Slippin' into Darkness

10:39 P.M.

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.

Steve crossed Marvis’s lawn, which was now a muddy swamp. He wished that he had Ernest Kellogg’s bright yellow galoshes. A fireman tried to stop him, but Steve flashed his badge.

“He’s okay,” came a voice from the garage.

Steve recognized Sergeant Rafer Williams’s rasping baritone. The previous winter, he had worked swing shift under Williams. Rafer smiled and they shook hands.

“Johnny-on-the-spot, huh, Austin? I just got here myself. Don’t tell me you’re turning into one of those nuts with a police radio.”

“No. I was just passing by. I went to high school with the guy who lived here.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah…he okay?”

Rafer shrugged. “The boys tell me that there’s a body in the house. Crispy critter. Right in the living room. Poor sucker didn’t know what hit him. Molotov cocktails we think.” He pointed. “Anyway if the corpse is your man, he ain’t close to okay. Punks threw the cocktails right through the front window there. Fire boys say that things got going quick-the basement was full of chemicals and stuff.”

“Marvis Hanks ran a photo shop.”

“That’s the story huh?” Williams paused a beat.

“ Marvis Hanks? You don’t mean the guy was Marvis Hanks’s boy?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn. Me and his daddy went back some. There was a time when we were the only two black guys on the force. Hanks was kind of a cold fish, not a social guy at all, but he was a helluva cop.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “He was my training officer.”

They stood there for a minute. Rafer lit a cigarette, and Steve was surprised to find that the stink of the little cancer stick bothered him more than the raw odor of burnt wood.

Across the street, the black guy laughed and the cop who was interviewing him smiled. The kid in the leather jacket was cuffed and shoved into a police car. For the first time, Steve noticed the girl with the swollen eye sitting in another car, all alone.

The ambulance that had been on scene pulled away from the curb, empty. Flecks of granite-colored ash danced off the vehicle as it picked up speed, drifting to the street like dirty snowflakes, but a few hung in the air long enough to hit the windshield of a black sedan that pulled smoothly into the driveway.

The guy who exited the sedan wore jeans, tennis shoes, and an old Grateful Dead T-shirt.

“Here’s the coroner,” Williams said. “Let’s get this over with.”

The three men entered the house. Williams and the coroner, whose name was Vince Ching, held flashlights. Puddles of oily, wet soot pooled on the floor. “Damn,” Ching said. “Here goes another forty bucks. I’m still stupid enough to answer a call wearing white tennies. You’d think I hadn’t been doing this shit for fifteen years.”

“What you guys need is a uniform,” Rafer said.

Ching nodded. “Maybe we could get black cloaks and skull masks. Scythes, too. A whole squad of grim reapers.”

Rafer laughed. “Well, anything would be better than that tie-dyed shit.”

“Don’t start.” The coroner pinned his flashlight between his arm and ribs while he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. The gloves made snapping sounds, like giant rubber bands.

Rafer’s light swept the floor. It was a small room, and he found the body soon enough. “I’ll never get used to this,” he said.

Steve stared at the body. It lay in a pool of water.

Calling the thing a crispy critter was an understatement. The corpse was slick black from head to foot, and it looked like it would flake away to nothing if anyone tried to move it. Worst of all, the arms were drawn up, as if the corpse had been trying to ward off an attack at the moment of death.

“Jesus,” Steve whispered. “Look at the arms…you think he saw it coming?”

The coroner shook his head. He was on his knees, next to the corpse. “No. It’s called pugilistic attitude. Flesh burns and muscles tighten. The arms curl up. It’s a completely natural reaction.” He paused. “And it’s not a he. It’s a she. And yes, she probably did see it coming. Death by fire isn’t instantaneous, and neither is it pleasant.”

Words spilled from Steve’s mouth. “I knew the guy who lived here. His name was Marvis Hanks. Single guy… Are you sure this isn’t him?”

The coroner’s smiling face bobbed in a circle of illumination cast by Rafer Williams’s flashlight. Ching said, simply, “This isn’t Marvis Hanks, pal. I can tell a boy from a girl.”

Steve’s knees wobbled, but neither flashlight was aimed in his direction and no one noticed. He recovered enough to ask, “Anyone else in the house, Rafer?”

“No,” the sergeant said. “Not that we saw. The basement’s a swamp though. The chemicals were really burning down there, and the fire boys sluiced it down pretty well. Water heater was down there, too, and it was spilling water until we got the main turned off. We’ll have to check again but-”

“Damn,” Ching said. “Will you look at this.”

Rafer Williams redirected his flashlight beam. “Sweet Jesus. Who…what kind of a man would do something like that?”

The corpse’s jaws were drawn wide, locked, straining around a billiard ball. The cheeks had split like jerky and curled up, receding to eye level like slashed window shades. The billiard ball was singed and slightly melted, but the number eight was still visible between two rows of stark white molars that were bordered by blackened gums.

Ching whispered, “I’ve seen things, but…”

“My God,” Williams said. “The things that happen on a quiet little street like this one. After all these years, I still hate havin’ my nose rubbed in it. What do you think, Austin? What kind of a guy was Marvis Hanks’s boy, anyhow?”

Suddenly, Rafer Williams realized that he was talking to himself. “Steve?” he called. “Hey, Austin, where’d you go?”

Two flashlight beams swept the room.

Steve Austin was gone.

Steve swore at himself. At his hesitation. Paying attention to the stupid questions that danced in his head had done this to him. If he had lost everything because of that… If he had lost April…

He couldn’t believe it. Life had given him a second chance, and now-

Steve threw open the garage door and flicked on the light. The door to his fortress of solitude hung open. The top hinge was broken. The varnished oak was scarred, splintered. Steve stepped into the room.

Life had given him a second chance, and now it was gone. All his life he had wanted to break the distance. He had longed to feel the way other people felt, see things the way they saw them. He had wanted to smash the barrier that separated him from those simple emotions. But he had never imagined that the distance that cut him off from others also protected him from the world. It kept him from trusting. Kept him from believing lies and false promises.

And Hanks had promised him. Marvis had sworn to stay away from April. But he hadn’t done that.

Steve stepped over Doug Douglas’s corpse. The girl from the land of dreams and nightmares was gone. The empty husk of April Destino leaned at an odd angle in the far corner. It didn’t look like something broken; it just looked like something dead.

There was a note pinned to the dreamweaver’s cheek:

ONE CHEERLEADER FOR ONE MOVIE SEE YOU AT SKYVIEW

Skyview. The cemetery. For the first time since childhood, tears filled Steve’s eyes.

“You lying bastards,” he whispered.

To have seen April like that, in Marvis Hanks’s house. Burned down to nothing. Pugilistic Attitude… shit, he didn’t care what the coroner had called it. He knew that April had died shrinking from her nightmare, just as he knew that he would forever picture her lying there in a filthy puddle of her own oily ashes, an eight ball jammed in her mouth.

To have seen her there, like that. To see her here, like this.

To see her dead twice.

It was all his fault. Things had really gotten away from him. He should have shot Marvis Hanks dead behind the counter at the camera shop. He should have broken every bone in Bat Bautista’s body with his tonfa. Instead, he had worked his mouth. He might as well have told Marvis that April was in his basement. He might as well have told Bat Bautista, too.

And now the girl from his dreams was dead. Marvis was probably dead, too. But Steve guessed that Bat Bautista didn’t know that. Bat was busy setting traps at Skyview Memorial Lawn. He probably figured both April and Marvis were safe, well hidden until things blew over.

The note pinned to April’s cheek was the biggest lie yet. Steve was sure that Bat Bautista wanted to kill him. He stripped off his coat and shirt, put on the lightweight Kevlar vest he wore under his police uniform, and dressed again. Then he grabbed a shotgun from a cabinet in the garage. Sawed-off, double-barreled, loaded with number 0 buckshot-each pellet as lethal as a. 32-caliber bullet. He took some extra shells from another drawer and filled the pockets of his denim coat.

Something was wrong. There should have been a box of. 45-caliber ammunition next to the shotgun shells. Steve closed the drawer, opened another. His. 45 was missing, too.

Bat Fucking Bautista. And Steve had hoped to stop him with a friendly little warning.

Well, naivete was a bitch, wasn’t it?

Steve slammed the drawer, breaking the wooden knob. The missing gun didn’t matter. His. 38 police special was already in the Dodge.

In a matter of seconds, so was he.

He didn’t bother to close the garage door.

He was never coming back.

He gunned the sputtering engine and drove into the night.

He went to kill a nightmare.