Penny Dreadful (11 page)

Moon:

Plump, stately Detective Moon hit the street with a mean hard-on for something sweet. Maybe a piece of pie, or sticky bun. His first mistake was turning on his police radio in the car. Bad fucking habit, that was. Another thing he would have to work on. It didn’t matter. He could easily turn it off and go about his business. But the first call he picked up was an officer down. He sat in the front seat of his rancid Taurus, dimly registering the details and wondering if he knew the guy. Hungry or not he couldn’t very well ignore this.

Let’s go.

He put the car in gear and drove south. It looked like it might be a hell of a beautiful day but a cop was dead, or dying. Like a brother. Moon nibbled at his tongue and watched the sky. He spat. He had no brothers, not really. The sky was safe, wasn’t it. White and endless with a smackerel of blue tucked into the corners. He made the scene in no time, five minutes or less. Two black and whites blocked the mouth of an alley. Moon eased his car to a stop and sat there. He hadn’t lifted a fucking finger and he was already soaked with sweat.

Out of the car, get out.

Through the yellow tape and down the alley, his shoes grinding in dirt and gravel. Red brick walls with ancient fire escapes. Eyes to the front now and there was the body, a lump of black and brown. Moon counted three uniforms and a photographer, the medical examiner and his assistant. And lurking on the edge of the scene like a pale green stork was a Homicide dick he had reluctantly been partnered with lately, a stiff British guy named Lot McDaniel. He gave a long whistling sigh, his throat gurgling like a fucked pipe. Lot McDaniel. Of all the cops he might run into this A.M…son of a whore. How he hated that fucking limey.

And now McDaniel came skittering toward him, all ghoulish and pale.

Moon, old fellow. Don’t believe we’ve seen you in a day or two.

The bastard, thought Moon. He always laid the accent on thick when he wanted to get up your ass.

Yeah, he said. I’ve been sick.

McDaniel sneered. Oh, my. You aren’t sick of police work, we hope.

Shut up, said Moon. What’s the story?

Yes, well. Tragic bloody thing. Narcotics officer name of Mulligan. Throat ripped out and he didn’t suffer much, as they say. No badge, no gun on his person. Dead since last night at least.

Ripped out how?

Bare hands, old boy. And teeth. The coroner says it was a fair imitation of an animal’s kill.

Fucking hell.

McDaniel shrugged. Come on, then. Have a look.

Yeah, said Moon. But his feet weren’t so cooperative and it was a moment or two before he could drag himself along behind McDaniel. The uniforms ducked away as they approached, lighting cigarettes and murmuring about hockey. The medical examiner was lazily packing his gear. He nodded at Moon with an empty face. The photographer snapped one last shot, and Moon flinched like a little kid at the sudden flash, the exploding bulb. He crouched down, wheezing. His shirt was dripping. The dead man lay on his side like he was having a nap. Brown hair razored short. Black jeans and a brown leather jacket, buttoned up to the collar. His hands were in his fucking pockets and his throat was a bloody mess. It was pure hamburger. Moon took a long look at the guy’s face and saw that he was young, maybe thirty. Thin, sunken cheeks. Black eyes and a crooked nose and this dead man was no one he knew.

Not too healthy, was he? said Moon.

McDaniel coughed. There’s been no bloodwork done yet, of course. But he has the look of a user, no question there. An off-duty incident, possibly. Two junkies scrapping for the same bag or something along those lines.

The guy’s got his hands in his pockets, said Moon.

McDaniel sniffed. It’s only a theory, don’t you know.

What’s his first name?

Fred, said McDaniel. His name was Fred, I believe.

Fred Mulligan, said Moon. I’m sure he deserved better.

What do you think, McDaniel whispered. Does he look familiar?

No, said Moon. I’ve never seen him before.

Moon felt hot. His face was sweating now. His face. What kind of god would give him a sweating face. Oh, he was a fucking wreck and he only wanted something sweet for breakfast. There was nothing he could do for dead Fred Mulligan. Nothing he could do and McDaniel was crouched very close to him, too close. His long, white hands hanging from his bent knees like two sleeping doves. McDaniel smelled of rosewater and boiled sugar. Moon stood up, wiping at his damp face with one dirty sleeve.

What about Jimmy Sky, said McDaniel. Do you think Jimmy killed him?

You, said Moon. You motherfucker. Jimmy is no killer.

Jimmy Sky, said McDaniel. His voice dripping scorn. What kind of name is that?

McDaniel stood up now and Moon glared at him for a long twisting moment and maybe his eyes played some kind of trick on him or maybe the clouds were shifting fast up there but something happened to McDaniel’s face. His nostrils were suddenly three sizes too big and there was a ridge across his forehead and his skin was like leather and those were fucking fangs jutting up over his lip. He looked like a dog, a dog-man. Then the shadows relaxed and his eyes went normal and McDaniel wore his own thin-lipped pale face.

What do you know about Jimmy Sky? said Moon.

Not much, said McDaniel. I know you won’t find him, though.

Moon lunged at him with a vague idea of thumbing the bastard’s eyes out and McDaniel snorted, stepping sideways. Moon fell against a rack of garbage pails with an embarrassing crash. He lay there in a heap for two seconds, three. He gazed up at the sky and thought of poor old Charlie Brown and how often the round-headed kid had this very same view of the world. Moon shoved himself back to his feet, panting. McDaniel hopped forward with the dainty footwork of a ballet dancer and punched him in the throat with an elegant, blinding left-handed jab. And Moon went down again, easily.

Take the day off, said McDaniel. You look like shit. You look a lot like our dead Fred, there.

I walked in the heart of downtown. Where the tall, mirrored buildings gleamed. One of my friends was a lawyer of sorts, with an office in the labyrinth. Griffin, the smiler.

I moodily kicked at a piece of broken glass, spinning it into the street. I wondered if the fucker was still my friend. Maybe not. The last time I saw him was two or three years ago. Griffin had dragged me to some very popular but hateful nightclub that was so packed with mad, happy people that the one unisex bathroom was like a furious game of Twister. People had been living in there, growing rapidly old as they exchanged drugs and money without pause. They had chatted on cell phones, smoking and drinking. And they had noisily fucked each other in the stalls. It was nothing out of the ordinary, right. But that shit gets pretty tedious, after a while. I had finally gone out to get some air, to urinate in peace behind an abandoned car. Griffin followed me, and I clearly remember asking Griffin in a sleepy voice what time it was and Griffin turning to face me, grinning. His eyes like wet black stones.

What time is it, said Griffin.

Menacing.

What the fuck. The fuck.

I had just stared at him, blank and probably smiling. And in a moment of universal weirdness, Griffin pissed all over my legs. He shook his dick at me, then breezily told me to fuck off and walked away. He hailed a cab and left me standing there in damp, stinking pants.

And I had ended up going home with a drunk little bank teller who apparently was equipped with no sense of smell. I apparently collapsed on her kitchen floor without fucking her, which annoyed her. She called the cops on me, then herself went to sleep before they arrived. Two moody beat cops did show up, an hour or so later. They banged on the door until I woke up and let them in. They smirked when I identified myself. The bank teller was by then mostly naked and snoring on the couch. The uniforms looted her fridge and made a big show of checking out her body, cheerfully deriding my lack of taste.

They gave me a ride home and I crawled like a rat into bed with my wife, Lucy. She wasn’t dead yet, then. But she was dying pretty efficiently. Cancer and depression were ganging up on her without a bit of mercy.

And I had not seen Griffin again after that. I didn’t expect him to have changed much. Nobody changes, really. Griffin would literally pounce on this coke.

Now traffic swelled around me. The noise and shock of overpopulation.

Vertigo, nausea.

It was boring to freak out all the time. If I could only remind myself to concentrate, nothing rattled me. I was a cool one at heart, really. Oh, yeah. If I was dead, maybe. Then I might relax. Downtown always troubled me. I was careful to avoid the pedestrian mall, the gauntlet of gift shops and juice huts along which senior citizens and random tourists gamely refused to buy ugly overpriced T-shirts while sullen kids reclined in the shade, begging for spare change.

Griffin worked in a handsome brown slab of a building. It looked like a coffin standing on end.

I walked into the lobby and was immediately surrounded by mirrors. A security guard leered at me while I patiently checked out my reflection. I wanted to tell him how fucking pitiful it was, how tiresome, this irrational urge to confirm my existence in one mirror after another.

The guard eyeballed me as I walked to the elevators but that was all.

I was obviously no one to worry about.

The elevator was empty and way too big. There was room enough to spare, I reckoned cheerfully, for a dozen commuters plus a nice herd of actual sheep. I stood in the middle and looked at my feet as the box rose slowly, endlessly to the sixteenth floor.

A female receptionist coldly told me to wait.

I waited. I sat on a blue leather loveseat as the woman whispered to Griffin through her headset. There were no magazines in the waiting area. There was one gloomy painting on the wall that could be anything: a gray-and-black landscape of a Scottish moor, a chemically altered examination of a rain cloud. After a few brief moments of study, I concluded that it could only be a giant human brain, floating in a sea of alcohol. I asked the receptionist how much the piece might cost. She looked me carefully up and down, and I knew what she saw. A skinny drifter with ragged clothes and a desert tan, uncombed hair and gray lips still numb from the wind. A paranoid, lonely fucker who badly needed new shoes and who kept rubbing his nose as if it were numb and dripping. A person of dubious means. Not someone who could begin to pay Griffin what must be a very handsome retainer.

Eve:

She lay flat on her back, still wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. No concept of time. She was like a child and a few minutes could mean anything. Hours were arbitrary. They weren’t real. She sighed. It was maybe nine o’clock, or ten. The light had that flat, midmorning quality that she usually hated. She hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours and she wasn’t really tired. She felt a little bit jet lagged, really. Day was night and so on. Boring. Her body was just confused by the sudden shift between worlds. The night before was hazy in her mind.

Adore leaned over her.

The swing and flash of the razor. The frantic wings, the swelling orange light. A Redeemer with the lips of a monkey and now the touch of anxiety when she tried to remember everything that happened and it’s only a game, she told herself. It’s a game.

She turned her head to look at Christian. He was curled naked on his side, facing her. His limbs were too stiff, unyielding. He was pretending to sleep.

There was a spot of dried blood on his cheek, a splash of rust. She had cut him pretty good. He now had a nasty jagged scratch across the bridge of his nose and one eyelid, like he had tangled with a cat. That eyelid might permanently droop, she thought. Which would either make him look very stupid, insane or sleepy. He wouldn’t like it at all. He had blubbered a few meaningless French phrases and accused her of trying to maim him, to blind him. Eve had merely shrugged and reminded him that she didn’t like people to grab her. And that she enjoyed fucking with him, with his mind. She couldn’t help it.

Christian was sexy, very sexy. Beyond sexy. He was one of those guys that sucked people into his wake, male and female. It was nice to be near him. He smelled good and he was talented in bed. But he was melodramatic when it came to the game of tongues and his face had turned fairly purple when she mentioned that she might just quit. A lovely shade of purple.

But she did feel a little sorry for him, and so she had calmly made up a bed for Mingus on the couch, her heart fluttering foolishly at the sight of an indentation in the crushed velvet that might have been left by Phineas. His head, his bent elbow. His foot. Jesus Christ. She was such a simple girl and all she wanted was a big brother. Mingus thanked her silently and laid himself down, pale as a monk.