Darkness of the Soul (11 page)

Time slipped through his fingers as grains of sand, each second before his ascension grating against his mind and striving to create the pearl of godhood within. To have it so close, to know the exact date of its coming, and yet to be forced to wait for it was an agony in and of itself for him. Still, there was much left to do, and not even a moment to be wasted, if he was to be prepared. So thinking, he opened his eyes to the things that had been familiar to him for many years but always subtly different.

The room was like any other he had been in, for he had not had a place he truly called home since he had become the Warden. Each hotel room, regardless of the city, country, or year that it existed in, was always the same: sanitized bedsheets, always with the smell of cheap detergent still on them, and small bottles of sanitary products that never proved sufficient to make a person feel truly clean; a carpet that always appeared ready to be replaced but never was; televisions that received only the most insipid programming and could never be set to a decent volume, always far too loud or annoyingly quiet; the constant sound of maids rolling their cleanup carts down the hallways. These were his constant companions when he was not with his father in the place beyond the
talu`shar
. He might even have considered such things the signs of home, in his own way, were he a man who thought about such things deeply.

He was not such a man, however, and so when he sensed nothing different about this room from any of the dozens of previous ones, he merely nodded to himself and rose to greet the sunrise, so that he could begin another day of work, marking it off on his mental calendar as one day closer to his freedom.

When he grew irritable and turned on the television, he smiled as they spoke of the much-loved police captain who had died in the night and laughed as they told the tale of the young boy found mutilated in an alley. Busy days indeed.

Chapter
9
 

2:00 pm, December 13, 1999

Drakanis and Parker stood among their brothers and sisters in blue, each of them with an upraised glass or mug, toasting the memory of the fallen captain; such was how he would always be remembered, though he hadn’t died in a dramatic gunfight or anything of the sort. Still, enough of them—Brokov, Drakanis, and Parker, at least—were of the opinion that his death, crazy though it might seem, had not been mere chance and
was
, in its way, tied to a case, and may possibly even be some twisted sort of murder.

The others might have looked at them oddly if they had shared such thoughts out loud, but the fallen Captain Morrigan he would be, regardless of the circumstances.

The mood in Woody’s was somber, quite unlike the standard post-lunchtime goings on in the place. The usual decorations, dozens of dancing figures and neon-lit sticks, had been removed for the day, leaving only a photo montage that had been arranged by the late captain’s widow to break up the drab wood walls. The jukebox, most often found pumping out the overly gleeful tunes of the mid-eighties, had been unplugged, leaving the room silent except for soft whispers and the clinking of glasses. Even the smell of beer and fried onions, normally so pungent a gas mask was recommended for first-time visitors, seemed muted out of grief and respect.

Parker, watching the proceedings with a cynical eye, found himself feeling both amused and morbid about the whole thing. It occurred to him that if anyone had mischief on the mind, they couldn’t really pick much of a better time to do it. With at least half and more than likely three-quarters of the damn force crammed into this shitty little tavern and those not present thinking about it instead of their jobs, the chances of anything being seriously pursued today were basically zero. Thinking about all the idiots loose on the streets this afternoon led naturally enough to thinking about the specific nutjob he was after, so he tapped Drakanis on the shoulder—breaking into his catching up with Perez—and pulled him aside.

Drakanis’s eyes were reddened, both with fresh grief and a few too many boilermakers. The grief had been something of a relief. In a perverted sort of way, this new trauma had helped him let go of some of the old, come to grips with it in a way that living among their ghosts and shutting out the world had never been able to do. His voice was slightly blurry and muddled, but there was enough light left in him to hold something resembling a conversation, Parker judged.

Parker—having had more than enough boilermakers himself, thank you—had decided he was finally buzzed enough to at least broach the subject, though it’d been hard to crack the shell of pessimism and seriously consider the idea for any length of time.

No.
What
you’re
thinking
is
insane.
Drop
it.

That was what his mind had cautioned repeatedly for the last couple of days, and he’d considered it good advice, for the most part. Apparently, though, he had just been looking for an excuse to bring it up. With a few drinks in him, Drakanis was less likely to laugh, less likely to put it off as the heebie-jeebies, and maybe even more likely to take a look at the shit he’d dug up.

“We gotta talk, man. I’ve been thinking some fucked-up shit lately, and I gotta air it out or eat it and smile; and I’ll tell you, I ain’t very hungry, you got me?”

Drakanis arched a brow, working on his Leonard Nimoy impression, but the expression was hard to maintain when he really looked at his friend’s face. Parker wasn’t aware—or didn’t seem to be, at least—of how white and wan he looked at the moment, but there was an almost desperate air hanging around him. Drakanis could practically smell it.

Hell,
it’s
what
you
looked
like
until
just
recently,
and
probably
what
you
look
like
right
now,
isn’t
it?

He supposed that Parker at least had good reason. Morrigan hadn’t been just another guy on the force to Vincent; he’d practically been a second father to him, so Drakanis figured he was probably taking it a hell of a lot harder than almost anyone in the room today except maybe the old man’s widow. He let his face fall back into seriousness and quirked his head.

“Spill it, Vince. Cough it up.”

Parker continued dragging him, until they were at the far end of the bar. This was the part in the deepest shadow. The bulbs over the tables on this side had gotten smashed, probably the night before, right around the time a bunch of kids had decided to get a little rowdy and before the boys in blue, Perez among them, came to take care of it. He then practically shoved Drakanis onto a stool. His voice was urgent, running far more rapidly than his usual slow rumble, and even he could detect the note of panic, the hint of “talk me out of this, please,” that had crept in without his knowing.

“Do you believe in the supernatural, Mikey? Like the shit they got on late at night? People burning themselves up, phone calls from the dead, shit like that?”

Drakanis was about to shake his head—the world was fucked enough, in his opinion, without adding all kinds of boojums into it—but then he stopped and really considered the question. He had never had anything obviously odd happen to him—that he could recall, at least—but like almost all people on the face of this tiny planet, he knew a few people who had claimed to have genuine psychic experiences, people he trusted, people who would have no reason to lie—people like Ed Marco.

Marco’d been a detective, something of a mentor figure to both Drakanis and Parker, though in truth he hadn’t been out of his training for much longer than they had. He’d come to the calling later in life, and so by the time they’d met him, he’d already been pushing fifty, but Marco could still kick the shit out of any recruit just coming in off his POST. He also could just find whatever he needed, and that was how he had managed to attain near mythic status during his brief time with the Reno Police Department. Before departing his position after only five years, Marco had taken the number of unsolved crimes in the files down from two hundred and eighty to just forty-five. Nobody really understood how he’d done it, least of all Marco himself; though a few of the old-timers who didn’t care to have their records being caught up to by a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, fifty years old or no, used to joke that he’d spent the first forty-five years of his life committing crimes so he could solve them himself. He used to say that if he sat and thought about things real hard, the answer would just come to him or people would just spit out whatever he needed to hear from them.

It was Marco that Drakanis was thinking of now and how he could just sit and look at a guy and that guy—no matter if he was some sixteen-year-old caught filching a dime pack of gum or a hard-ass lifer still running on appeals and waiting to shiv the first dolt who forgot to search him—would just crumple and spill his guts on any subject he cared to hear about. Drakanis had watched him do it a time or two and still couldn’t tell how the hell he managed it. He was wondering if you could do something like that to a person from a distance—like from a pay phone in a casino, say—and if you could, if you could do it hard enough, if that was the right way to think about it, to kill somebody.

The rational part of his mind would have dismissed bullshit like that immediately and had been doing so for a couple of days now, but the somewhat drunken and superstitious part wanted to brood on it, turn it over and over in his mind like some precious jewel, and consider it from all angles, and that part of him had ultimately decided that, yes, you could. There was stranger shit out there than that, and some of it spoken of by men he trusted and believed.

Parker had continued to look at him with those wide eyes, waiting for an answer, while he’d sat there and thought it out. Drakanis shook his head.

“You don’t look like you wanna hear what I think, but I’ll tell you anyway. Yeah, I think that shit exists. And I’ll even answer your next question, since I know you’ve got one. Yes, I think it could have happened to the captain, and yes, I think it really was our boy that did it. Now can we go back to drinking and fucking forget about it for ten minutes,
please
? Because I could really give a shit about it at the moment.”

Drakanis hadn’t realized that the volume control on his voice box had apparently been slowly twisting toward the maximum as he spoke, but the sudden tingling running down his spine and the muting of what was going on in the rest of the room clued him in rather quickly. Parker’s eyes flicked over his shoulder an instant before Drakanis turned to look himself and stared back into a sea of eyes and gaping mouths.

Perez was breaking through the crowd.

Jesus,
what
a
bunch,
Drakanis thought.
Even
the
fucking
janitors
are
down
here
partying.
Don’t
they
realize
the
man’s
fucking
dead?

Perez was trying to turn the gawkers’ gazes back to their own affairs and only partially succeeding. Both Drakanis and Parker could see as the whispering started, could see as Brokov turned to Woods and with a secret little smile mouthed, “Crazy. Psychiatric leave,” to the young man, who nodded.

Drakanis could feel the veins in his forehead pulsing, could tell he was about to do or say something very stupid, that all it would take was one more comment, one more stare that looked even the slightest bit like it was directed at him, and someone else was more than likely going to end up with a broken nose today.

Parker saw Drakanis turn, saw him go that disturbing shade of purple only those about to do something idiotic or have a heart attack—or both—tended to turn, and reached out with one nimble hand. It tightened like a clamp on Drakanis’s shoulder. He shot his eyes up to Perez with a questioning look; the other officer just nodded, looking apologetic, and jerked his head in the direction of the door with raised brows. Parker nodded back, and before Drakanis could begin to get further than deciding who was going to get punched, his former colleagues were ushering him out.

Once they’d shuffled out the back door and into the dump that Woody—or his son, depending on how drunk the owner was at the time you talked to him—only half jokingly called Shooter’s Alley, Perez and Parker let go of him. Perez kicked the door shut with his foot while Parker tried to get Drakanis straight again.

Perez was not by any stretch of the imagination a large man, and when someone like Parker was around for comparison, he looked positively shrimpy; still, the look on his hard-edged face and the gleam in his almost-black eyes told enough of the tale to anyone who really felt like arguing with him. He crossed his arms and stood in front of the door, shaking his head with apparent disappointment and sadness. Perez, in this state, looked like a father expressing unhappiness over a bad report card, but he radiated a palpable aura that enforced the unspoken: they were not getting back in that room, at least not right away.

Seeing that look on this man—a man he genuinely liked and had always thought well of, a man whose nose he’d broken and yet who still put up with his shit and tried to keep on pleasant terms—caused something in Drakanis to hurt more than almost anything ever had. Seeing that look made him think about how many others he had hurt over the years, how many people he’d just shut out so he could wallow in his own misery. It also made him feel even worse about the captain’s death.

Christ,
you
fuckwit.
It’s
the
man’s
goddamn
wake,
and
all
you
can
manage
to
do
is
shout
about
how
you
don’t
want
to
think
about
it
loudly
enough
that
you
send
his
widow
crying
and
get
half
the
damn
cops
in
town
thinking
you’re
a
nut
again.
That was what one part of him was saying. A deeper part, one that usually only spoke to him in the darkness of the night, when he wasn’t aware he was thinking anything at all, added to it,
And
how
responsible
am
I
for
Morrigan?
If
I’d
done
what
I
was
supposed
to
back
then,
would
he
be
dead,
now?
What
about
the
others
this
guy’s
killed?
Is
it
just
two
old
men
and
one
guy
with
a
bad
heart,
or
is
it
more?
How
many?
How
much
blood
is
on
my
hands?