Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº15

Alchemy and Silence

Alchemy

and Silenceby Reed Farrel Coleman

My face was wet with Casey. She tasted just as I dreamed she would, a heady alchemy of the sweet from the bitter. Honey and patchouli, lemon and heavy cream.

She tugged on my hair, shuddered, and said, “Please, Ish, please. We’ve waited too long.”

I hadn’t even thought about Casey Rucco for… s**t, I don’t know. Do you remember how long it’s been since you last thought of someone? It felt like forever. Not that I knew what forever meant any longer. Once, forever was a thing. Since Red Sunday it had been reduced to an ironic joke. Unrequited high school crushes are like gut-shot shotgun wounds, but their scars fade with time until you forget you were gut shot at all. When you’re a teenager, the littlest things are life and death. Acne in the mirror is Shakespearean tragedy. An awkward first kiss, worthy of a victory lap. Then life and death become about life and death. Currently, it was exclusively about the latter.

She tugged harder, pulling me up. “Kiss me, Ish. I want to taste me on you.”

Again, she was all I hoped she would be: the way she tasted, my jolt at the brush of her hard n****e against my skin, the joy of sliding inside her, her breathless sighs when I did. But when I pressed my lips to hers and opened my eyes, she was Casey at fifteen. The Casey whose glowing blue eyes had me pinned and wriggling when I saw her for the first time in our homeroom at Murrow. Not Casey (“Call me Jackie, I’m Jackie here”), the Brixton bartender who seemed not to recognize me. Casey, who wanted to be rid of me like head lice.

With the sight of her as she was when we met, the dream came crashing down around me. The world would soon follow suit. The patchouli, lemon zest, and honey were gone, replaced by the choking stink of sulfur. The electricity of her touch replaced by the pounding in my head. I tried sitting up. Then it dawned on me: I already was. I tried reaching to feel the back of my head, but my hands wouldn’t move. They were taped up behind me. I opened my eyes. That was a mistake. Not my first.

A bucket of cold water was poured over my head and an ice bag placed on the back of my neck.

The thrumming fluorescent tube above me might as well have been a lightning bolt. The pain of it set me spinning off into black space. The spinning made me puke, which in turn was another lightning bolt, which made me puke some more. You know how that goes. Eventually I ran out of puke, but not out of pain. When I passed out, fifteen-year-old Casey abandoned me. I was glad of it. She was lost to me one night back in Brooklyn on our way to the Windjammer Motel. We were on the way, never to arrive.

A bucket of cold water was poured over my head and an ice bag placed on the back of my neck. I opened my eyes again. This time the fluorescent was turned off, but the room wasn’t completely dark. Ambient light filtered in from somewhere at my back. My eyesight was blurred and grainy like an old black-and-white newspaper photo. The wall in front of me was unadorned, its plaster as cracked as the earth’s crust.

“Christ, he’s f*****g ripe.” The voice from behind me belonged to the man from the bar, the same man who had tried to buy my M4.

That was the last thing I remembered, him approaching me on the street, offering me a wad of cash for my Federal Inland PD issued M4. After that, it was a blank.

I said, “Puke usually stinks.”

“A funny man.”

“You’re going through an awful lot of trouble to steal my weapon.”

“Don’t be an ass, Connor. If that was all we wanted, you’d already be dead.”

I laughed, immediately regretting it. When I got my pins back under me, I said, “My friends call me Ish, asshole. So you keep calling me Connor. I hope you’re not going to threaten me with death. Those kinds of threats are less and less meaningful.”

“You’d be surprised, Ish.” It was Casey. That got my attention in a way the pain didn’t “The closer to the end we get, the more people cling to their lives.”

“And you know this how, Casey? Sorry, Jackie.” I turned left and right to look at them, but they seemed to be standing far enough behind me to be out of my sight. I said to the man, “Asshole, whatever your name is, you know her name isn’t Jackie, right?”

I got silence as an answer.

Silence.

Several times over the years since Red Sunday—when we were told in the most polite scientific terms that we were royally f****d with whipped cream and a cherry on top—I found myself considering that old philosophy question about a tree falling in the forest. After the oceans of lava and water burned and drowned us, would there be sound? What I knew was this—it wouldn’t matter.

The silence didn’t last. My screams filled the void when the ice bag was removed and a thumb pressed hard against the mushy spot on the back of my head. I retched, but my guts were depleted.

“I know everything about her, Ish.” He pressed his thumb harder. “Ish, what kind of stupid name is that?”

“It’s my kind of stupid name, asshole.”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Casey said. I could feel she was standing close to me, maybe between me and the thumb-presser. “Ish, why are you here?”

“You know why. I asked you where I could find the Holy Defilers when I first walked into the bar. I guess I found them.”

“I hate that name. It’s not who we are.” She was the one screaming now, at me. “We’re doing God’s work.”

“God’s work! I must’ve missed that memo. You don’t like Holy Defilers, okay. How about the Holy Hypocrites? Suits you better. I mean, you were the people who executed doctors, bombed clinics, threw blood and rubber fetuses at poor scared women outside Planned Parenthood. After Red Sunday, you changed sides. Now you guys can’t abort fetuses fast enough. It’s your thing. In a few months, it won’t matter anyhow.”

“We’re saving those children’s souls, saving them from short horrible lives and terrible deaths. We have a priest baptize every one of them.”

I laughed again. “The s**t people tell themselves to sleep at night. As a detective, I heard some of the most ridiculous, convoluted rationalizations justifying everything from torture to rape to murder, but you guys … you win. We’re killing unborn babies to save them. I’m not sure even Hitler would have tried to sell that one.”

Casey stepped around me and slapped me hard across the face. “How can you say that?”

Now my mouth tasted of blood and vomit. “Knowing we’ll all be dead in a few months, let’s me say it.”

“But you’re not a cop anymore. Why do you care?” the man asked. “You’re a PI. I saw the license in your wallet.”

“Talk about stupidity, huh?” I said. “Like anybody needs a license or permission to do anything. The FIPD actually charges a fee for that. Here’s the stupid part. I paid it.”

Casey knelt in front of me, smiling. “That was always, you, Ish. Playing by the rules. Doing the right thing. When we were on the bus that night headed for the motel and I told you I couldn’t go through with it, all you had to do was push back a little and I would’ve gone. I wanted to, but no, not you. Didn’t you realize I wasn’t like you?”

“If I didn’t then, I do now.”

That killed her smile. “Why are you looking for us?” She tried turning her blue eyes on me. “Why did you have this in the back of your car?” She reached onto the floor. She held the rubber fetus with the red crucifix around its neck up to me.

I didn’t answer her questions. “You know, I was thinking about you, about us when I was unconscious. I was dreaming about us finally sleeping together after all these years, but it was the fifteen-year-old you in my dreams. The sad girl with the glowing blue eyes I fell in love with. Do you still hate your eyes because you had nothing to do with them, because that’s just genetics?”

“How was I?”

“You tasted great and sighed when I put myself inside you.”

She stood, leaned over, and whispered in my ear, “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you find out if I taste like what you imagine. We can shower together and I’ll clean you up and …”

I slammed the side of my head into her jaw. She went down and I was on fire with pain. It was worth it. The guy behind me came around in front of me, arm pulled back to punch me. I kicked him in the crotch before he could.

“f*****g amateur. You should’ve taped my legs, too, schmuck! I’ll tell you why I’m here,” I was screaming down at Casey, who was on her knees, rubbing her swelling jaw. “All you had to do was ask me over that meal we were supposed to have. Now cut the tape off my wrists and let me wash up and I’ll talk to you, Casey. Only you.”

The little man was up on his knees now, too, but he wasn’t rubbing his balls or his jaw. He had a .40 caliber SIG in his hand. “We’re not amateurs, tough guy. She didn’t want me to tape your legs. I knew better, but …”

I said, “C’est la guerre, right, asshole?”

He smiled as he racked the SIG’s slide.

“Don’t!” Casey stood in front of me. “If he’s who I remember him to be, he’ll keep his word. If he doesn’t, we can kill him then. He can’t get out of Brixton if we don’t want him to.”

The little man released the slide. Casey walked around behind me and cut the tape off my wrists. “The shower’s in there.” She pointed at a door behind me on the left. “I’ve got some men’s clothes here that’ll fit you.”

I stood and walked through the door on my left. What I didn’t do was ask how she came to have men’s clothes that would fit me.

The little man was gone, but I had the sense he wasn’t too far away.

“A woman came to me to investigate the death of her infant son,” I said to Casey who was scrambling some eggs and brewing what passed for coffee these days. “That must seem pretty insane to someone like you.”

She turned away from the stove, a huge smile on her face, her eyes almost as bright as when I saw her that first time. “You are still you.” She went back to cooking.

“Too late in the game not to be.”

“So this woman…”

“Mary Johnson. Her seven-month-old son was dead and she was desperate. No one would help her.”

“No one except you, Ish.”

“She fully expected to have to f**k me in exchange for my services. I think she really wanted me to because she wanted to punish herself. She half undressed, got down on her knees and—”

“You didn’t.”

“No. I should have. I wanted to, but no.”

Casey served the eggs and coffee. “No milk. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Milk only makes me miss real coffee.” After shoving several forkfuls in me and washing it down with the faux coffee, I said, “She gave me an independent pathology report from a Dr. Ellington in southern New—”

“—Jersey.” There was consternation writ large on her face. “We know him.”

“Knew him. He’s missing part of his head and brain. I found the rubber fetus at the end of his driveway. But it wasn’t you, I mean, the HDs, who killed him, was it?”

She didn’t answer. “So what did Ellington say about the Johnson baby?”

“That no one killed the infant, that it was SUIDS. Sudden Unexpected Infant—”

“Death Syndrome.” Her smile sank at the corners. “I know all about it, Ish.” She pointed behind me at the photo of an infant girl with a pink bow and silky band around her forehead. “I know all about it.”

I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but I thought I already knew the answers to them all. So I went on with my story instead. “Ellington said the New York City Coroner’s office had reached that conclusion, but Mary Johnson refused to believe it. Apparently, Ellington told her what she wanted to hear, and she let him have her any way he wanted her. I got the sense it was more than once.” I pointed to the photo of the infant girl. “I assume you understand her refusal to accept the verdict and her guilt.”

“And about Ellington.” She nodded.

“He was one of yours?”

“Not exactly. He … he …”

“He did the procedures and you paid for them with …”

“You must’ve been a good cop, Ish.”

I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but I thought I already knew the answers to them all.

“What does that matter anymore?”

Casey stood up, taking my empty plate and cup. “What will you do about Mary Johnson?”

“I’ll call her and tell her I found the cellmate of a man in a prison down here who heard the man confess to smothering several children in their cribs while they slept. That he did it when he was sure the parents were asleep. I don’t know if she’ll believe it, but it’s all I got.”

“She’ll believe it, Ish. She’ll believe it. But what brought you here to Brixton?”

“I’m a PI, but you saw my old FIPD shield. I remembered the last intel report on the HDs and where they were operating. Coming here was the next logical step.”

“Of course it was.” She put the dishes in the sink. She pointed through the kitchen at a hallway. “My bedroom’s through there. I’m going to shower and we’re going to f**k. It’s not anything about the past or the Windjammer Motel, so don’t say no. I’ll meet you in there in fifteen minutes.”

She didn’t taste like magic or alchemy but like a woman. Somehow that was better than the dream and more appropriate to what lay ahead of us. She did sigh when I slid inside of her. We didn’t stop f*****g until we were too sore to go again. It was all so glorious and tragic. It patched some holes in our lives, yet solved nothing. My unrequited teenage crush wasn’t vanished or fulfilled, and the guilt, like Mary Johnson’s, wasn’t washed clean.

“The room really stinks of us,” she said, exhausted and breathless. “That’s something.”

“How so?”

“For the first time in two years, the stench of sulfur is out of my nose.”

I laughed. “There are easier ways to accomplish that, you know?”

“But not nearly as exciting,” she said and kissed me hard on the mouth. “I love the way I taste on you.” She got out of bed, turned. “There’s a satellite phone under the kitchen sink. Call Mary Johnson. When you’re done with your call, get out of here and don’t look back. I’ll be dead by tomorrow morning.”

“Are you going to—”

“I am,” she said without an ounce of emotion. “If I don’t do it, they will.”

“They?”

“The SBs, the Still Believers, the pro-lifers I used to run with.”

“They killed Ellington.”

“Yes, and you’ve led them to me, but they would’ve found me soon enough.” She leaned back over me and kissed me, barely pressing her lips to mine. “I wish you would have pushed me a little on the bus that night. I wish it so bad. Sometimes I think about how different things would have been.”

“Everything and nothing.”

“How’s that?”

“Our lives would have been different, but Red Sunday would still have happened and D-Day would still be here soon.”

She smiled. Casey reached into her top dresser drawer and pulled out an old Army issue .45. She placed it under her chin, whispered a name, and pulled the trigger. I didn’t move, didn’t try to stop her. She was dead. She was the lucky one. I got out of bed and called Mary Johnson to tell her a lie she desperately wanted to hear. /MT