Land of the Blind, Part 7
7 - The Buzz Kill
Since he had an “emergency key” to Holden’s apartment, he went there and used it, finding the place to be in general order. (Should it bother him that Holden was a better housekeeper than he was? He wasn’t sure …)
Figuring Holden was beyond caring at this point, he used his computer, and found Judge Garver’s address in minutes. (Lloyd Garver, to be precise.) He thought so called “activist judges” needed to protect their addresses, but then he remembered that only applied to judges who made any decision that could be considered left wing. The right leaning activist judges never had to worry about harassment, even if they made a ruling that made Sharia law seem far too lenient. Thanks to Google street view, he was even able to case most of his house. He lived in a McMansion with a high gated fence and wall. You probably needed a special code to get in the gate, but since he was figuring on jumping the wall, he didn’t need it.
He searched Holden’s bedroom, looking for the photos, but found other interesting things in his dresser drawer and closet. He found enough condoms and lube to keep an orgy going for ten years, and some very questionable leather gear he assumed was for clients. He also found a ski mask, which made no sense, but he took it anyways. He also kept meticulous records of his STD testing (the latest was a clean bill of health that came back two weeks ago), but Roan assumed that was necessary for his employment at the agency, as a whore giving a client a disease would look bad for business.
He suddenly remembered Holden’s favorite hiding place, the one place no one was guaranteed to look: in a South Beach diet sandwich box in the fridge. Because the South Beach diet stuff was shit, and even a desperate junkie wouldn’t eat it.
The box looked pristine, unopened, but as soon as he examined it more closely, he saw one of the ends of the box had been carefully resealed. He opened it with care, pulled out the plastic packing material, and a couple of Zip Lock plastic bags fell out. One held several hundred dollar bills (Holden’s emergency fund, presumably), and the other held a rather thick sheaf of photos. Presumably the negatives were hidden elsewhere, since a fridge probably wasn’t the best place for them, but knowing Holden he had them in a safe deposit box or something. Roan also noticed a Washington State driver’s license under the name Holden Fox, but pretended he didn’t. (It wasn’t like he didn’t have a half dozen fake IDs himself.)
The photos were pretty explicit – there was no way in hell any of the men could say the pictures were “misconstrued”. Having looked up a picture of Lloyd Garver online, he knew what he looked like (well, his face – there was no telling what was under the robe), and eventually found him. The pictures were wonderfully awful for Garver – it showed Holden handcuffed to a bed, while Garver sucked his dick. Holy shit, how did he talk his way out of that? “I handcuffed this hot nude ruffian to the only solid object around, and while phoning the police I tripped and fell mouth first onto his cock.” Roan didn’t put it past a hypocrite like him to actually try the story to see if it would fly.
He decided on an approach with a cold clarity that was pure psychosis. Hot anger was awful, and could be deadly, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the cold rage that made you see the world as only a true predator could. He knew exactly what he was going to do, and how he was going to do it. Did Holden feel this way after he saw Coyote killed?
Muffled music started playing, and when Roan realized what it was, he burst out laughing. It must have been his “regular” (not client) cell phone, and yet the ringtone was the Flight of The Conchords’ “Sugalumps”. Of course he’d have an ode to balls as his ringtone, no matter that it constantly referred to women. A song about balls was something that Holden couldn’t pass up.
The laugh should have broken his homicidal mood, but it didn’t. He fell back to it as he grabbed the ski mask and photos and headed out. Holden didn’t look like he was going to die, but head injuries were funny things – you could bump your head on the door, say you were fine, and drop dead two hours later of bleeding in the brain. Any blow to the head had the potentiality to be fatal, as Mike Oliver could have told anyone.
Garver lived in Bellevue, which kind of figured, and Roan found a place to hide his bike on the previous block, while he rolled the ski mask up like a stocking cap to hide the odd color of his hair. Not that he should have bothered – there was no one walking these exceptionally well tended streets at this time of night. The wealthy had extremely nice neighborhoods, and never used them.
Climbing the wall and jumping over the top of the fence was nothing; scaring off the two German Shepard guard/family dogs was nothing (just a snarl and a growl and they were off), and disabling the lame alarm system they had was also nothing. There were lights on upstairs, probably the kids, and as he crept around the house, avoiding windows lit up or uncovered, he was able to hear a television. He found a darkened window, the curtains slightly parted, and thanks to his rapidly cycling night vision, he was able to see a book lined study. Had to be Lloyd’s, as it just screamed man who wanted to make an impression. Forcing the window open was just like opening an average one, and climbing into a room that smelled of cigar smoke and scotch, filled with thousand dollar furniture, was like getting out of bed. In a bizarre way, he was disappointed. He wanted a challenge, a fight, some sort of difficulty that would make him pause. But it was all too easy, and his rage quietly bubbled and blackened, becoming a weapon of incredible ugliness. His hands felt sweaty in their leather gloves.
He went to the man’s phone, right there on the two thousand dollar desk, and wrote the phone number down on his arm. If he didn’t show up in ten minutes – unlikely – he was going to call the phone. He found more to anger him in the fact that, save for a couple of thick law books, none of the other books had been shifted in some time; someone wasn’t dusting properly. He hated people who only had books for show. They weren’t supposed to be decorations only.
He could hear all the noises in the house. The wife was watching Big Brother, one of the kids was listening to music upstairs (Green Day), there was an occasional creak of the walls shifting and settling. They’d had beef with a burgundy based sauce tonight, mashed potatoes with garlic and sour cream, steamed asparagus. At some point, someone had made Japanese rice pudding. Upscale sure, but oddly normal. The fact that this man was having his fake life, full of lies and contented domesticity, while Holden could have been fighting for his life in a hospital, made him see the dark in shades of translucent red. The lion was right under the skin, for once listening to him, waiting for him to give the signal to tear him to pieces. It was a weird sort of insight, to realize they could work together when violence was a given.
Roan didn’t have to call. He came in, flicking on a light, unaware of the man in the ski mask standing to the right of the door as he picked up a tiny remote no bigger than a mini MP3 player and turning on his Bose stereo system, which played something classical from its deft speakers. He tossed the remote back down when he finally noticed the photo Roan had placed near his computer keyboard, the one of Lloyd sucking off Holden. He did a slight double taken, shoulders stiffening, tension and anxiety starting to come off of him in a smell like acetate when Roan moved, grabbing him by the back of his neck at the same time he slammed a foot down on the side of his knee.
The crack of his leg shattering was quite loud, but not enough to triumph over the orchestra coming from the speakers. Lloyd tried to scream, but just like Roan expected, all that came out was a high pitched squeak like a balloon slowly deflating as he sagged towards the floor. But Roan had a death grip on the back of his neck and held him up, a feat he knew would startle Lloyd. After all, he was holding up a two hundred pound with one hand on the back of his neck – if that wasn’t a feat of strength, what was?
“You shut up and listen to me if you don’t want me to rip your balls off and shove them down your throat,” Roan growled in his ear. “You tell me the names of the men you sent to beat up Fox, and I won’t pulverize every single bone in your body.”
It took him a moment to find his voice, a harsh whisper. “You’re making a mistake, assho -”
Roan let him drop on his broken leg, which would have elicited a scream from him if Roan hadn’t grabbed his chin and forced his mouth to slam shut, causing an audible click of his teeth as well as another noise, a muffled grunt that brought tears to the man’s eyes. Good. Roan was hoping he’d get him to bite his own tongue. With any luck, he’d bitten it off.
In reflex, Lloyd reached up to grab Roan’s wrist – weakly; even if he were a normal man, he could have kicked the shit out of this pudgy, bloated benchwarmer – and Roan idly, with almost no exertion on his part, pulled it off. In the process, he twisted his wrist until his bones crackled like ice underfoot, and the muffled moaning screams coming from him were truly terrible. He let Lloyd go to fall forward and retch on his thousand dollar carpet. “You think it’s hyperbole, Judge? A negotiation? Every minute you don’t tell me what I want to know, I break something. Get it through your thick head: your power means nothing to me. I’m not afraid of you, your authority, the police, no one. Because you are all Human, and I’m not, and there’s nothing you own that I can’t destroy.”
After he finished spitting up bile, he rasped, “You’re insane.”
“Yeah, that too. Just more ammo in my armory.” He stepped on the nape of Lloyd’s neck, driving him face first into the puddle of his own sick. “And don’t think it stops at me breaking you physically. The photo? Tip of the iceberg. Those are stills from a video, you know. Just think if the meal KING or KOMO would make of that footage.”
Lloyd had been struggling, but stopped as soon as he said that. He got his face free enough to mutter, “Video?”
He didn’t know if Holden actually had video of himself and his high powered clients, but all those action photos he saw seemed to indicate they were juicy stills from longer and more involved pieces. Only the most explicit shots would do. “Despite what you may think about whores, Fox isn’t dumb. He knows you guys might try and throw him to the wolves someday, so he had a plan B. Namely, he takes you with him, and let’s face it, he has nothing to lose. You? You have everything. Career, power, prestige, money, family, presumed moral authority … the lie that you’re hetero. Wanna pick one, Lloyd? Which one will you miss the most?”
The smell of his fear was rank and awful, asparagus piss (and it may have indeed been just that), and Roan ground down his boot heel just enough to exert terrible pressure on the fine bones of his neck. “I’m part of that plan B too. You think you wipe him out and the problem’s gone? No, now you have a bigger problem. But as low as I am, I’m not the worst – Fox has friends in even lower places, ones who probably would have killed you as soon as you walked in the door. You don’t fuck with street kids, Lloyd, certainly not if they’ve managed to claw their way out of the gutter, ’cause that means they’re a lot more ruthless than most, and predators generally hang with predators.”
The hand with the broken wrist was laying as limp as a dead fish on the floor, and remembering Holden from the ER, Roan stamped on it, bones breaking with a cereal like crackle. Lloyd made an odd noise of pain, half scream half sob that was mostly buried in the carpet. “You’re not telling me what I want to know, Lloyd. How ’bout I rip your ear off? I’ll feed it to one of your dogs on the way out. Good luck on getting that reattached.”
“Fuck!” Again, a kind of half sob, but this time mixed with anger and fear. “You stupid crazy shit, they’re cops. You can’t do a thing to them.”
He wished he was surprised, but he wasn’t. It explained the blunt trauma injuries. “Wanna bet? Give me names.”
He hesitated, so Roan dropped down to one knee and gave him a vicious kidney punch that would have him pissing blood for the next two weeks, and snapped his shot ribs just for the trouble. Lloyd made a sort of keening noise, squirming as best he could while trying not to aggravate his many injuries. It was difficult. “Vince Carmody and Oscar Muhlfeld.”
“You’re making those up.”
“No.”
“I know cops, asshat, and I don’t recognize either name.” Okay, there was no way in hell he knew all cops in Washington State, but he was trying to get more information out of the guy. Oftentimes the best way to do that was either by pretending you were an idiot or totally belligerent. Belligerent was very easy for him.
“They’re Staties.”
“State Patrol?” He snickered derisively. “What, couldn’t contact the Three Stooges? Jesus. Not even good people owe you favors, huh?” He had nothing against the state patrol, they were generally fine police officers, it’s just that all groups – be they police, fire, military, even hospitals – had to indulge in childish pissing contests with their “rivals”. Roan reached down, grabbed Lloyd’s arm, and with one twist dislocated his shoulder and his elbow, which sounded with muffled, small pops. He made a noise of pain that was almost breathless, unable to do much more. “How do you explain these injuries, Lloyd? And the photos? I’ve left more than one around the place. How do you explain that to your wife, to your Focus on the Family friends? I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with the video. Send it to the news vultures? Upload it to YouTube and Xtube and see if anyone ever works it out? Might be fun to see how long it takes. You have a favorite, Lloyd?”
“F-fuck you,” he wheezed. It sounded more pathetic than defiant. “You’ll pay for this. You and the whore -”
Roan stamped on his dislocated elbow, crushing bones. “If anything happens to him, I will hunt you down, destroy whatever career you have left, and then take my sweet time killing you. You’re Human, there’s nothing you can do to escape me or protect yourself. Are we clear?”
“You’re insane.”
“The good thing about insanity? You really don’t give a shit what other people think of you. Stay away from Fox, or die for your trouble.” He then stomped his head into the carpet, breaking his nose and severely stunning him, if not knocking him out. Roan pocketed the incriminating photo before leaving by the window he came in – the picture was still ammunition. Lloyd had just needed to know more than one person had them, because otherwise Holden was still a target.
Roan took off, and found an open cyber cafe in downtown Seattle where he found addresses for Vince Carmody and Oscar Muhlfeld. Carmody lived in Queen Anne, not far from here, but Muhlfeld had a place in Burien, much farther away. So Carmody, by necessity of geography, was first.
Since he was able to connect with his usual database, he discovered Carmody was divorced and lived alone in a condo. Fifth floor, fourth door on the right. He may have been a cop (well, trooper), but it was easily to pick his lock and walk right into his condo. For a bachelor, his place was fairly neat, a pizza box with uneaten crusts on the coffee table the only stereotypical item visible in the darkness. Creeping by the kitchenette, he smelled Holden’s blood. Carmody had rinsed his nightstick off in the sink.
This whole time, Roan had felt oddly disconnected from himself, almost feverish, as if everything that was happening was a vivid hallucination he was only half interested in. But the smell of Holden’s blood layered over the scents of Carmody – everything; body odor, stale coffee, beer farts, bad breath, rank cologne, shoe polish, hair gel, toothpaste, all the smells of a modern day Human – brought him back to himself in a very bad way. This was a man who brutalized another, and then, after cleaning his equipment, went to bed. It didn’t bother him at all? Maybe he objected at some point; maybe Lloyd had something on him, maybe he was forced into doing it or lied to about what Holden did to deserve it (surely Lloyd hadn’t told them the truth). But he still did it. And Roan smelled no fear here, no sorrow, nothing that could be construed as regret.
And he could hear him snoring in the next room, the deep sleep of a man at peace with his conscience.
Even though he felt more alive than he had all evening, he blacked out, or maybe the lion had taken over more than it should have. Because one minute he was standing there, looking down at the stainless steel sink where you could smell the blood in the drain and not see it, and the next he was back in the corridor, heading for the elevator. His hands hurt, and the faint scent of a stranger’s blood lingered in his nostrils. Alone in the elevator, he whispered to himself, to the lion within him, “What did you do?”
But he really didn’t want to know, and the lion knew that if it knew anything at all. There was no reply, but Roan hadn’t expected one. The lack of blood on his clothes was the only sign that maybe it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
In a way, he was hoping the drive to Burien would wake him up, snap him out of this black mood, but no such luck. It was cold, and the sky was starting to lighten – had he really been out all night? It felt like only a couple of hours – and he felt like death. Not like he was dying, but like he was actually Death, a thing in a black robe with a scythe and an urge to use it.
When did he lose his mind? He wished he could remember; he wished there was some point when it became clear, a moment when he heard his brain actually snap, like a guitar string pulled too tightly. But would it have really helped? He didn’t think so.
Muhlfeld was married with a kid, and he had no intention of terrorizing his wife and child. But there was an SUV in the driveway with a half naked woman depicted on an air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, and he was willing to bet it wasn’t his wife’s car. So he broke into it through the back seat, and found a Sharpie in his coat pocket. He had a vague idea he’d picked it up at Carmody’s place, but why? In a way, he didn’t want to know that either.
He hunkered down in the back seat and waited. The great thing about an SUV was there was a lot of room, so hiding in the back wasn’t so bad. He almost could have fallen asleep if he wasn’t so wired on his own insanity right now. The sky was a fragile pale blue of dawn by the time Muhlfeld came out to his car, carrying a travel mug full of coffee. He was in the front seat, door slammed shut, before he noticed ‘Why Lloyd Garver?’ written in black Sharpie on the interior roof. He was still looking up at it when Roan reached around the seat, grabbing him in a chokehold before slamming his fist into his face repeatedly, until blood splattered the windshield and he sagged limply, unconscious and bleeding from almost every orifice in his face.
Roan left then, walking away from the SUV, retrieving his bike on the next block and only when he started driving off did he realize he had no idea where he was going. Maybe he should just drive until he hit the border, until the road ended, until his bike fell to pieces.
He didn’t feel very satisfied, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was he had enjoyed it in spite of it all. His transition to monster was complete.
