Shifters (12 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Shifters
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It’s money! It’s cars! It’s suede leather coats, wine, and black silk shirts!
All an antithesis to everything Locke held sacred.
But the vision, the glimpse of her, blinded him.
I’m a fuckin’ poet who works a day a week at a goddamn bookstore…
The real world was material, and that excluded him exclusively.
What woman in her right mind would want to spend the rest of her life with a penniless fool?
 
Yeah, cars and cash—that was reality, and why shouldn’t it be? Locke didn’t have any of the things that real people wanted, so—
Why should she want me?
It all dragged him down, further than ever before. Maybe he was just full of shit. Was his perception of truth just a selfish impulse? Locke looked down the wet street again—the red Corvette was gone, and so was Clare—but all he saw was the long black avenue of his failure.
He had to face it. He’d never add up. Not in
this
 world.
He stood for several more minutes, sucked in the cold night air and the clouds calmly spitting on him. The city was abed; the houses along the side streets stood black. Black shadows pooled across the parking lot.
Locke walked back the other direction, toward where his half-soused brain told him was his apartment. Concannon’s was kicking people out. When Carl said Last Call, he wasn’t fooling around. Locke hiccoughed, then stumbled around the corner and crossed the parking lot.
Just get your drunken ass home!
 he thought. His balance slipped, equilibrium shortchanged. He almost fell when his foot buffeted a curb slab.
“Drink much, Locke?” he asked aloud.
He’d only taken a half dozen steps across Concannon’s emptied parking lot when he heard someone say: “Hey.”
He’d been wrong, the lot
wasn’t
 empty. A single car remained parked in the corner, in rain-spotted darkness.
“Yeah?” Locke called out. The dismal weather seemed to suck all the vitality from his voice. “Who’s that?”
“Come here, I need to talk to you.”
In any city you don’t approach faceless voices at night, not that Locke had any money for muggers. But he felt no fear. Was it his drunkenness, or an insight?
Another step and he made the car: a shiny black Firebird, one of those Formula models; its waxed lacquer hood looked like polished obsidian. Locke’s eyes adjusted in the pallor of the streetlight.
Sitting at the wheel was White Shirt.
“Figured it out yet?”
“Figured
what
 out yet?” Locke queried. Suddenly his curiosity overwhelmed his inebriation. His face smacked of the wet cold.
“How do you kill your feelings?” White Shirt looked past Locke’s shoulder, at the moon. “I know the answer. God just whispered it to me, just now. Think I’m lying?”
Locke was insensate. “What’s the answer?”
“Transposition, man.”
“What?”
“Metamorphosis.”
Christ.
 Reason snapped back, and maybe even a trace of sobriety. “Hey, you’re pretty drunk. You should call a cab.”
White Shirt ignored the comment. “You still love her, don’t you?”
Locke stalled in the cold. White Shirt must’ve deduced his plight by reading the poems he’d written on the napkins. “Yes,” he eventually said.
“I know the feeling. That’s the transposition. That’s the link, I guess.”
The link?
 
The darkness rose again in Locke’s heart, like the darkness which now idled about White Shirt’s head.
An aura. A black aura.
“That’s what makes the two of us the same.”
Locke stared.
“And we want to know how to make it go away, don’t we? We want to know how to kill our feelings.”
Locke’s heart seemed to seize. His joints locked up.
“I can show you.”
Locke didn’t know from guns. He only knew that the gun White Shirt was suddenly pointing at him was
huge
. The giant tarnished revolver looked like it weighed ten pounds. Locke thought he could’ve stuck his entire thumb into the end of the barrel and there’d still be play.
“Don’t move, Locke. Listen.”
Even in the swift, bracing terror, Locke caught the illogic. “How do you know my n—”
“I’m not sure what this is about. It’s… funny,” White Shirt seemed to muse to him. “‘Heralds in ashes, heralds of love. Pewter mugs dangle up above like the hasp on my soul’s broken lock.’”
Then White Shirt smiled.
Locke remembered the beer-club mugs hanging from the ceiling over the bar. He remembered how White Shirt had been staring at them…
“It’s kind of like that,” White Shirt said next. “But this isn’t a herald, Locke. It’s a portent. A warning, I guess.”
“A
warning
?”
White Shirt’s arm didn’t waver against the big revolver’s weight. His eyes gleamed like diamond chips. “Love is a great power, did you know that?” He chuckled. “Of course you do. But it’s also like a summons. It calls to things. It calls to things that are alike. Doesn’t matter if they’re good or bad—you know what I mean? Maybe it’s primordial or genetic. I don’t know. It just calls to things that are alike.”
Locke’s eyes felt stapled open. “What things?” he asked.
“Sometimes wonderful things. And sometimes the worst things you could ever imagine.”
Lunatic
, Locke realized.
Madman.
 This guy was going to kill him. Locke figured his only chance was to drop to the ground and try to roll…
White Shirt cocked the pistol, as if he’d sensed the calculation. The click of the hammer sounded like a piece of tinder snapping.
“People are whispering to me,” White Shirt informed him. “That’s part of the summons. They’re using me, I suppose. ‘Into heaven or the saddest realm of nether… my love for you goes on forever.’”
Impossible. The poem he’d written yesterday, and had later thrown out. How could White Shirt possibly quote a poem he’d never seen?
“Arrivals,” the gun-wielder went on. Behind them another ambulance roved slowly down the street, its lights throbbing but its siren off. “He’s coming, Locke.” The gleam in White Shirt’s diamond eyes flicked out. “He’s coming soon.”
“
No!
” Locke lurched forward and yelled.
White Shirt, his face touched by the saddest smile, plugged the gun barrel into his left ear, and—
“
Jesus Christ don’t do it, man!
”
—squeezed the trigger.
BANG!
The bullet made its exit through the right temple, and in the process evacuated the entirety of White Shirt’s skull, leaving hanks of brains and viscera pasted to the passenger side of the car’s plush Scotch-Guarded interior.
EIGHT
The Second Arrival
(i)
The new dawn left him awash in light the color of despondency: deathlike, pale, drained. North Precinct Homicide Captain Jack Cordesman stepped onto the coaming of the 24-foot cabin cruiser called WE’RE AWEIGH. Another 64; they always got them early in the morning. TSD floodlamps blazed in the entrance, behind intent shadows. Cordesman went down the short steps of the companionway, then stopped, forced to glance down at the atrocity.
What kind of a world is this?
 he thought.
“Kenneth Parker Ubell,” the uniformed first responder told him. “Also known as ‘Wire.’ We been looking for this fucker a long time.”
“What, he’s skell?”
“Scumbag across the board, sir. Word is he’s pinching for the fences in south county. Done county time on a GTA and a stint in the state cut—multiple counts of armed burglary. ID’d him through the latent datalink in my car. Hell of a machine, Captain.”
Technology. Wonderful.
 A Hair & Fibers guy was studiously vacuuming the carpet, while another fumed for latents around the forward cabin. But Cordesman was still staring, still not quite sure how this thing at his feet could be human.
The uniform prattled on. “Got about ten outstanding warrants. A dust burnout according to our squeals; used to deal coke before the Jamakes moved in, and the word is he snuffed two of our inside stools on the DEA jam we had going a couple of years back. World’s better off without him you ask me.”
So the guy was skell. Fine.
What goes around comes around.
But what had happened? Who had done…
this?
The smell was extraordinary. Cordesman hadn’t smelled anything like it since that time the Jamakes had left a couple of movers hanging upside down in a project laundry room. Bellies slit open. Guts on the floor. Cordesman pitied the janitor. The odor spiked him: fresh offal, excrement, fresh blood. Kenneth Parker Ubell, alias Wire, or what was left of him, lay nude upon his side. His innards had been expeditiously hauled out of his abdominal cavity, as though someone had been searching for something lost among the crowd of organs. The cabin had been decorated; Cordesman thought of a high school party adorned with crepe paper, only in this case the crepe paper was the majority of the small intestine, hanging from the low ceiling. The rest had been thrown around. And his head… his head…
“Somebody did the job on this guy,” the uniform remarked.
“Even bad guys have bad days.” Cordesman surveyed the cramped cabin, careful not to step past the evidence line. Wire’s clothes lay aside, unbuttoned, not torn. “I don’t like the clothes.”
“Sir?”
“I mean what the fuck happened here? What, this guy was busting onto the boat for stuff to pinch, then somebody caught him? Suddenly the perp’s the victim? And why take off his clothes?”
“He was raped,” a tight, nasally voice answered.
The figure aft turned. It was Jill Brock, Deputy Superintendent of Technical Services, a.k.a. Evidence Section. She wore booties, acetate gloves, and a hairnet, to prevent erroneous fiberfall from contaminating the crime sector. “Good morning, Captain,” she added.
Cordesman made a face. “What do you mean
raped
?”
“The crime of forced sexual intercourse without consent.”
“I know what rape means, Jill. Usually it’s women who’re raped, not guys.”
Jill Brock shrugged. She was skinny, bony, pallid. “Changing times, sir. You ever walked through Broadway? I’ll bet a lot of the fellas there would turn you on. This guy’s an ex-con. Lots of ’em get turned in the joint.”
“How do you know he was raped?”
“Non-reflexive rectal dilation, giveaway sign. Happens a lot in the bigger cities and the state cuts. Washington, Baltimore, your old stomping grounds. Death by asphyxia, choked to death during the act. You want to see his asshole, Captain?”
“No thanks. I gotta drive.”
“My guess is he was working with a partner. The partner turned on him during the job.”
“Come on, Jill,” Cordesman objected. “His partner
sodomized
 him and then tore him up into a cold cut platter?”
Again, Jill Brock shrugged.

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