Disciple of the dog

NO COPS

I dropped the sheet on the floor, gazed at my palms and fingers. Hands are miraculous things. Placed thumb to thumb, they’re perfectly designed for wringing necks…

I gazed around for several moments, looking from this to that, just to be sure it would all be there if I needed it. In my skull.

Nazi, I decided. The room smelled like Nazi. I drove through the centre of the town. Dark business fronts. Stretches of deserted sidewalk, freckled with gum. The street lights crawled over the lip of my windshield. Shadow and light dropped like water across me. The gleam of my Volkswagen struck me as alien, made me feel as though I were the squishy insides of a bug.

Ruddick. Fawk. If it had been a city, I could have romanticized things. I could have waxed wise about the scum, squalor. I could have mythologized the ethos of the parasite, or even the out-and-out killer. Lots of people deserved to die in the city. Lots of people brought on what they suffered.

But Ruddick was a small town. There was no anonymity to round off the hard edges, no background clamour to lift the music out of human screams. Everything was stark, real.

With no cracks to fall between, the dead made themselves noticed.

The light of the Kwik-Pik fanned across the small asphalt parking lot. I parked next to the car I recognized from that first meeting, back when Molly and I were still knocking on doors. I sat and waited for the paying customers to leave. Then I cracked my door, breathed deep the oily smell of summer leaking from brick and concrete. For a moment Ruddick almost tasted like a city. My heels made no sound across the tarvey.

I pressed open the glass door.

I walked into the white-baked interior, floated past all the pretty plastic colours. I reached back and tugged my automatic from my belt, held it directly in front of me. Tim stared in abject horror.

“A guy pulls a gun,” I said. Track Twelve