bit.”

I said, “Yeah, but…”

Devin leaned toward me. “The prick who did this is going down, Patrick. Believe it.”

I wanted to. I really did.

Just before we left, while Devin and Oscar were in the bathroom, I looked up from the blurred bar top and found both Gerry and Patton staring at me. In the four years Gerry’d had him, I’d never known Patton to so much as bark, but one look in the dog’s still, flat eyes and you’d never consider messing with it. That dog’s eyes had probably forty different casts for Gerry—ranging from love to sympathy—but it had only one for everyone else—bare warning.

Gerry scratched behind Patton’s ears. “Crucifixion.”

I nodded.

“How many times you think that’s happened in this city, Patrick?”

I shrugged, not trusting my tongue to enunciate properly anymore.

“Probably not many,” Gerry said, then looked down as Patton licked his hand and Devin came back into the room.

That night, I dreamed of Kara Rider.

I was walking through a cabbage field filled with Black Angus cows and human heads whose faces I didn’t recognize. In the distance, the city burned, and I could see my father’s silhouette standing atop an engine ladder, hosing the flames with gasoline.

The fire was rolling steadily out from the city, kissing the edges of the cabbage field. Around me, the human heads were beginning to speak, an incoherent babble at first, but soon I could distinguish a stray voice or two.

“Smells like smoke,” one said.

“You always say that,” one of the cows said and spit cud onto a cabbage leaf as a stillborn calf fell from between its legs and puddled by its hoofs.

I could hear Kara screaming from somewhere in the field as the air grew black and oily and the smoke bit my eyes, and Kara kept screaming my name, but I couldn’t tell the human heads from the cabbage heads and the cows were moaning and tipping in the breeze and the smoke was all around me, and pretty soon Kara’s screams stopped and I felt grateful as the flames began to lick at my legs. So I sat down in the middle of the field to get my wind back and watch the world burn around me as the cows chewed the grass and swayed back and forth and refused to run.

When I woke up in bed, I was gasping for air and the smell of burning flesh clung to my nostrils. I watched the sheet shake over my racing heart and swore I’d never go drinking with Oscar and Devin again.

10

I’d crawled into bed at four that morning, been awakened by my Salvador Dali dream sometime around seven, and didn’t fall back asleep until about eight.

Which meant nothing to Lyle Dimmick and his buddy, Waylon Jennings. At exactly nine, Waylon started screaming about the woman who’d done him wrong, and the harsh grate of a country fiddle climbed over my windowsills and rattled china in my brain.

Lyle Dimmick was a permanently sunburned housepainter who’d come here from Odessa, Texas, because of a woman. He’d found her, lost her, got her back, and lost her again when she ran back to Odessa with some guy she met in a neighborhood pub, an Irish pipefitter who decided he’d always been a cowpoke at heart.