In Too Deep (4 page)

I never heard from her again. It always felt like the only job that I had left unfinished, and it was unfinished, until this morning.

Suicide, the papers said. As wealthy as she was, her death was high profile enough to make the national rags. The details were sketchy but, apparently, she cut her wrists. I could picture that, her gentle hands, the marble glow of her skin and the incision. Her in the bathtub, naked in a few inches of warm water, her cheeks wet from tears, working up the courage with a bottle of ten-year-old malt whiskey while the straight razor lay in its crooked fold on the tub's porcelain edge. The papers put it down to depression caused by the tragic death of her husband, the transport magnate, Jake Malone, two years earlier. Things like that make nice news, tragic love, a strange kind of happy ending.

Not the way I wanted it, even though she was the one blot on my copybook. Obviously, she took her life because she could no longer live with what she had done. But if she didn't believe after all that her husband's death had been accidental, then really, she should have paid me what I was owed, don't you think?

Dog days. That was what Melissa always called them, those January and February Sundays in any midwestern city, when they were down to the stitching of their pockets and the hunger for whiskey had made a festering pit of their bellies. The sort of days when the air has its own sound, when the streets are empty of people yet full of people's waste. Rags of newspaper bound and tumble along, then mildew to death in the sodden gutters, their warnings and promises melting into the same inky pulp, to be forgotten by the world. Melissa is three years gone from Johnny's life, but the dog days still come.

This isn't any kind of town for the likes of you, she used to say. Not for the likes of you.

And actually, there was something in that, some meaning that he glimpsed from time to time but could never quite catch. He listened, almost understanding, but all he could do to ease her pain was nod his head in agreement. She smiled at his lie and so did he, and they both had something to share, even as little as that. He listened to her, but he could not leave, even after he had offered up every promise in the book that, okay, he would, just as soon as he … because all of that was just whiskey talk and everyone knows that there is no holding to those sort of promises. He told her what she wanted to hear but, as with all his other lies, these were just words spoken to fill the hollows and to add a little variation to the constant strumming of the wind. If she could take some additional solace from what he was saying, if she could somehow persuade herself that she really had reached out and maybe helped save a life, then that was great, so much the better. All he wanted was for her to be happy. But deep down, they both knew that he wouldn't go.

Staying was partly down to the fact that this was a place he knew better than anywhere else in the country, but it had even more to do with the fact that she was there, Melissa, light of his one thing, fire of his other. She was not perfect, of course, but who in the world was, and when she smiled all the bothers slipped away, all the ragged clothes and the dirty hair, all the bad thoughts that nibbled with such fever at her mind. When she smiled she was as pretty as a country morning and that is a memory far more precious than gold. He stayed because of her, and even though she has been gone a long time now, three years, he continues to stay. The reasons for his staying have shifted somewhat, but they have not diminished. The lights may have dimmed, but that is all.

Life out here on the street is defined by the empty stretches, the torpid meandering of darkness into day and then slowly back again. That emptiness breaks a body down, ravages a quick mind down to the slowest liveable beat, but it serves to brilliantly heighten the moments of brilliance and dream, the punctuations of terrible night-time violence and the occasional offered smile. Johnny walks the streets and collects smiles, gathers them up and stores them in his many pockets and in the folds of his clothes, sporting them like badges. Sometimes he is convinced that, worn in such a way, the smiles will protect him from the worst that the dog days have to bring, though they didn't help at all on the morning that Melissa was found. Terrible things happen in every city. When so many people are caged together and armed to the teeth with money and fear, the odds are good that someone in the crowd will be stewing bad thoughts. But even knowing that, even braced against it, it hurts like hell's pitchfork when it stabs your life asunder. What happened to Melissa settled in that bad rocky place far beyond the realms of terrible, but what it did not do was to chase him away and off these streets because now these streets are all he has, they are where he had met and come to know her, and they are where he can continue to savour even the merest hint of that thing, whether it was love or something as close as bedamned to love, that they had once been so blessed to share. She is three years gone, but out here he can still feel their closeness, perhaps not to the flesh and bones of her, but at the very least to her ghost. That, at the very least, because she haunts this city now.

To his knowledge, there had been no funeral. They don't bother, generally, not for the likes of her, not unless a priest or church minister intervenes. Two men had come, police, but of a different variety than those who were already crowding the scene. Armed with a black nylon sack that zipped all the way up the front and shut with an ugly snap, there was nothing gentle or sympathetic about the way they gathered her up and loaded her into the back of their grey, windowless van, nothing even the least bit compassionate. One was black-skinned with a neatly-trimmed goatee beard and the other was white and wore very delicate wire-framed glasses, but essentially they were mirror images of one another. Large men, here to take care of some dirty business. They dressed the same, in dark grey overalls and heavy coats, and they pulled on gloves and bagged Melissa up like they were dealing with a spill of trash. Their faces registered nothing, which somehow made the whole act even worse. So, no funeral, or none that Johnny was aware of, but that was all right. Melissa had never been much for the business side of religion, though he knew that she did like to pray, that she did take comfort in it, not in a churchy sort of way or anything, but in her own manner of simply talking to God, asking him for things and giving thanks when thanks were due. No funeral, but dead was dead, no matter what sort of spin anyone tried to put on the deal. The morgue and then the crematorium, ashes to ashes, dust back down to the grainy fur of dust again.

Maybe it is because of the lack of finality, the ritual sense of closure that really only comes from standing in a church, crying through the words and then watching that boxed-up loved one slip down into the earth of a grave or be eaten up by the flames of a cremating furnace, that Melissa has refused to be chased entirely away. Wherever Johnny walks now he sees her, there on the familiar corners or tucked up in certain doorways, shielding herself from yet more of that dog day Sunday morning wind, there and just as real as breathing while the shadows keep their depth. Always out of reach though, and gone at the very moment he risks a step of approach, banished out of teasing or out of terror. Melissa had always delighted in a game of teasing, and she had more than earned her right to fear. So either is understandable. There she is as she might have been on her prettiest day, until just as he is about to step within reach, she is gone from him, dissipating first to a frail, smoky outline and then down to nothing at all. His heart breaks without fail every single time it happens, yet he falls for the trick over and over, both because he is helpless to resist and because he is afraid that if he doesn't at least try then a day may come when she will vanish for good. The passing of time cannot so much as touch the ache of his loss, and because she feels so constantly near, the wound falls open and bleeds anew every day, but he tells himself that feeling pain is at least feeling alive, and that, apparently, is worth something.

He stays in the city and he walks the streets, without hurry in his step, and the only way that he can go on is by holding fast to the lie that he is just walking, not thinking about her or looking for her at all, even when he is. Lies are like crutches, now just as much as always.

Of course he understands that she is gone, dead, and that is clear in his mind as the very worst sort of fact because he was there, right there on the scene with the others when they found her after two entire days and nights of searching. Her body had lain slumped in that doorway after a long and bitterly cold night, there and beaten down to nothing, with her clothes torn away to expose her harried, rail-thin frame all glassy-skinned from the exposure and the malnourishment and wretched beyond nightmares. Something bestial had found her in the darkness and ripped out her throat, and all around her shattered carcass the snow was a thick and filthy brown, polluted from its proper crimson hue by the sullen amber cast of a lonely nearby streetlight. That obscene shade of brown was the only colour of any note in a sullen after-dawn cracking open into a new day, this one yet another aimless middle-stop in that long line of dog days, with January beating vicious one-two combinations into the front end of February. He was there on hand to see all that, and he understands completely what that means, that she is gone and he will be forever alone, but knowing that doesn't stop the dreams. A man lost in the desert will dream of a drink of water and if he gives up the dream then he will die because there is no more reason to go on.

Whoever was responsible for butchering Melissa down to chump had been as neat as doily lace about his work, skilled to the point of perfection that only came with stone-hard practice. A man that good with a knife poses a genuine threat everyone, even to society's upper echelons. They'd look for him, the police would, not so much because he'd done what he had done to Melissa, but because of the very fact that he'd done this at all, that he was imbued with enough poison in his veins and hatred in his heart to be able to take up a tool designed for nothing more than the practical duties of slicing food and use it to carve apart a throat of living, gasping, pulsing flesh. As much as anything, what sickened and terrified everyone who had stepped close to that scene was that he'd had the stomach to do this all so thoroughly. There were no signs of a struggle, and the wounds were clean. Nothing had been ripped, not so much as a single seam or button from the victim's over-shirt.

With a monster like this one – and monster was not overkill as a description, not in this case – there would always be another morning waiting just up ahead to mirror this, perhaps a week or a month or two months from now, and then after that one, another and another and another, and so on. A monster such as the man who'd done this got himself off on killing, on going out and wandering the streets in search of just the right pathetic little soul, that tiny sprout of a woman still young enough but just on the turn towards stale. He'd walk, studying the faces of the passers-by and even more carefully the faces of those people who had to huddle beneath bridges and in doorways and in the many other dark places of the city, because it paid high dividends to be meticulous about this selection. As with Melissa, he would probably look to pluck his next target from among the homeless or the prostitute class, but sooner or later he'd be sure to work up an appetite for better flesh, and the chances were only improving that number whatever next-in-line could be someone who actually counted for something, that or perhaps the wife of someone like that. So they'd take pains to look, the police would, and they'd keep on looking, following the muddy amber-lit bloodstains first through the snow and then the slush and then through whatever came after, the winds of spring and the baking days of summer. They'd keep on looking until they caught up with their prize, only it was a mistake to ever believe that they were bothering to look because of what had just happened to one worthless piece of street trash. The police had stood around, securing the area back from the doorway with yellow-and-black warning tape, preserving the scene, taking their evidence photographs and talking about how fucked-up all of this was, about how far beyond belief it was that anyone could even bring themselves to touch one of these people, never mind do something like this to them. There were some real sick bastards in the world and no mistake.

The talk was not about Melissa, but about a slab of meat, something rank and odious and nothing at all like a child of God, not even related to the idea of a real person. And all of that unfolded while he stood there, watching and listening, in clear view but back a ways, in the mouth of a nearby alleyway, watching without being seen to watch, crying, but not in a way that anyone would bother to notice. The police saw evidence when they looked, Exhibit A, The Murder Victim; they saw arms and legs, tiny perished breasts coated with a crust of blood and dark staring eyes and a mouth open and clogged all the way to the back of the throat with gathered feathers of snow. What they missed and what they could never even imagine, was the notion of love attached to anyone like this. So they missed a lot.

He stood there, watching and waiting for something to happen, crying to fill the time until dawn had properly broken, and after a while he realised that the tears had stopped, that he had cried himself out and his throat had begun to throb with thirst for something the right sort of hot to drink – wine that would burn all the way down and touch the parts that most needed touching – and he allowed himself one last look, hoping that this would not be how he'd remember her, but knowing that as a memory, a mental image, it would never be far from his conscious thoughts. Then he turned away and set himself to walking. Not in any hurry, because there was no place along this street or the next or the one after that that would be any better or worse than where he was just then, out in the open with a dog day stirring awake and a sky above thick to the very heavens with snow. Not in a hurry, but moving just the same, walking, because movement felt right, felt like an answer, of sorts.

Now, three years and some change later, he is still walking, still moving. There are days when the answer seems very close, as close in fact as the ghost that he is always chasing, and there are other days, the dog day Sundays full of bitter cold and blowing wind, when he knows that he will never catch up, but that the chase is all he has and all he will ever have. Dog days when all the world feels weighted against him and when crying helps only a little and only for a while. Lately, he has taken to talking, and Melissa, who had always been such a good listener in life, is no less so now in death.

This isn't any kind of town for the likes of you, she used to say. Not for the likes of you.

She was correct about that but not all the way correct. He walks and watches her dance, her smiling face light again and full of love, happy with the movement of life. Then, just for a moment, he is caught up in a gust of fatigue, and he stops and closes his eyes, squeezes them shut, and sees her lying dead in that doorway, her pathetic breasts and stomach clotted with an apron of dried blood, brown at first, a dirty shade, but then, as the light slowly waxed, a colour of sickening maroon. Her eyes are wide with shock, her mouth yawning some feeble plea, and the only thing remotely resembling a smile now is that gaping black rictus grin of a throat wound as it gathers in the first stray spittle of the snowflakes. He is standing in a quiet city street with his eyes clenched shut, but in the swollen blackness of his mind he is really standing just a few paces away from that doorway, back with the other gathered watchers who are happy to gaze past the yellow-and-black warning tape and the shoulders of the policemen hunched against the cold, and no one bothers to notice him at all, even though he is crying, and even though his fingers are caressing the blade of a small knife that is concealed in his coat pocket, caressing until his touch grows heavy and the flesh is pierced. When he opens his eyes again to face the world, the morning seems to have lost a little of its edge. A gloom has settled, heavier than feels right. He takes a moment to study the street, taking in the familiar shapes of the crawling traffic, the granite and sandstone building fronts and the few unhurried passers-by. And ghosts too, just ahead, at that corner, or across the street in that boarded up doorway. He takes a deep, shuddering pull of breath and the fatigue falls away, leaving him, the perfect dog for this perfectly ugly Sunday morning, free to walk again, his destination nowhere.