Black Cat Weekly #127

Chapter 5-1

byNo matter how many times she did it—shimmered in next to him—she caught Tanner unprepared. He jerked the wheel, startled, and then waved apologies at the honkers.

“I’ve asked you not to do that when I’m driving.”

“Sorry,” she said without meaning it. “You know I like to start as soon as you get a case.”

He raised the window on her side so wind wouldn’t whip her hair into her face. In the stillness, he inhaled the floral scent he’d grown used to prophesying her appearance when he couldn’t see her yet.

She flipped down the shade and checked the mirror. “What do you know?” Demurely tucked a strand of her shockingly red hair behind her ear.

“I’m still not clear on how you don’t know everything already.” Tanner turned off the radio news headlines. Another earthquake in another country too poor to recover from the last one, another market bombed by savages trying to prove more pious than their victims, another politician more interested in serving himself than the suckers who elected him.

“I’ve told you.” She pulled her harness over her and clicked it into place. “That’s not how it works.”

“More like an admin,” he recited. “Less like a force of nature.”

“That’s my mantra.”

Tanner turned onto Feneos Lane, a dead-end side street he was surprised he didn’t know, and parked behind a squad with its light bar strobing yellow and blue. He’d spent years working the Midtown beat from foot patrol to detective, and it had been three or four years since he’d been dispatched to an unfamiliar address.

“My mantra,” he muttered, “is that I don’t know why Death needs a mantra.”

* * * *

Tanner exchanged niceties with the corporal controlling access to the crime scene. He absorbed this little street, which resisted the encroaching blight to which much of Midtown succumbed as families prosperous enough to buy better schools fled west toward the lake or south toward the mountains.

While Tanner signed the crime scene log, she wandered through the recently tuckpointed brick wall into one of the building’s ground-level apartments.

Tanner kept a careful mental accounting of when she chose to obey the law, like the shade and harness in his squad, and to flout the law, like her direct route into the building. She emerged in the entry hall and waited, arms crossed and fingers drumming impatience. Years after accepting the unacceptable reality of her frequent but inconstant presence, he hadn’t settled on the level of caution he owed Death.

“What can you tell me?” Tanner talked to the corporal but looked at her.

“Homicide.” The corporal slipped the log into the box under his battered metal clipboard. “Not too messy.”

* * * *

She climbed the stairs in front of him and he hated that he couldn’t not notice the curve under her snug skirt. The sashay. He said a silent thank you that she’d worn boots instead of those heels with the hose that had an intricate swirl of ivy running up the seam.

In the years since she’d shimmered into the bathroom as he hurled out his reaction to his encounter with her, Tanner had come to terms with Death’s sleek professional seductiveness. Come to terms with it as a paradoxical metaphor for her alternative, her opposite.

She, as always, observed him as carefully as Evie observed the various insects she studied in her magnifying box while he listened to colleagues or civilians who’d found the body, talked to neighbors and passersby, canvassed for witnesses who might not know what they’d witnessed. Her curiously emerald eyes, large and wide-set and exotic, always on Tanner, on Tanner’s notebook as he scribbled facts and rumors and ideas. It was the same observational intensity she applied from across his coffee table while he pored over murder casebooks at night, muted video flickering behind her as she idly stroked the bellies of Evie’s aging cat siblings, Salt and Spice, and he wondered what her touch felt like to them.

What her touch would feel like on him.

“Found her ID in her purse.” The officer named as first on scene, Hoxley, met Tanner in the hall outside the victim’s apartment. Hoxley had been a well-regarded recruit during Tanner’s last year of patrol. “Bridget Mammon. Twenty-nine years old. Thirty next month.”

She backed away then, through the wall and into the victim’s apartment, leaving Tanner in the hall with Hoxley. Tanner considered that to be his alone time—though he couldn’t help but think of her as always with him, he worked hard to think of her more as never with him, so he didn’t slip up and talk to her.

Didn’t give everyone a reason to think he’d gone crazy.

He’d thought he’d gone crazy. When she’d introduced herself as the incarnation of what became his nemesis, his obsession. When she’d nestled herself against the cabinet beside the toilet into which he’d gagged up the remnants of his last few meals and whispered, “I’m here only to observe.”

“What else?” Tanner asked Hoxley as he wrangled paper booties over his shoes.

“It was the boyfriend.” Hoxley clenched his fists, then flexed his fingers. “Strangled, but no sign of any struggle. He just did her, right there in the living room, watching some interior decorating channel.”

“You know she’s not married…”

“Only one person lives in there. From when I cleared the apartment. Just her. One toothbrush, one razor—one of those lotion razors for shaving her legs and pits.” Hoxley guided Tanner aside as a pair of crime-scene techs came up the stairs with big cases and cameras. “She probably made him watch one too many of those owner-suite dream shows.”

* * * *

“You could call me Vishnu,” Death had told him after he’d earned new sympathy for the Midtown street people jabbering to visions only they could see.

“I’m not calling you Vishnu,” he’d replied.

Tanner never mustered the courage to print her true name. A single D was the best he could do on the rare occasions he made a note about something she told him.

He spotted her again in the kitchen, just beyond the hall closet but not yet into the living room. Instead of hers, the victim’s scent pervaded the space. Fruity, and evocative of the way his bathroom had started to smell when Evie stayed over since her last birthday, when she’d solemnly informed him she wasn’t a kid anymore and he’d jovially informed her that she’d always be his kid, no matter how grown up she grew.

The CSTs did their thing, efficient and brisk and silent, and Tanner could tell where the victim lay, on the far side of a purple couch.

D stared at him with wide, wet eyes. “You can’t take this case.”

He nodded imperceptibly to confirm he’d heard her, then shook his head the same way and approached Bridget Mammon’s body.

The CST with the camera told him to wait while he negotiated a difficult angle.

Another CST, a woman, nicked away a tear from the corner of her eye. Noticing that he noticed, she said to no one, “This shouldn’t have happened to her.”

Moving toward the body, Tanner saw the victim’s feet in fuzzy slippers. Then her legs in exercise pants. Thick, almost lush. Pajamas, he thought.

PajamasHer body stretched on the floor in front of the couch. The coffee table, jostled out of location, blocked Tanner’s view of her face, her head.

Bridget Mammon wore a wide-necked sweatshirt over something like a jog b*a or tank top. It occurred to Tanner that she looked like an ad targeted at her demographic.

Except for the red and purple bruises around her neck.

Ugly and livid in her recent murder, not yet starting to fade with time.

Tanner knew without touching Bridget Mammon that her body was still warm.

“How did we find her so soon?” he said.

“Anonymous call,” Hoxley said from the hall. “Male caller from a noodle shop on Macaria.”

The boyfriend. Did her, got scared, ran, felt guilty, called.

The boyfriendTanner let his eyes glide the space, searching for photos of Bridget Mammon and her boyfriend. Nothing in the living room. D stood in his line of sight to the refrigerator.

That’s where Bridget’s pictures would be. Where he posted pictures of Evie in her Warriors football uniform, sporting a c****d hip and his favorite “go ahead—try it” smile.

Tanner used his eyes to tell D to move.

She didn’t. She used her eyes, wider and wetter than before, to plead “not this case” again.

Tanner over time had gotten good at pretending to ignore D. At first, he’d feared her too much to ignore her. Once he’d convinced himself that he wasn’t hallucinating, anyway, that he wasn’t due for an appointment with magnificent doses of something psychotropic. After she’d haunted him so long, he stopped fearing she’d come for him, he started assuming whatever she said was incontrovertible truth.

On facts, he’d learned during the three—wait, has it been four?—years she’d been his invisible partner never to challenge her. He’d had to figure out how to tell her to stop giving him the answer when playing trivia at the police bar, tell her without speaking and without making a motion that would cause awkward questions from others while she pretended not to understand, a game they’d grown so easy playing that he missed it on the rare occasions she wasn’t there.

wait, has it been four?On suggestions, he’d learned she wasn’t much better than flipping a coin, and he had yet to figure out why she asked him the same series of questions—precise and detached to the point of being sterile, clinical, cold—about his observations and opinions and feelings for every case he caught.

About every victim he avenged.

Every case—every victim—except Bridget Mammon.

Yet.

Yet.“Any pictures of the boyfriend?” Tanner said.

The CSTs paused, looked around and then at each other, and responded with a universal no.

The CST with the camera told Tanner he was done. That Tanner could approach.

Tanner asked the CSTs to lift the coffee table away so he could observe Bridget Mammon’s body without obstruction.

They did.

And he saw Death.

* * * *

Tanner careened up the ramp of a parking deck used by cube-farm drones who wouldn’t return for hours. As he slotted between a black van and a red truck, he started chanting the word D had given him to summon her. “Vocato,” he repeated, louder as he turned off the engine, louder again as he banged the dashboard of his squad. “Where the f**k are you? Vocato.”

He’d chewed raw the insides of his cheeks to finish working the scene, to do his job just like any other job, just like any other body, even though Bridget Mammon, with her shockingly red hair and her curiously emerald eyes, was unlike any body he’d notched among his two hundred sixty-four cases, two hundred fifty-one cleared, the best rate in the metro, in the state. Maybe in the country.

“Vocato, dammit, vocato.”

vocatoD shimmered in his passenger seat, already shrinking toward the door, away from Tanner.

“What the f**k, D?”

“Tanner—”

“Seriously, D, what the f*****g f**k?” He got stuck for a moment, realizing he’d heard his name on her lips for the first time. “Who is Bridget Mammon—I mean, who are you?”