I peeled out into the flow of traffic as soon as I got Dolores kick-started and into gear. I could have wove back to I-18, but I saved time by going the long way around. I had pressed my luck braving the stop-and-go traffic downtown once already.
Rain clouds had rolled in while I was talking to Adora, bringing on a premature nightfall and adding another element to my already hazardous commute. Dolores’s tires were bald, three years overdue for a rotation, and her windshield wipers wicked water like a chicken flies.
My work as a private investigator—and detective before that, and beat cop before that—gave me a good mental map of the city, especially the rougher parts of it. The brief description the garbled voice of Detective Morris had given Adora was enough to get me to the heart of The Margin.
The neighborhood was a dead gulf, a wasteland of abandoned businesses and sunken dreams. Aspirational For Sale signs were hung in boarded-up windows and printed on knocked-over sandwich board signs. The realtors’ names and phone numbers were all chipped off and most were tangled up with thin tentacles of vines and lichenous barnacles of unnameable fungi.
Even from that pit of despair, I saw Regis Fellini’s billboards looming over the elevated highway. They were lit from above and below, giving the lion and his idiotically simple slogan an ethereal glow. It would be hard to pin the downfall of most neighborhoods on just one man, but for Moire Park and the forgotten wastes of The Margin, Regis Fellini and his policies were a good place to start.
Taking Hot Type City as a microcosm, it wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen if he had his way. Entire counties and states would be left to rot while those who lined his pocket and gilded his road to political domination would prosper, no matter the long-term cost.
As I passed under the overpass, putting the garish billboard behind me, my mind returned to Al. The Margin, as the name implies, is far away from I-18 which cuts straight through the city and runs near the airport a few miles south. If Al was from out of town, maybe—maybe—he could be excused for taking a few wrong turns. It didn’t track that Al, who had decades of experience in Hot Type City, would mess up this bad. He couldn’t have missed the trail of signs paving the way to the airport, even if he had recently suffered a traumatic brain injury and was driving around the city in a fugue state.
Maybe I-18 was closed off. Maybe Al was double-dipping jobs and running deliveries too. Or maybe Al wasn’t acting under his own volition.
When I got close to Beckminster Street, I followed the pulsing strobes of red and blue. They piggybacked off raindrops to refract and propagate, making bubbles in the smoggy air. Three police cars blocked the alley behind the warehouse with their noses pointed in. The overlapping cones of the headlights illuminated a fourth car, a black luxury sedan, with all its doors open. A herd of police officers and detectives huddled around and in front of it, crouched down, pointing, scribbling in notepads.
I parked behind one of the patrol cars, blocking it in. If they couldn’t get out, someone would have to talk to me eventually. Rain pattered off the brim of my hat as I walked into the crossfire of curious looks, but my trench coat only deflected a few drops before the drizzle broke through the shoddy weatherproofing and the fabric took on water.
One of the walking uniforms startled when he saw me. He noticed the straight-backed confidence of my stride as I approached what many would see as a lion’s den and assumed I was meant to be there. Others around were confused, but he took it one step further by reaching out a hand. He was young, a hippopotamus with smooth skin that glistened in the rain. The colored lights of the police cars’ strobing exaggerated the purple tones in the soft rolls of his face and neck.
“You’re Detective O’Howell, the Delinquency Dog,” he said. “I remember you from TV.”
I looked at his hand but didn’t shake it. Clearly, he was new on the force and hadn’t heard the stories about me. If he had, he would know I don’t shake. Ever since I left the force, I don’t do tricks—not for anyone, but especially not for the police.
“What do you have?” I asked, carrying over the veteran swagger from my walk up.
The young officer, already on his back foot, faltered. His hand closed and slid away like a timid spider collapsing on itself and floating away on a gossamer strand. He looked at the sodden mess of cloth and fur on the ground, the hollowed husk of dear old Al McCarthy, then back at me. His trembling lips verged on forming words, but before anything came out, a gruff voice from the Stygian black behind the car said my name.
An imposing figure in a gray suit and a fedora like mine came around into the light. His face, a canine scowl, was like mine too. He had a grizzled muzzle, heavy brow, and long flappy ears, but his fur was a lighter color overall, and his snout was shorter. It looked like someone had smashed in his nose with a cartoon frying pan, flattening it out and letting all the excess skin puddle and droop around it. If anyone deserved a hard thump in the sniffer, it was him, but he had been born like that.
“Henry,” I said. The greeting was curt, but accurately conveyed the amount of respect I had for the man.
“See you finally crawled out of the doghouse. Looks like you forgot your collar.”
“It itches.” I idly scratched my neck to illustrate my freedom. “Besides, not a fan of the leash attached to it.”
“Cute, but you had better find somewhere else to sniff around.” Detective Henry stepped up beside the hippo. He put a hand on his arm and guided him to the side—the noble hero telling the poor newbie to get behind him. “Let the real police do their work.”
“That what you’re doing here? Looks like you’re standing around smelling each other’s asses.”
Detective Henry snarled. We had been at each other’s throats since long before I left the force. We’d shared a dorm at the academy, spent time as partners, and competed for the same promotions. He had a much different view of what policing should be. For me, in the idyll of my youth, I thought it should be about helping people. He thought it should be about controlling them.
I’d pulled his boot off more than a few necks in my day. Maybe there was someone around now to carry on as his handler, but I doubted it. New recruits, like the fresh-faced hippo making himself small behind Henry’s back, might join up with the same stars in their eyes I had, but when those stars dimmed, they crashed down one of two paths. Either they dropped out when they saw the cruelty and the bullshit, like I did, or they joined ranks with people like Henry and became part of The Beast.
If I had known Detective Henry would be there, I might not have been in such a hurry to show up. I could have scraped some details from the police scanner and probed what few inside sources I was still amicable with for the rest. It hardly felt worth the raised hackles and barking-induced tinnitus, but I couldn’t trust the police to manage the scene on their own.
“The kid’s mom hired me,” I said once Henry’s dander lowed. “I’m not leaving empty-handed.”
“Right. Detective O’Howell, always keeping kids safe. As I remember, you don’t have the best track record of that.”
I leaned forward, muscles bunching up, ready to explode. I might have been out of training, but Henry and I had both caught a debilitating case of middle-aged. It had hit him harder. He had kept himself fed well enough to put on a paunch, whereas indigence had whittled the body under my rumpled coat down to hard sinew.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I could’ve taken him down, gotten a few good hits in before someone pulled me off him, but I unclenched my fist. That was what he wanted—to rile me up, give him an excuse to put me in cuffs and stuff me in the back of a police car. No one would think to say anything if they saw him getting careless with my head and the roof of his cruiser, either.
Any other time, the satisfaction of knocking his teeth out might have been worth it, but I wasn’t there for me. If I was going to fulfill my duty to Virginia, I needed to keep my cool. I wouldn’t be able to find out what happened to Ethan from inside a jail cell.
Henry smirked, begging for a fight, but I stepped down. I turned away from him to face the body, presenting Henry with my cold, rain-damp shoulder. Rain had washed away the standing pools of blood, but not before they had darkened the ground under Al and dyed his fur. There had been time for the stains to set before the clouds opened up—a couple hours at least.
The pointed tips of Al’s shoes stuck straight into the air, but death had sapped the rigidity from Al’s face. His jaw hung open on one side, exposing a massive hooked fang, and his eyelids were parted, revealing slivers of fogged glass. A bullet hole, crusted with dried then rehydrated gore, pierced the center of his forehead, but his brow maintained its shape, frozen in a consternated knit. It looked like he had spent his last moments on this mortal plane trying to solve an intractable puzzle.
A pair of officers with rubber gloves knelt beside the body, poking at it with their instruments like they were engaging in some macabre form of social grooming. One picked a speck too small for me to see off Al’s coat with a delicate pair of tweezers, then held the sample in the beam of the headlights to make sure he had it. He put the microscopic clue in a plastic evidence bag and set it down next to the others, lined up by Al’s feet like goldfish at a carnival.
It could have been the one bit of evidence needed to crack the case, but it was probably nothing. Generally, it was the big things that brought the bad guy down: something he left behind, something he took with him.
“No sign of Ethan?”
The cops around me stiffened. The hippo started to say something, but Henry cut him off with a sharp huff.
“Spangler! Don’t feed the pests.”
“Should we…arrest him?” Spangler asked.
“I like the way you think. Unfortunately, we don’t have cause. Yet. Just keep an eye on him.”
Eyes I could handle. As long as the officers kept their muzzles on and let me think.
The hole in Al’s forehead didn’t lead to a chunky splatter under him; I saw the mess further back, where bits of what appeared to be brain matter flecked the bumper. He had been standing when the fatal shot hit him. Squinting into the abyss of black clothing, I saw two more wounds on Al’s chest, right in his center of mass. The killer had made goddamn sure he was dead.
Looking past the blood, inside Al’s parted jacket, I saw a black strap hanging from his shoulder. I studied it until the investigator flipped the coat fully open and revealed what I suspected: a holster. There was no gun inside, and I didn’t see it or any bullet casings among the evidence bags. Could be he wasn’t a stranger to the gat that punched his body full of holes.
“He got a license for that?” I asked, pointing at the holster.
Henry snorted, his arms crossed. To his chagrin, a boar in a gray suit who had missed his partner’s “no talking” edict came up out of the darkness. He interpreted Henry’s dismissal as open dialog and finished the response for him. “Doesn’t matter. We know for damn sure the kid doesn’t have a permit, and he’s got the gun now.”
Henry glared at his partner, but the boar didn’t notice. He might have been new to the bureau, but he was no spring chicken. He was old and grizzled, with a chipped tusk and lots of white peppered into his boxy buzz-cut. This wasn’t his first murder scene, but without the historical animosity Henry had toward me, he was less stingy with the details. I had to milk what I could before Henry shut him down.
“You think Ethan took the gun? You think he killed Al?”
Henry dropped his act for a chance to take a dig at me, take back control of the information his partner so freely shared. “Sure he thinks that, but that’s only because Detective Boggs is a top investigator. Got a mind like computer, ain’t that right, Boggs?”
The boar grunted.
“You see,” Henry went on, “he did the math himself. One missing gun, one dead body, one missing kid. I know it’s a tough equation, but I checked his work.”
“Hmm… An interesting theory,” I said as I turned my back on the body to check the rest of the scene.
It would have been a compelling theory in a world of spherical cows floating through a vacuum. Here, in reality, it was never so simple. If, for some reason, Ethan had Al at gunpoint, it might explain why they were off track to begin with, but it wouldn’t explain why they were deep in The Margin. On top of that, the shots were too clean for a kid with no experience killing. If he already had Al under his barrel and really wanted him put down, it would have been easier—from a logistical standpoint and as a way to distance himself mentally from the mortal sin—to put a round or two in the back of Al’s head.
One bit of incongruous nonsense in any case was plausible, even likely. When the ill-fitting puzzle pieces started to stack up, one on top of the other like a little piggy’s roughshod house of sticks, it was time to look elsewhere for a theory not so full of holes.
I reached into my coat as I walked toward the abandoned car, and several of the officers bristled. My hand found cold metal, but it was only a flashlight. I’d left my snubnosed revolver safely locked up in Dolores’s glove compartment. I flipped the switch, and the light bulbs clicked in the suspicious officers’ heads as the flashlight illuminated Al’s ride.
The clear coat was glossy to begin with, recently washed and waxed, but the added rain turned the flat, angular panels into black mirrors. The car looked like the type movie stars and important business men got shuffled around in, but the emblem poking out of the hood said it was on the cheap end of the luxury sedan spectrum. It had a few years on it and more than a few miles, but Al had taken good care of it.
One of the officers lurking nearby would have bitten my head off if I touched anything. Fortunately, the doors were already open. I sliced the beam of my flashlight through the gap, peeling back the darkness. There were no blood spatters on the tuck-and-roll leather seats or freshly vacuumed floor mats. The car was in park and there were no scuffs, dents, or cracks anywhere that might indicate a struggle.
I stood back and listened to the murmured conversations and drizzling rain beating on the roof of Al’s car in a driving rhythm. Al hadn’t take Ethan against his will, but I still didn’t believe the kid had taken himself. It just didn’t fit.
Officers by the trunk talked as they pulled a piece of luggage out of the dark void. The faded leather suitcase was scuffed and one of the four rubber feet on the bottom was missing. A big letter E stamped into the top, near the handle, made damn sure we knew it belonged to Ethan.
I swept my light across the alley, keeping away from the places the officers were destroying evidence with their careless tramping. The concrete slab forming the base of the alley was cracked with age and lack of maintenance. Weeds grew up wherever they could break through, forming thorny tiger stripes, but the overgrowth was especially prevalent near the sides.
My probing spotlight fell on a dumpster that had once been flat green but was now mottled with rust. It hadn’t been moved in years and nearly melted into the scenery like set dressing. The dumpster hadn’t changed, but the onrush of decrepitude had brought the rest of the alley down, so the powerful symbol of desolation no longer stood out.
What did stand out was a spot of bent and broken stalks next to it. In a more trafficked area, it would have passed me by just as it passed by all these officers. A drunk could have stumbled there to piss against the wall, or a wild creature might have scrounged there, but it wasn’t likely. Even the feral beasts seen grazing in the parks downtown wouldn’t dare to tread into The Margin. Here in the ass-end of the city, the noxious fumes of industry and the pollution of sleepless lights were enough to keep them out.
I strolled over to the patch of weeds and rain-slurried dust, careful of where I stepped so I didn’t disturb any potential evidence. A line of silver stood out from the green and black of the dumpster where the grimy coating had been scored with a sharp point. The slice of a knife?
I leaned in closer and saw a fainter line, a perfect offset of the first, but slightly shorter. It looked like someone had tried to make an arc with a draftsman’s compass, but their hand on the pivot slipped. It could have been a second slash, but the constant distance of about two feet between the lines seemed too perfect. The span was too big to be from the kid’s blunted horns and Al didn’t have any hardware to speak of.
I made a mental note, then surveyed the rest of the area.
“Anyone got the kid’s shoe size?” I called back after a minute of searching.
“Uh… His file says 7,” some oblivious officer responded without thinking.
“What the fuck do you want now, Howl?” Henry asked. He packed a pound of frustration in each huff as he waddled over to stand behind me.
I pointed at a shoe print the size of my face on the ground by the dumpster. The imprint had a fat, rounded front, ruling out Al’s pointy-toed shoes. It was far too large for Ethan. He could’ve sat in a shoe that size and paddled it like a rowboat.
“Looks like there’s a variable Detective Boggs missed when running his calculations. Somebody else was here.”