Disciple of the dog

FORTY THINGS WE SHARE

Saturday night… One man’s dog is another woman’s pig. I get that. But I like to think that I’m a dog in a deeper sense.

Did you know that the word cynic comes from the ancient Greek for dog?

Apparently the Roman Cynics were actually evangelical-some to the point of burning themselves alive to make their point. They went around preaching virtue and screaming hypocrite everywhere they went-kind of like Jesus. Fuck that. No, give me the ancient Greek version. Give me good old Diogenes, living in a stone tub, tossing the odd load in the agora, and searching, endlessly searching, for a single honest man. The dude that Alexander the Great said he wanted to be were he not Alexander. The guy that Plato called Socrates gone mad.

Even better, give me Diogenes as he should have been. Doglike in every sense of the word. Gnawing on his leash. Chewing up his master’s shoes. Crapping on the neighbour’s putting-green lawn.

And, of course, humping everything that moved.

Rules, brother. That’s the real difference between you and me. Every-fucking-where you turn: admonishments, tickets, citations, not to mention out-and-out convictions. Judgments, endless condemnations, raised on the clay brick of half-baked belief. You can’t see them because you can’t remember, because the million ways you repeat continually topple into the bottomless abyss of five minutes ago. Over and over, the same way, the same time. Even your flaws and foibles-even your sins-follow ironclad commandments. Again and again.

Rules.This is how you remember. Rules are what binds you to your past. The content of your life shrivels into a wicker cage of imperatives, where mine is trucked to the landfill.

It’s a paradox, really. Your inability to remember dooms you to repeat things-and here’s the kicker-for the first time. You are imprisoned and utterly convinced you are free. While here I stand, soaked in an awareness of everything I’ve done, totally able to step sideways, to walk perpendicularly to you and your pantomime world-able at any instant to do something radical, something genuinely new…

And knowing, because you’re so fucking predictable, that I would simply run afoul of your rules. That first you would tag me, lest you lose track of me in the absent-minded scrum, call me “crazy” or “troubled” or “pathologically self-centred.” And then you would bag me, dump me into some Secure Housing Unit, or give me one of those jackets with armholes but no cuffs.

So, I try to be a “good boy,” even if I shit on the carpet from time to time. Begging for treats, barking at strangers, not so much feeling shame as cocking my head and watching it.

Whatever it takes to keep the feed bowl full. Take the Holocaust, for instance. I mean, seriously. How, after the greatest, most thoroughly chronicled tragedy in the history of the human race, could a cadre of Nazis take root and blossom in a town like Ruddick, PA?

Fawk. Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

This is generally what I do when I can’t sleep-rant to the congregation of me. I usually try to take advantage of my insomnia, use the time to relive the particulars of whatever case I happen to be working on. But for some reason I found myself batted back and forth between Reverend Nill and his surreal God Plays Favourites rap session, and Baars saying, “What if cynicism and self-righteousness were one and the same thing.?”I understood the comment this time around: the self-righteous prick was calling me a self-righteous prick-an irony I could appreciate. Condemning others becomes a trifle when you stand condemned in your own eyes. I got it.

Even still. Fuck. Him.

I stared at Molly in the gloom. She lay on her side facing me, her hand out as though braced against the possibility of the mattress tipping. Her hair had been swept back in some accident of restless sleep so that her face lay bared in the dim illumination. Feminine yet strong in an impish, Julia Roberts kind of way. Full lips that I could still taste on my own. I slowly drew the sheet from her freckled shoulder down the line of her arm and along the curve of her waist. Her brow furrowed in dream perplexity. Her top leg was drawn forward, concealing her pussy like a Renaissance nude. Lines of white etched her horizons, from the arc of her shoulders to the long curve of her buttock.

I could see her breathe.

Sasha Lang, that old philosopher girlfriend I told you about, once claimed I was the kind of guy who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. That was January 20, 2001, another bad day, as it so happened. The description struck me as apt enough. Sasha loved to theorize, and I loved to tease-not a great combination given that teasing is so much easier. She had figured it out-Christ, she had an IQ that would make most physicists blush. She understood that a cynic is just someone who believes nothing to better judge everything.

So was that what I was? Just one more pious prick?

Take Molly, nude and unconscious, her skin pimpling in the air- conditioned cool. I understood what made my gaze so ancient, so lecherous. I understood what made her so ideal, so desirable that whole industries had been raised around her. There was promise in her youth, strength in her morals, glory in her naivete…

I understood all that-even as the hour hand crawled along my belly toward the high noon of my navel.

I could see, even appreciate, the value of things apart from all our tacky self-aggrandizing.

And that’s the point, now, isn’t it, Doctor? Here I was, poised on the threshold of something breathless and profound, peering into the mists, straining to make lucid my epiphany…

And all I really wanted to do was fuck. That was about when my cellphone spanked out its riff and Molly’s eyes popped open. She blinked, curled into a shivering ball. Her gaze faltered then focused, first on me, then on my sheet-tenting boner.

“Disciple? What the fuck?”

I leaned back to grab my cell.

She flopped like a fish to her side of the bed, snapped on the bedside light.

I held my hand out against the glare, concentrated on the voice murmuring through the receiver. “Disciple. This is Nolen here. I just wanted to give you a heads-up before I arrived.. “

Arrived?

“You… You…” she said, sitting up with the sheets clutched tight to her neck, squinting and scowling beneath a dishevelled pile of hair. “Ugh! You’re such a fucking creep!”

“Yeah,” I said to the Chief in a rough voice. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Sorry,”Nolen said in an entirely genuine tone. “But I’m kindofin over my head with this one. “

“What?” Molly continued ranting. “Were you… like… beating off or something?”

I clubbed her in the head with a pillow.

“You found something?” I asked.

“Another one. We found another one. “

Molly was talking to herself now, her hands raised in Why-me-God? exasperation, her expression one of abject, mystified disgust. “While I was sleeping? Ah! Ah!”

“What?” I said into the receiver. “Another finger?”

That shut her up.

“No,” Nolen said. “A toe. This time we found a baby toe. “ We were scarcely dressed when Nolen’s headlights panned across the room’s curtained windows. Molly had spared me a couple of scowls but otherwise pulled on her clothes-a white button-up and blue jeans- with her eyes unfocused in that unfinished-business way.

“Look,” I finally said as the headlights flashed out, “I wasn’t whacking off, okay. I was just… admiring…”

“Not now, Disciple.”

“I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t want to…” I added as I strode to the door in anticipation of Nolen’s knock. I pulled the chain-the church picnic had left my nerves a little peckish.

“I’m supposed to be flattered, huh.”

“You make me fat, baby. What can I say? Hi, Caleb.” Policemen typically look intimidating when they darken your door, but Nolen had too much of a Barney Fife aura. He was drawn, taut in voice and manner. “Um, would you mind coming with me to the station?”

He looked like a kid, standing as he did, awkward in the irregular parking lot light, a high school senior suddenly tapped to play lead man in his community’s first bona fide disaster. He had that overmatched mien, face and eyes disconnected lest the fear shine through. Like Bush on the day after 9/11, before prayer fooled him into thinking he was equal to the trap fate had set for him.

“The finger belonged…” he began, “or, ah… belongs to Jennifer. And now with the toe…” He grabbed the back of his neck, blinked skyward. “… we’re almost certainly dealing with a homicide…” he said, letting his voice trail away.

Homicide! his eyes repeated.

I understood-or thought I understood-what he was driving at. “It’s okay, Caleb. I’ll call the Bonjours first thing in the morning.” The guy had enough on his plate as it was. Besides, I had given too many people too much bad news in my life. Practice makes perfect.

And as any private dick will tell you, it pays to collect markers from The Authorities.

Caleb’s relief was obvious and immediate. “Thanks, Disciple… I would really appreciate that. I mean, I know I’ll have to talk to them… eventually. B-but I’m, ah…” His voice pinched about a sob. Apparently he had bigger terrors on his list. “I’m, ah, not so good at, ah, you know, failure…”

Why was I the only person who had assumed she was dead all along?

Nolen raised thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “It’s, ah… It’s, ah…”

He was crying-crying!

Fawk. Me.

I blame it on Hollywood. Christ, I blame it on our whole fucking Just-believe-in-yourself culture. The problem wasn’t that Caleb Nolen possessed the sensitivities of an interpretative dancer; the problem was that he had been fooled into thinking he could be anything he wanted,, if only he were to try-try-try. He had been an imaginative little boy, I’m sure, one captivated by blazing images of justice and domination, when he should have been practising how to stand on his tippytoes.

“Just, the stress, ya know?” he exhaled. He tried to smile, grimaced instead.

“Go slow, Caleb,” I said with a reassuring smile. Iraq-the old one, fought for the old Bush-had taught me how to fake crisis-compassion. “Remember, the freak show is just getting started. Everything works better if you tune out the noise and take things one step at a time.”

“One step at a time,” he repeated, breathing as though preparing for a dive. He did his best to avoid Molly’s gaze, which condemned all the more because of its obvious pity.

He swallowed, nodded to himself as if remembering some original purpose. “Sorry, Disciple. Stupid, huh? A chief of police who loses it over a baby toe!” He flinched from this line of observation, realizing that it was making things worse. What was important was that he pretend… That was the human answer.

He copped an artificially relaxed pose, hand on hip, something an underwear model might practise in a mirror. “Um, hey, Disciple? Have you ever worked a case… I mean, I was wondering, if you had ever worked a case involving, ah… you know”-a quick swallow-”ritualistic murder.” That was how Molly and I found ourselves in the back of Nolen’s cruiser, whisking beneath a long necklace of street lights. Nothing was said for a minute or two. Molly and I just sat stewing in our embarrassment for Nolen. I could almost feel him grinding his teeth in shame.

I was actually relieved when my cell riffed for the second time that night.

“Hi, Disciple. Albert. “ I could tell from his tone that he was embarrassed about his previous call on Thursday night. “I know it’s late, but I thought I shoud take a chance anyway-leave you a message at least. Did I catch you at a bad time? “

“Kind of. Hospital emergency room, actually.”

“Oh… Is everything okay?”

“Don’t have much time, Albert. I think I see the proctologist waving to me now.” Molly punched me in the arm for saying that.

“The Church of the Third Resurrection…” he said with an air of hesitation. “I actually came across them researching my last book. They’re what’s called a Christian Identity sect:. “

I knew a thing or two about identity politics and several things more about evangelical Christianity, enough to know that any love child of theirs was bound to be a homely bastard.

“Lemme guess. White supremacists, right?”

An appreciative pause. “You do know why it’s calledthe thirdresurrection, don’t you? “

It was a good question-one ofthose obvious things I keep overlooking. “I don’t know, Albert. They all seem to have some kooky name. I just assumed they used it to differentiate their racist brand, you know. It’s a crowded market out there.”

“Well, they call it the third resurrection because they think the Second Coming’s already happened… “

“You mean Jesus has already come back?”

“Oh yeah. Only this time around he went by the name Adolf Hitler…”

Ever get that wet-your-mental-pants feeling? I always knew I was swimming in the deep end-that I was investigating a murder-but this was where I realized I had forgotten my water wings.

“You gotta be kidding.”

“Shit you not. Just watch yourself, okay? These people may seem silly, but they have their fair share of dedicated fanatics. From what I can tell, they spend most oftheir time whacking each other, but…”

I just love the way civilians throw words like whacking around. Fucking HBO, man.

“Life just wouldn’t be the same without me, huh, Albert?”

“Don’t underestimate them, Disciple. There’s a good reason we can’t stamp this lunacy out. Just look at the nearest school playground. We’re born little fascists.”

I’ve always thought that kids are overrated-even as a kid. Can’t hold their liquor worth shit.

“Hitler as Jesus, huh?”

“I told you, man. Nothing’s quite so cheap as belief.”

Sometimes insights hit you so hard, so fully and completely, that your IQ drops through the bottom of your boots. How could I be such an idiot?

“And let me guess,” I said, my scalp prickling. “Their cardinal sin is…”

Albert said all he needed to say. “Miscegenation. “ People get all fucked up about purity. I dated this chick, Brenda Okposo, who was a social psychology professor teaching religion at New York University. Bitter and beautiful-my kind of girl. A “sessional,” she called herself, which led me to crack innumerable jokes about our “sessions” together. Anyway, she said that humans have specialized regions of the brain dedicated to avoiding contaminants. Apparently even before we knew about germs, we had evolved instinctive aversions that helped us avoid them. Then along comes culture, and the ability to train children to attach aversions to this or that, so that we can be utterly revolted, out- and-out nauseated, by pretty much anything.

We get all fucked up about purity.

The ironic thing was that it was a small disagreement about condoms that festered into the blowout that ended-or “Brended” as I joked to my buddies at the time-my relationship with Dr. Okposo. She got it in her head that condoms were simply another expression of our culture’s pathological addiction to purity. So, of course, the best way to slip this obsessive noose was to submit to a battery of clinicians and blood tests and throw the rubbers out the window. I was busted at the time, flat- fucking-broke, and too proud to take her up on her offer to pay.

The last words I heard were literally, “I can’t believe you’re choosing cock balloons over me!”

That was October 3, 2002-what should have been a bad day, but was just too weird to be anything… really. “Caleb,” I said, leaning forward to talk through the slot in the safety glass. I fixed his eyes in the rear-view mirror. “I just have a couple questions.” He was enough of a nervous Nellie that I could tell he knew what I was about to ask him. He had caught my conversation with Albert-or as much as he needed, anyway.

“Shoot.”

“Why didn’t you say anything about the Church of the Third Resurrection?”

When he failed to answer, I glanced at Molly, saw the twinge of sudden apprehension.

“Yeah… “ he finally said, his eyes bouncing back and forth from the street in the windshield to me in the mirror. “What about them?”

Evasion. Plain and simple. This was when it dawned on me that Molly and I were pretty much trapped in the back of his cruiser…

I blinked and saw him sitting behind his desk-our first meeting. “I know how it sounds. But you live here long enough and you begin to take a dim view of things, you know? There was just something about her that made you think she was, well in danger. Like she was an endangered species or something. “

You would think double takes would be part and parcel of a career like mine, but the fact is, they’re not. I mean, I didn’t simply get into the business because I was tough, charming, and didn’t need to take notes. Thanks to all the retards in Hollywood, I also thought private investigating would be filled with surprises. Wrong. Like I said, people repeat, even when they’re busy fucking each other over.

I had been had. Despite all the goofy precautions I take, all the little anti-social gimmicks I use to remind myself there’s always more than meets the eye, I had willingly jumped into the jaws of what could be a lethal trap. People take things at face value, especially when those things gratify the old ego. So when a cop calls you at 11:38 EM. to say that he needs your help with the latest twist in your case, what do you do? Apparently you leap to your feet like the stooge you are, shout, “Hurry, Watson!” and jump into the back of his police cruiser.

Motherfucker.

“That wasn’t my question, Caleb. I asked you why you never said anything about them?”

But the fact was, he had, only in ways that had made me think he was soft in the head. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I had purposefully antagonized Reverend Nill in the hope of goading him into action. And then, true to form, I had let the prospect of getting laid derail everything. As bad as James fucking Bond, only minus all the class. I mean, with all those references that Nolen had made to bigotry in our first talk… All I had to do was rehearse that conversation and all the obvious questions would have asked themselves. And now here I was, trapped in the back seat of Nolan’s cruiser, with every reason to believe that the turd actually belonged to the Church of the Third Resurrection.

Why else would he have worked so hard to put verbal distance between himself and bigotry that first meeting?

“I don’t understand,” Nolen replied with an oh so phony smile. He braked at one of Ruddick’s few stop lights. I could see Molly covertly trying her door. Locked, of course.

“Well, Caleb, let me put it this way, then. You have this beautiful white girl, named Jennifer, who likes going out dancing with her best friend, who happens to be a handsome black man, at a bar that happens to be frequented by several fanatic members of a white supremacist religion, which is not only run by a cadre of ex-cons but also happens to be actively recruiting in your jurisdiction, and then suddenly, poof, this beautiful white girl disappears, vanishes… “

While I was saying this, I pulled my cell out of my belt clip and handed it to Molly, who snapped it up like a fat kid with chicken nuggets. Caleb didn’t reply at first, so the sound of Molly leaving a “detailed message” for her editor at the Post-Gazette seemed to grate with sham intent…

“Yeah,” she was saying, “so I’m, like, with Chief Nolen right now, Chief Caleb Nolen, and we’re heading to the station…”

I glared into the rear-view mirror with violent intensity, watched Nolen’s face from the angle of out-of-body experiences and guardian angels. His eyes clicked to meet mine once-twice…

“I have a daughter,” he fairly blurted. “Cynthia. She’s seven, more beautiful than… I don’t know. About eight months ago I get this call, an anonymous prowler tip… over on Ross and Maitland. Turned out to be nothing… except that I was almost forty-five minutes late picking Cynthi up from her swimming classes. When I finally arrived at the school, I find out that someone’s already driven her home… her coach’s assistant, a woman who just happens to belong to Nill’s church… “

His eyes flash up to the mirror, and for the first time I glimpsed real fury. “Thirds,” he says, staring at me for a heartbeat. “We call them Thirds… “

His gaze bored on down the road.

“They own this town.”

He pulled up in front of the white-glowing station, dropped the cruiser in park. A call crackled across his radio-some small-town nonsense that he completely ignored. My hackles had smoothed somewhat, but I wouldn’t breathe easy until he cracked the fucking back doors. He had fairly admitted that Nill had leverage, that he was frightened for his family. Maybe that explained his emotional outburst at the motel.

Nolen turned in his seat, continued explaining in a more apologetic tone. After the incident with his daughter he had researched Nill, discovered that he was in fact an ordained minister. Nolen had toyed with the thought of discrediting him before his congregation. But he was a former convict as well, one with connections that ran deep into the Aryan Brotherhood and the Hells Angels. This was why the man leapt to the top of his list when Jennifer went missing.

“I went and talked to him,” Nolen said in defensive tones. “To Nill. He was pious… furious… Said that there’s no one in his church who would dare cross his word. And his word was to keep everything quiet, to express nothing but Christian charity, to do everything they could to see the Thirds grow… “

He turned his face to the white gleam of his station, hesitant and brooding.

“Maybe I was afraid. Hell, I know that I was afraid… And why shouldn’t I be, when both you and I know I’m just a grocery clerk playing cops and robbers.” Even without seeing his expression, I knew that this admission cut him deep.

The upholstery creaked. He turned his face back, glanced at Molly then at me through the slot. “But I believed him, Disciple. I just thought… I just hoped that I could have it, like, both ways, you know? So I believed the lunatic.”

And for my part, I believed Nolen. Well, to be more precise, I believed that he believed what he was saying-which is about as good as it gets with someone like me.

I mulled his words for a moment, thought about how Baars had avoided my question of whether they had any enemies in Ruddick. “And what about the Framers?” I asked. “They would know about the Thirds, wouldn’t they?”

“You would think so,” Nolen said. He stared down into his palms, frowned as if seeing a stain he thought he’d washed away. “But the town they live in is five billion years away.” The Ruddick police force was about the size you would expect for a town of around four thousand souls: a chief, a deputy chief, two sergeants, and about twelve PFCs. But since Ruddick had once been a small manufacturing hub of some twenty thousand, the police station was almost ludicrously oversized-it was like Nolen and his people had set up shop in the corner of an abandoned warehouse.

Nolen waved us past his unblinking duty sergeant and ushered us into a conference room adjacent to his office. I had popped the cork on my memory and was reciting details of every similar ritualistic murder I had seen on A amp;E, Discovery Channel, and so on. The truth was, I had never worked a case remotely like this one before. Murders like this, ones involving intentional as opposed to inadvertent clues, are a bona fide rarity. The vast majority are either simple crimes of passion or involve money and property. If anything, murderers are even more allergic to symbolic abstractions than the general population. There’s nothing quite so literal as blood.

It really is a miracle when you think about it: that there could be so many brains-billions of them buzzing out there-and that so few of them would suffer this kind of glitch. Thank God for natural selection, I say.

It was Molly who asked Nolen if he could pinpoint the locations of the two fingers and the baby toe on a map. He left the two of us blinking in the fluorescent glare for several moments, then returned to spread a large map of Ruddick across the veneer-topped boardroom table.

“So…” Nolen said, scratching his head with a pencil while he found his bearings. It took him several moments peering at street names, but soon he had marked the map with three little-girl-neat Xs. Dancer, I thought. The guy was a dancer.

I tried to make a show of being hard-boiled and wise, but all I could really think about was how gay Nolen’s Xs looked. He should be politicking behind the scenes on the latest Britney Spears tour, not policing.

“What if…” Molly began.

I knew her well enough by now to take her thoughtful tones seriously. “What if what?”

“Nothing.”

“Spit it out.”

“It’s just so… cheesy,” she said.

“Nothing original about murder, Molls.”

“Well,” she said, leaning over the map, “what if the fingers have been arranged, you know, in order…” Nolen answered her questioning hand with his pencil. “So that if you draw a line…”-she connected the two Xs marking the locations of Dead Jennifer’s index and bird fingers- “between these locations… and extended it…”

I laughed. She was right, it was cheesy, but then so was the bulk of the American public. Hell, even I had a weakness for skulls and eagles. Odds were the killer was cheesy as well.

“A cross,” I said. “Fuck me.”

“What?” Nolen asked with the anxious air of a keener struggling to keep pace with his more witty peers.

Molly handed me the pencil so that I could show him. “See,” I said. “If you join the location of the baby toe at right angles to the finger line… “

“And if you take the interval between the fingers…” Molly added.

I eyeballed several more Xs along the length of both lines. There it was,

Ruddick dissected into quadrants, the stick-thin shadow of the cross, with the intersection matching Molly’s hypothetical intervals perfectly.

“If Molly’s right,” I said, pointing to the crossing, “that’s where we’ll find her… what? Thumbs and big toes, I suppose.”

“Or her, ah… her body,” Nolen said, his voice as thin as his face was white.

The lines were hand-drawn and inexact, but they nevertheless intersected in a shaded region containing grey blocks instead of the orange the map-makers had used to represent other large buildings.

“What is that?” Molly asked, peering for a title of some kind. “Another factory?”

“Nashron,” Nolen said, frowning and nodding. “The deadest of the dead. Packed up before there even was a China.” The Nashron plant was old, positively ancient by industrial standards, built at the turn of the nineteenth century, long before zoning had become a going concern. A chain-link fence that had been skinned with scrap sheets of siding ran around the perimeter. The main structures loomed above, brick walls so stained and chapped they looked Roman, their monumental monotony broken only by the long rows of what had once been windows but were now empty frames, lattices of rotted wood about blackness-utter blackness.

“You gotta be kidding me…” Molly said as Nolen pulled the cruiser across the turf and scrub thronging about the gate. The headlights flashed across an old rust-scabbed sign with red lettering-something about legalities. A large commercial real estate sign had been planted to the right, shiny new even in the dark.

“Think of the story, Molls,” I said as Caleb cracked the door.

She glanced at me in her wry, endearing way. “Yeah, hey… I might even end up with, like, an in-depth special report.”

I grinned and winked. “I was thinking obituary.”

Not the best joke, I admit, given that we were hunting for Dead Jennifer’s thumbs and toes, but it kept me chuckling while Nolen sorted through keys for the lock-a land mine-sized thing hanging from a heavy- duty chain. Apparently Nolen and his deputies periodically accessed the grounds to check things out. “Tracking itinerants,” he explained, which I took to mean rousting bums.

I helped him yank back the gate, which was quite heavy thanks to the sheets of corrugated aluminum. Our flashlights probed the grounds: pale ovals revealing sumac, sundry weeds, and humps of rusted iron-old train parts by the look of them. We followed the remains of a concrete walkway. The night soared about us, painted the aural world behind the crickets and cicadas with utter silence.

We paused before a battered entrance: a heavy, metal-skinned door that had been smashed from its tracks. Our flashlights chased the shadows of weeds and debris deep into the structure’s interior.

“Eew,” Molly said with the bubbling beginnings of panic. “What’s that smell?”

I raised my flashlight to my chin, made a campsite face. “Me… I always fart before battle.”

“You eat potato chips or something?” Nolen asked without the whisper of a smile. He seemed remarkably at ease, given the circumstances. This raised my hackles once again. I much prefer weak people stay weak, if you know what I mean. The idea had occurred to me that pretty much anything could happen on this nocturnal expedition, and that the world would be captive to the facts as the survivors told them. Just where were Nolen’s patrolmen anyway?

I thought of my revolver stuffed in the bottom of my bag in my room. Fawk.

“Follow me,” I said, striding over the low heaps of junk and over the threshold. The factory interior was at once cavernous and cramped with ruin, like a mine shaft and an airplane hangar all in one. Another stinker slipped loose as I picked my way forward; it felt like a hot marble between my butt cheeks.

The building was largely open, broken only by the ruins of stairs that led to a series of hanging offices above. Debris had been scattered like flotsam, leaving patches of floor bare. Sweeping my light back and forth, I glimpsed graffiti, stick imitations of the baroque stuff I was used to seeing in Jersey. I saw the same FUCK UP NOT DOWN as earlier. Numerous metal posts stumped the floor, the remains of long-dead workstations. The air reeked of water damage and industrial squalor. In the sea-wreck distance you could make out blackened presses, machinery that had been too ancient to auction, or so I imagined, when the factory had closed.

Nolen and Molly seemed content to follow me. We creaked forward together.

My memory, as always, continued to torment me. This time with a Tragically Hip tune about fingers and toes. I did a mental version of blocking my ears and singing, “Na-na-na.” If Molly was right, if we did find Dead Jennifer’s thumbs-or her corpse-I would rather attach the experience to something more emotionally appropriate, like some old Sabbath tune. My memories, remember, cling to their original emotional charge. Mashing together recollections from opposite ends of the emotional colour wheel often jars me to the point of becoming nauseous. Imagine a mouthful of shellfish and ice cream.

I’m not sure what drew my eye the first time my flashlight scrolled over the work table. The relative cleanliness, perhaps. Whatever the reason, I found myself turning toward it, stepping across the wobbly backs of several smashed cinder blocks. The table was one of those old metal jobbies you used to find in high school shop classes, the kind designed to protect ducking and covering students in the event of a Commie nuclear attack. The thing was about as big as a snooker table, and probably just as heavy.

The message on its back lent a whine of horror to the silence. Molly’s “Oh, God…” were the only words spoken. Several moments passed before I breathed.

There it was: a cross in the plain fundamentalist style, made of some kind of wood… only turned into a swastika with two thumbs and two toes set at right angles.

We just stood there dumbfounded. I found myself at once knowing they were real and thinking they looked like dollar-store fakes. The nails, especially-like something dripped from a candle.

“He is insane…” Molly finally said, her face as ashen as the digits it regarded.

We all knew who she was talking about.

“No…” I said. “Nill didn’t do this.” I’m not sure where this insight came from, the sudden realization that I knew him-or his type anyway. Nill had taken a long haul from the crack pipe of power. Like Nolen said, the Thirds owned this town. Why remortgage with a risk like this?

“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